Most Days I Can Barely Breathe.
the check in, before the post about completing a decade of therapy. Spoiler alert! I'm still a fucking human with complicated feelings and everything still hurts except when it doesn't.
The bodies protections are worthy of praise no matter the suffering they create when the abuse has passed. To be in a toxic/chaotic/precarious environment with full awareness of what is happening is cause to scream without ceasing.
Sometimes I have to look up the definitions of words because I know how they feel but I cannot remember what they mean. Or rather, I feel something so deeply, I need to know if the definition has captured it. Usually it hasn’t. Usually I must look to artists for all that dictionaries fail to offer.
Grief: the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person. Grief is often distinguished from bereavement and mourning. Not all bereavements result in a strong grief response, and not all grief is given public expression (see disenfranchised grief). Grief often includes physiological distress, separation anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, and apprehension about the future. Intense grief can become life-threatening through disruption of the immune system, self-neglect, and suicidal thoughts. Grief may also take the form of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for a mishap to oneself. - APA Dictionary of Psychology
When grief comes for you
Because it comes for all of us.
I hope someone gives a damn.
I hope there are still hearts left that are capable of tenderness.
I hope there are still folks who bring beauty to your broken world.
And if they do not
may you give a damn about yourself.
And if you have yet to find them
May the kindness of strangers hold you in small moments.
Most days are hard.
I know I need to write but I can’t seem to find the words.
I worry that if reading a poem is like trying on the writer's spirit, then maybe this writer's spirit is lost and I am too exhausted with myself to search.
I sit in therapy twice a week saying some things and not saying others.
And no one is dead but grief has me in its clutches and will not let me go
Last year, the grief that was and wasn’t yet stole my shoelaces so I could not run
Now the grief just is and is and is and is and is and is and is.
I sit in Al-Anon meetings on Thursdays and I cannot stop my tears from falling
I have something like a mental breakdown in the We Work bathroom after meetings
I have to remind myself that I am a person.
My name is Mary.
I am a writer
I like running and yoga and art
I like nature and backpacking, and the way the air feels before a storm
I like sunshine, and traveling to new places, and snorkeling, and riding on the backs of motorcycle taxis in South America
I like books and intellectual conversations with peculiar people
There are people who love me in ways that feel like love.
Most days are hard
I see red behind my eyes
I’ve got one foot in the present, one foot in the past, and I cannot stop my body from trembling about some small heavy thing
I taste my mother in the boiling of my blood but I cannot weep
I want to break dishes
I want to scream that scorched earth is a language I learned in the brown house
From you.
I contemplate “grace” while stomping through a neighborhood I would not have chosen for myself with a puppy that is not mine.
I name my rage ancestral birthright
Passed down as violence
Earth so scorched it is “grace” enough that anything survived.
Most days are hard.
I carry precarity and helplessness on my back like boulders
As quickly as I gain my footing the ground shifts beneath my feet and I am stumbling again
I want to lay down in the fetal position and not get up
People ask me how I'm doing and I do not know how to answer
I count my breaths and try not to let my thoughts crush me.
My name is Mary
I am making a choice to show up to a chaos that is not my own.
I interrupt the self loathing of my smallest selves
I hold myself with tenacity and tenderness
I keep reaching out to my support system even when I feel ashamed.