I Miss You

Speaking on the reality of grief and the crippling affects of depression.

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Welcome to another thought provoking experience to explore how people view topics of the world. We offer viewpoints and opinions all in good faith for the sake of growth with one another. Tell you to step out of your box by joining me, your host Fleetwood, to bend the needle. Because I like to Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the first episode of season two twenty twenty-three of Move the Crowd. Let's let's talk about grief and depression. This is a very uh sensitive, tough, necessary conversation that we as a community need to have more openly and frequently. And also, it's a conversation we need to have with ourselves. So I think I'm going to call this one I Miss You. Let's get into it. So we all have dealt with the loss of a loved one, and it doesn't become easier as time goes on. I think it's especially rough that first significant, first or second significant holiday. As you know, we just came through the Christmas, holiday, and Thanksgiving, and I couldn't. That's a very difficult time. Your first time going through without somebody who you love. It's even more difficult, I believe. And you know what? I don't want to give degrees of difficulty, but my heart really goes out to people who actually lose someone in that time as well. It's difficult enough for our lives to change because that person is no longer physically there. Their laughter, their wisdom, their love, their cooking, their jokes, just their presence is no longer there. It's a very human time because God's will is done. I think the selfish side to us and the loving side is some selfishness in love. We want our people to be here forever. I think we understand that that's not possible, but most times we'll always say, I wish they could stay just a little bit longer. I know for me, I've had an extreme amount of loss. You know, being a murder capital veteran, I lost a lot of comrades, a lot of associates, friends, schoolmates, uh, teammates, um, whatever you want to call them, you know, homies, my man and them. I lost a lot of them. I also lost a lot of my community in my hometown of Elizabeth City. I was fortunate and blessed enough to be lovingly submerged within my grandparents' peers as a small child. I was overwhelmed more times than not with the wisdom that I would get from them. But life began to open up as I got a little older to understand what they were saying, but their time here on earth had come. I don't think there's any one way to deal with the loss. I do believe that time does help. Understanding understanding is a process. Understanding that it's okay to hurt, it's okay to not be able to just get it together sometimes. It's okay to have an ugly cry. You need that to get the sorrow. You need to deal with it. I'm not going to say get out of your system, but in that moment where you missed them, or something could have triggered a memory, you could have thought of something, you could have seen something, you could have smelled something, but in that moment you're paralyzed with sorrow, and you just need to cry, or you need a moment to get yourself together. That's okay. You you take the time you need. More times than not, the exact person that we're missing, that we're grieving, that has us momentarily paralyzed in situations would not want us to suffer. We need to get to a place eventually, in our own time, in our own way. We need to get to a place where we can smile about the legacy and the memories that they left. For some of us, where we may have lost a parent or a grandparent, at some point you'll get to share stories about them. And you'll get to speak downhill to the younger children who may or may have known or may not have known about them, especially your children or your grandchildren, when they may ask about some pictures. Hey, who is that? Or why do you do this? Or who taught you how to cook that? This allows you the opportunity to smile and appreciate the life that they shared with you. I miss you. This process, this moment, this season of life is definitely not easy. And just think, for some people, it's gonna happen over and over and over again. Hey, you know, some people have to go back into a new season when they haven't even finished the first one. You got some people going to three or four different seasons of loss at one time, and it's a struggle. It's a struggle. There's nothing like the person that you miss. You know, out of all of my losses, I remember one of my first traumatic losses was my grandfather. I learned so much from my grandfather. And I realized, you know, a lot of people in my generation, we're grandbabies, you know, a lot of us love our grandparents. No shade to our parents, but man, our grandparents were better than Superman and Wonder Woman. Our grandparents can do no wrong. I don't know what to tell our parents, but I'm telling you, your parents were dope to us. I remember I was at work and my mom called. You know, normally I don't get a phone call at work. My mom called me and she said, Your granddad had a stroke. And I instantly panicked and I had to get to a side. And I've never experienced anything like that. Everything just rushed, rushed through me, and I couldn't imagine him suffering or my without him, or I had so many emotions going through my mind, my heart. I was hurt, I was worried, I didn't know what to do. But I did, I jumped in the car right away and I left. You know, I'm straight to North Carolina. And to this day, my testimony is I got to right around Doswell, Virginia, which is King's Dominion. And my testimony, I'm telling you now, as sure as I'm on this microphone, every needle on my dashboard started jumping back and forth, including the gas hand. I