grief

You may have noticed that I've not been doing very well at posting every day for the last couple of weeks. This is because I have not been doing very well for the last couple of weeks. I believe that setting my focus on a moment of truth and beauty as a daily discipline is worthwhile, helpful, inspiring. But I also believe there are times when life is so hard, and my heart is so heavy, that even though I know not all is bad and even though I know there is beauty in the middle of all the tough stuff, sometimes my fingers are made of lead and my heart is just a bucket of rusted nails and nothing can make me sit down at the computer to write something lovely. Sometimes the unlovely stuff wins. I hate that.

I don't like that I've spent most of my life walking close to the edge, teetering on the tipping point between feeling good and feeling lost and sad and overwhelmed, but mostly I'm pretty proud of how good I've gotten at beating the black dogs of depression from the door. I've discovered lately, though, that depression has a cousin named grief and she's a nasty piece of work. I have tools for the battle depression, but no real strategy for grief. Depression is a lot about perspective, fixing your focus, keeping your mind from doing the Dance Macabre at every turn. But grief strikes when circumstances beyond your control shift your world, and it doesn't much matter from what angle you view the situation, it looks the same-- something is gone, something that gave you joy now gives you pain, what was is no longer, full stop.

Time, they tell me, I need time. The way I see it, with all these layers of loss weighing me down, I need to build muscle, first to carry the loss and then to cast it off. Does time build muscle? Do I just keep thowing at grief the things I throw at depression and hope for the best? Is grief the hysterical toddler of the emotional life and I just have to let her scream it out until she falls, exhausted, into sleep? Sigh. Probably.