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Your Friend In Grief
A safe space for conversations around grief and loss. Bringing these conversations out of the darkness and into the light.
Your Friend In Grief
Compartmentalizing and Comfort
How does grief affect your ability to socialize? Join me, Melinda Rubinger, as I recount the raw and personal journey of losing my husband, Mike, and how it fundamentally reshaped my social energy. From navigating the overwhelming tasks of selling our car and house to moving in with family friends, I found myself relying heavily on compartmentalizing my emotions. While this helped me get through those initial weeks, it came at the cost of my social battery, shifting me from an extrovert to someone who finds solace in solitude. My cat Toby has been my unwavering companion through it all, a reminder that grief is messy and life isn't always polished.
In this episode, I reflect on the ongoing process of grief recovery and the importance of embracing new routines for comfort. Everyday activities, like watching "SVU," once shared with Mike, became difficult to engage with due to the memories they triggered. As I continue to heal, I've learned to honor the evolution of my social battery and comfort zones, allowing myself space to avoid these triggers and embrace what currently brings me peace. Join me as I navigate this challenging yet enlightening journey of self-discovery and healing, finding moments of unexpected solace and understanding along the way.
Welcome in friends. This is Melinda Rubinger, your friend in grief. Thanks for listening today. Appreciate it if you are a return listener. This podcast strives to bring the tough and difficult conversations about grief and loss out of the darkness and into the light. Out of the darkness and into the light. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about compartmentalizing and social battery.
Speaker 1:The first four weeks after Mike died, I sold a car, I sold a house, I moved stuff to storage, I moved in with some family friends family friends. I had to make a lot of decisions very quickly and I think the only way I was able to do that was to compartmentalize getting the tasks done. Mike and I had always just gotten our shit done. Whatever needed to get done, we did it. We got it done. We completed the tasks, we knocked them out and I continued upon that path for the next month and pushed my grief aside a little bit, because it was the only way to get through. It was the only way to complete the tasks and sometimes when you're grieving, it's okay to just complete the tasks. When you think about how hard is it after you've lost someone to maybe get up in the morning to take a shower, to brush your teeth, to do all the normal things that you had done every day for the past 22 years, but all of a sudden those things became challenging, became challenging. The only way I was able to get those things done was to compartmentalize my grief and put it aside a little bit. One of the challenges with that is that your social battery changes right Because you're expending all this energy to push aside feelings and to only focus on tasks at hand. So when you do that, it changes the level of socializing social activity that you're able to really handle, right.
Speaker 1:When sorry, you're going to hear that's Toby. You're going to hear him a lot in this podcast. He knows when I'm talking about his dad. Mike was his human and every time I start to record, he has started to meow and honestly, I was fighting it and now I'm just going to go with it. So this is Toby Rubinger. He is 15 years old. He absolutely helped me through my grief journey in the beginning, when I would cry, toby was always there. When Mike died, we had two cats, milo and Toby. They were twins. Milo has since passed. Toby is still here. He is 15. And he yeah, he's just going to meow from time to time. So you know, this is real life, folks. A grief journey is not pristine. It's messy, it's complicated, it is not necessarily polished, and that's what we're going to give you here Honesty. I'm going to be very honest about my that's what we're going to give you here honesty. I'm going to be very honest about my grief journey. I'm going to be very honest about it being messy, and so we're going to be very honest about Toby, just so you know, that's who you're hearing.
Speaker 1:But my point about the social battery is that before Mike died, I was absolutely an extrovert. I was the one who wanted to go out and go to dinner. I wanted to go hang out with friends. I was always encouraging him like oh, let's go do this or let's go do that. And Mike was believe it or not, for those people who knew him, if you knew him, he was incredibly gregarious and full of life and very extroverted around you. But if he didn't know you, he was very shy and introverted. When I would ask him to be like oh hey, a bunch of people from work are going to go for a cocktail after work. Will you come with me? He was so hesitant because he was so uncomfortable around new people that he didn't know. It was always funny to me that I would really have to twist his arm. I really had to pick and choose which functions that I would get him to go to. I had to kind of choose my battles. He was really okay if it was one-on-one or one person or a friend it was small groups that he was okay with. But if I was like, hey, we're just going to go out for a drink after work, do you want to come? He didn't know who was going to be there. He wasn't sure who they were. He didn't know them, he didn't know personalities and he just wasn't comfortable. So that was him and I had to encourage him to get out of his comfort zone and go to dinner and do the things and be more extroverted in some ways. When it was people he knew from work or people that he was friends with, it was very different. Because he knew them, he was comfortable.
Speaker 1:But what happened is after Mike died, my social battery was quick to drain. It was very quickly depleted and I couldn't handle being with people in person a lot. Obviously we were in the middle of COVID, but I found that it was easier to talk to a friend on the phone, to text with a friend for hours than to actually spend time in the same room with people. And I think this directly relates to not feeling comfortable in my own grief and even not feeling comfortable in my own skin anymore. I wasn't sure who I was. I just had never experienced anything like this before and it was incredibly uncomfortable. I was just uncomfortable all the time in all kinds of social situations, even when I had been comfortable in those situations before.
