← UNRULY WITH SHELAH MARIE
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Welcome to Unruly. I'm your host, Sheila Marie. I'm an author, a fierce advocate for black women, and the founder of the curvy curly conscious movement. In this space, I'm sharing what I've learned on my own journey while sitting down with some amazing women who are all navigating their own paths to healing. Because there's no better time than now to get a little unruly. Welcome back to Unruly with Sheila Marie. This is a very special episode. This is really like my birthday episode. Today we're going to be talking about grief. Grief is a season and not a sentence. Okay? We're going to get right into it. I'm not going to waste your time. I want to acknowledge, though, like, right off, you know, at the top, that at first this topic might seem melancholic, maybe even a little heavy or a little sad. But stick with me, because I promise this episode will offer hope, healing, and possibility. All right? All right, so let's go. Are you ready? Strap in. So I just had my 40th birthday. Oh, my gosh. I can't believe I'm saying that. I thought about for a while, like, should I hide how old I am? And then I was like, people find everything online anyway. And you know what? No. I'm releasing shame. I'm proud of myself, and I'm grateful for reaching 40. And as my 40th birthday approached, I feel like I'm in this deep state of reflection. You know, I'm, like, taking inventory. I'm in Aries, which obviously I never let you forget. So that means that April is not only the beginning of a new calendar year for us, or, like, not calendar year, the beginning of our new age year. It's also the beginning of our new year. So that. And then that, to me, aligns with nature, right? Spring is in April. There's nature's doing a soft reset. The trees are in bloom after being bare. The air is shifting. The days are stretching. Everything starts to come alive again, but only after a period of stillness and shedding. That feels like the truest new year to me. And I honestly Think everybody needs to be celebrating their new year in April. It's weird to start a completely new year and be making resolutions and be thinking about things you're going to do new in the dead of winter. Right? You know, I always thought about that. I'm like, is this the time to be starting something new? So at the start of my new year, my new decade, I've been taking inventory. And when you reach 40, grief becomes something that you no longer witness from afar. Right. It lives in your house. You know, you lived enough life to start grieving. Not just people you've lost, but versions of yourself. Choices you didn't make, time you didn't get back. And I think that grief culturally can be very misunderstood. We often think it only shows up around big losses, like when someone passes away. But it lives in the little goodbyes, too. And there are all these rituals and space for grieving a loss of life. But where is this space to grieve the life you lost? The versions of you who died along the way? Right. The dreams that never came to be. Today, I want to open up about the grief that isn't always honored, the grief that doesn't come with a funeral, the grief that whispers in the quiet corners of our lives. I was inspired to talk about this topic in a clip that I saw of Tracee Ellis Ross, and she was on the IMO podcast. I hope I'm saying that right. Imo, it's a podcast with Michelle Obama and Craig. Can't remember his last name. I'm sorry. And in the clip, Tracee was sharing. And it's funny, because you know how it's, like, respectful to call people by their last name, like Ross. I don't know why I feel like Tracy is my homegirl. I always call her Tracy. Like, girl Tracy. Look at Tracy. Launched the hair care line. Look at Tracy. You know? So I don't know. I feel very kindred to Tracee Ellis Ross. There's not many. I don't really like, idolize people. There's nobody that I look at life and go, like, ooh, not anymore. I used to. And I'd be like, oh, I want to live just like them. Except there's elements. I pick elements, like aspects. There's aspects of Tracy's life that I absolutely love. I absolutely love her confidence. I love how much she plays with life. I love how much she plays with style. I love how she channels her creative energy. And I love that also, that even though she's a Nepo baby, she really has carved out a Lane for herself. That feels genuine to who she is. It's really inspiring to watch. I also love how, like, watching her age and how much she's embraced aging in such a graceful way. It's just so inspiring. Her and Kelis. Kelis, I love it. She just out there in Africa with the giraffes, grilling, making salves and tinctures and looking great and wearing workout gear and showing off her cute frame. Like, I just gotta love that for her, you know, that's just goals to me. But anyway, back to Tracy on the podcast. So she has been very vocal about the fact that she is loving her life as a woman who does not have a partner and is child free. And in this episode, she kind of gave us a little bit more insight and she was talking about some of the grief that she feels as a single child free woman. And her words kind of gave language to grief that so many women carry silently. And it made me think about what are the griefs that we've never named. You know what, there's so many forms of grief ways that we can experience grief that we don't talk about. Like, you could be grieving your pre motherhood body and still love your children. You could be grieving the freedom that you had before you