I’ve always heard people say that grief isn’t linear. Which is true. Anybody that has suffered grief from some sort of loss in their life be it a death, a heartbreak, a relationship etc can attest to that fact. There are days when you just go about your life and you feel okay and then there are those days when you feel like you can’t get out of bed and nothing will ever be right with the world again. But at some point the grieving ends. It is not this active thing. At least in my experience. But then, I wonder what this is…. that can then crop up years and years and years after an event. It is not quite grief… grieving again. But it sure can hurt.
It is interesting to look back and see 2 sides of the coin. I can look back to this past event and remember that I truly honestly believed at the time that I would never stop hurting. I felt that with every ounce of me, I could not imagine a life past the one I was experiencing. A life where it didn’t hurt. But then day by day, month by month, year by year… it just becomes this thing, that yes it happened to you, but it no longer defines you. You become something else, you grow, the event doesn’t seem so raw to memory.
But then the other side of the coin… that something can happen that just rips at the scar tissue. You feel like you’re bleeding all over again. The hurt comes back. The anger over the hurt comes back. Searching your brain for what could have been different comes back. It can all come flooding back over the right triggers. And holy fucking hell if you didn’t expect the trigger, lemme tell you.
The past 2 days I’ve been between both sides… almost looking in at times. Trying to figure out a why when in reality, there may just not be one there. At all. This could all be tragically yet so beautifully random. The problem is is that it feels hard to accept when everything else in your history with it feels like it was never random at all. So finding a new way to explain it seems terribly hard. How can *this* be random now?
I’m one of those people that think there is a lesson in these things that happen. Sometimes it feels so naive. But yet I search my mind for reasons… for a lesson. It is linked to the part of me that is more spiritual… everything happens for a reason… karma… dharma blah blah blah. Strangely too it was a part of me that was numbed out for a long long time, but it seems to be returning. But then again, attempting at one point to study psychology for a career choice made me for a bit… this science minded person who secretly hated the shit out of scientist explanations of how seemingly everything about a person’s mind works and seemed to take away any concept that we could be more than brain and nerve cells but at the same time, I found myself ascribing to some of that shit and wiping out this concept that we could very well be spiritual beings. I hear myself telling myself that my feelings can’t be logical b/c it is my brain doing stuff from this survival/biological blah blah… blah.
The most peaceful in my times has been when I trusted myself fully. I trusted the universe fully. Meaning. Meaning, there was lots of meaning. How the hell do you lose meaning?
So I struggle for meaning now in having to relive something painful. Perhaps it is so significant to me because it really has been so long. In fact I know that is probably why it is so significant to me. I don’t remember questioning it much when it was daily or even monthly or 6 monthly or what have you. Perhaps it was the way it was dredged up. Oh yes, I am sure too that that is part of it as well.
So far at best the lesson seems to be the reminder that at one point the pain and anger was every single day of my life or at least most days and even though I thought it would never end, it did. Or perhaps the lesson is that if you open up avenues to experience that hurt, don’t be surprised when somebody takes advantage of that route. Those are the 2 best I can come up with at the moment anyways. Or maybe something just decided that it was time I remember moment. Maybe I wasn’t meant to completely heal.
this is the nonsensical mass that is my life. welcome. 