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Let it go. It’s all right.

September 5, 2015 by Farewell Stranger ·

I’m driving down a road I’ve never been on, sun streaming in, music on the radio.

I’ve run away again.

***

For the last few weeks I’ve been carrying the pain of this in my gut. Before that it was in my head, threatening to take over so I pushed it down, but it’s making me sick. It can’t be pushed down or ignored.

“What’s true is true,” the voice on the radio had said, reporting on someone else’s journey from pain to acceptance. “What’s true is true,” I thought. It is what it is. I can’t change it and it will happen whether I like it or not. There’s no point refusing to accept it because what’s true is true. It is what it is.

***
Acceptance is one thing. I’ve tried to get there. I sit and breathe and try to accept. I feel mostly flat.

Letting go, on the other hand, is active, deliberate. Letting go is hard, necessary.

Letting go is something altogether different.

I take a deep breath and think, Right. Let it go. And then the tears come.

This is the work I need to do.

***
Those who have been here before me assure me it gets better. Those who have already walked the path from married to not assure me there is beauty on the other side. Sweetness. A bit of freedom. A different but happy future.

I can see all of that. I can. I can see how it could be so good for me and even possibly better. I can see how my kids will be okay. But I can also see the big and significant things I’m losing.

***
“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us,” said Joseph Campbell, whom I have quoted here before.

I had forgotten about that quote, hadn’t thought about how it applies in this situation until I read this very wise piece. And it does, of course, in much more literal ways than the circumstances I had applied it to before.

“Your post-divorce life may be radically different from the life you once expected, so you’ll have to refocus your vision to match your new circumstances. Divorce initiates major life changes, many of which are extremely unwelcome and difficult to accept… Events you once blissfully looked forward to — growing old with your spouse, sitting side by side at your children’s weddings, hosting your grandchildren together — probably aren’t going to happen… It’s not easy, but if you want to be happy, you’ll have to let go of the old image of your life and replace it with an exciting new vision of your own design.”

–Shari Lifland

You’ll have to let go…

***

Once again a friend has said, “You can stay at my place,” except this time it’s on the other side of the country. So here I am, in a place I have always wanted to visit, in a setting so beautiful it can’t help but inspire peace. The atmosphere of this place – beach and shells and quiet and shades of turquoise – makes me feel decidedly somewhere else. And very far away.

I have three days here to find myself somewhere I haven’t been. I have three days to let it go.

And when I get home I’m going to accept. And find a way to move on.

***

Driving down that road I’ve never been on with the sunshine streaming in, the voice on the radio is different.

“I’ve got a smile on my face, I’ve got four walls around me
The sun in the sky, the water surrounds me
I’ll win now but sometimes I’ll lose
I’ve been battered, but I’ll never bruise, it’s not so bad

And I say way-hey-hey, it’s just an ordinary day
and it’s all your state of mind
At the end of the day, you’ve just got to say,
it’s all right.”

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, depression, Divorce, expectations, going public, meltdown, perspective, travel

Grace Under Fire

August 23, 2015 by Farewell Stranger ·

“Give yourself some grace.”

This is a phrase I’ve heard often lately. “You’ve had a rough few months.” “You’re going through a lot.” “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

I’m eating way too much ice cream.

“You’ve had a rough few months. Give yourself some grace.”

I’m spending way too much time with my bed and Netflix.

“You’re going through a lot. Give yourself some grace.”

Sometimes I just don’t even know what to do with myself.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. Give yourself some grace.”

I’m giving myself grace, but it’s too much. I just need to say that: it’s too much. Grief is one thing; grace is one thing. Giving up is something else entirely.

Staying in bed on a rainy day when you have no obligations and can indulge yourself by binge-watching your new favourite show is lovely. I’m all for it.

Staying in bed because you can’t figure out what to do with yourself and can’t summon the — the what? What is it that’s needed to not let depression win? Energy? Strength? Motivation?

Whatever it is, I don’t have it right now.

I stare in the face of JUST DO IT, and I don’t.

It – whatever it is – should be a simple thing, but it’s not simple. It’s a giant chasm, in fact. It’s the difference between maintaining mental health on the one side and just plain not coping on the other. Between staying in bed and getting up to do something. Between eating all the ice cream and not. Between eating, period, and not.

There’s grace and then there’s giving up.

“Perhaps your expectations are a smidge high,” a friend said.

“Just give yourself some grace,” they all say.

“You’ll get through this

Move past it

Be okay.”

“Just give yourself some grace.”

But not too much, I think.

After all, there has to be something left when I come out the other side.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, depression

Lost: One Happy Place

August 17, 2015 by Farewell Stranger ·

Twice in the last two days, completely unprompted and in totally separate conversations, two friends have mentioned that being near the ocean is their happy place. These friends are entirely different from one another, and in fact don’t know each other. But each made this statement so resolutely without even having to think about it.

It made me wonder where my happy place is.

I’ve lost it, you see. If you asked me to think of the one place I can be happy, peaceful, content, no matter what else is going on, I’d say… I don’t know. I don’t know where that is. I don’t think I have one right now.

I have places I enjoy, but that’s not the same.

I have places I retreat to, but that’s not the same either.

I’ve been doing more retreating than enjoying lately. Since this.

It turns out you can’t just draw a line in the sand. There isn’t everything before and everything after. It’s more like a Venn diagram – everything that remains untouched from before, everything that will be new after, and all the crap in the middle.

It turns out the crap in the middle is both bigger and crappier than I had expected, and at the moment it feels like I will be in that middle zone forever.

Logically, I know that won’t be the case, but today I came face-to-face with something that has moved from the untouched zone into the crap zone. I should have anticipated it, or known that there would be places from before that would become tainted by the now. But I didn’t and so I ran smack into it and now a place that had good memories…doesn’t anymore.