became a mother and still be in love with motherhood. You could be grieving the version of you who thought things would be easier by now. Grieving opportunities you turn down out of fear or pressure. Grieving who you were before, stress, adulting, caretaking, and survival. And I think it's really important here to note that many things can be true at the same time. And women aren't always allowed to express that. Like, if a woman expresses regret, like, let's say she, like Tracy, for example, she's like, man, you know what? I am happy. I'm very selective about my partners. I don't like a lot of men because they have toxic masculinity, et cetera. But you know what? I do grieve that I am partnerless sometimes. Oh, and then here comes everybody. Oh, well, you, you know what you signed up for. Oh, well, you're old now and blah, blah. And it's like women don't get to express the duality of life. Sometimes you can very much be grieving something and then be glad at your choice at the same time. Right? You could be grieving that you didn't take that certain job opportunity and still be very clear about, like, loving the opportunities where you are maybe understanding that that job was gonna cause you stress in other ways that you might not be able to make space for or fully understand. Right? For me personally, as I reached my 40th birthday, I realized like, oh, in a career sense, I'm not exactly where I thought I'd be in my life. In some ways, in a certain capacity, I still feel like I'm trying to make it. Does that make sense? Like I there's a part of me who still feels like I'm hustling to get it, that I'm still working towards something which is good in theory, but there's just some framework in my mind that is like the 20 year old version of myself who was like overly optimistic that by now we'd be done.
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Platinum terms apply like my 20 year old self, if she could enter the chat right now, she'd be like, oh yeah, oh yeah, by 20, by 40. Oh my God, 40. I have this many kids, I'm married, I'm coasting on the fruits of my labor now. Like, I don't have to work and be reinventing new things at this time in my life, right? And I know a lot of us can relate to that, right? Especially millennials. I don't know about you guys, but I feel like I've worked so hard my whole life and a lot of the promises that we were promised, I don't know, the promises did not materialize. The promises ain't promising. You feel me? And I know that we're not alone. Pew Research in 2020 found that 52% of millennials feel financially behind where they were expected to be by this age, despite being the most educated generation in history. Now, even though that statistic is speaking to finances, I think that this could be true across the board. Millennials were told, you know, if you just do the things, you go to high school, you take the AP classes, you do the community service, you get a good scholar, you get a scholarship, you get into a good college, get a degree, and then you will get the things you were promised. And for women. And this advice came from a good place, by the way, because women, the women before us, told us, hey, we couldn't even Get a checking account without a man signing off on it. Hey, I had to stay in an abusive, toxic situation for years because I couldn't financially support myself. They told us, make sure you have your own. Do not put a man before your own financial and career security. And we were like, okay, great. And then a lot of us did that and then entered motherhood later, which I've talked about several times. And I just think there's a lot of us that are like, hey, hold on, wait a second. We did the thing things. We followed the rules, and on the back end, we kind of got punished for it. Right. Many millennials are not buying homes like they used to. A lot of us are becoming disillusioned with the corporate ladder and structure. We're not climbing the corporate ladder like previous generations. A lot of us are like, so what is next? And what do I do with the grief that I'm feeling for life not panning out the way that I thought? In the words of Dr. Ajita Robinson, who wrote the Gift of Grief, she's my colleague. Shout out to you, doctor. Dying persons are living. Some are dying more actively than others. You can definitely be alive and be dying. And you need to make space for that grieving that comes along with those versions of you that are dying, the dreams that are dying. Right. I want to say this before I get. Because this will be hopeful, as I did say, it is going to feel a little heavy, but it. There is a payoff. Okay. I want to say this, though. We're going to be better off when we understand that there's grief either way. I made a post about the Tracee Ellis Ross clip because again, she was talking about the grief that she feels sometimes from not having a partner and not having children. And I really relate to that because I absolutely. I am so happy that I have my husband love him down. But I do feel grief sometimes that I don't have children. Right. Sometimes I. I feel like, you know what? Spirit never led me astray. Maybe I'm being saved from something. Maybe my calling as a mother is just gonna look different. But there's still grief there, right? And on my post, Malik Teal Tool. I'm gonna just say Malik, I'm sorry, Malik, because I don't wanna get your last name wrong. Okay. Because I can't remember if it's Teal Toole. But Malik, love her down. She wrote on my. On my post. There's a lot of unspoken grief in motherhood that gets covered up