My heart is cracked. It’s been cracking for a few weeks already. Since just before lockdown began. Though, much of what I’m experiencing has its origins from way back when.

I’ve done my best to stay happy. But, I’ve struggled during the middle of the week, and I’ve been longing for the weekends. That’s very odd! Because for several years I’ve been living the kind of life where I work flexibly across the week, and days are just days. I get by.

But this weekend I didn’t get the uplift I had hoped for. Not like I experienced last weekend. Instead my mood plummeted. I woke up feeling lost and low in self-worth. There was a deep lingering sadness beneath all of that. I’d call it grief, and I know that it has long been there.

However, under normal circumstances, with the correct dose of something, which for me these days could be, coffee, social media, food, or plain worry about something not worth worrying about, I can normally avoid having to feel it.

But, these aren’t normal circumstances. There is no dose that can do it for me. Thankfully, admitting our distress seems that little bit more permissible now than it was, and we’ll do a great service to humankind by allowing ourselves to feel it. It is OK to be sad. It is OK to feel what you feel.

We don’t have to be happy or pretend that we are either. Somewhere way back when, I learnt that some emotions were bad, whilst others were good. Absurd – I’ve always known. But it turned out safer to not express any emotions rather than be chastised for the emotions others loathed to see. And so I missed out on my sadness. And I’ve been missing out on happiness too. Inevitably. For these great emotions are powerful indicators to enable us to find better ways to live together.

And now I’m grieving. . .a side of me has gotten lost. I want it back. And I’m going to keep grieving until it is. This is our time to feel.

And once we’re though this peculiar situation, perhaps we’ll feel our way into something much better than what we had before. In my grief, I can have my hope too. And I am OK with feeling both.