electric mist

when you lose what you are

I remember one time not so long ago when I had realized I had lost something of myself that I could never get back. I cannot explain what it was without telling other people's stories (and nothing anyone else did, just my own hell), but it hurt beyond what I thought I could comprehend, to the point that I found myself sitting on the floor of my closet, simply in pain, beyond tears. Sitting in the closet, lest anyone hear me and feel the need to ask what was wrong, sitting for hours, hiding, really just wanting to be dead and not quite knowing what to do next to move on, to put that one foot in front of another, to breathe in and then out again. I think one of the most difficult types of losses that a person has to deal with is when there is a loss of self-identity, of something that you identify as being you or a part of who you are in this world, and when that loss happens, it's like a sudden earthquake of the soul -- no warnings, no mercy, ripping tears in the soul, upheaval, despair, destruction. The landscape changes on the inside so completely, you keep looking in the mirror to see if the fissures are showing, and it's shocking that they aren't. I think it would be somehow easier for us if they did show, at least a little while, so that people walking along and having to deal with you could see you all zig-zagged, broken and stitched back together crazy sideways, sort of limping along and they would know to just be gentle, just be quiet, that's a broken person right there, don't move too fast or make loud noises because everything could shift again and do more harm. And just like after an earthquake, a 7.1 on the Richter scale, there's no way to put everything back just right again. Sometimes, the losses are too great for anything to be rebuilt, and sometimes, the rebuilding is slow and tedious and painful and eventually, maybe years later, you can look back over the area and be surprised not to still see rubble, and then sometime after that, you're suprised that when you look at it, you never really still think of the rubble and you catch yourself short in that moment and wonder if that means you've somehow healed. You're almost afraid to think you have, because will that mean you start taking it for granted, will that mean that you're not as alert, as ever ready for the little tremblings of when you may be fooling yourself, of when you may be about to discover another serious loss? It's a hard place to live, in that earthquake worn soul.

I made it through that time mostly due to friends who loved me through it. There was some talk, but mostly distraction, and lots of laughter, eventually. There were other things too, like finding funny people on the web who'd lived as hard as I had, maybe through other things, rarely through the same sort of things, and they spoke with a surety of who they still were, who they were becoming, of having survived and still managed to find the humor in the cracks. It took me a very long time, but I started to learn how to define myself, not by what I wasn't, but by what I was, although that sometimes works only on Tuesday, Thursdays, and occasionally, Saturday afternoons. When I read entries like this one from getupgrrl, it rips my heart to pieces for her. It's the kind of pain that you know you can't help or fix or advise or even distract from, and you can't shoulder it for someone else. But it makes me cry, it makes my chest hurt and my throat tighten and it bothers me that there's nothing I can do to show her how her writing has been a joy in my life, and how unfair all this sorrow is for someone so clearly good and funny and warm in her connection to the world. And as little as it is (and I know it is very little), I want to say to her thank you, because even though right now she's defining herself by what she's lost and what she isn't, which is only natural and necessary and breaks my heart that she's having to go through this, I hope she keeps in the back of her mind what she is and what she has and what she's given. She's made me laugh on way more occasions than I can count, which has rescued me on days that would have otherwise been too bleak for words. Maybe if we're all lucky, her reaching out to the world with her story will rescue her right back.