Grief

This is a tough subject for me. It's really close to home for me at the moment. I suppose that it should make this post easier to write, but seriously, it just makes it harder.

Grief is a tricky emotion. It's an emotion that we try to cast aside, insist that it doesn't exist. When we're actually feeling it, maybe we don't recognize it. I certainly don't half the time. It swathes itself in a million layers so that we don't recognize it and we cover ourselves in as many blankets to get as far away from it as possible. I've certainly been doing that for the past few months. But here goes.

Three months ago, my grandma and my great grandma died. It would've been hard enough to lose just one of them, but to lose both of them was devastating. I was so lost. It made a whole heap of changes in my shattered life that I'm now trying to piece together. I distanced myself from my friends and didn't tell them anything about what was happening, which means that now I'm trying to convince them that I am their friend. It was so tough for me.

I'm actually crying as I write this, because it's just so hard to remember all of this. Some might say that 2015 has been their best year yet, but for me, it's quite definitely the worst. And it was supposed to be great-the year that I graduated from primary school, the year that I started soccer. Instead those have all been shoved aside as I wallow in my grief.

As some of you may know, my actual name is Amelie. Both my gran and great gran loved that name, so I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I considered a bunch of different names, from Beatrice Finch (my two favourite book characters) to Thejellybeangirl, but I knew I wanted something simple, something that I might be able to commemorate them with. So how did I get El? Well, not only is my name amELie but my grandma's name was Elizabeth Leslie. I liked the name El, so I became El. At first I just wanted to do really light hearted blogs, but I realised that it might help me to unload a little bit of everything in a blog. So My Random Life was born.

Now it feels good to hide behind a name on the internet, and to just spill. It helps in a way that I can't even describe.

So grief.. How do you deal with it? Well, you tell your friends, you don't try and hide how hurt you are, you just try and shuffle along to get away from it all. You make sure that someone knows what's happening, and make sure you have some sort of habit to fall back on. Mine was reading-I have read nearly 200 books since my grandma died in June. I am trying to regain my footing from all this, and with this blog post I feel as if I've taken one big step.

~El