The Wistfulness of Endings
A few weeks ago, I answered a question from a Patreon member in my Closet Coaching story (on Instagram and now YouTube) about feeling grief when things end.
One follower aptly described it as: "the wistfulness of endings," and the terminology gave me life because I've never heard it so perfectly defined.
As a way of describing what this concept means to me (and how I see it as relevant to binge eating), allow me to outline it in greater detail:
At the age of eleven, I graduated from fifth grade. The class that I had moved through elementary school with was moving onto middle school, a larger and wider place that spoke to me of the closing of childhood and the entry of pre-adolescence (which I felt unprepared for).
Something about this transition felt like a punch to the gut. I remember journaling the morning of the last day of school, trying to express what I could only identify as “sadness” about this being the last day our class would stand together as kids. I understood that the graduation implied that a part of our life story was over, and that we'd never get it back.
My friends called me nostalgic; my parents called me overly-sensitive. I called it sentimental, and understood that most people (especially not 5th graders) were not even remotely concerned about what seemed to me a strangely heart-breaking moment.
I cried a lot that day. I experienced unbearable sadness. I felt I was in the process of loss. My siblings wondered why I didn't look at the bright side of things and see the transition as a moving forward -- "you're too negative," they said.
I absorbed this self-definition. I'm too negative, I thought.
But the label didn't make the emotion go away.
After this time period, and especially moving into high school, I recognized that my sentimental, over-sensitive, nostalgic tendency was not going to serve me well. It was clearly a blip on my emotional map, and one that was apparently seen as depressing. It started to irritate me because I clearly needed more time processing the wistfulness of endings than other people. I raced to catch up. I decided that bypassing the grief might be more productive than letting it download at all, so it wouldn't slow me down.
On my 16th birthday, I cried all day. My mom gave me a necklace of pearls to signify the milestones in my life up until that point, and I choked on my tears. I knew those pearls were lost moments, and I knew every pearl that would be added would signify more losses.
Depressing.
Stuff, shove, numb, quiet, push, hide, squash.
Since then, I have done an efficient but probably unproductive job of bypassing the organic emotion that seems to exist within me when it comes to endings. Efficient because I learned how to do it; unproductive because it manifested elsewhere.
Emotions are energy, and pushing them down is like holding a beach ball under water -- it's not going to sink, it's going to build momentum and eventually burst through the water in another direction when you lose balance, attention, or energy.
I believe that binges are like underwater beach balls in this regard -- they signify emotional suppression that is begging for expression.
I also believe that any attempts we have to stuff our authentic nature is not going to end well. There is a difference between working with our authentic nature to navigate life effectively, versus rejecting its existence as a means of escape.
As a result of suppressing this emotional experience for the next 20 years, I lived in a chronic state of mid-"download" (a term I borrowed from Alicia Brown during a recent podcast recording, you can check out a previous one here) where the emotions I felt naturally were building up in a queue of unprocessed energy that spilled over into binges, irritability, and mood swings. They say that anger is sadness that had nowhere to go for too long.
My recovery from binge eating and body image began by understanding that my authentic self was no longer willing to stay shoved in a box so that I didn't bother anyone, or so that I could fit into the world more quietly.
Part of reclaiming my authentic self involved allowing myself to be deeply sentimental, nostalgic, and sensitive -- and even sometimes depressed.
It seems to be a part of me.
There are other times when I wish I could be more optimistic and future-oriented; to let things pass without needing to mourn them or hold them longer.
The wistfulness of endings doesn't just show up in obvious places like graduations or obvious points of closure, either. I believe it can come when any powerful emotion begins its descent, especially in moments of great beauty, awe, poignancy, and connection with others.
In my experience and in the experience of a number of my followers on Instagram, this flood of emotion has been noted in things like:
finishing a meal
sunsets
leaving a great party
coming home after a date or dinner with friends
the last day of vacation
following an orgasm
closing of seasons (especially summer)
end of a movie
end of a song, or turning off a playlist to re-enter life
breakups
end of a bonding group experience, even casual groups
leaving a job
the day after a holiday
Sunday evenings
and so many others.
If this resonates with you, what do you notice as a trigger for your wistfulness? And have you noticed that urges to eat are stronger as a way of avoiding the transition away from something?
I'd love your thoughts.
