For the past few weeks, I have felt like I could break down at any moment. Mere conversations with people that I normally handle with ease have become strangely burdensome, and I used to answer texts and emails in a timely way, but I find myself unable to even type out a response at times. That social butterfly I know to be me is now hiding.
I seem to be lost in some strange void of anxiety. If a friend starts to tell me about all of their problems, I simply can’t hold space for that right now. Maybe I’ll get back to being that friend who loves to help solve others’ issues, or maybe I won’t. I realized only a few days ago that all of this was happening to me because I wasn’t recognizing my grief. I can’t shoulder the problems of others if my load is already too heavy for my own strength to bear.
People around me aren’t acknowledging that something dreadful happened to me two years ago at this time, and therefore I got sucked into their version of reality and I stopped acknowledging it myself.
I lost love. It was traumatizing beyond words. It was something that doesn’t happen to most people. My experience is not relatable for the masses. It’s hard for me to process because there is no precedent in my life for healing from this tragedy.
It’s hard because people see the grief as being about losing that person — but I am seeing that it’s more about my own relationship with myself. I have lost him (of course, he is not really lost at all), but the grief and pain that comes in waves now is all about me and my own journey.
I see clearly now that my grief is not for the loss of him, but for the loss of myself. I have to grieve in order to face my darkness.
Grief isn’t for the dead, it’s for the self. Because when you experience loss like this, you’re experiencing a death of some part of yourself. And that part of yourself may be what you identified as the ‘happy part’ — so you’re only left with sadness. You are traumatized and you have to nurture yourself back to balance somehow. And people don’t see that or make that connection — all they see is your relationship with that person is now gone. They don’t give any thought to your relationship with yourself. They can’t see it, so to them, it’s not valid.
I was living my life like a “normal” person this past month. But this is when it happened — December was the precursor for a cataclysmic event in my life two years ago. I have to honor that. I have to face it. But instead, I was almost gaslighting myself by going through my day-to-day like my other half didn’t die, like my soul wasn’t shrouded in complete darkness, like I hadn’t touched the abyss and come back from it.
I was acting like half of me hadn’t died two years ago. Total make-believe.
That’s why I have started having anxiety. My soul knows what is right. It knows that I have to embrace the reality of my experience, even if others can’t see it. I can’t just expect myself to move on and live a normal life like everybody else. I shouldn’t expect myself to.
I had this silly idea that one year was enough time to grieve like that. The first year was a complete nightmare for me. And people were even acting then like nothing really bad had happened to me. I felt like I was expected to just move on.
They didn’t understand how important this person was to me. I had only known him a short time — a few months — so they just assumed that when someone like this dies, it’s a cinch to just pick up and move on with life. But they are wrong. And they are the ones living in a fantasy world.
When you love so deeply and then tragedy slices through your existence like that, you can’t just move on. In fact, it would be normal for it to permeate the whole rest of your life.
The problem is that most people have never loved like that. I am convinced, from my observations of people around me after this happened, that most people don’t know what love is at all. They think it’s something you control. They think it’s an accessory to your life. They think a loss like this is just another mundane experience. But for me, with this particular person, it is a catastrophe.
Two years is apparently not enough time to grieve. I don’t know what ten years will feel like, or twenty. I won’t make the same mistake again — I will not try to fit my emotions into some version of anyone’s expectations. I am still broken and I am still healing.
I know I never want to feel this anxiety again — I have to be aligned with reality from now on.
This event in my life was a pivotal turning point for me to realize my truth. I was knocked down violently but even in that moment, from the very beginning, I knew that it was challenging me to be something greater than I have ever been before. Until then, I was scared to express myself authentically. But when he was gone, I realized life is short and I can’t hold back anymore. I don’t care what anyone thinks. It changed me forever.
So, to try to live life in December, two years later, as if nothing happened? This was a mistake. I have to correct it now and grieve properly. I have to cry. I have to embrace the darkness within me. I have to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix yet again — to remember that this experience has made me who I am. If anyone tells me that I should have moved on by now and resumed “normal” life, they’re the ones who are delusional, not me.
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