instantly, instantly heard God. And I said, Okay, I'll turn around. I I don't know what it was, but I turned around and I came back, still unsure, still uncertain, but trust in the process. God's will would be done. Subsequently, a few days later, he passed. And this is December, y'all. This is December. This is December of 98. And he passed. My hero, he passed, and I didn't know how to feel, I couldn't process it. I I I'd never known life without him. I just couldn't process it. And sometimes it gets that way, you know. You have this ball of emotions, of fear, of anger, of hurt, of emptiness, and you just don't know how to respond. And then you feel you feel kind of crappy because you feel like you're not responding properly. You know what I mean? But so I go to we get to the funeral, and um, you know, and I look at my grandmother, and she's completely broken to understand your world leaving you. Here I am as the grandbaby saying, Oh, my granddaddy, my hero. I'm sitting looking at my grandmother, who's also my granddaddy's right hand, and it was always them too. Her whole world was him, and I'm looking at her completely, completely broken. And again, I didn't know how to feel. Four months later, after her birthday in April, she passed as well. In a matter of four months, the foundation that created the memory which I speak to this day of Elizabeth City, the founding foundation of my memory of my lineage both were gone in four months. I miss you. How do you put the pieces back together? How do you stop the flashbacks? How do you stop the remembrances? How do you stop the everything reminds you of them? How do you do it? I had to get myself together. The unfortunate part about life is that the world is not going to stop. And people, because of who you are, people still need you. As you go through life and have losses, some of us are siblings, some of us are parents, some of us are caretakers, and within these moments of sorrow, we have to find the balance to grieve, function, celebrate, and grow all in this one season. And it it's it's one of the most difficult things to do. You know, people have so many obstacles emotionally already in their lives. For your world to be turned upside down and shaken violently by the loss of someone, it's just devastating. I urge everyone who is in that season, who is gone through that season or seasons, and for everyone that will go through that season, I encourage you all to take the time to properly grieve, to have a very transparent conversation with God frequently in those times, and to seek comfort. And when I mean seek comfort, I mean allow yourself to be comforted. Don't shut people out, don't say, Oh no, I'm okay. It's okay, it's not okay. This isn't a time to be strong. This isn't a time to basically deny your emotions as if you're a machine. There is a delicate balance to function within grief that does not mean you have to turn your back on how you feel. You don't have to put on an air or put on anything. Your feelings are valid, your loss is valid, and your time to recuperate is valid. But I urge you to get into prayer and to just speak very candidly and don't deny yourself the tears, the memories, the smiles, and the thoughts that come with grieving when we lose someone we love. I miss you. There's another duty that I have not had the difficulty of experiencing within grief yet. At some point, some of us may be responsible for delivering the news of the loss. That's a different level of responsibility. But now you have to be intricately woven to keep yourself together to deliver the news to your respective family and friends. I feel like that is an honor. God, that situation, thought enough of you, and enough of your leadership and your ability to deliver, to give you that responsibility. I feel it doesn't feel good, but I think it's an honor from God. He trusts you with people's heartache, with people's sorrow, with their immediate reactions. He trusts you with it. He trusts you. Again, this this talking about loss isn't easy at all. You know, I pray for everyone's comfort, and I pray that everybody understands that these conversations can be had with people who you love that may be going through the same thing. But, you know, if both of you all are saying I'm okay, I'm okay, neither one of you are getting the comfort that you may be able to provide to each other. It and and believe me, it doesn't get easier until let me put this in for me. You know, I didn't have an ugly cry about my grandparents, probably until like eight or nine years later. I believe it took so long because I wasn't open. I didn't allow myself to grieve because I didn't know how. Then I was able to talk about them. I was able to smile, I was able to reflect, and it didn't feel so gloomy. I can feel them living through me instead of their death hanging over me. This conversation is never easy. I have a number of friends that are going through it. I got friends that lost parents, and parents were young. I got friends who ooh, I got I got people who've lost their children. And you know the way the world, the way the divine order is, parents are supposed to go before children. For any parent, any parent listening to this that lost a child, please accept my condolences. That burying a child or losing a child is just unfathomable. I I I've never had to face that. I pray to God I don't. And for everybody that's had to go through that, I pray that your comfort is intact. I pray that your comfort is forever yielding, and I pray that your comfort is always there whenever you need it. I miss you. So there are things in life. That can beat you up. There are times in life, there's seasons in life to include death, but there's times where you seem like you can't get your footing, you just can't seem to catch a break, and the world is just unrelenting