My problem with Sorry Your Loss (Spoilers ahead)

I did my first re-watch of this show called, Sorry for Your Loss, and I really wanted to talk about it. So what is Sorry for Your Loss?

Synopsis:

Sorry for Your Loss tells the story of Leigh Shaw, a young widow struggling to put her life back together after her husband’s unexpected death. The show is simultaneously devastating and uplifting with grounded, flawed characters who are desperate to find humor anywhere they can.

It’s a Facebook original show and it only lasted two seasons (such a shame. I wished it went on for longer). It stars Elizabeth Olsen and that’s all I needed at the time. I started to fall in love with Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was itching to try out another one of her works. Then I came across the trailer for Sorry for Your Loss.

A simple concept for a moving show and it was a pretty short show. I watched it in a couple of days. I was hooked. I loved Elizabeth Olsen’s acting, I loved the filming, the characters, everything. The humor melds together with the tragic story within the show. The amalgamation of memories of Matt with Leigh’s attempt at moving on showcases the real grueling reality of grief.

Elizabeth Olsen’s performance captures Leigh’s grief so beautifully. Throughout the show, you live and breathe Leigh’s tragedy so you feel for her. However, she can be unlikeable at times, such as using the loss of Matt to win arguments with her sister, Jules. Grief can bring out the worst in people and Sorry for Your Loss portrays that amazingly. You follow her struggle to go on in life without her person, such as getting up in the morning, going to work, writing a blog post for her job, and hanging out with family. Leigh’s family dynamic reminds me of the show, Grace and Frankie with the hippie mom and quirky moments between them. I was gripped from beginning to end. It feels like an indie show, a very small show and it has so much heart in it. I absolutely loved it. Now, when I first watched this show, I did love it. However, I had one gripe with it when I watched it the first time. That was I didn’t like season 2, especially what happened with the relationship between Leigh and Matt’s brother, Danny.

In season one, we follow these two through their grief, Leigh with her husband’s death, and Danny with his brother’s death. These characters hated each other at the beginning of the show. So Matt’s death brought them together. In season one, it was such a beautiful progression, and the season ends with the twist that Danny has fallen for Leigh. A great way to end the season and a great human twist. I wondered how they would continue on with it in season 2.

When I started season 2, I felt it got slower. That it wasn’t as interesting and then episode 7 happens. Danny and Leigh got together and it went downhill for me. The first time I went through the show, I felt that was a cop-out. The writers just did it for shock value. No one would ever get with their dead husband’s brother nine months after their death. It felt unbelievable and went against the characters I grew to love. And then the season ends on a cliffhanger with it being the last season. So I left it with a bad taste in my mouth. After my first watch, I loved the show but didn’t like season 2.

However, I re-watched the show recently, and I have a new appreciation for season 2. The whole concept behind the show is how every person deals with grief differently. With Leigh’s journey, we follow her stages of grief, but the show also delves into everyone’s different forms of grief, such as Leigh’s mother feeling she lost a son and ends up disappearing to Alaska for a couple of episodes. Or with Leigh’s sister feeling her alcoholism contributed to Matt’s death since she couldn’t be there for him as much as she would have liked to. And in the second season, they explored that more vividly through the relationship between Leigh and Danny. Leigh and Danny have very different experiences of grief in season 2. We start to see Danny and Matt’s relationship through flashbacks and it wasn’t always good.

Danny didn’t view Matt through rose-colored glasses like Leigh. In season one, we see Leigh relieving this beautiful life she had with Matt and having to accept he was gone. She accepted that Matt wasn’t doing well and that he possibly didn’t die by accident. Then you have Danny who tries to make Leigh see that his brother wasn’t a hero in a cape as she likes to remember him. He tells her of times he wasn’t a good brother to him and a good husband to her, which leads to their ultimate breakdown in season 2. But both characters return to a similar place after they clashed. At the end of the season, Danny finds himself in a therapist’s office and says that if he was a different person, maybe Matt would still be alive. For Leigh, she arrives at the consensus that she is a terrible person and that Matt took the best parts of her with him when he died. That she hates herself by the end of the show. Though both characters feel differently about Matt and deal with their grief so differently, they arrive back at the same place. Alone and feel responsible for the loss. The appearance of Matt’s apparition to Leigh at the end reinforces that point. Matt won’t leave Leigh when for the first time, she wants him to.

To me, it was an interesting dichotomy of grief, as neither characters do good things but through their grief, it’s a human experience that is so raw and harrowing. This show reveals so many beautiful and harrowing moments of grief and after my re-watch, I have a newfound appreciation of season two. It was not made for shock value or just to create drama out of nowhere. It all led to more realizations for these characters to get through their grief and it’s hard. This is not an easy fix and Sorry For Your Loss showcases that.