with wine. So much so that many don't see what's happening. This is what I wanted as someone who stood on the they can't have kids bench. And then as someone who now has kids, I can say the weight of grief feels equal. Very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. And although we're talking about motherhood here, I think that it applies across the board. Whether you choose a traditional route or you break every mold. There's grief. You become a mother, you lose parts of your identity, your freedom, your time. There's grief if you don't become a mother. You watch other build others, build families. You imagine for yourself, there's grief. You grieve if you stay too long in a relationship. You grieve if you walk away. You grieve the life you tried so hard to build that didn't turn out the way you hoped. You grieve the life you never dared to build because you were scared. There's no path that exempts you from grief. Once I accepted that, I stopped trying to avoid grief, and I asked myself, what was that about? Because in the episode of that podcast with Tracy, she later says, yeah, what was that about? She was asking herself, what was she looking for in a thing? And I thought to myself, yeah, what is this grief about? And what lesson is here for me? And I know for the healing girlies, I don't know about you, but sometimes I get fatigued with thinking about lessons. Like, I'm fucking tired of lessons. I'm tired of learning lessons. All right, I am going to just be ignorant and dumb because it honestly seems more blissful over there sometimes. Like, girl, another lesson. Whom? Hit him again. Wom. Hit him again. It's like, bae, I'm tired. But I do think it is a part of life. We cannot escape them. We either do them the easy way or the hard way, right? And when it comes to grief, one of the ways that I reframe it from something that is undeniable and something that is to be avoided is to think of gifts in grief. What gifts are here for me in this grief? And I also want to say that you might not be able. There's stages of grief, so there's absolutely a poss. There's absolutely a stage of grief where you're not going to be able to hold space for this thought, where this thought is just going to be too painful to even contend with, and you're not going to want to hear it, and that's okay. But there will become a moment where maybe there's an opportunity for you to think of the grief, of the gift of grief and grief as a possibility as opposed to a punishment. Dying is a natural process that leads to death, but death also leads to rebirth. Many times I'm a plant, mom. I have killed many plants. Okay, I'm a serial plant killer, but I'm a reformed one. I went to therapy in Sweden and like, they reformed me and like, now I don't no longer kill plants. Haha. That was a joke. I don't know if anybody got it. Haha. But anyway, like, I once thought, so a lot of times what happens is a plant looks like it's dying and I don't even give it a chance. And I think, oh, I killed it and I throw it out. So one time I. I thought, oh, this plant's dead. I put it on my patio, didn't pay it no mind. And I think a month went by, maybe eight weeks went by, I didn't pay it no mind, didn't even look at it, wasn't thinking about it. Went out there, there was a whole new plan. I was like, what? I thought you were dead. And I feel like this is the lesson here, right? There are gifts hidden in grief. And grief is just one part of a process that is ongoing. Grief isn't just about what was lost. It's also about what we never got to be, right? There's grief of unlived potential. All of those things, the babies you didn't have, the relationship you walked away from, the version of life you didn't pursue, all of that, right? But on the other side of grief, you need to make space for morning. No, no, no. To get to the other side of grief, gotta make space for the morning. Okay? That is one thing that I've learned. I've been doing womb work and my practitioner told me, have you ever. Or she asked me, have you ever had a funeral or anything like funeral, like any type of ritual mourning and putting to rest the children that you lost? And I'm like, oh, no, I didn't even think of that. Because when it comes to miscarriages, especially if you're not showing yet or, you know, you haven't like announced it to the world, it kind of is just life goes on, you know, there's no elaborate space of mourning, there's no ritual, there's no repast, there's no funeral around that. It's just like, oh, we're sorry. And then life keeps going. And so I realized that these losses were so unceremonious. I was pregnant and then I just wasn't. And life kept going. And I think that's what many of us do. We move forward before we make space to feel. And I'm still unpacking this, but I did absolutely do a small ritual outside in our backyard. And I now I do, like, a thing with candles, and I have them on my altar. And it's really been so healing for me. And I think that that's the lesson for us here, is that when we make space for our emotions and we make space for the morning, then we can make peace. And so here's something for your unruly toolkit about grief. Think of grief like your teacher. One that's kind but hard on you and deeply invested in your growth. I had a teacher like this when I was in high school. She was an AP teacher. She was one of my favorites. It was literature, and I love reading. And so one day in class, we were talk. At the beginning of class, she kind of let us talk about current events. And this was right around when Bush was invading Iraq. And I