8/18/2023
wow - kind of an unexpectedly heavy topic that i never really expected to write about on webheaven of all places?
i am in a really weird place right now.
a short while ago, my close circle and i all experienced 'the event' which for my privacy i'm not really going to go into in any more than slightly vague detail. it was a loss - not a death, but in a lot of ways it felt like one. this is probably a really strange way to describe it, but maybe there are people reading this who get it. it's really hard to explain without giving you the in-depth play by play, but i don't really want to do that lol. this was long enough ago that maybe i'm not as in shambles about it as i was before, but it hasn't been long enough for me to be really feeling completely alright again. grief is just stupid like that i guess.
when everything happened, i couldn't go very long without crying. i was crying pretty much every time i thought about it, which was all the time, and that lasted for a few days. it is different now - i'm not cryind any more and now that my job has started up i'm usually too busy to dwell on it very deeply. actually i did just kind of lie to you, in the middle of writing this i laid down on my floor and i cried. still, kind of paradoxically, i'm thinking about it a lot. it feels like it's always on my mind and hanging over my head. it's hard. i do my best to stay in the moment and be a good friend to the people around me, but i keep just kind of drifting off into this weird gray feeling and not being present in the moment. i keep kind of swinging between feeling sad and beating myself up for feeling sad.
but like. it's not stupid to feel sad over something like this, like objectively. someone i felt very close to and very fond of is gone now, and it kind of feels like everything around me got burned and shaken up in the process. i was so close to this person i lost - physically too, we had almost all of our classes together and they lived with me, in my home. the people around us associated us with each other so much that it feels like every day, someone asks where the rest of me is and i have to respond that they're gone and they're not coming back. i still haven't decided if this is cathartic or if it just reopens healing wounds. can it be both? i can feel the hole left in the wake of everything. i'm sitting at my desk where they used to rest their head, their furniture is being used by someone entirely new, their abandoned personal affects are in the hands of strangers after i donated them, and our four person group chats have become three-person trios. my mom compared me to a newly divorced wife, which is insane i think
i wish i had a way to tie this sad little essay into a neat little bow, but i don't. probably i never will. maddeningly, there is no one-size-fits-all handbook on how to process grief. there's a different way for every person and every situation and you just have to stumble and trip and fall the entire way through it. hell world, actually.
silver lining? silver lining! i guess i've learned some things and maybe matured. (mostly because this whole ordeal took a year off my lifespan.) there is a part of me that just wants to shut out the world and never let something like this happen again, but that isn't any way to live. you have to hold onto what you love and what makes you happy. i am doing my best to hang onto that. i still have people i realy love in my life, and thanks to my job and even this situation i've become closer with some new people too. you have to accept help and let yourself lean on others - it doesn't make you weak. people like to help each other actually! we are social creatures, it's a part of our biology to help each other and support each other. you can't be so prideful as to never let anyone in. if i did that i'd just end up like walter white, inevitably, and that thought alone is enough to keep me humble and recognize i can accept support from others in this time ...
yeah anyways. i'm sorry if this didn't make any sense. i'm working through a lot of complicated feelings. grief, hurt, anger, relief, shock. it's a crazy world!! if nothing else i hope someone can read this and maybe feel a little less alone. bye. be well.