on you, and you feel dark. Depression is real. So many people struggle with depression and don't even know it or don't know the severity of it. Some people don't know some of the signs. And depression is no joke. I battle with depression. And there have been times where my last bout, you know, I said I didn't know how to describe my feeling. I knew a cloud was over me, and all I could say to acknowledge it to myself and to others who may have been worried about me, all I could say was, look, the world is heavy right now. And just like when you're powerlifting, I don't want to make a sudden move. What I'm trying to do right now is just shore up my footing to handle the weight that's on my shoulders. I'm not making any moves. I'm not doing anything right now. I'm just focusing on my footing so I can get myself under this weight to stabilize it. Everybody doesn't recognize their pitch of depression. They don't recognize when they're starting to get dark or when things are starting to affect them. Some people can recognize it, but it's already taking a hold of them. I'm fortunate enough, I feel that I see it. I feel different and I don't like it. Um I I don't have any actual, you know, I don't have any training in this stuff. I just, you know, I I feel like a lot a lot of people deal with depression. For me, um, I start to string along some little small things that that can kind of give me some more confidence. You know, I think for me, a thing that really drives depression for me because I'm task-oriented is when I fail, when I when I don't do things I'm supposed to do, or things aren't going right, or other people are affecting my ability to succeed or to get things done, it bothers me. Um as a man, as a man, and and I've mentioned say this. We as men need to articulate, we really need to find the tools we need to articulate to ourselves and to others and be truthful about how things affect us because when you keep trying to facilitate a facade of masculinity at the cost of your emotions, you're not helping anybody, you're only hurting yourself. You want to give this facade to everybody else that you have it all together when the truth of the matter is you can't put two sticks together. But nobody can help you because you're too busy being proud. That depression will eat you up. As men, you know, I was I was saying this to somebody a couple of weeks ago, as men, especially as African-American men in the inner city, we have a lot of weight on our shoulders with these preconceived notions of what a man is. We're supposed to provide. We're supposed to have it all together. We're supposed to take care of the kids and take care of the home and have a job and be able to give everything and anything that our family needs at the cost of ourselves. That doesn't sound too bad if we all have it together, but a lot of us don't. And we put that weight on our shoulders and we critique ourselves, and we're very hard on ourselves about failing. We critique ourselves about failing a prerequisite that has nothing to do with your manhood. That's what society says a man is. A man, a man is determined by, if you're on your own, if you are sustaining yourself responsibly, that can be considered a man. We do have men out here who find it very hard to get their footing in the world. It took me a long time to get my footing, and that didn't question me as a man. And I don't know how many times I heard a female question my masculinity. It was funny to me that a female could tell me what I was. And that's just another angle of peer pressure. Again, with society constantly leaning on us, telling us what we need to do as men to be a man. It's a lot of pressure to live up to something that does not matter because masculinity is defined by the home that you keep. What's masculine to uh Susan may not be masculine to Karen or may not be masculine to Tabby. I don't look, whatever your home needs and you provide, that's what your masculinity is in it is derived from that. There's no cookie cutter answer to what a man is. You whole waitement, there are definitely some things that are not man like. I can definitely, I can definitely say that. There are definitely some things that men don't do. I can say that. But with absolute certainty, there's no cookie-cutter approach to what a man is. So when we have this false narrative of what a man is and we're failing at it, it's a very depressing thing. Imagine being depressed about not reaching a goal that's not even your trajectory. You're going to constantly be depressed because you're constantly failing at something that's not even required. You are reaching for a goal that isn't yours. Depression's so real. I miss you. Fellas. Understand how to be proficient, upstanding, and solid. If you understand those three things, I promise you, whomever looks at you will see a man. Don't worry about society. Worry about your home. Don't worry about what the real housewives of the Potomac or Atlanta or Alabama or Tuscalouska. That's the same thing. Mississippi, I don't know, but don't worry about what they say. Focus on you, your home. Depression is real. Depression is real. And for the people who understand health one on one, if you are battling depression, drinking liquor more times than not won't help you, as liquor is a depressant. Focus on small victories. If you need some counseling, please seek it. But please, please, please, please stop allowing depression to eat you up and keep you immobilized and paralyzed from enjoying life, from enjoying prosperity, and from enjoying your family. Fellas, come on. We gotta be honest. We gotta work on what makes our homes go individually. And as I said before, once you start getting your home flowing like you need it to, reach out to other positive men. They're gonna give you pointers, they're gonna