Category: Danielle Balmer

 

Some things in life are hard. Your exams, assignments, exercise, people. But dealing with grief and loss? That’s the hardest thing of all.

You cannot explain something so raw and real. One day your life is carrying along as usual and the next it is completely shattered. It makes you question your purpose, how do you go on? You just do. The world will always keep spinning and everyone’s life will keep moving. I’ve experienced the pain of loss, of death to your once tight-knit family, and the emotional trauma that is grief. Losing my grandfather, my godfather and uncle, even my childhood dog and cat. It is immeasurable. You feel as if you have lost a part of your soul that you can never get back- how many tears can you cry, when does your body stop feeling numb, when does the shock of pain pass? When the funeral is over, when the flowers have died, when everyone has carried on with their lives, you suddenly realise that this is your life now. Nothing will ever be the same again.

I was visiting a family friend the other day who had just lost her husband, my boss that gave me my first paying job. As I was listening to her speak of his final days and the visible pain of losing her husband, a father, and a grandfather I noticed how frustrated she was at recent mourners that have come and gone and how in social situations, you avoid talking directly about the loss and overcompensating with words that don’t really help mend that pain. “I’m so sorry for your loss” – are you? Then would you mind please bringing them back now. “Yes my husband went through the exact same thing” – yes but he is still alive. “I had some casserole left over so I thought I would bring it to you” – gee thanks.

In this moment I looked down into my cup of tea and thought about how grief is like a cup of tea. It takes so many formations, colours, and textures. You never know how or when it will rear its ugly head and take control over you. Sometimes you cry unfathomably and other days you feel guilty because you haven’t cried. In some moments you are so angry or filled with this anxiety not knowing what to do.

“Death comes to all, but great achievements raise a monument which shall endure until the sun grows old.”

I see grief as an emotion that has a life of its own. It carries every feeling within it and sometimes there is just no way to discern it or control it. You cannot measure it or even begin to understand it in its entirety. That is what grief is at its core. No matter how many books you read or how much advice you get or how many times you go over it in your head, you cannot define grief. There is no right or wrong way in dealing with it. You take every day as it comes and appreciate the memories you did have- no one can take that away from you.

The shock of loss to our bodies- emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual is incredible. For those of us who have experienced grief you wake up in the morning and for a split second everything is okay in the world. And then you remember, the storm clouds gather and the overriding question lingers: what is the point in getting out of bed? It questions the very nature of who we are.

So here are my thoughts and tips if you want to call them that. Grief cannot be solved, taught or justified. Grieving is a process and a journey you have to go on by yourself.

Self-care: During this time our bodies need to be fed in order to handle the multiple phases of grief and trauma. Although this may seem small and insignificant you must remember that you are still with the living and to live you must eat, drink and carry on because your body won’t stop to allow you to just crawl into a ball and ignore all signs that tell you you are still alive.
Accepting what we cannot control: A time will come when you need to accept you have no control over what happens to you. You need to realise that what you once knew, you no longer can know. If you look at this from a sort of spiritual perspective (regardless if you are or not) you have the power to realise all that we are not and less about what we are or what we think we know. There is great freedom that comes with this because it gives you the courage to meet life’s adversities head-on.

Accept the bad days: As myself and my family have learned over these years, grief pressures you to seek within yourself. Sometimes you have bad days- that is fact and others will understand that. It may be as simple as a text: “Bad day, can’t talk”. The simplicity of that text shows that you can’t force grief to be something different. Don’t suppress it but don’t force it to be something it really isn’t.

Embrace the hard times: When the pain of loss happens, it is like a lightning bolt. I use this comparison for two reasons. Grief is like a lightning bolt because you are aware there is lightening around you, you can hear it and sometimes you can see it but you never think that it can strike you. And when it does it comes and shakes the foundation of your grounding. You question everything- what you’re doing, what’s more important, who you truly are. But there comes great power in surrendering to the unknown.

The days and the weeks that follow on from a death in the family will seem like they bleed together like the diary of your life disintegrating in front of your very eyes, but there are days in between that where you experience joy and laughter. Don’t feel guilty about that because one of the feelings you can experience from grief is joy. Joy for the memories you shared, joy for the time you had, and joy for the life you have lived with them. Outside of that context, a weekend away with your friends, a lunch out with your family or simply days where the sun was shining and you felt no reason but to be happy. Embrace these days for what they are and don’t feel guilty. Life is there to be lived because one day the harsh reality of it is that we will die as well.

And like everything else, your suffering will go, until one day it comes back again. Their favourite song on the radio, the car they used to drive or their mail that arrives in the letterbox.

