I see a lot of people taking off. Grief is very private for a lot of folks. And Facebook, you know, is the problem, or at least a big, big piece of it, it's right, it's natural to try and get away. I'm a private person, but I guess I do things differently. I need to give voice to what I'm feeling, I need to work it out on a screen, and for some reason I need to share it, even if only two or three people see it. So I'm grateful for anybody who does read the stuff I'm going to be posting. I hope it helps you, and I'm sorry if it doesn't.
Focusing on emotions. Paradoxically I feel like, as a chronically mentally ill person, I'm better equipped than some to deal with everything that's going on right now. I have a pretty refined palate for anguish. Everything I'm feeling, I've felt before. All the fear I have, I've had before.
But it's so much more intense. It's so overwhelming. Yeah I've felt all of these things before but I've never really known how to cope with them. How to feel all this and still function, and still put one foot in front of the other.
I try to cope by making concrete plans. A lot of my plans are grandiose and impractical and even when they aren't I just have a hard time following through on them. And even if they were... it's different for everybody, this overwhelming pain is in some sense _not_ a shared pain because we all experience it differently.
I'm experiencing it a couple different ways myself. Sometimes I want to run and hide, but there's nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Sometimes I want to stand and fight, and that feels better, but I don't know who to fight, I don't know how, I don't know that fighting would be anything different from this torrent of destructive rage we've been living through.
I'm really afraid of becoming the problem. We don't choose our feelings, we don't choose what happens to us, but we choose, to some extent, how to react to them. So no talking points, no reasoned explanations, no eloquent righteous fury.
I feel awful, possibly more awful than I've ever felt in my life, and I don't know what to do about it. (Possibly not more awful than I've ever felt. We have a way of burying the things we don't want to remember.)
You know, for months, I go to therapy, and I say the same thing over and over again. I say that I want the hurting to stop. And it doesn't. There's no reason to it. There's no purpose to it. I've spent long sleepless nights cursing God, cursing this earth and all the people on it. I know according to Job or whatever you're not supposed to do that, it's supposed to be bad, but I feel like it's been time well spent.
I wonder if maybe I just can't be an alcoholic. I've always worried about it, because my family history, because I do really like drinking. I just don't know if I can drink like alcoholics do, to numb the pain. I'm thinking about getting drunk, and I realize, you know, I don't want to. I'd rather write. Isn't that fucked up? Who ever heard of a writer who'd rather write than drink?
I come closest to crying when I laugh. I don't know why that is.
Anger and sadness, they mix together very strongly in me. When I'm sad it comes out as anger, a lot of times. But I have... I have kind of a fatalistic view on anger. My therapist pushes me on this. My therapist suggests without directly saying so that I don't fight hard enough for myself. And I explain over and over again what I've learned, what I think I've learned, that anger just feeds on itself, that what I want is peace and anger has never, ever brought me that.
And I just don't feel it. Oh, sure, I have hatred in my heart, lots of it, but it's a cold, numb hatred. A detached hatred. All these people... I feel pity for them. It's not like they win and we lose. It's they lose and we lose too. It's absurd, it's farcical, it makes me want to write all kinds of pseudo-philosophical gibberish which I won't because it doesn't matter.
What I want now is not peace, is not for things to be OK, because the quickest way to get there right now is for me to learn to lie to myself better. For me to say "Oh, that victory speech was so nice, maybe he won't be so bad after all," to try to forget the trauma like we all want to. Hell, I don't even necessarily want to be able to sleep at night. I've had plenty of great, restful sleep in my life.
What I want is simply to be able to _function_, to be able to live my life. I'm not now, I haven't been for a while now. I'm not going to be able to do it, I don't think, until I dig to the bottom of this pile of hurt, until I find out something to do with it.
If I'm writing a lot, if I have logorrhea, it's because when I'm writing, when I'm saying these things, I feel... I feel in control of my life. I feel like if I keep typing, maybe I'll accidentally turn out Hamlet. Nobody would know. Writing is not a social activity. But for so long, I've been afraid, so afraid of writing because it seems like a gateway to madness and dissolution. Because I wanted just to lead a normal life.
No normal anymore, folks. That option's off the table. The demons aren't just flying around loose in my head anymore.
