One of the curses of being GenX is that I often visualize my life through movie scenes. There is a scene in Heathers where the Dad is telling the entire funeral that he loves his dead gay son. For whatever reason this is the scene I think of when I think about being overwhelmed by grief. I am scared to death I am going to allow my own grief to become my personality. I’ve seen it happen too often, where memorialization of a dead loved one… becomes the driving purpose. I see that my blog has largely become me working through my feelings about what has happened… and am scared that I am starting to do the same thing. I also see the fact that I had a weekend where nothing much happened, because I lacked any drive to do things. Nothing really brings me any semblance of joy, so I kind of feel like I am just checking off boxes and doing the things that have to be done… until I can go back to sleep again where I blissfully am free of both grief and the need to think about anything.
All of this said… I also feel overwhelmingly guilty that I am even attempting to move on with my life. Today is going to be my first day back at work, and on some level I am looking forward to having something to distract me from the pain. However I wonder if I deserve to be distracted. This is not even two weeks old at this point… and I am just not sure how to exist in the world. I feel like my attempts to keep moving forward, are somehow an affront to the importance of the pain that I am experiencing. Everyone needs me to be this person who is feeling everything in the same way as they are… and I am not even sure entirely what I am feeling. I think on some level there are parts of me that have gone numb as a defense mechanism because the pain was just too much. The cats need me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding them and loving on them… and my body needs me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding it… and now my workplace needs me to function enough to be able to resume my job. The only way I know how to do all of these things… is to disconnect my brain from my heart… and just sort of do what needs to be done.
The thing that is killing me right now… is that I am having hallucinations. That is honestly too strong of a word for it, because it isn’t like I am seeing things in the world, but more that I am experiencing brief after images. Like for example I keep thinking she is in bed with me. I will turn over and swear she is beside me… only to realize that I am not hitting anything but empty space. Last night I had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to go down and check on her… which is a thing that I would often do after a few hours in my office. In fact that is the entire reason why I went downstairs on the night she died, was just that I had been by myself for awhile and figured I should check to see if she was okay. There are these burnt in pathways in my brain, and I swear I keep feeling like I am seeing the hazy afterimage of her still there… only to realize that it is just my expectations working against me. The only thing I can relate it to is the discussion of phantom limb syndrome, but in this case I am walking into a room certain that someone else will be there… but they are not. I know this is just the built up impulses after twenty six years in the same house… but this honestly is the thing I am struggling with the most.
Right now I am distracting myself with Path of Exile, Movies, and YouTube Videos. It isn’t so much that I am enjoying playing Path of Exile, but more that it is a familiar pattern that does not require too much of me. It is a thing I can do… that does not require me to spend too much time thinking about the situation I am going through. The thing is… I am getting zero joy out of it, but I am also getting no joy out of pretty much anything I do. I put in a request to our “Employee Assistance Program”, which I still feel like is a weird name for mental health assistance… and I am hooping that I hear something back. I am not sure how this process works, but I am hoping at a minimum that they can refer me to someone… preferably online so that I don’t have to deal with going into an office. Everyone wants to help me… but I am not sure what I need, or even how to explain what I am going through. I feel so fundamentally broken right now, and I am not sure what is even broken to begin trying to resolve this. I know this is just part and parcel of grief and loss… but I don’t want it to override what is left of my personality. Then again… I am still not even sure who the hell I am without my wife.
I’ve also been back in Guild Wars 2 some, largely because it is a good task based structure that I can focus on. It asks me to do certain things every day, and doing those… pushes me closer to some goal. I should in theory be cleaning out closets and preparing things to donate… but that is all too fucking heavy right now. I should really actually be working on thank you cards… but I am not even sure where the fuck to begin with that. I need to talk to the person who is working on setting up the scholarship fund and figure out what they need from me for that as well. There are a ton of donations coming in through the Church and they want somewhere to put that money. I recorded and edited AggroChat this weekend and also edited the church sermon… so that was some semblance of normal. I had to figure out how to get onto my wife’s facebook account so that I could grant myself access to the church facebook… because there were a bunch of things that she took care of after I had posted everything. However I think I more or less have a gameplan going forward, and next weekend I should be able to generate the powerpoint that she used to do for the church digital display that we bought.
Then there is the duality of people reaching out. On one hand I appreciate it greatly, because it is keeping me from falling too far into isolation. However on the other hand I am a massive introvert bordering on a hermit… and I just want people to stop intruding on my life. It feels like I am sitting in the living room floor, trying to rebuild a castle out of blocks… and then when someone forces their way into said living room… it all gets knocked asunder and I have to accommodate another human being inside my head for a bit. I can’t just be “chill” about other people in my space. That is not the default state of my existence. My wife and I pretty much spent countless hours with it being only the two of us in the house, and anything other than that just feels fucking weird. On some level I feel like I need time to acclimatize to it only being me… and I can’t really do that if people keep interjecting themselves. Like someone from the church brought food by yesterday… and it was very sweet of them… but it forced me to suddenly have to deal with not only a stranger existing in my world… but now trying to file away food for future use that I was not prepared for.
Like on one hand I just want to lock everyone out of my life until I am “better”, but I also have no clue when that will be… or if I will ever reach that point. Human beings doing human being things… stress me the fuck out. For most people… humans are comforting… for me… they are just chaotic variables in the equation of my life that I don’t quite know how to account for. All of this continues tweaking my fear that my personality is becoming one of grief and loss… and I will never be myself again. I am not saying don’t reach out and check on me… just do it in a way where my participation is optional. I love the people who text me, because that is something that I can answer at my leisure when I am up to it. I detest the people who call me… because it requires me to spackle over the gaping holes and force myself to be mentally well enough to have a conversation. The cardinal sin however is when folks show up at my doorstep unannounced because so much of me wants to hiss at them like a startled cat and run away into the darkness never to be seen again.
I am dreading going into the office tomorrow. I have a new employee starting and I need to be functional. I am not functional. I especially hate the thought of being forced into conversations by people who I have not been face to face with for roughly five years. I expect to bail early on the day, or at least as early as I can. I have no fucking clue how to do any of this. I just want the world to pause until I am well enough to exist in it.
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