But for me, the greatest thing about death is that it helps us grow. It matures us, brings us lessons of holding on so tightly and letting go and gracing us with the wisdom we need to move forward with everyone else. With time, the sun will shine again. Embrace this new chapter in your life by going for a walk, taking your shoes off and feeling the sand beneath your toes, looking up at the trees and breathing in the air. The happiness we once had never really went away, one day you will find that it still exists inside us, we are just remembering it anew. It engages us again and revives us.

“This too shall pass”

That is the very nature of grief because it has its own rhythm. It is both in the present and in the past and will always appear to stay that way no matter how much time has passed.

Learn to live on, accept the hand you are dealt, and never forget what is important in life.

(By Danielle Balmer)

 

Today is International Women’s Day. A day where we celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Did you know that? Nah me either. I think it’s because I’m living beyond my means. These days a third of us young professionals are. And I salute us… the lost generation.

It’s a Tuesday morning in the office and I’m sitting with my mouth open on its hinges still trying to recover from the weekend. I don’t seem to bounce back like I used to because back in my day… wait who am I kidding I’m 22. I look around at my fellow employees and can’t help but ignore the sour taste of envy in my mouth. With their children, their fiancés, building their new homes, complaining about the tenants they have in their rental properties. Basking in the glory of success. I sink slowly into my chair.

I’m having a millennial breakdown. We’ve little hope of a high paid job, saddled with debt, will probably never own a home, we can’t get a boyfriend because they are all on Tinder… I’ve even worked out which one of my girlfriends I’m getting hitched to and adopting two children with. She seems like she would do a great job at being my life partner based on my previous track record.

This is the life for us born shy of 1980: a hopeless offering of limp employment, academic debt, sex so casual that choosing partners is as easy as swiping right with your index finger, and, of course, little hope of ever having a “place of one’s own”.

Let me throw some numbers at you to prove that I’m not being a Drama Queen. The gender pay gap in New Zealand for women is 11.8% based on median hour earnings. I guess I can counter-argue this. I would be mega rich by now if I had no social life, if the word ‘takeaway’ wasn’t in my vocabulary, if I thought the bus was my only convenient form of transport, if I didn’t care what clothes I wore, how I looked when I woke up in the morning or the quality of my cellphone to take the right selfie. The brands, oh the brands! I do care because it’s really hard not to.

It’s no wonder then that at least some of this generation see things a little bleakly. I’ve got Lena Dunham to cry with me and capture the sad-eyed, antsy demographic through her character in Girls. Girls, if you haven’t seen it is our generation’s version of Sex and the City, just with bad footwear. It is infused with a language to a world of dead-end sex, dead-end jobs and expensively educated kids working day shifts at their local cafe. Dunham has created quite a name for herself as the town crier for a frightened generation. For the young men and women who believe their feelings are only valid unless posted on social media, struggle to make sense of a world that doesn’t really have any room for them.

And I know what you’re all thinking: “Please! This generation will never know the threat of military service. These young women will never know what it feels like to be confined to the four walls of their kitchen as the legal ‘subject’ of their husband or denied free access to contraception. What real punishment meant for them in schools. For them, a university education is a given, not a privilege. They can travel! Delay motherhood! Build a social network empire through the voodoo magic of their phones!”

And without a doubt this age group enjoys the spoils of modern life that their parents and grandparents could only ever dream of: free entertainment in their back pockets; air travel that costs less than a meal out; and cheaper food which means we will never know the taste of the mystery casserole in a can.

These are the things our predecessors worked hard for. Paying for movies and music, shopping in charity shops, and riding the waves of the devastating effects of a recession: houses lost and savings obliterated. What a depressed bunch we are.

But doesn’t every generation think they have it worse than before? The classic first world problems and all that! My father would probably agree. But then if his mother was alive she would shake her head and explain that neither of us would ever know how it feels to have lost loved ones to the war, or know with certainty that your life would never stray beyond the perimeters of motherhood and the small patch of a home town.

So I did some digging into the gossip mag archives to find the headlines that made the decades:

1960: “When a Working Girl sees a Psychiatrist”

1970: “What’s New and True about Woman Doctors”

1980: “25 Ways to Ignite a Love Affair”

1990: “How to Look like a Fashion Model” with a close second being “Does he bore you? How to stay interested”

2000: “You! You! You! Secret Ways to stop stressing about Hideous Days”

2016: “New Year New Booty”

So in short, we have all had it hard. Even though I’m biased I still can’t help but think us poor, rictus-grin selfie of a generation still have it worse. We’ve been duped the most out of all of our counterparts. Nothing stings worse than the feeling of being over-promised so much yet realising you’ve become an adult overnight. Our self-esteem was bolstered: being told in school that we could do or be anything if we put our minds to it. A university education was the way to go next and a guarantee of well-paid employment. Grandparents cannot fathom how their adult grandchildren still don’t have a home, husband or any assets that signify “welcome to adult life this way please”.

