When I sat down to write my blog post today I had a list of topics. And I started writing on each one and had to stop myself. I just couldn't settle down on a topic where I wanted to tell the full truth. They all kind of sucked.
See, the problem is when you have a line of work like mine, there is kind of a temptation to sound like you have your issues all tied up and emotional biz completely under control. That just isn't true in life--not mine or anyone else's.
I'm just feeling a bit impatient about my own emotional story.
Truth is, I'm sick of all the grief in my life.
We had to put Turtle to sleep two weeks after he started having terrible seizures. Except for a brief period where he seemed like he was more or less his old self, the medication zonked him out and his seizures came roaring back. I found myself crying in private and public a lot after that--something that I'm a little self conscious about because it wasn't that long ago that I was doing that over my brother Steve.
And now, just this weekend, it was the 29th anniversary of my father's death--a day Steve usually marked by heading down to the cemetery with a can of Brasso and a rag to clean Dad's headstone.
Before anyone starts taking issue with a possible comparison of my brother's suicide and my cat's demise, there is no comparison there. Only another loss--you can't control the way your heart responds as it knows no measure or scale around what you should feel.
Only the other day I saw a work glove in the road and had to go hide in the garage and cry because I didn't want to talk about how the glove looked a lot like the pair Steve offered to give me but I turned down.
Am I getting help for this? I'm working on finding someone who can guide me through my my grief labyrinth. Can't white knuckle it forever. It's time to step back...far back and look at what the last decade brought to my door--the joyous and the terrible.
This is one of the reasons why writing is so important to me. Through the accumulation of words I have a sky view of my life. I can see the grim thought loops and also when things are just too damn chirpy. The micro scope view of the moment to moment can fool a person into thinking things are "fine".
Here is the truth. I'm not "fine".
There is a whole lot I just don't give a shit about anymore. I don't have energy to waste. Some things have got to go-- at the top of that list is trading the truth for a ration of "fine".
I've had to figure that out about myself in the last few months, too: that I'm not fine. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the vast space between the micro moments and the macro ones, in fact. And all the component parts that I have been breaking into. We are transformed by our losses and sometimes that means we come apart into a lot of pieces and have to reassemble ourselves into the someone new that we are on the other side of it. We are never not affected, no matter how well we get through the mechanics of our lives.
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