You can never really prepare yourself for the worst, right? I’m a big fan of this whole Enneagram thing and I am a proud, anxious type 6. By nature, sixes imagine every worst possible scenario in an attempt to be prepared for everything. What I personally end up doing is being anxious about everything. I like to think sometimes they go hand-in-hand and I am simply being REALISTIC, but maybe that’s just to make myself feel better. I spend a lot of time thinking about worst-case scenarios. I think about my plan for when I get fired from my job, for when my best friends decide I’m no longer worth their time, and for when my apartment burns down because God forbid, I left the dryer on for the last 20 minutes of its cycle as I leave for work. I think about worst-case scenarios for every-day things, their consequences merely inconvenient, but not earth-shattering. But what happens when you don’t prepare for the literal, actual worst?
I’ll tell you what: it knocks you right on your ass, or punches you in the stomach, or takes every breath away from you. Maybe it’s a combination of the three. You spend the coming days, months, or even years trying to recover from the piece of you that you lost, the piece you never really expected to lose. You spend some days in a fog so dense you can’t see a foot in front of you. You spend some days trudging through sticky molasses trying to accomplish simple tasks at work. You wake up and begin your day, running on autopilot until you get home and stare at the ceiling until by some miracle, you fall asleep. Other days are different: you’re excited about the lunch you packed, you thank the heavens for the blue sky, and you dance in the living room to a song that makes your heart flutter.
The “worst” thing is different for everyone, but I think the common outcome is grief. Grief and grieving in our society is most often associated with death, which is still correct. The death of a loved one is really, really tough and that type of grief has the ability to melt you from the inside out. However, we need to acknowledge that people experience grief for a multitude of reasons and all of those reasons are valid. We grieve the loss of people, jobs, moments in time, and pieces of ourselves. We often crave the way things once were, and I think that’s grief, simply put. It’s easy to focus on how we were before we lost that person, before we moved away from what we call home, before that bad thing happened. This is not an “always” feeling. You might wake up one morning after months of good days and feel a big empty hole in your heart. It’s a blessing and a curse that it comes in waves for many people; those waves can be really intense and hard to push through, and since they might be rare, they’re confusing.
All this is to say, I’m in a strange period of grieving. This could be because life is evolving pretty rapidly for me or because it’s the holidays or because I’m certifiably nuts. We’re approaching the third anniversary (I feel weird calling it that) of grief-worthy events and that’s always tough. For me, it leaves me wondering what things would have been like had events transpired differently. I think about the days I’ve lost to these feelings and I think about what I would have done with those days. Life is evolving for the better, but it still evokes really powerful emotions that I don’t really know how to express. If I’m being honest, I don’t even know what I’m feeling so I don’t know what to express. Things are crazy all around me, everyone buzzing between houses and parties and shopping malls. While seemingly everyone else is posting their best holiday pictures perched in their skimpy velvet dresses and sipping champagne, I am standing still, and I am standing here alone. I feel alone in this period of grief and sadness and it certainly feels like I will be stuck here forever.
The tricky thing is this: life keeps going. I kind of hate that. I’m selfish and I want the world to stop around me when I feel like my world has stopped. I’m angry that everyone else’s worlds keep turning when mine has come to a screeching halt for whatever reason. It’s jealousy for what I perceive, which is undoubtedly false. Everyone deals with this and a lot of people have miserable days, especially at this time of year. We all deal with grief and we have all suffered major losses in our lives, whatever that looks like. Part of the bad news is that it often comes when you least expect it. Those aforementioned waves well up under the surface and are upon you before you can even turn around to see them. The good news is that the waves will crash and it will be mighty and ugly, but you will wade through the water once again. The water might even be a little murky, but if you look really hard, you can still see your feet at the bottom.
Cheers to the last 99 days, and on we go to the next.
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