was sharing something, and I was like, yeah, yeah, you know, whatever. Like Korea or whatever. And I meant Iraq, but I didn't know enough of. I can't believe I'm embarrassed. I've never been good with geography, but I mixed. I mixed up Iraq and Korea. And she was like, what? And I was like, in a class of very, very smart kids. And they all, like, looked at me like, what? You know, like, how could you make such an error? I was kind, so embarrassed. But I was trying to play it off like, oh, I. I don't care. I don't care. But I was embarrassed. And she took me aside and lovingly but firmly said to me after class, you're too brilliant to be just saying things like that. Especially as a young black girl. This world. This world is going to judge you more harshly for your mistakes. She handed me a Time magazine and she told me to read it weekly. And she said, if you read it weekly and you write, like, a synopsis of what you've read for the week, I'll give you extra credit. At the time, it was embarrassing, but it was formative. I learned the importance of being informed about the world around me. And that's what grief can do. It can be like that teacher. It can teach us something that doesn't feel good in the moment that but benefits us overall. And I think it's if we choose, everything is about your choice. We all have free will and have grace with yourself, because you might not be ready to Choose. And that's okay. But whenever you are, you can lean into that classroom and you can graduate. You don't have to stay in grief forever. Take the course, do the work, listen to the whispers, and then graduate. Let your grief make you graduate. Don't keep it. Don't let it keep you from progressing and not passing. And you just. You at your big age, still in high school, you know what I'm saying? With a bunch of younger kids around you. You feel me? I kind of stress that metaphor, but you get what I'm saying. Here are rituals that I think can help you, okay, Movement. Sometimes you have to get out of your head in your body, especially your hips. Twerking. Don't. It's a. It's a sacred ritual. If you want to do that, you can. I like to put on music. I love doing my step aerobics and stuff. And I move, and as I'm moving, I think of it as I'm moving trauma out of my body. I also make sure to, like, move my hips a lot. Stretch your hips. Frog pose from yoga. Really opening up your hips, moving your womb area. Even if you don't, you're not actively thinking, oh, I am releasing trauma. I am healing from grief. Do it anyway. It doesn't have to be that linear, if that makes sense. You can also send voice notes to yourself, either recording how you're feeling to keep track of your journey or just some encouragement for yourself. I love talking to myself. I record voice notes to myself all the time. You can also do altar work if you have an altar. You can go on there and refresh your altar. Make sure there's things on your altar that are appropriate for whatever way you've set up your altar. You can request help, you can request guidance. You can request peace, you can request comfort. You can also listen to any of my meditation mixtapes if you're a Patreon member. I have uploaded three meditation mixtapes up on there so far. And so. And there's also tons of videos on YouTube. What I've been loving lately is I listen to, like, YouTube videos overnight, like, while I'm sleeping. Like, high frequency guru. I love her channel and she, like, her. Her. Her affirmations are really funny. They're like, of course I got it because I wanted it, period. You know, like, they're really funny. And I just play them while I sleep and see if any of that works for you. And then let me know. I would love for you to tap in on socials and let me know how this episode affected you. And if you tried any of those tools, I want to. I want to say this. Grief means you've lived. It means you dared to love. It means you dared to dream and to imagine. And I want to say that it is not a weakness. It is sacred. And if you're going to have any semblance of a meaningful life, you are going to encounter grief. The only way around grief is to never try anything, and then you're still going to have grief. Either way, the goal isn't to eliminate grief. It's to learn to walk with her, to not stop the dreaming, the hoping, or seeing new futures for yourself. Grief can be an opening to a deeper kind of wholeness. As for me, as I had this moment of grief, and now I'm Moving into my 48th year with another level of power, another level of agency and hope. And specifically, I am not anymore controlled by my fertility journey. I've really released it. I don't know what's next for me, but I know it's. Whatever's next for me is going to be what's best for me. All right? I want you to invite yourself to reflect on those thoughts. What are you grieving that doesn't have a name yet? Feel it. Don't try to fix it. Just allow space. Because that's what I'm doing, too, right? I'm not 100% fixed. I'm not 100% healed. And I'm not here to sell you that lie. But I am stronger and I am clearer. If this episode touched something in you, please send it to a friend. Talk about it, cry about it, make space for it. DM me, share it on socials, and I will see you on the next episode of Unruly. Okay, Stay unruly and stay open. If you have something on your mind, a question or something you want me to answer, just send in a voice note@speakpipe.com unruly I can't wait to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to follow or subscribe so you never, ever, ever, ever miss an episode of Unruly.