Another piece added to the middle zone.

Another thing to grieve.

Right now I am near the ocean, which used to be my happy place. Less so, strangely, once I moved away from it, but definitely a place I still enjoy.

I ended up in this particular place quite unexpectedly. It has incredible views and amazing sunsets and an abundance of shells.

It’s beautiful here, but right now it’s not managing to be my happy place.

Maybe nowhere is. Maybe the peace and contentment that come with a happy place are elusive when you’re in the crap zone.

Regardless, right now, in this place, the sun is setting on this difficult day.

And for right now, I will simply enjoy the view with as much peace and contentment as it can offer.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, depression, moments, travel

The Line

May 10, 2015 by Farewell Stranger ·

I have (very) recently entered a new phase in my life. It feels like I am standing on a beach and I turn around to find that someone has drawn a line in the sand right behind me, and that side of the line represents before and this side of the line represents now. I am standing right on the other side of the line but there’s no going back. It’s not even a big line, but it’s a line. I didn’t really expect it to be drawn there, but there it is.

I did try to erase the line, sort of. After all, it’s just a line, freshly drawn and not very deep. If I fill in the hole, I thought, maybe the line won’t be there anymore.

But it doesn’t work like that.

I can’t explain what this is just yet. I’m not ready, and it’s not entirely about me. I am walking another line as well, one that’s between my desire (and probably need) to write about this and the reality that it’s not time. But please bear with me. It’s a significant, in fact life-changing, thing and I don’t know what to do. But I do need to put it out there as I work through it.

In one of her Dear Sugar columns, author Cheryl Strayed (when she was still writing anonymously) was asked, “What do you do when you don’t know what to do?”

Part of her answer included this:

“I talk to my partner and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my ‘best self’ – the one that’s generous and reasonable and forgiving and loving and big-hearted and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.”

That’s what I am trying to do.

I have had many people tell me I am strong and can handle this and am so loved and will be okay. Easy for them to say, I think. What I think is that this is just another thing I have to deal with that might sink me. It feels, on a daily (and in fact moment-to-moment) basis that I can’t do this. I am not equipped. I am clearly messed up and this is just another thing that will reveal that to be true.

I can do this, of course, and I will, but oh, it’s hard.

The irony (truth? beauty?) is that I’m mentally moving through the phases of this fairly quickly. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – the stages of this, at least for me, are pretty much exactly the stages of coping with dying. And just like those stages as identified by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, these stages are not linear. They are messy and they stop and start and sometimes one phase completely overwhelms the others and makes any feeling other than that anger or that depression seem absolutely, undeniably impossible to achieve. And then it retreats, even if only slightly, and something else can start to emerge.

I can’t recall exactly how I came across that particular Dear Sugar column, but like so many things that find their way to me when I need to see them it was an unassuming click on a passing link that led me down a path I didn’t know was there and didn’t know I needed to find until I was standing on it.

Since crossing that line a mere three weeks ago, I have had a few glimpses of my “best self” – the one that’s generous and reasonable and forgiving and loving and big-hearted and grateful – and I know she’s in there. At this stage she’s being drowned out more often than not by my not-best self – the one that’s angry and hurt and sad and scared and disappointed – but she’s in there.

It’s early, though. It’s early days on a very hard journey and I’m going to mess up sometimes, but I’m trying to keep the faith and continue on.

After all, it’s only a line.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, depression, meltdown

Stuck at the Second Level

June 25, 2014 by Farewell Stranger ·

Sitting at your kitchen table at 7 a.m. trying to determine where mental health fits on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is probably not a good sign. It’s probably a sign that you need help.

I didn’t get a satisfying answer from Google (one site suggested that failing to have needs met at any of the stages can lead to depression or anxiety, but I think it has to work the other way around as well, i.e. that mental health issues can prevent people from moving through the stages) so I turned to a friend who is wise in the ways of psychology and mental health. “I would put it in the safety band,” he said, “but really, mental health is a precondition for all of the four levels above physiological.”

That makes sense to me, and it’s why I had turned to Google for answers that morning.

What I had secretly been hoping for was for someone to suggest that mental health was a requirement for functioning properly in this world, that it fit squarely in one of the levels as a clear and understood need, as though I could then point to this theory and say, See? I have a right to good mental health! and someone, somewhere, would then be obligated to ensure I got it.

This, needless to say, is not how life works.

The idea of it being a precondition to the higher levels does fit squarely into the thought process that led me to Google, however.

Many of the things I would normally aspire to, like being involved in my community or deeply pondering or even pursuing answers to life’s big questions—the things that normally make me feel alive and grateful for this life—now exist mostly as a sidebar to the story of my life rather than being woven in as a fully developed theme.

I know I have important needs that are not getting met. I even know what some of them are (lately, a lack of sleep has been putting me firmly at the bottom level of the triangle).

Other needs, though, are less easy to defend as legitimate. The need for solitude and for quiet, the need for living space that isn’t constantly terrorized with the mess and energy of three other people, the need to be able to do my own thing sometimes without the burden of guilt caused by leaving more of the childcare to my spouse who is already home with them full time – where do those needs fit? And why does not getting them met cause me to spiral?

I don’t know how to reconcile these needs AND be a mother. I don’t want these needs to rear their ugly heads on hard parenting days and, while I’m down, kick me once more with the knowledge of how significantly (and negatively) I can affect my children’s place on the pyramid. But it feels like admitting these needs is taboo. Not okay.

I’m stuck. I’m struggling. And admitting these needs is scary, especially when there’s no clear path to getting them met.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, depression, meltdown, sleep, spreading the love, telling the truth