Hitting The Stage
I’m sick of feeling so conflicted inside. I’m over grieving, it’s been enough and I have a low boredom threshold. It’s time for grief to amble off to a dusty corner until the next time it’s called upon.
The emotions battering my insides are conflicting, raw and belligerent. Anger, sadness, bitterness, betrayal, guilt take turns playing out vicious tableaus behind my eyes. I just want it to end, I’m exhausted emotionally. It’s not really my call though.
Grief isn’t over me yet.
It feels like there’s a furious vortex whirling inside my body, washing over my guts. The force of the whirling uproots everything, old hurts mixing with fresh agonies, long forgotten memories like jagged shards of glass embed in my brain, self recrimination screams in my ears.
The worst part is the center of the vortex, the eye of the storm. It’s supposed to be calm in there, a haven of stillness at the heart of cacophony. There’s no safe haven in here though, everything is worse in the eye.
Turns out, it’s not an all-seeing eye down there. It’s black hole, sucking in all unfortunate enough to make the middle. It’s a bottomless pit of unnamed want, ravenously gobbling everything but never getting sated. It consumes and demands more, consumes and demands more.
It’s a physical ache inside my belly that I can’t soothe, can’t balm. It’s an angry toddler, unable to express its desires and lashing out in frustration. Nothing makes it calm, nothing satisfies it. It exists only to be miserable.
I ricochet between manic energy projects – like writing an ebook in week – to long periods of over-arching ennui where I can’t muster the will to even get dressed. The house is a shambles, the yard is a wreck, I have no will to clean anything, to tidy up my once lovely garden.
Cooking has long been my refuge. Cleaning up after is what keeps me out of the kitchen nowadays. I’ll do anything to avoid washing dishes and frequently use the drought as an excuse not to do them at all.
After reading up on the five stages of grief, I know I’m stuck in limbo between stages two, three and four. Anger, bargaining and depression. The three horseman of my personal apocalypse.
As I stated before, knowing them intellectually doesn’t help much. The vortex whirls too fast for rational thought to do anything but get carried off and beaten up. I’ve considered talking to a professional, but what’s the point? I won’t take the pills they will offer, I’ll still have to endure the grieving process. What words can I say to that person that I can’t say here?
That’s a personal choice, by the way. I’m not condemning mental health professionals or people who choose to take their help. I’m just not choosing that because I’ve been down that road before. There’s nothing at the end I can’t achieve on my own on the same schedule.
I just wish I knew the details of that schedule. I’d like to be able to circle a date on the calendar and know that’s when my time is up, when my penance has been served.
But vortices don’t run on schedules, they run on chaos. So I sit and feel all the feels, like it or not. Usually it’s not. I sit here and don’t clean. I sit here, stuck. Stuck again. Stuck some more.
I can’t keep jumping out of airplanes every time the eye of the storm gets to be too much. I can’t put off grieving. All I can do is ride it out, hoping the vortex doesn’t swallow me up.
The only thing I have to hold onto is the knowledge that this will pass someday. I’ll be a stronger person at the end, on that magical day, better for the pain somehow.
Until then, for any of you readers who are experiencing the same thing, we can only hold fast and have faith. All storms, even the most furious ones, pass eventually. One day, we’ll find a sunny clearing inside, pristine and unharmed by the vortex.
One day, we will feel the sun again.
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