So what have we done? We’ve hustled and created “personal brands”. Our YouTube channels, our blogs, our social media hierarchies. Some of us have found the job the husband and the baby growing inside of them. I wonder how many ‘likes’ they’ll get on Facebook?! It is a little bit of a disguise, I’ll give us that. We’ve mastered the art of distraction by waving a cheery scarf, or a well filtered Instagram photo from where you’d rather be while stuffing our frightened senses into our pockets.

So forgive us when you hear us talking about our followers or our Snapchat filters. Purchasing the right shade of Mac lipstick or taking 1000 selfies to capture the most ‘natural-not-looking-at-the-camera’ shot. Don’t judge us for our relentless self-promotion or our Saturday nights on the town. We do it because we have to. We get tough and we get pushy in the most discrete way possible and we do whatever it takes to get noticed in the 21st century.

(By Danielle Balmer)

 

I once knew this guy who made a lot of money. He saw the world as a series of values and propositions. Everything from what home to buy, who to deal with who, to why certain people liked him or not.

If someone was rude to him it was because they were jealous or felt threatened by his power or success. If someone was kind to him it was because they admired his power and success, and in some cases, may be trying to manipulate him to get more access to it.

He measured himself through his financial success. And naturally he measured the world and the people around him through financial success.

I once knew this woman who was beautiful. She saw the world in terms of attraction and attention. Everything from the clothes she wore on a lazy day, to getting discounts, to dealing with the naggers.

If someone was rude to her it was because they were intimidated by her beauty or their own lack of beauty. If someone was kind to her it was because they admired her beauty and wanted access to it.

She measured herself through her beauty and attractiveness. And naturally she measured the world and people in it by their beauty and attractiveness.

I once knew this guy who was an introvert. He was socially awkward and nobody liked him that much. He saw the world as a popularity contest, a contest that he was perpetually losing. Everything from how much beer he could drink alone, to the invisibility cloak he wore out, to the girls who just didn’t get him.

If someone was rude to him it was because they realized how much cooler they were than him. If someone was kind to him it was because they saw how much of a loser he was and took pity on him. Or perhaps they were just bigger losers than he was.

He measured himself through his social status. And naturally he measured the world and the people in it through social status.

The way in which we judge others is a reflection on the ways that we choose to measure the value in our own lives. Some of us measure our life through money and accolades. Others measure it through beauty and popularity. Others measure it through family and relationships. Others measure it through service and good deeds.

Chances are you measure it through some combination of all of these things, but one in particular matters most to you. One stands out and determines your happiness more than others.

I’ve showered you with my opinions on here for quite some time now. But if there is one thing you can take away for later, it’s that it is always important to measure ourselves by our own internal metrics as much as possible. The more external we make our metrics for our own value and self-worth, the more we screw everything up for ourselves and for others.

If you measure your life by your family relationships, then you will measure others by the same standard – how close their family is to them. If they’re distant from their family or don’t call home enough, you’ll judge them as deadbeats, ungrateful or irresponsible, regardless of their lives or their history.

If you measure your life by how much fun and partying you can have, then you will measure others by the same standard – how much fun and partying they have. If they prefer to stay home and watch reruns of the soap opera we all love to hate every weekend, you’ll judge them as inhibited, scared of the world, lame and soulless, regardless of their personality or needs.

If you measure your life by how much you’ve travelled and experienced, then you will measure other people by the same standard – how worldly they’ve become. If they prefer to stay home and enjoy the comforts of routine, then you will judge them as incurious, ignorant, unambitious, regardless of what their aspirations really are.

The tape measure we use for ourselves is the tape measure we use for the world.

If we believe that we’re hard workers and we earned everything we have, then we will believe that everyone else earned what they have. And if they have nothing, it’s because they earned nothing. And if they haven’t worked hard but still manage to get what they want for nothing, we will judge, my god will we judge.

Speaking of God, this is why people who are born-again Christians tend to believe that everyone should find salvation through Jesus Christ. This is why hardcore atheists try to logically argue about something that has nothing to do with logic. It’s why racists often claim that everyone else is racist too. They just don’t know it. It’s why sexist men justify their sexism by saying women are worse and sexist women justify their sexism by saying men are worse.

This isn’t to say that judging is wrong. There are plenty of values worth judgment. I judge people who are violent and malicious. But that is a reflection of who I am. I judge violence and malice within myself. Those are traits that I will not tolerate within myself, therefore I do not tolerate them in others. But that is a choice I am making. That is a choice we are all making, whether we realise it or not. And we should make those choices consciously and not on auto-pilot.

It’s why people who think they’re ugly look for all of the ways people around them are ugly and why people who are lazy and slack off look for all of the ways others cut corners and slack off as well. It’s why corrupt officials choose to be corrupt: because they assume everyone else is as corrupt as they are. It’s why cheaters choose to cheat: because they assume everybody else is going to cheat if given the chance too.