give you support, they're gonna give you the brotherhood that all men need. We don't have enough men to support one another positively in reference to being fathers, homemakers, and community-oriented men. We need more of that. I miss you. Ladies masking same as men, but masking depression or masking hurt. We we as men to be available to you. We need you all to be available to us. Depression sometimes is it's it's it's just engraved and ingrained and separative right between us. And because we both respond, male and female may respond to depression differently, not even speaking about individually within the same, you know, each woman, each man. Everybody responds to depression differently based on a lot of different things. So, ladies. One of the main things that from a man's standpoint, I can ask of ladies who may be the battle they may be battling depression. Please don't talk to somebody else that's depressed. Please. Please, there has to be some positive way for our sisters to positively affect their growth and brighten their bulb and their light again. If you're struggling with the way you're being treated by the way you've been treated by men, or you don't like your body, or you want to be doing more with your life, we have the same struggles on our side. This is why I say we need one another. We have some of the same struggles, but more times than not, neither side wants to admit or acknowledge or even know that we're going through the same thing, which creates us from staying away from one another. We need each other to help one another out of this thing, not constantly fuel it. Depression is separation. Nobody should suffer alone. I miss you. Hey, what if you grieve and losing yourself? That's completely possible. You can grieve losing yourself, which makes you depressed. You know, we have to learn how to create a community of diversity and a community of like-minded people around us that can help us. We all should genuinely be able to call at least one person not related to us that we can just have a conversation with about what you're going through, what you may see, what you've gone through, what you're going through, how not to go through. For ladies, I know you all, you all have different parameters of life. I know you all have a different layer of health scares that can really create anxiety in you guys. You need to have someone that you can speak to about your fear, about what you should do, about even possibly having a surrogate to bring you home after you go. You know, if you have to have a surgery or procedure, just somebody to go with you. And I mean somebody that truly is with you, not just a ride, somebody that can you can talk to to make this process of life easier. Fellas, fellas, we gotta get to the doctor, and it doesn't make us any weaker of a man if you say, hey, you get one of your fellas to go with you, man. Because look, man, woman, beast or other, if we get a not so good health report, it's going to affect you. You're gonna worry because that's what we do. Nobody wants to be alone when they get bad news. That is the truth. You get bad news, you don't want to tell nobody, you know what that creates? Depression. Look, you only get one time to get life right. I'm just trying to provide an insight, trying to give you a different way of seeing things. That's it. I I don't get it all right. Hell, I don't know everything. I swear I don't. But I'm just trying to offer some insight of what I've gone through and some things that possibly I see a different way to help just one person. That's it. You know, people, I figure like this. If I do these podcasts and one person, one person hears something I say, that's the same as a pastor, the same as a teacher, the same as a mentor, anything. Somebody heard you, and you don't know how that one person is going to react, affect, or transcend of what you said. I'm gonna wrap this up with this. First and foremost, on the first part of this episode, we talked about grieving, the loss of a loved one. How do you get through it? What can we do to understand and to feel and to give ourselves enough time? There's no cookie cutter answer. There's some things that we have to do to get on with life at some point, though. We have to. That's no dig at the person we lost, that's no disrespect to them. That's why it's called a process. Other people are still depending on you. I miss you. In closing, depression is real. If you don't feel like yourself, reach out. If you feel like you don't have anybody to talk to, call somebody, email somebody, talk to just try anything. Go on Facebook, go on your social media and say, hey, I just need to talk. You'd be surprised at how many people just want to listen and help you. One of the biggest things we have to learn as a community, African Americans, we have to be open to be helped. We are taught to to to internalize weakness, hurt, concern, and that's just not the way to be. If you are concerned, if you're hurt, if you need something, I implore you to reach out. You don't know who can bless you if you don't ask. Everything that was expressed and said tonight is out of love. I pray that nothing I said was offensive or offended anybody. I want everybody who can hear this to understand that we are human. That makes us emotional beings. It's okay to hurt, it's okay to not understand how to figure it out, but it's not okay to suffer in silence, and it's not okay to go through grief continuously alone. God has given us grace and mercy time and time again, and with that grace and mercy, we should give ourselves the same. We should give ourselves enough love like He has to move forward, to appreciate the evolution of life, and to understand His will being done. Whether it's the person that I lost or the depression that lost me, I miss you. Till the next time, people.