I’m feeling so much grief right now. My heart feels heavy, yet hollow at the same time, like there’s a gaping hole right above my stomach. Tiny cracks seem to stretch out all over my body, making it difficult and painful to move. I sometimes can’t find the strength, courage even, to just do things, for there’s always the risk of the hole opening up again and taking my breath away in the worst sense. I seem to move around unusually slowly. It takes me forever to walk home from places, because there’s just no point in arriving there. I’m going through the motions, but they seem to have lost all meaning.
In addition to all the grief I’m feeling, there’s a whole lot of guilt.
What reason could you possibly have to feel THIS sad right now? The amount of sadness you feel is completely out of proportion and other people have it so much worse than you!
And then I snap out of it. I go for a run. I take care of things. I go to work.
And then the sadness creeps back in, so I try to ride it out and wait for it to pass, so I can go back to doing stuff. It’s quite a challenge actually, logistically speaking: if I don’t take care of things, they don’t get done. There’s no one around to delegate tasks to. And I know that I will feel a lot worse if, at some point, piles of laundry are flooding the apartment and there’s no more food in the fridge. So, whenever I do feel alright enough, I get things done. I clean up, I move my body and I try to keep the sadness away for as long as I can.
I may not be having the time of my life right now, but I’m doing the best I can to deal with it, with the resources that are currently at my disposal.
What’s causing all this grief, you may wonder?
Well, a number of things are. First and foremost, there’s the friggin pandemic. Yada yada yada. I don’t need to get into details about this, you get it – everything’s been cancelled and even though things are moving forward, it seems to be happening so slowly that I still can’t see the end of it and it’s causing me so much despair.
Then there’s been some actual, tangible loss – a break-up of some sort – which I was completely blindsided by. Isn’t it weird how you think you know someone and then suddenly, they turn out to be this entirely different person, even though they were right under your nose the entire time, and you can’t help but wonder how you could possibly have missed what was going on there? And I mean this in a completely non-judgmental way: people have the right to change, to change their minds and to decide who should be in their lives and who’s no longer aligned with who they want to be. Heck, I’ve been that person.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy for the other person though, especially if the feeling isn’t mutual.
Either way, boundaries have been set and since these are meant to be respected, that’s what I’ll be doing, sadly or less sadly, depending on what my grief levels are.
I can’t think of a way to end this post on a positive note. But maybe that’s okay. Sometimes, life just sucks.
And sometimes it doesn’t, so I guess I’ll just wait it out.
Carrot Days 