Please if you haven’t already, give this show a watch. I promise you won’t regret it. I hope you enjoyed my little review or thoughts on the show and I shall see ye in the next post.

The thing about falling in love

“I don’t want anything else.”

The thing about falling in love is how amazing and debilitating it is. I’ve fallen in love twice in my almost 27 years of life. And it’s terrifying. It’s an all-encompassing and beautiful experience with someone who finally gets you. But like with life, there’s always a catch. In order to fall in love, you need to reveal yourself. Break down all that armor, throw away the self-deprecated jokes and be vulnerable. I’ve never been good with vulnerability. Well, maybe in my writing but when it comes to my real life, I find it hard to drop the wall I built up. You get to put it down long enough by the people you love, and it becomes the only way to survive. When you show yourself, will they still love you? And how long will this last?

I believed for a long time that whenever I was happy, it wouldn’t last. Maybe I manifested it myself or was self-sabotaged, but I felt that any good, happy memory will be washed away by some awful event that happens months later. My first love crashed and burned after a month or so. I lost friendships through that. It put extreme stress on my already mounting trust issues and made me question my love for that person. Falling in love is always a risk.

Can you trust this person with your heart?

Do I deserve this kind of love in my life?

Because when you come with massive trust issues, you develop self-doubt. Maybe all these people leave because I’m a bad person. I’m not a bad person, but your brain will conjure up these anxious thoughts and it’s hard to dismantle them. So when you have this person who confesses their love for you, despite all your flaws and all your insecurities, your brain doesn’t know how to handle it. You question the motive of such a confession, but it’s real. This person loves you despite all of that. They love every part of you.

For me, that has been hard. To have love with no strings attached, no selfishness, and just intimacy, is strange. I have someone that will always be there for me. My partner to the end. Why? How?

Because I love you. My anxieties were quelled by a single sentence. For an anxious person like me, being in a loving relationship has been easy and hard at the same time. I search for the storm that never comes and sometimes that can overwhelm me. Overall, love has been a tricky thing for me. To have someone that is your person has been amazing and weird. I found I was better off alone and I worked on myself. I built up my standards and knew what I wanted. I never expected him to come along. It has been very fulfilling. Love has its perks, but with my brain, it can have its downsides. I guess my reason for this post was that it’s okay to have these moments of doubt. You can’t just switch these emotions or these survival techniques you built up over years off. In moments I self-sabotage, my partner comforts me and reminds me he isn’t going anywhere. Other people who have self-doubt and don’t think they deserve love, trust me you do. Even after being in a relationship for almost two years, I still have doubts. But I always know that I have someone I can come home to when things get dark.

Another rambly post, I apologize. But I hope you enjoyed it and I shall see ye in the next one.

I feel like a failure

I know that title sounds extreme, but that is a thought that comes to the back of my mind constantly. This year, I finally feel like I know what I want to be and who I am. I have never felt that way. For the past two or three years, I felt frozen. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. I was in a job I didn’t like, I just graduated with a Master’s degree and I find I couldn’t get anything out of it. The number of people who said, “You have a Master’s degree! What are you doing working here?”

My self-esteem plummeted. I tried escaping by applying to every job out there, even jobs I knew I would be miserable in. But I felt like I was conditioned to find a job with a very good salary, to have a good life. I’ve been told all my life that if you don’t have money or a job that could make you a good amount of money, you are a failure. So the thought of creating or pushing my writing never crossed my mind. It actually made me more depressed. I wouldn’t have the support from people around me if I took that route and it wouldn’t necessarily make the money that was desired. So I stayed in my frozen state and felt like a constant failure. Why aren’t you saving for a mortgage? Why aren’t you looking for a better-paying job? Bare in mind, that I am not rich but I am not poor by any means. I have savings, and I am making a living. It’s just some people around me, want me to do better. I felt like I couldn’t do any better.

But this past year, I felt like, “well fuck it. I’m going to do what I want.” I going to push this journey for the first time in my life and that’s it. When I came to that epiphany, I felt the weight of the world off my shoulders. It’s my life, no one else’s. I don’t want a job for the money. I want a job or a career out of something that means the world to me. I want to do something with my life that brings me a lot of happiness. Because I most certainly didn’t have a lot of joys in my life. At least writing and reading got me through it.

Apologies for this rambling post, but that’s what I have been feeling for a long time. There are some days when I still feel that word nagging at my brain. “You are a failure.” But I feel like I found my purpose and make myself happy. I work for myself and make my life how I see fit. No one will take that from me anymore and I’ll work my ass off for that passion. You live one life so you might as well live it how you want to. A very short post for today but that’s okay. I wanted to get this off my chest. Hope ye have a fantastic day and see you in the next post.

