On ambivalence

One of the most intriguing experiences that I have had over the last couple years has been how my grief manifests itself unconsciously. Down beneath my present consciousness it seethes. It has been a persistant feeling of generalized anxiety about any endeavor, combined with a nagging pessimism about the prospect of positive outcomes. What I write here is done with a lot of self-compassion, but I’ve been hopeless.

This may conjure stigmatic images of a wailing depression, that flail of tears straight to the nearest couch. A much more disdainful version of me in years past would have seen it this way. However, the trauma of loss has brought me straight to that cliff of reality. And, as I gasp over its ominous precipice, my mind, my being has yielded to this irrefutable truth of human experience, my experience.

Perhaps its just the strength of recency bias coursing through my neural pathways. The bad that has happened to me still looms preeminent. It hasn’t even been 2 years. But, I once believed that by this point I would have embarked liberated into my new epoch of life. Instead I find myself slogging through the quotidian, constantly assailed by the collateral repercussions of an event that I had never had any control in the first place.

I’ll regretfully admit that for dozens of months I have felt hand-cuffed to this orbital imprisonment of circumstance, revolving that black seminal moment of death and despair. All that led up to it was a tear-stained struggle to bury dreams, never-to-be-had, before the body was ever interred. All that succeeded since my miraculous escape from that tortuous event horizon could be compared to building a sea wall amidst the onslaught of the tempest.

I’m tired. In saying so, my shoulders don’t require to be dragged up to be draped on someone’s back. My afflicted brain not only has had to unwind a life with a cherished partner, but it has also had to confront ramparts of uncertainty and seemingly impossible demands unrelated to loss. And, as if that wasn’t enough, further molestation has come from the affliction of global pestilence and the threat of war. My heart is not yet failing me, but my cerebrum may still be punch-drunk from these unyielding blows.

So, what am I left with? All that remains is a plane of radical self-empathy. Acceptance is not a surrender. You don’t need to rip these frayed bootstraps from my bloodied hands. No manner of trite, euphemistic optmisim will supercede this neuropathy. For that is what it is. Trauma and loss renders a pathology, not just a perspective. You may recoil at this apparent wallowing, but I ask you to sit with me, as I am sitting with myself, learning from me and the pain that this body continues to hold. Time, that omnipotent practitioner, will one day render me cleansed from this pain, but for now, there is nothing for you or I to do but listen.