Five steps to make it out on top every time.
Tomorrow may never show up
For you and me
This life is not promised
I ain't no perfect man
I'm trying to do the best that I can
With what it is I have
— from “UMI Says” x Mos Def
When I was a teenager, I attended the funeral of a woman named Betty Lou in Columbia, South Carolina.
It was at this stranger’s jubilant funeral that I developed my current perspective on loss and my way of coping with it.
There was no sadness at Betty Lou’s homegoing service. I was fascinated by how contradictorily joyous the occasion seemed. In the face of a loss of life, all I could see was joy reverberating off the 100+ bodies in the building.
I recall thinking that if someone were to walk in off the street, the last thing they would think happened was a death. And that's because while there was a death, that wasn’t what was on anybody’s mind.
Her life was the focus. Love anchored the room. It was my first time witnessing a genuine celebration of life. It was a moment that forever changed how I perceived grief and loss.
It inspired me to regularly consider how I can take my losses (Ls) with more grace.
A loss is when you really wanted something to happen in a particular way, but it didn't, or when you have to give up something unwillingly.
A loss is also an opportunity for gratitude, a chance to grow wiser, and an invitation to celebrate.
You can lose people and relationships, you can lose your vision of what you thought would happen, you can lose hope for a situation, you can lose your expected outcome, or you can lose something material.
Whatever the loss is, there is always a way to make it out on top. Here are five steps you can take to win even when you’ve already lost.
Accept your reality for what it is. Don’t go arguing with the past. You’re going to lose every time. An important part of accepting your reality is feeling your feelings as they come. Before you can really determine if what you’re experiencing is a loss, you must give yourself space to sit in whatever feelings you’re having. Put a name to them. Acknowledge them first and then figure out what to do with them after.
After high school, I had a very close friend walk away from our friendship immediately after graduation without warning. One moment they were there. The next, I couldn’t get them on the phone.
I was hurt and, in response, I tried to fight it. I tried to “win” by any means necessary. But my concept of winning was so narrow. I thought having my way and resurrecting the relationship to its former joy was the only way I could win. I fought tooth and nail to achieve that without ever giving myself the space and time to sit with myself and question how I felt and what this actually meant for me in the grand scheme of the rest of my life. I wasn't willing to ask those hard questions of myself. I wasn’t willing to accept defeat nor the fact that I was fighting a losing battle.
I pushed and pushed, and it only hurt me even more in the end when I did the absolute most and still had to walk away without what I wanted. I tried to fight the inevitable, but in reality, I was going to lose regardless.
Can’t fight fate, baby. Sorry!
Was it an L, or did it just not go exactly how you envisioned it? What are the real consequences of this L? What is this loss in the larger context of your life? How could your perspective change if you looked at it “big picture-wise".
Some Ls aren’t actually Ls at all. You may experience emotional and/or physiological responses to what initially appears to be a loss. But once we get friendly with our feelings and give them names to better understand them, we’re able to evaluate the situation to gauge whether or not this is an L to begin with.
When I graduated from college, I was afraid that the friendship dynamic within a group of darling and hilarious women would be affected by physical distance. We'd go from being a four-minute walk from each other to being an average of a two-hour drive from each other. I was grieving that loss of community, sisterhood, and closeness before we even left campus. But in reality, we grew even closer in spite of us being further away and having new responsibilities. I was so focused on the dynamic I was losing that I never imagined our bond blossoming into what it is today. If I had evaluated in the moment, I would’ve saved myself some heartache for sure.
To evaluate your L, check in with yourself to consider whether you really lost anything at all or if you’re just weary of change. Perhaps the change is good! Perhaps it’ll strengthen you in unexpected ways. Or perhaps it will all fall apart. And if it does, be very real with yourself about what that means for you in real-time and how or if you’ll need to process it.
Engage in self-soothing behavior. Say, “Self, you are okay. You are safe and you have the power to make it through this. You have the power to make it worth it.”
I gave myself a full month to process and grieve the loss of a relationship I was really optimistic about. I had it, and then I didn’t. It was a loss. And I gave myself plenty of time, but not too much, to process that in a healthy way.
I gave myself what felt like an eternity to process and grieve what I thought my life would be post-grad. After a summer internship punctuated by near-perfect performance reviews, there was no return offer to follow. With no other leads, all roads led to graduate school. I was looking the career I wanted in the eyes and was unable to pursue it immediately. In that time I had to process my L, I found myself exercising almost unfathomable emotional fortitude, self-sacrifice for the greater good, and deep faith in God’s plan for me.
Our bodies are our best teachers for recovering from a loss. It takes time, depending on the injury, but if your body loses something, it’ll generally always replace it or substitute for it. If you fall and scrape some skin on your knee, within two weeks new skin will be there to replace the skin you lost. Your wound would heal. If you lose a part of your brain, your brain will rewire itself to accommodate for the missing piece. It will heal. And if you take the time to process your L, so will you.
You’ve got to make your L worth it. And to do that, you’ve got to reframe it to be something you can easily gather a win from. In what way did you actually win in the midst of your L?
That sounds like, “Oh yeah, missing that train was a loss, but it was actually a gain because I ran into someone I haven’t seen in forever.” or “I’m so grateful that through this loss, I was able to realize something new about myself.”
A few years ago, my Japanese wallet was stolen from my car. It was in itself a souvenir of possibly the most impactful trip of my teens, but it held the one artifact I hoped to show my grandchildren: my Japanese student ID.
But I had to talk myself out of grief with something like, “Wow that’s so unfortunate that I lost that from my life, but I realized my capacity for empathy for people that transgress against me and also understood that the wallet was not the only proof I lived in Osaka for five full months.”
Find a new way to look at what you lost, and maybe you’ll find something you gained instead.
Don’t be hard-headed, shawty. The worst thing you can do after taking an L is forget what you learned and fall into the same situations with no change in your perspective.
Remember your L. It’s a part of your story, and if you choose to forget it, you run the risk of having to experience it over and over again when that’s not necessary. Not to say you won’t ever take the same L twice, but remembering your L allows you to navigate spaces of loss with a wider, more informed perspective.
I lost a very close friend once, and it wasn’t until we became friends again some years later that we realized how big of a loss that really was for both of us. So because we remember that L, we did and still do the work to avoid taking the L again. I remember what it was like to not have the person you really want in your life not in your life, I remember the feeling that came with that loss. And it inspired a lot of work that we are still doing to this day to maintain and grow our friendship.
What Butcher Brown say?, “Nothing to lose only to gain/I been all up inside the pain.”
Friend, what I need you to understand is that you can’t control nothing fr. Some L’s you give to yourself, but a lot of L’s are 1000% outside of your control.
Say it with me, “I can’t control nothing or nobody outside of myself.”
Lean into that last word. It is only through accepting that we’re going to catch L’s no matter what we do, that we’re able to utilize self-control to ensure we emerge as winners every time.
It takes an immense amount of self-awareness and self-control to take your L’s as they come and turn them into something to be celebrated, learned from, and grateful for. That ain’t easy! But who said it was?
You and I are winners, darling. Even when we’re down, we’re up. Believe that.
Thalia, 24, is a winner. She up fr. She may not feel like it all the time, but she knows she’s got the victory regardless.
