We Keep Going

source

My depression guides me to reach out for help. My loneliness guides me to connect. My fears guide me to act anyway because it must be important if I'm scared of it. Thinking of these uncomfortable emotions as guides helps me somehow.

Lately, when the depression has taken over, I've let it guide me to do whatever feels right*. I'm finding it easier to push against thoughts like "Distract yourself, numb yourself, don't lie around all day, you'll just wallow! Don't be lazy. Don't give in to the feelings." and instead do exactly what my body feels like doing. If it feels like rotting my brain with a Parks and Rec marathon, I do it. If it feels like cocooning in bed in the middle of the day, I do it. Get dinner delivered rather than cook? Yup. Leave the laundry and clutter and dishes until some unknown day when my energy returns? Sure. 

As I succumb to the things my body says it wants, I realize more and more that if I just do what I need, I pass through the stage faster than if I push against it, trying to ignore the messages I'm getting.

Sure, if I stayed extremely busy I might skim over some of these feelings throughout the day, but they always return. I have to tackle them anyway. Taking them on, all at once, instead of one little sip at at time can feel overwhelming and scary, but it's never permanent. I always shift back to the world of the living. I always emerge.

Interestingly, when I do emerge, I feel like I've really conquered something. Not just the fleeting pangs of grief that poke through a busy day, but full-on Tsunami waves of loss and heartbreak, desperate fear and hopelessness. I realize that I did that. I got through that. The emotions didn't kill me, though they felt like they certainly would. They were actually thoughts about feelings and they were mostly about the past or future, not the immediate moment.

My immediate situation is hard, very hard. It's missing someone I spent almost half my life with. But it's also evidence of how much I've survived, how hard I've worked to rebuild this life and what a fucking warrior I am. If my thoughts remain on my current situation, I see that I'm not in immediate danger (though the anxiety makes me feel like I am), that I'm surviving, that I'm loving harder, accepting myself more, listening more, feeling instead of numbing, and getting up every day to at least attempt to face the heartbreak I still feel at every moment.

*I realize how unique a situation mine is. I don't have to go back to full time work yet, and I'm not raising kids alone, so I have the "luxury" (ha!) of grieving fully when normally I'd be filling my days with work and kid-raising. I know this is rare and I'm fully aware of how many of you have to work full time AND some. This is just my personal experience within this life of mine.

On the other hand, I've noticed lately that being alone is harder than ever, I'm more and more envious of families with children and often tears spring to my eyes before I know what's happening when I witness little nuclear families. I have less career-related motivation than ever and have a harder time figuring out what it is I even want to do with my life.

So, that's my reality as I begin year 3 of this crazy new life. It is a life so completely different than my former life that I often shake my head in disbelief as I look around me. Other than the love of my Dave, I've kept so little of that old life. In many ways, that has helped me move forward. A fresh start and new viewpoints were what I needed. On the other hand, the old life sometimes feels like an illusion. Did I imagine that? Or am I imagining this new life?

I just keep plodding on. My mantra is "Just show up" and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't. My other mantra is "He wouldn't want you to give up" and I can say with conviction that I haven't. Each day I get to wake up and try again, I do. All of us going through this can say that. That is our superpower. We keep going.

Snap and Bam

Ironically, a friend posted this right after my meltdown.

I had a meltdown. A bad one. I haven’t experienced that bad of a meltdown in probably a year.

It was getting ready to take a bubble bath, then BAM. It hit me. It hit me so hard I seriously thought I had been hit in the face.

My knees started buckling underneath me. The room was spinning. Panic set in. And the gut wrenching tears started. I crawled into bed and just cried. Cried so hard I was dry heaving and gasping for air.

I didn't see it coming. Nothing triggered it. It just came out of nowhere.

The melt down was so bad, it scared me.. not in a - I’m going to hurt myself way - , but is this the  breakdown where I finally snap and never recover? Will I end up in the hospital? Will I spend the rest of my days a hysterical mess?

The meltdowns scare me. Bad. I think it’s partly so terrifying because I have no control over it. Feeling like I have no control over what is going on inside me is terrifying.

As I was laying in bed hysterically crying, I kept telling myself “suck it up, you have been through worse, for hell sakes it’s been (almost) 3 years, quit being a whiny bitzch.”

Then it dawned on me. I am my own worst support system.

When a widow friend needs support, I drop everything and run to their aid. I never think “get over it, suck it up”. I listen, relate, make sure they are safe, and we all move on. But when I have a complete meltdown, I’m insanely hard on myself.

Why?

Honestly, I don’t know why. I guess I think I should be past the complete meltdown point. Past the point of where I lose all control. Hell, maybe I should even be over this by now.

I realized I need to treat myself the same way I treat my widow friends. With love and compassion, and not take a tough love approach.

I see now that the meltdown came from sheer exhaustion and the 3 year anniversary looming.

I also can see I need to be my own amazing support system, and I think it’s time to check myself back into my personal intensive care unit.

