Wednesday, 22 October
Mostly I feel awake. I look back over the years before 19 Sept 2014 and I feel very estranged from the person I was. Not better and certainly not worse.
The year after my mum died seems a daze - I behaved in ways so unlike me, I thought and lived in a fog. It was essentially free falling, more or less aware, more or less willing. It was a year of indulging, of justifying by waiving the need of justification to myself. It didn't feel wrong, it didn't disappoint or gratify - it almost didn't feel like anything at all, with some very few spikes. I was going through the motions, but in a continual and pressing state of expectation. I started having minor anxiety attacks ( they might not have been minor, as I have no reference point and I can't quite verbalise the complexity, intensity and rapidity of those emotions). Existential anxiety. I look through the journal I stated keeping and the words that jump out from those smudged, crumpled pages are " I can't see myself" but I can't read an emotional charge in them - they are more of a N.B. and as I'm writing this it dawns on me - the explanation is in the actual words: I can't see myself. How can you draw something from something you don't see?
It wasn't depression, not in the way it's defined in medical terms -" feeling persistently sad over a period of weeks or months" and not in the way I define it to myself - a lack of vital energy. I did feel lethargic at times and lonely, lost and unsettled but no more than anyone who uproots themselves. It seemed more that my vital energy was wrong - diesel instead of petrol and I was getting nowhere fast. I was essentially what Kierkegaard defines as the unhappiest of people - one who dwells on the past or future, in such a way that they spend their life in the wrong tense. Well, looking back, I was twice the unhappiest because I was living in the past and projecting it into the future. I wasn't aware of it though, so bold as it may be, I'd go as far as to amend the philosopher's postulate and say I was the most foolish and the unluckiest - a fool for the obvious reasons and unlucky because I didn't catch it sooner. This is not to say it was an empty year - I travelled, I learned, I worked, I met people and had experiences but I was really living my life as a pass time.
A very cruel person once said to me you are like an animal - you don't learn by explanation, in a gentle way; you only learn by shock and aggression; in fact this is true of all humanity - the great lessons we learned were prompted by disaster and suffering. I was 23 at that time and my biggest problems were how to nurse a hangover and ditch work as much as possible, without hurting my chances for a quick promotion, as the rising star that I was. Am I more considerate now, more aware, more consistent, more my own person, more caring? Yes, much more and a great many of the lessons I learned were indeed crash courses, hence I have no sense of evolution, but more of a rupture, as if someone picked me up and dumped me so hard that my bones shattered. So you start walking,wobbling, stumbling, falling and even crawling for part of the journey because the alternative is against our nature. Would I have learned the lesson diligently and gently? I think yes, I would've, with time and at the right time and frankly, the jury is still out on the value for pain of this clarity and insight, this change that is so apparent to all who know me and to myself. I am so grateful for all the revelations - and I'm not using the term lightly, but the not so fashionable, not so progressive bottom line is that ignorance is bliss.
It's very difficult to live one day at a time, it takes patience, with everything around you and with yourself. You're so desperate to heal, to breathe easy again it's pathetic - not in the trivial sense of the word, but in the lyrical, etymological sense of intense sorrow, of passion in pain. But it's a decreasing emotion, it fades one day at a time because the human heart is not built to operate at such levels of sustained intensity - good or bad and feelings evolve,transform. I read about the notion of synthetic happiness, which is what you get when you don't get what you want. Essentially, it's part of our innate emotional autoimmune system and it's a blessing. It's our ability to to find a way to make ourselves happy with the alternative, choice or situation we find ourselves in, even though it's not the ideal scenario, or even very far from it. As it turns out - and this is scientifically proven, at the end of one year from the event, a guy who won the weight of his dreams in lotto money and a guy who lost the use of his lower body in an accident, are equally happy.
My initial reaction is to ask what drugs are you on, mister scientist and may I please have some? Then I get off my high horse of sarcasm and realise I have been through this before, not so long ago and I got with the proverbial program and I was very happy.
I miss him every day, really miss him and he already feels very far away because I know he is never going to be here again and feeling like this is part of my mind's survival mode but it also gifts me with the cold realisation of what happened, at random times and I re-live everything. I wonder what I would choose if someone came up to me and offered me a pill that would erase him from my memory and the easy way out is so appealing but time and time again, I choose him. Now, if someone would finally invent that much coveted time machine...
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