Grief for a Lost Year (Mini-Essay #10)

Ten things about lupus life and trauma recovery

This is part of a series about living with lupus and trauma recovery. I hope those of you with chronic illness or struggling with your mental health might feel less alone as you read these. This is also written for those who want to care, but need an insider’s perspective to help you develop compassion and empathy.

10. Grief for a lost year.

You know what really gets me though? Grief. The wide range of emotions needed to process loss. I’ve been learning about loss a lot, and this has the most profound effect on my mental health.

I usually don’t know exactly why there is that undercurrent of sadness. Or why I have to fight to get out of bed and face the day, to take a shower, or just do work I usually love. Depression is a strange beast and I haven’t invited it to stay.

When I see the why behind depression, though, I can tolerate its presence more. I might work out that I am grieving a loss of one thing and then the next week it is another. Or sometimes it is all of them at once and the weight is so heavy. Here’s some examples of things I grieve:

• My last pregnancy—it was supposed to be beautiful

• So much of my kids’ lives

• My middleschoolers transitioning to being independent teenagers

• Intimacy with my husband

• So much relational collateral with too many friends, and friends who I lost

• My nonprofit

• The muscles that atrophied

• My inability to hike now

• The half a year in wheelchair then

• The months I couldn’t write from nephropathy and shaking

• All the momentum I had made at Average Advocate that I had to restart

• I couldn’t breastfeed

• How I couldn’t be there for my preemie in the NICU or even often at home

There is much grief in losing a year of your life. I have very vivid trauma memories that blur together, and I have flashes of good memories I could put on a timeline. But I wasn’t present while everyone kept going. I disappeared in the fall of 2021 and picked up my life again at the very end of 2022, or maybe early 2023. Everyone else is a year ahead. It is very disorienting.

Thank you so much for reading this series on living with lupus and trauma. I feel pretty honored that you took the time to read any of these!

Grateful on this Fourth of July to have the right to free speech, able to share authentically!

• Read the rest of this series:

  • Waves, Breakers and Red Helicopters

  • Please Don't Simplify the Complexities (Mini-Essay #1)

  • Pharmacy (Mini-Essay #2)

  • PTSD Et Al. (Mini-Essay #3)

  • Not-So-Friendly Insomnia (Mini-Essay #4)

  • Phantom Pain (Mini-Essay #5)

  • Hello, Hair! (Mini-Essay #6)

  • Homebody (Mini-Essay #7)

  • The Scars (Mini-Essay #8)

  • Betrayal (Mini-Essay #9)

  • Grief for a Lost Year (Mini-Essay #10)

• Here are other lupus/trauma related posts from the last year-and-a-half:House of Life, Washing Hands, Do Your Job Well, and the Lupus, Pregnancy, and Autoimmune Illness series posted at AverageAdvocate.com.

• On Average Advocate this week: Receiving Kindness When You Rather Give It

• Follow me on Instagram @AuthenticallyElisa