When The Applause Stops
Nnaku ziraba muzaale
I’m upside down on the inside!
I’m in disbelief. I’m exhausted. I don’t know how to move through the world as the version of me that exists after loss. I don’t know how to be this person yet. Most days, I still find myself pretending I’m okay because the world is often cruel to people who are grieving, bambi.
People put timelines on grief. They are patient for a few weeks. Sometimes, a few months. Then life moves on for everyone else, and there is an unspoken expectation that you should move on, too.
But grief doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t ask what month it is. It doesn’t care how much time has passed. It arrives when it arrives. It stays when it stays. I keep to myself because I don’t always know how to explain it.
How do you explain waking up inside your worst nightmare every day and realizing it is no longer a nightmare? It is your life! Grief is losing a person you love, but it is also losing the person you were before they were gone.
It is learning how to trust again. Learning how to walk again. Learning how to carry memories that feel both comforting and unbearable. It is filtering your emotions because you are afraid of making other people uncomfortable. Most of all, it is learning how to live in a world that keeps moving while part of you remains standing still.
For a long time, I thought I was misunderstood. Now I think I was trying to make my pain easier for other people to sit with. I’ve spent days, months, weeks softening the truth; editing my feelings into something more digestible. Not because they are too much, but because I was afraid of making other people uncomfortable. Grief arrived and stripped away my ability to do that.
I’ve watched movies and TV shows where someone loses a person they love, and their entire life changes. I understood the story. I didn’t relate to the reality. Not until it was my turn. I hate that it took losing my mom to learn certain things: the importance of kindness, the importance of love, to learn how important it is to choose tenderness anyway, and the importance of showing up for people, no matter how small the gesture may seem.
The hardest part is realizing how much of life is performance. Ensi stage, and we learn what roles to play. We learn which emotions are acceptable and which ones make people shift in their seats. We learn how to tell the truth in ways that won’t make others uncomfortable. We learn how to perform healing before we’ve actually healed. Wabula, ensi egula mirambo!
People applaud! They applaud resilience. They applaud composure. They applaud the version of you that makes them feel comfortable. But eventually the performance becomes exhausting. And when the performance stops, the applause stops too.
So I keep asking myself: What matters more? The applause or stopping the truth? The applause has never brought me peace. So what now?
The truth is that I am still grieving; some days, I am extremely broken by it. I am trying to be gentle with myself because there are things I need now that I can no longer receive from my mother: patience, grace, compassion, forgiveness, and love. I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to give those things to myself.
Sometimes I worry that everything I write has become heavy. But this is where I am. How can I write about joy that I cannot reach yet? How can I write about light when I am still learning how to carry the dark?
I have spent so much of my life showing up. Showing up when I was tired. Showing up when I was hurting. Showing up when I wanted to disappear. For a long time, I thought that was strength.
Lately, I am not so sure. Am I still performing for them or for me? Perhaps that is the question grief has been asking me all along. Agali amanyige, ge gakaaba…