Speaker 1:And I will say that the more people that were involved in the social situation, the harder it became for me. When I was living with friends, when it was the three of us, it was much easier for me to be together with them because it took some of the spotlight off of me. But when it was one-on-one it was a little harder because at this point I couldn't really be a friend, and I'm only recognizing this now, after a lot of soul searching and trying to understand what was happening to me at the time. But I wasn't able to be a friend and I have so much gratitude for those people who are still my friends, who have remained by my side. My friends who have remained by my side because I absolutely took and took and took from them. I was not able to be a friend. I was not able to give back to them and if I was, it was in very small amounts. So I went from being a good friend to being no friend and just needing them. So I took from them and they gave lovingly and I'm so grateful for my friends for that.
Speaker 1:But it was very hard for me to be in social situations. I didn't know how to act anymore. I didn't know how to act when I was alone, let alone in social situations. So that was a whole learning process and one of the things that I've learned about myself is that I actually am learning to like my own company. I'm learning to value the time that I spend alone. Well, it's me and the cats, but when I spend alone time whether I'm reading or working on the podcast or working on other projects that I have around the house, making my house my home I'm okay being alone. I've learned over four years how to manage being alone and not just manage, but how to thrive in that situation and how to really appreciate the time I have alone with myself, whether I'm Reading or taking care of the house or taking care of regular mundane chores. I might text with a friend, but it is more comfortable to me in some ways still and to be alone than it is to be in big groups.
Speaker 1:Yesterday I ran all kinds of errands. I left the house at 7.30 in the morning. I didn't get back until 4.30. I had a ton of things to do doctor's appointments, phone meetings Then I had a car appointment. I did all these things and I was out and about all day long. I came home and crashed like freaking crashed. I didn't want to talk to anybody, I didn't want to see anybody. I was completely exhausted. My battery was completely drained. I had big ideas like, oh yeah, I'm going to come home tonight and I'm going to do some work on my personal stuff. I did none of it. I was so exhausted and so emotionally and socially drained just from all the interactions of the day that I just couldn't function. I was like it's time to go to bed. I was very quiet, I read for a little bit and that was that.
Speaker 1:One of the things that is so normal in grief is that we change the things that we are normally used to, the things that are comfortable for us before our loved one dies are no longer necessarily comfortable anymore. They're very uncomfortable, and you'll find this with television shows, you'll find it with music, you'll find it with books. I loved to read mysteries before Mike died, and after Mike died I could not go back to the books that I was reading before he died. I started on a whole new genre. I ended up finding Nordic noir, the Lars Keplers, the Joe Nesbos, those authors. I had never read those books before. They're thrillers that take place in Scandinavia, norway, sweden, all of these places, and I had never read them before.
Speaker 1:I completely latched on to this new genre of thrillers and eventually I could read again, but I had no focus at the beginning. I couldn't really watch Schitt's Creek. After Mike died I was able to watch the Big Bang Theory and Friends, and I'm not sure why, but those are. They're comfort shows and you know how they're going to end because I'd seen them a lot. We watched them over and over again. But there are still shows that I haven't watched since Mike died. As much as I love Ice-T and Mariska Hargitay, I've not seen another episode of Law Order SVU since Mike died, and I know that's so weird because it was always on in our house, always. Now I can't watch it, and that's four years later. Someday I hope I can go back and watch it, but right now it's just not on my radar. I've since moved on to criminal intent, so I've replaced one for another.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating as to what changes, and you're not even aware of the changes. They just happen subtly and it's not anything you can control or you can recognize. I will never, ever see the end of Ozark. I have never been able to watch House of the Dragon. There are just a few shows that I can't watch now and it's really crazy. I just won't finish them because it's completely different. A lot of times you want something that's got a happy ending, or it's fluffy, or it's easy to watch, it's not scary. There's nothing really truly bad that's happening within those shows.
Speaker 1:So I think, allow yourself to find what comforts you, whether it be books, music, television shows and it's going to be new things. It's not necessarily going to be the and to that journey and to just learning more about yourself. Now that I'm four years out, I absolutely am going back and analyzing like, wow, why can't I watch SVU? Like so weird, it was just a constant part of our daily life and on the weekends or in the evening we'd be making dinner and SVU would be on repeats on USA, or you know. On the weekends we'd be vacuuming or doing whatever else and the TV was on and it'd be SVU. And it's crazy how those little things impact your world daily and I'll talk more about music in another podcast. Impact your world daily and I'll talk more about music in another podcast.
Speaker 1:But, just as a reminder, your social battery changes. The things that comfort you change. The things that make you uncomfortable are potentially things that made you comfortable with your partner, with your loved one, and you can't necessarily go back to those right away. It's really important to recognize those things and give them the space they need. Don't watch the TV shows, don't watch the movies, don't read the books, don't listen to some music. Do what feels right, do what comforts you and slowly you'll be able to integrate some of those things back into your life as time goes on. It's a journey and those are all pieces of the journey. Thank you, friends, and we'll talk soon.