Someone once told me, in less
refined terms, that I’d sat with grief for so long, over so many unresolvable
issues in life, where ‘acceptance’ was the only way forward, that
I have now developed some ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ with the feeling of grief. So,
now, subconsciously, I seek out situations that lead me to it. Maybe I wouldn’t
even know what to DO, with a life free from grief. After all, when you sit with
grief for so long, it becomes part of your personality. So, I, subconsciously, in
my day to days, feed it. Breathe it to life.
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Why would ANYONE do that, to
themselves, …one might ask? It would be easy to summarise it as “you think too
much”. Maybe. If this were the price to pay for having a depth that expands like
nebulae in an infinite universe, to be able to write with a profoundness that leaves
readers with goosebumps, maybe, just maybe, I’ll take it.
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| Source: https://pixabay.com/gifs/galaxy-universe-cosmos-sky-3468/ |
How does one feed grief? Grief
is nourished in the music you let play in the background, the words you read,
the online content you consume, the people you surround yourself with, the type
of conversations you have with yourself, the compromises you make that chip
away too much from an authentic living.
Grief is apathy. It takes away your willpower to fight for people to stay in your life. “Oh, you think this connection is too one-sided? You don’t really feel like we know what’s going on in each other’s’ lives anymore? You think we have grown into wholly incompatible people as adults? Well, okay then. I hope you find someone who does it for you.” Poof, goes another 15-year friendship out the window. It is not even motivated by spite, it’s motivated from an increasing need for detachment from everything which matters because you know, all too well, that what goes up must come down. Everything has an expiry date.
It’s like being in the midst of the longest free-fall
of your life, constantly just WAITING for the moment things go “thud”. EVEN IN THE MIDST OF EXPERIENCING GOOD TIMES.
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| Source: https://makeagif.com/gif/evanescence-bring-me-to-life-HHiseS |
Grief is narcissistic. It
takes away your ability to ‘lose the argument, not the person’. You just stop
associating with those you know are going to see that giant glow of a red
button that says ‘TRIGGER’ and press it with full force. But you forget, it’s
only human, that the people you love, or even strangers, are going to gloss
over that button whether they intend to or not. The world does not, and cannot
operate around what your triggers are like a game of minesweeper.
To some level, you are subconsciously, belatedly,
“punishing” the person you just met for all the previous people who
could have exercised better thought process over their words and decisions,
which have now unfortunately altered you in a somewhat negative and permanent
way. As you are doing it, you realise that this is not the way to go about interacting
with people. But you just can’t stop. Deep down, you know. You owe yourself a duty
to heal and fix yourself through your acquired knowledge of human interaction,
and get back out in the game again to make someone’s day around you a little
better than before you met them. But you’re already too worn out.
Grief is erratic. Prolonged
exposure to grief causes a learnt numbness, that you would do anything to make
yourself feel a little more alive. Some resort to drugs. Shopping. Food.
Sex. Gambling. Whatever it takes to feel a dopamine hit. It may create an erratic,
impulsivity, that, to the outside world, makes you look so spontaneous, like
you have retained your youth when others have let it slip away. So you let life
happen to you, instead of you taking life by the horns, since everything you’ve
tried to manage, control, structure, had plans of its own anyway that deviated
so far from anything that you could have imagined. So, you just don’t ‘play
with life’ anymore, like the sour grapes theory.
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| Source: https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/patrick-bateman-american-psycho-christian-gif-5104406 |
Marinating in grief takes the foundations,
bases, the ground-zeros of someone’s life and pushes it one whole mile below
that. It strips you off everything you
ever attached happiness to, like lying down on warm sand, then realizing that
you’re fucked because it was quick sand, but making no attempts to get
out of it anyway because maybe you’ve just resigned to this fate.
So, because of that, Grief is arrogant. It feeds you with a mistaken belief that ‘NOBODY’
could survive the things you go through, the thoughts in your head, the choices
you had to make in the crossroads that you had to take, that it’s almost offensive
(?) that someone else is going through what they term as grief. You forget,
that, someone who drowns in 6 feet of water is just as dead as someone who
drowns in 20 feet of water. You believe that it’s human nature to nourish and
create a safe space. Not to destroy or belittle. …And yet.
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Maybe this grief, now attached like
a cancer, manifested in romantic interests who kept me a hidden like a dirty
secret, then replaced me in weeks and some, even days (!) when I was prepared
to take my whole world and spread it like a red carpet so their feet are padded
from anything less than bliss. It’s slowly losing the ability to offer a kind
of love that makes a beggar feel and walk like a millionaire.
Maybe, grief is hyperfixating on
the one thing I could fix and have control over, i.e my career, (which to be fair
is the only thing which has loved me back). Yet knowing at the end of the day
that a job is just a means of making money, a man-made currency that cannot
bury you.
Maybe, grief is losing a constant,
but also having no willpower to fight for that connection to stay in my life
because what I could offer into that person’s life pales in comparison to the interactions
they could be having with others who more align with where they are in their
life right now.
Maybe, grief is a sudden
unexplained loss/disappearance of a pet I raised from when it took its first
steps in this world, which, despite not being able to say a word to me, and running
away from cuddles or sitting down with me, I know deep down loved me just as
much as I loved it.
Maybe,
grief is the increased isolation I feel from all that was supposed to be
familiar, my childhood, parents. The age gap, language barriers, and
differences are hyper imposed in my memory rather than all that makes us
similar.
I go back to a textbook definition of love as found from a Bible verse:-
1
Corinthians 13:4-8
4 Love
is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does
not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does
not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily
angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love
does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It
always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
I
would have come across this verse many, many times in my lifetime. But today, it’s
become crystal clear that grief is, (and risks turning you into) the opposite
of love. And, quite heartbreakingly, grief is born out of the absence of
love. Just look at the examples I wrote about immediately above.
With that , I am entering into 2025 with a different lens. The goal is simple. To cultivate love and joy above all.