Grief- the inexplicable feeling you get after loss
It was something everybody felt and yet no one talked about, that was the same for many things though. Everything ugly, complicated, everything that required an odicum of care and effort.
The world was an uncaring and selfish place, the people in it the same, although they all had good intentions, most of them anyway.
Life had become so hectic and busy, so stressful, everyone was so overwhelmed they no longer had time to worry if the person beside them, the person they cared most about in the world was so overwhelmed they couldn't take it anymore, so they didn't.
Hindsight was an ugly mistress, you saw things you never noticed in the moment, recognised that split-second, that badly faked smile you were too tired, and overstimulated by modern life to notice, to worried about something that seemed so important at the time but now didn't matter at all, that instant you realised they had been silently screaming for help behind the suffocating hand of depression. Only after the fact did you realise you'd lost your best friend well before the day their heart stopped beating, it iust took you until it was too late to notice.
To notice how they were so tired all the time, how every little thing in life took so much effort for them to do, how they cancelled plans more often than attending. The unbrushed teeth behind unsmiling lips and the greasy hair beneath that hat they rarely took off. How they tried so hard to seem the same, carry on like nothing was wrong whilst their brain was screaming at them to drive into a wall not wearing a seatbelt with their foot to the floor.
What killed them? People may ask. It was worse than cancer, silent like an aneurysm, crushing as any disease, exhausting. It was the death of happiness, of hope, the future became an impossible feat to achieve, let alone think about. It destroyed the brain whilst leaving it practically untouched, it killed so many every year, there was no preventing it, no vaccine to make you immune, no nasty little parasite you need avoid. Your brain gets so overwhelmed it just can't cope anymore, so it kills itself, plain and simple.
...
I hadn't lost a friend personally to depression but i know people who have. I notice some people around me struggling sometimes, i stand there not knowing what to say or do because i myself felt the same and nothing i've done so far has helped. If i couldn't help myself, didn't know how, then how could i possibly help them? I just settled for hiding my sadness, they had enough to deal with, i didn't want to be a bother.
Before you ask, yes, i'd gone to therapy, but it was hard to talk about a problem that wasn't there. Sure, i'd lost people, done things i regret, haven't done things and regretted it, been hurt, but so has everyone, so why was i the one broken?
People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but i think each of us is given a rock, everyones is a different size and made of different things and each and every hard moment in life chips away at that rock. To one person the same moment might chip away only a pebble but for another it might be a boulder, each moment something would happen to that rock and depending on the material, on the individual person the rock will come out different at the end.
I think my rock must of been really small, or made of something incredibly crumbly, like a good cheese.
What i mean to say is what doesn't kill us silently brings us closer to death. I might still be alive but i was running out of ducktape and superglue to keep whats left of my rock together. And i was tired, tired of tip-toeing past my rock pretending the cracks weren't there, tired of glueing the pebbles and stones back onto my rock and keeping myself together.
You might say, but Miro, a weathered rock becomes smooth and beautiful, stronger than it had been before. Under pressure it might even become a gemstone of some sort, or might already contain something beautiful, but you won't know unless it gets broken.
I already felt broken, nothing beautiful was hiding inside, just this ugly, suffocating chasm of numb all-consuming sadness that might ebb and flow but would never completely leave, it just lingered like a bad smell or a stain that you couldn't get rid of no matter how hard you scrubbed, or what concoction you poured on it.
It must be... what? almost three years now? I'd struggled through for three years, it terrified me to think of living the rest of my life like this, somedays felt like climbing a mountain, others just numb, the rare few bearable. It wasn't living, this wasn't living, but i'd done it for so long it had become my normal, fucked up had become my normal, now how fucked up was that?
...
I missed hugs, one of my random thoughts today. It wasn't that i didn't get hugged, just not as much as i'd liked, certainly not on a daily or even weekly basis. There were those people that almost always hugged me when i visited them, i looked forward to those times, not just for the hug but those who hugged freely tended to be the ones who made me feel lighter, even for an hour or two.
I didn't live with any of those people, not because they didn't love me but they just weren't the hugging type.
I had to go to work today, i really didn't want to but if i didn't i was just enabling the vicious circle of depression. That was the one thing i learned from therapy, do shit, even if you didn't want to, especially the extra shitty things, because if you do those you mostly stay in depression limbo, it mostly stopped you from getting worse but i didn't really do much in making you better.