Loss of Friendships

For the past several years since 2019, I’ve lost many friends. Friendships that lasted over six years were gone in an instant. The biggest grief to face besides the death of a loved one is the ending of a friendship, especially if that friendship ended badly. For this post, I feel like being honest and I just want to talk about something I’ve faced since I was young. That is my difficulty with making friends. I want to talk about the friendships I’ve lost and what I’ve learned from them.

I am awkward and quiet. I don’t go out of my way to meet new people. I’ll always be petrified of what they may think of me. Ever since my primary school days, I’ve had a low opinion of myself. Kids can be mean and can’t communicate properly so cruel things can be said at a young age. Ever since I was a child, I’ve thought that no one likes me and I don’t deserve to be liked. I’m the ugly awkward friend that no one wanted to be friends with. I used to be alone a lot. I would eat my lunch in the library because I didn’t have anyone to eat with. And it didn’t help that for most of my teenage years, the friends I had surrounded myself with, bullied me.

In my secondary school days, I was surrounded by toxic friends. My friend group consisted of five of us and we had a leader. She always did things her way and we followed suit. I knew her since we were in primary school and I thought I knew her pretty well. But I was wrong. She would pretend that we were on the same page, such as, we would go to the cinema and love the movie. But next day in school, she would tell the rest of the group that it was awful and made me look like the weirdo for liking it. The group loved Twilight for years, but once she decided she didnt like it anymore, everyone else followed suit. It was very much a cult of personality. The rest of the group would almost play into how she did things and I became the outlier. There were times where this girl would ignore me for months on end and I wouldnt have done anything to her. And when I did ask her why, she would just laugh in my face. After years of being made fun of, little backhanded comments and being ignored by the people who I thought were my friends, I decided to fight back. I became more argumentative with the leader. We fought a lot, mostly she started them. But I wouldnt have been innocent to all of the fights. But when she was in the wrong, the group would always side with her. I remember it was my final year in school, and six years worth of abuse and stress led to me bursting into tears in front of my mother. So I decided to end the friendship with the leader. It ended with her cursing me out, confirming we were never friends and storming out. My mother was called by her mother and they had a meeting. Basically, the blame was put solely on me and she tried to spread rumours about me in the school afterwards. I spent the rest of my final year, eating by my locker and avoiding the group like the plague. I did tell the rest of them that if they wanted to know the truth about what happened between me and the leader, all they had to do was ask. They never even tried. So I entered college with no friends and quite a lot of distrust of people.

When I entered my college years, I found my people. Good people that treated me pretty well and I felt comfortable with. No back-stabbing and no need to create toxicity. But as the years drew on, I experienced the selfish friends. Friends that only care for themselves and you only serve a certain purpose for them. The ones that would look at your messages and never respond to you when you ask to meet. I had one particular friend who I called Mé Féiner (the irish word for myself). All she cared about was drinking and needing us around to take care of her. I remember that back in the day, I sat down and tried to think of all the pros of having this person as my friend. All I had was that she was a drinking friend, and a terrible one at that. When we went out drinking, she used to abandon us all the time. Now, thats fine when you are in a group. I remember one time, where I was out drinking with her, I got really drunk. I was so drunk that I was puking on my leg. Instead of waiting with me until my parents came to get me, she left me there and asked a group of strangers to keep an eye on me.

Another time, she asked me to meet up with her but I had already made plans with some college friends. She asked if she could come along, but at that rate, she always made a habit of dragging herself into things where she wasnt invited and my friends didnt like her. So I said to her that I cant meet her that night, but I could meet the next day or the following day for coffee instead. She tried to guilt trip me into saying she needed someone to talk to and cant I just push my plans ahead. I said no, because my friends and I had tried planning this night out for weeks but we were all too busy to meet up. And I hadnt seen them in over a month, whereas I saw this girl nearly everyday. When she wasnt getting what she wanted, she turned it back on me and said, “I would cancel a wedding for you if I knew you were this bad.” The biggest red flag for me in that moment, was that I would normally have dropped everything to hang out with her. So the one time I didnt do that, she took to quilt tripping me and lecturing me about how I wouldnt make time for her.

I had a couple of interventions with her and explained that I would not torelate that behaviour. I told her that she would never cancel a wedding for me. In fact, she wouldve attended that wedding and drank herself silly before she would ever consider coming to help me. But the biggest thing that broke the camels back for me, was that she betrayed my trust and showed how selfish she really was. Maybe someday I may tell that story but thatll need a whole other post to detail how bad this was. All you need to know for now, was that she hurt someone I loved and betrayed my trust to the point that it couldnt be reversed. So I cut her out of my life and so did the rest of our group. For me, that person only cared about their needs being met and they would never do the same for you. I would always meet up with them when they needed me, but if the roles revered, it would a different story. She never really cared if I was there, especially when she did things that she knew would hurt me. So I was better off when I cut her out of my life. I didnt need someone that unreliable and selfish to be my friend.