Still Alive For You, Love

source

                                                                         

I tried dating. It didn't go...in my favor...shall we say. The whole thing felt like I was being jerked around by my heart. Not that he meant to or that he was malicious. Just that my poor, aching heart felt so torn up already and the experience of allowing myself to be vulnerable and hopeful again for a moment, only to have the whole thing blow up in my face really hurt. It really, really hurt.

But what I've discovered is that when everything else falls away - the humiliation, rejection, anxiety and pain that went along with it all, even the excitement, the affection, the companionship, the glimpse at happiness and joy, when all of that was stripped away and I had to face reality once again, it's still there. The gaping hole that is Dave's absence. It's still there and was exactly what I got to avoid in a small way for a little while.

Not that there's anything wrong with a little of that. The loss that I've suffered is too huge to take in all at once and all the time. I have to live and distract and try to find a new life.
It's a part of the process and some of it is healthy and normal. I need distraction. I need to feel alive again. I need to make mistakes and try new things and feel the fear of being vulnerable again. But, there, behind all of that was this pain I haven't fully addressed - the loss of this man I miss so much, that I can't look at that pain directly very often. I have to look at it peripherally just to not be taken down by it.

The truth is, that man I lost was the love of my life. He was my best friend. He was my everything. I suffered something so horrible and painful when he died. And I'm still suffering. Sometimes I think I'm not suffering LESS as time goes on, because I miss him MORE the longer he is gone.

After a last, sad conversation with this new man I had to say goodbye to today, I went for a run in the woods. So many thoughts crowded my mind as I ran, but I felt more peaceful than I had in weeks. I blasted the Bon Iver song, Perth through my earbuds until I felt myself begin to let go of some of the tension I'd been holding onto for days. The lyric still alive for you, love* reverberating through my mind and heart again and again as my feet flew above the dusty trail.

The woods are my church. The trees, moss, spiders, pine needles and ferns my cathedral and stained class. I feel closer to Dave when I'm there. At the halfway point, I turned around to jog back to the car, and without warning, a sob tore through my guts and out of my lungs and left me gasping. I stopped and bent over at the waist, my hands on my knees, as more sobs followed, one after another.  It's just this, my heart said when it could no longer be silenced by the pounding of the jogging and the music, my husband was everything to me and he is gone. I'm lost without him and I try so hard every moment of every day to be good at this new life, but I'm terrified and I need him and I miss him. My heart is cracked wide open. 

That one truth ripped through me like an explosion and I trudged back to the parking lot, winded by the racking sobs. At a bend in the trail, the sun pierced the thick canopy of leaves and shone a ray of brilliant light through several elaborate spiderwebs. I stopped in the middle of the trail, face raised to the sky. Tears I didn't know were leaking from my eyes slowly made tracks down my cheeks to my neck, and sweat dripped down the hollow of my spine, as I let the warmth of the sun soak into me.

It was so bright that I had to partially close my eyes, narrowing my view of the trees and glowing webs to a pinhole. It was so achingly beautiful that I wanted Dave to see it. I wished and prayed for Dave to appear to me in the trail behind me. His soul, his ghost, his spirit, whatever. I wished so hard. I turned around, opened my eyes and waited to see him coming around the corner. Just a memory of him, even. I prayed to feel his hands on me. I prayed to feel him wrap his arms around me and hold me.  I prayed to hear him reassure me that I'd be okay and that he loved me. It didn't happen. He didn't appear to me. He didn't hold me. I didn't feel him.

But, I did feel my own strength resurfacing from somewhere deep inside. I turned away from the bend in the trail where I had hoped to catch a glimpse of his sweet face and I walked on. Toward the sun, the trees, the life I have to live without him. I have to keep walking toward it. Even though he can't physically walk beside me.

I know he wishes he could be here with me. I know he misses me too. But I've been waiting for him to come home and he's not going to. I've been avoiding that horrific, giant, unavoidable, black cloud of truth a little bit, nough to survive the last 15 months. Somehow, though, I'm going to have to face that truth completely. Bit by tiny bit, I will have to fully accept that he is gone and that his absence has been and continues to be shattering.

I have to allow myself to really accept that my heart is broken, I'll never be the same, and the whole thing has been unspeakably hard. I've put on a great show so many times. I've gritted my teeth and gone out in public and smiled and made words come out of my mouth when all I've wanted to do is lie in bed focusing only on breathing in and out. I've pushed myself forward when all I've wanted to do is live in the past and cling to what was. I've been hard on myself and had ridiculously high expectations for myself. I've felt ashamed of my failures and my shortcomings. I've second guessed every damn decision I've made. I've treated myself in ways I'd never treat a good friend. I've treated myself like a person who hasn't just lost her world and had to start over.

I'm not that person. I'm not okay. I had the shit kicked out of my heart and had to watch the life I knew dissolve before me like a mirage. That person doesn't function like a "normal" person who's not grieving. That person requires special treatment. That person needs extra TLC and patience and love and while my friends could always do that for me, I often couldn't do that for myself. It's time I did. It won't be easy. But I'll do it for him.

Still alive for you, love.*

*I just discovered that the lyric might actually be "still alive who you love" which bugs me because "still alive for you love" makes more sense and means more to me.