It’s why those who can’t trust are the ones who can’t be trusted.
It’s why this world we live in has a gross aftertaste of selfishness and milk 10 days old.

Many of us adopt our own internal tape measures not through conscious choice but through the shaming we’re subjected to. But another big part of development is to recognise that everyone has their own metric. And that metric is likely not going to be the same as ours. And that’s fine. Most metrics people choose are fine. Even if they’re not the same metrics you would choose for yourself.

You may view the world through family values, but most people do not. You may view the world through the metric of attractiveness, but most people do not. You may view the world through the metric of freedom and worldliness, but most people do not. You may view the world through the positivity and friendliness, but most people do not.

And that’s simply part of being human. Accepting that others measure themselves and the world differently than you do is one of the most important steps to consciously choosing the right relationships for yourself. You may not accept a person’s ideas or behaviors- but don’t be bashful because of it.

It’s inevitable- it’s in our nature to have a lack of contentment, a streak of jealousy, and a thirst for the spotlight. It’s not the healthy way to live our lives. At times I make myself ill on the inside just thinking about how I judge, who I’m judging and why I’m doing it. We are the parasites that thrive off the negative Nancy comments and the nasty words.

Don’t give these thoughts or the judgemental thoughts of others the time of day. If the spotlight isn’t on them, they’ll fade because nobody will listen.

Stick to your own path, it’s the one only you know and the one nobody else does. That’s how it should be, it’s how it can be and it starts with me. Right now.

(By Danielle Balmer)

Danielle Balmer attended FAHS from 2007 to 2011. She has a degree in communications and is currently a Communications Officer for the Manawatu District Council. She also writes a blog -www.daniellebalmer.org.nz

The following pieces first appeared on that blog. I have fallen in love with Dear Hypothetical Man. Here it is:

 

Dear Hypothetical Man,

We’ve often wondered what you’d be like. We even thought we’d met you before. A couple of times, in fact.

Other times, we’ve questioned whether marriage is ever a possibility for us at all.

We are not sure whether you exist. If you do, that’s lovely. But if you don’t, that’s fine too. Of course, it does make this letter existentially problematic – I mean, who are we even writing to? – but we’re totally fine either way.

We don’t do perfect. We do real. Let authenticity, conversation and hunger for each other be the manifesto for a marriage.

In the interests of full disclosure, please know that we aren’t porcelain dolls, we have insecurities- a kaleidoscope of flaws, as we hope you have too. We may get anxious, and bite our nails. All too often. And at times, get lost in our own heads.

But please don’t ever mistake our desire for independence or intermittent silence as indifference.

We want you to know that we’re not trophies or a symbol of your perceived success. Apparently it’s a compliment- just ask Kanye West. We were not raised to sit and look pretty on anyone’s shelf. We want to have intellectual conversations. We want to help you chase your dreams. We want to be your partner and not your prize.

Sometimes we’re boisterous and giggly. Confident. We were complete before we met you, as I hope you were too. So don’t get out the glue- that’s way too much pressure for anyone to bear.

Despite grocery shopping and doing laundry, our home will not be one of small talk and monotony. We are the authors of our suburban sonnet, after all.

We want you to know that we are feminists, and we want you to be one too (yes we said it). That doesn’t mean we are anti-men, and it doesn’t mean that we think of ourselves as superior to you. It merely means that as women, we believe we should have the power and the choice to define what it means to be female. Maybe it is defined through continuing to work a full time job throughout the duration of our marriage. Maybe one day it’ll mean deciding to take on the onerous yet rewarding task of being a stay-at-home mum. Either way it’ll be “working” and the best social situation that we can come up with will be free from societal expectations.

We want you to know that while your opinions will be valuable, we will try our hardest not to exchange our personal identity for your stamp of approval.

And what do we think you’re like? Well. The weight of expectation is a heavy one, so let’s avoid preconceptions. If we said yes, then, well, know that you’re perfect to us. Character is far more important.

I read somewhere once that you need to fall in love six times before you get married. Honestly, we are not sure what the ‘magic’ number is. We’ve fallen in love before, more than once. And fallen out of it again. We’ve met some very special people out of the 7 billion wandering the globe. Yet, despite time and life and multiple broken hearts, some inexplicable nonsensical pull could bring US together.

Too many people stay together because of expectation. Or exhaustion. Or fear of upsetting the status quo. But we, perhaps because of the divorce skeletons rattling through our heads, have always vowed we would never settle for second best.

And we won’t. You will be family. Bound not by DNA, but rather the family we choose.

And every day, we will choose you, again. And again.

It’ll be worth the wait.

With love,
Your Princess. (Ugh. I’m joking! Don’t you dare.)
Us