You are allowed to dance when you're grieving

And to make terrible tonsorial decisions, it turns out

I think there was a part of me that thought I had to die, too. Or maybe that I already had.

In those first days and weeks after my mum died, I’d startle awake every morning, struggling for breath, as if I’d been buried.

I then spent every day in tears as I chipped away at a mountain of admin tasks, putting on a brave voice for the coroner and funeral director and BT’s bereavement support team.

I did what I had to do, kept going as best I could, and it’s not as though I could have been mollified at that point by food or music or books, any of the small pleasures that previously made life as a disabled person in an ongoing global pandemic a bit more bearable.

Only now do I realise that I’d unconsciously absorbed the idea that I had to stay in that state, to live inside the restrictive bubble of early grief — whether because escape wasn’t possible or because to do otherwise would be disloyal to my mum, I’m not sure.

In grief support groups and chats with kind friends, people told me not to expect too much, that I’d feel terrible for a long time, that grief never goes away but we learn to live with it.

All the standard things we say now that it’s slightly less socially acceptable to tell grievers to suck it up and be glad for their memories.

I’m not saying anyone did anything wrong by sharing how unbearable grief is. No one was trying to sentence me to feeling awful forever.

But now I see that my perfectionist, guilt-prone mind twisted what they said to mean that not only would I feel bad, all the time, but also that I had to, or I wasn’t doing grief “right” and would feel worse in the long run.

The truth is that I did feel bad, almost all the time, for those first few days and weeks.

I had brief reprieves when I was able to cry during a grief support group and breathe a bit easier afterwards, or when one of the podcasts I played at all times sparked an unexpected laugh.

I tried, occasionally, to watch TV or a film, read a page or two of a book, but quickly found myself feeling suffocated, agitated, unable to concentrate and distressed by the attempt.

I felt alienated when other grievers mentioned collapsing in front of Netflix, wondering if there was something uniquely weird about the way I’d become incapable of engaging, how ostensibly relaxing things like lying on the sofa or reading or watching TV felt like torture.

I guess I just can’t take pleasure in anything (except podcasts, sometimes), I concluded.

And then my dad came over to stay with me, the first time I’d seen him in five years, and we went to get fish and chips.

When we came out of the shop, the sun appeared from behind a cloud, a woman walked past with a miniature dachshund, my favourite breed of dog, and I felt more brightened than I’d imagined I ever could again.

That moment showed me that the world wasn’t all terrible and that I was still capable of other feelings, even if grief would keep sucking me back in, every day, again and again and again.

While my dad was here, his company (and ability to drive) meant I was increasingly able to venture outside my own experience, to be reminded that there is more to life than my inner turmoil.

But when he left, I was plunged back into the loneliness of pure, unalloyed isolation, suddenly understanding those people who complained during lockdown of going into a mental spiral from so much time alone.

(Stay with me, I’m about to administer a horribly ill-advised home haircut as LOLs ensue.)

I had to do a lot of un-fun stuff, like washing and cleaning the kitchen floor and dealing with the aftermath of a horrific wasp infestation that:

1. deserves its own newsletter installment

b. made me feel like I was living in a horror film.

It’s probably entirely possible that whacking on Rock the Casbah or Islands in the Stream wouldn’t have made me feel any better even if I’d thought to do it. But I got stuck in this loop of feeling awful, being told it was normal to feel awful, and believing that I had to always feel awful.

It wasn’t until an online acquaintance in a Facebook group asked what music I like listening to that I thought, what music do I like listening to?

After realising I could get a three-month free trial of Spotify for students, I discovered that the answer was, in large part, Elvis Costello.

Maybe it was the fact that Every Day I Write the Book describes my new working life or maybe it was the melancholic meanness of Alison or the foot-stomping, arm-waving accuracy of that one Oliver’s Army lyric: I would rather be anywhere else/than here today.

Partly it was the fact that these weren’t songs that had any association with my mum, with her illness, or with any particularly painful times in my life. They weren’t upbeat but they weren’t maudlin, either.

Spotify recommended other songs and I added a select few that fit the same bill to my playlist, including There She Was by Talking Heads and Blondie’s Atomic.

I even danced around the living room a little, feeling subversive as I realised it was OK to listen to music and like it. It’s OK to enjoy myself sometimes, even though my mum has died.

That feels like a very obvious thing to say but I didn’t know it was OK, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know it was OK.

(Haircut still hoving into view, hold tight.)

But I am free to move around this flat — the one I’m solely responsible for, where I’ll likely take my last unassisted breaths, too — in any way I want (within several limits, not least my body’s capabilities).

I can sing along to Elvis Costello and Talking Heads and Blondie, drink too much caffeine and think that cutting my own hair, including an allegedly flattering and on-trend fringe, is a good idea. Just as one example.

And so it was that at almost 2 AM on a recent Friday morning, I found myself squinting into my spectacularly smeared bedroom mirror¹, blunt kitchen scissors in hand, ‘70s-inspired sideswept fringe on my mind and the mantra “It’ll grow back” in my heart.

It DID NOT help that I hadn’t actually washed my hair in more than a week, or that the TikTok instructional videos I’d watched as preparation were too fast for my learn-by-doing-not-by-seeing brain. But who cares, right? It’s not like it could be worse than death.

Taking a nuclear approach, I pulled my hair into a ponytail, held that over my forehead, and cut across the ends, making a rough and choppy layered haircut that I’d like to think gave Zooey Deschanel circa New Girl but was probably more Suzi Quatro circa now.

Unimpressed but determined, I started snipping my fringe, trying to get it to blend in.

I sectioned a rough triangle of hair from the front of my head and cut until it came to mid-nose, as the videos instructed, surprised that somehow this didn’t make me look like a TikTok model but a greasy-haired sleep-deprived middle-aged woman who’d been crying for three months and now had some shorter, stragglier strands clinging to her cheeks.

Risking disaster, I pulled the strands on the left side to the right, snipping at right angles as I’d been taught, and did the same on the other side. I brushed them down, realising that I’d made a fatal error by cutting on a centre parting like a Millennial rather than a more flattering side parting like the Gen X I am.

Quickly, I tried to rectify my mistake, parting on the left and attempting to sweep my new fringe to the right, which made me look, like, well… There’s no easy way to say it but it looked like a tribute to Hitler.

It was while I was pulling at it in desperation that Atomic cropped up on shuffle, so my efforts to look less fascist were soundtracked by Debbie Harry crooning your hair is beautiful/oh whoa tonight.

Thankfully, when I washed and dried my hair the next day, the Führer effect was reduced and I even experimented with adding makeup to my look (before going off the idea just as suddenly because WOW it’s a lot of work to look semi-presentable).

Since then, the new hairdo has proved messy to style and difficult to wrangle, when wearing a face mask in particular, but it’s also, in some weird yet significant way, brought me back into my body. Reminded me that I have one, and that I might want to look after it, or if not, then at least exist in it.

I still hate it here without my mum. At my PhD induction, I cried for an hour (camera off) because she was the only person on earth who would have wanted to know every tiny detail of the meeting and been excited about it all.

I still startle awake and feel like I can’t breathe. With some notable exceptions, most of the time, I would rather be anywhere else than here today. But other things are possible too, and maybe I can be open to them.

Music, meeting new people, administering low-stakes yet horrific makeovers in the middle of the night. All of this and more might happen in future. Hope, change, or just something different.

I might not be living again, not yet, but it’s dawning on me that I’m not dead.

1. Since cleaned!