Then the last amount of friends I had to deal with would be the one that inspired this post in the first place. These are the friends who have their preconceived notions of friendships and if you dont meet their expectations, you end up being the villain. I dont have a specific title for someone like that, but yeah. Recently, I chatted to a friend about someone who ghosted me over a year ago and gave me some clarity to the reasons why they did so. To make things easier, Ill call this friend, the ghost. It was actually the ghost that inspired this blog post.

After they blocked me on all social media and I never heard from them again, the ghost sent a 13 screenshots worth of a message to a mutual friend of ours. In it, they detailed all the reasons for why they stopped being my friend. Some I got, others I was baffled and two of them I was utterly appalled by. I couldnt believe it. Six years worth of friendship gone in an instant. Overall what I got from their message was that they never really knew me. I never would call myself a perfect friend. My main goal is to try and be there as best I can and I always try to be nice to everyone. Everything the ghost said, went against everything I am. If I said anything mean or said anything that upset you, I am sorry, but tell me about it. If I fuck up, let me know so I can try and fix it. Dont lock it away and bury it. Thatll only come back uglier. I could argue some but not all as this message was six years worth of shit. I cant remember them all. Also the claims they had about me were so outrageous and unbelieveable, it made me sit back and see them for what they were. They were never my friend. They never really knew me. Because if they knew me or if they were my friend, they would ask me about it. But no, the only responses they had was, “I shouldnt have to explain to someone how to be a good friend. Especially someone who is almost 26” and “I thought I knew her too.”

Every friendship has their own set of boundaries. We are all different people with different personalities. We wont all be able to get along and thats okay. I cant change to suit you and I would never ask you to change to suit me. We all have our own different opinions or views on the world. That doesnt make that person a monster (unless these ideas are criminal and against basic human rights). If you want me to text you everyday to see if you are okay, I am not that friend. But that doesnt mean I wont reach out. Just because I dont drop everything to be with you, it doesnt mean I am a villain. We will be there in our own ways and if you didnt like that, you should have told me. The ghost counted up a list of my offences in their head, all the things I did wrong in their head. There was never any discussions of these issues they had. I thought our friendship was pretty good. If I am unaware of their issues, how can I fix them? Ultimately, the ghost believed some heinous claims made about me from people who didnt really know who I was and from out of context shit. I believed that after six years, the ghost knew me well enough to know or at least even ask if it was true. Not to ghost me and never give me the chance to fight my corner. I could never make them stay my friend, but at least there would’ve been closure. After I got some clarity recently, I finally got that closure.

Ultimately these friendships taught me a lot about what I want in a friend. I just want a friend who is kind, no toxicity. No need to be afraid about what you say around them because theyll love you no matter what. If you do or say anything wrong or that upsets them, theyll tell you. I want honesty in my friendships. The ghost could never be honest with me and that was their issue. If they want to believe this monstrous version of me, then I cant dissuade them. I worked on my flaws. I gave myself that chance, but they never heard me out. They didnt want to, because maybe they wanted any reason to end our friendship. If you didnt want me to be your friend, thats okay. We are adults and you couldve said so. I dont believe ghosting is ever the answer. I dont believe being nasty to people is the answer. Treat people with respect and end things that way. But from my experiences, they dont always end the way you want them to.

For me, friendships are hard because, I’m not perfect. I pick the wrong people to surround myself with and I sometimes do the wrong thing. I trust too easily, but also not at the same time. When people seem kind, I jump at that chance. Nowadays, I keep to myself. I have my friends from college, my family and boyfriend. And my closest friend is with my writing. Writing gave me closure for a lot of these trials in my life and in a twisted way, writing led me to these people. But Ill continue to write for my therapy, for my creativity and for understanding. I used my pen to write about these experiences to understand that no one is ever perfect. Ill accept the hand I dealt with in these friendships. I accept any wrongdoing I may have contributed to, but I know those friends I’ve lost may never accept their part in it all. And thats okay because, I hate to quote Leigh Bardugo but if you dont like me as I am,

“Fine, make me your villain.”

My biggest advice from losing friendships myself is understand that it may not always be you. Accept what you may have contributed to and work on yourself. If you know yourself without a doubt, the friends you want and need in your life will follow. With that full confidence in yourself, you can select your friends from what you want and need in your life. That’s a life lesson I am starting to follow and so far, it has been pretty peaceful. And anyone who is experiencing a friend break-up, I know its painful right now but it will get better. You will find your people. I promise. Hope you have a good day and ill see you all in the next post.