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Pity Party vs. Pity City: What Grief Taught Me About Getting Unstuck in Business
Last Tuesday night I was just watching some random fluff movie on Netflix.
It was the story of some hometown hero who went off and became a bigwig and then came back to his hometown and found his old girlfriend and fell back in love. I picked it because it was simple and light and that’s kind of what I was feeling like I needed.
What I didn’t comprehend was that at some point in the movie, we find out the real reason he left his hometown and went out into the big world in the first place. It was because his mother suffered a really traumatic death, and his dad didn’t know how to support him. I could really have used THAT little piece of information before I got sucked into the storyline. Or, maybe I didn’t. Let me explain.
I lost my mom in January of this year, and her passing was very traumatic for me.
I’d lost my dad a year before, and it was so peaceful and easy and beautiful that I was expecting my mom’s to go the same way. It didn’t. I wasn’t expecting any of this to come racing back into my thoughts on summer Tuesday night watching this movie. My body literally just almost combusted into its grief.
When I woke up the next day, exhausted because I’d tossed and turned so much through the night, I got a notification that the one client I had booked in the afternoon needed to reschedule. I thought, this couldn’t be better.
So I decided I was just going to allow my grief to wash over me that day. I turned on the streaming services and watched as many fluffy, cheesy romantic movies as I could find. I set myself up in my bed with all kinds of fluffy pillows and made myself a nest to just cocoon, cry, and watch TV.
In my world, with one of my best friends, Lori, we call this a pity party.
I allowed myself to have the pity party. I don’t allow myself to stay in pity city. That distinction is important.
I fueled myself well. I had some of my favorite treats, which are Smart Sweets right now (did you know one serving has 15 grams of fibre?!). Alice, our cat, obviously thought I needed extra cuddles. She nestled right in beside me, and I had a wonderful afternoon crying, watching TV, and just being with my feelings.
At about one o’clock, I decided now was the time to go open that one box of mom’s stuff I hadn’t gone through yet. In it, I found three silver spoons.
The funny thing about the spoons is that when my mother was still living in her care home, she was convinced all of the staff had stolen all her silver. I now have evidence to prove they didn’t and I couldn’t even call her to tell her. Cue another wave of emotions. Here’s the thing about her silver spoons: they were tarnished.
So I naturally did what any ADHD woman in midlife would do, still in her pajamas from the night before, eyes so swollen from tears they could barely open. I went to Walmart and got silver polish. NOT in my PJ’s (though I probably wouldn’t have been glanced at if I did 🤣.)
I went home and spent the rest of the day polishing those silver spoons. I think that’s what I needed. I needed to do something to honor my mother and I did. I also reached out to my sister, and we had a couple of good laughs and were both able to move through some grief together.
I’m telling you this story and you might be wondering how this connects to marketing.
Many of you feel overwhelmed. You feel sad or shame that things aren’t moving the way that you want. Maybe you’re experiencing some grief too, for the things you’ve given up to try to make this work. Many of you know pity city well.
Heck, some of you have built the walls around your city so pretty that no one would know how sad you feel inside those walls. You beat yourself up for not taking enough action, for saying the wrong thing, or feeling frustrated you’re not further ahead than others.
The lesson here is to take your moment.
An hour. An evening. A day. A weekend. But don’t move in. It’s healthy to process emotions. It’s unhealthy to wallow in them alone without support.
I’ve been sitting with why that 24 hour time frame was so powerful for me, and I keep coming back to two things.
The first is the difference between my pity party and living in a pity city. I allowed the feelings in. Hell, I created space for them to expand. So go ahead and cry, stomp your feet, say the scary thing out loud, “OMG I don’t know if I can do this”. Just don’t set up camp there. Visit it, don’t move in.
The second was the spoons. It was what the spoons represented. When the feeling is too big to think your way through, you don’t need a plan or a pep talk. You need something that gets you out of your head and into your hands. That’s what the polishing of the spoons did. So go find something creative at the hobby store. Paint by number (not kidding I’ve done several!). Adult coloring. Vision boarding. Crocheting. Needlepoint. Silver polishing, apparently!
It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as it’s creative and different from whatever you do all day. That’s what will allow the feeling to actually move through you instead of staying stuck in your chest.
So the next time you’re struggling, remember to give yourself some space and try something creative. Your business will be better for it when you come back.
