Anderson Cooper is a journalist — an anchor on CNN and a correspondent on CBS. As of today though, my favorite descriptor for Cooper will be, “Guy Who Gets What Loss Does To You.”
Everyone grieves differently because everyone loses different people and relationships, but very few people will tell you that their lives weren’t changed by their loss(es). (Honestly, if they do, they’re probably lying.)
You feel the change in little ways, like how your time changes. You feel it in big ways, like your outlook on life. You’re dealing with anxiety now. You don’t know how to let yourself love. You need to travel. You need to stay put. You need to surround yourself with people. You need to be alone more. You…… Everyone’s sentences finish off differently, but everyone can finish one.
On FastCompany today, there’s an article with Anderson Cooper’s byline. At first, I thought it was simply going to be an article about career advice. Then I read the first two sentences:
“My father died during heart bypass surgery when I was 10 years old. When I was 21, my 23-year-old brother committed suicide.”
Here are some more incredibly relatable quotes from Cooper’s article:
(1) “I think that anytime you experience traumatic loss early on it changes who you are and drastically affects your view of the world. At least that was the case with me.”
(2) “I retreated emotionally as I attempted to understand what had happened and why. I was worried about my mom and even had serious doubts about my ability to survive and operate in the world.”
(3) “I would never have been as driven to do this kind of work had I not experienced such intense personal loss. When my father died, the world suddenly seemed like a scary place.
I didn’t feel that I could rely on other people, and I became fearful of what else might happen.”
(4) “I also felt comfortable, in a weird way, being in places where the language of loss was spoken.”
These tidbits are basically #TDYConfessions.
Send Cooper some love @AndersonCooper.
Cooper’s Fast Company article is an excerpt from a book, Getting There: A Book of Mentors, by Gillian Zoe Segal
(Image: Anderson Cooper Facebook)
