No room to grieve and no room to breathe

An ode to facing hard truths unashamedly weeping and to those strong enough to be weak

This past month has been filled with the empty business that death brings to the mourning. Nothing made sense, everything tasted and sounded grey, nothing caught my eyes or ears for all my efforts to listen in his memory. I have enough practice in grieving to go through the motions mechanically. Stopping makes it all much more unbearable and even worse brings everything to a standstill.

I do cherish and adamantly defend downtimes as autistic people, introverts and highly sensitives are known to do but I cherish and adamantly look forward to the times I’m pretending to be a normal non grieving still human being. Neither is the truth anymore (have they ever been?). Truths seem to have stopped existing. Again. He seems to have taken them with him, along with colour, taste, cuddles, smiles, sense and a great deal of my personality.

 

I’m well and truly miserable but unlike most people I grew up like this so this is my home turf. It’s what I know, what feels comfy because I know every nook and cranny of it. There was a time my demons had tea in my mental living room and there was nothing I could do about it just as I couldn’t do anything about the demons claiming to be loving and supportive family members. So the sight of said demons taking away hard won victories against depression and cPTSD does not horrify me in the least.

I find many people are pathologically obsessed with feeling happy all the time and manically fleeing into escapistic escapade after escapistic escapade pretending everything is just fine. This does horrify me. We evolved with a full set of feelings, including sadness, frustration, anger, shock, fear and all the other distinctly uncomfortable feelings and they all serve a function. I find it truly sick how people seem to actively castrate their limbic systems and think this is a good idea.

If you run away from the skeletons in your closet said closets will become surprisingly mobile and versatile in finding ways to haunt you. Your life will be spent forever running and running and running all for the sake of some fleeting happiness. We do not even seek content, the more sedate and longer lasting positive feeling. Instead consumerism has indoctrinated us successfully. We think we can have the short enthusiastic sparks of happiness all the time. We can buy emotions and harness and control them according to what we like. It’s no wonder people become mentally injured living in such a world. As soon as you aren’t manically smiling you suddenly become defective rather than simply being a full human.

This obsession has gone so far that people simply can not stand someone being in touch with their harder to deal with feelings anymore. Being reminded of the castration we are demanded to collectively perform on our limbic system is uncomfortable and thus a part of what needs to be slaughtered away. So it isn’t enough that one does not allow themselves to have a full set of emotions, people also have to preemptively castrate the people around them as well.

This is such an accepted practice that it’s become the norm to tell other people with mental illnesses including ones about whose lives we know about three sentences of conversation all sorts of bullshit rather than just being real with them. As if it was the end of the world to simply say “I can see you are going through a hard time and I bet it’s teriyaki hard, heck it’s already very stressful for me to just witness it.” We have no room for humanity anymore because we have no room for the uncomfortability of the human condition. We think if we give the run down house that is our loneliness and isolation a fresh coat of paint everything is fixed and we actively harass people who acknowledge this house is pathetic and there needs to be something done about it.

To me grieving isn’t done for the dead, we mourn because we are still alive. We mourn because our lives have to change and we have not chosen this change. It’s frightening to face change in general, but changes we didn’t look for become the stuff cPTSD is made of. Especially if we systematically erode all versions of support systems that should help deal with the catastrophes we all inevitably face during our lives.

We need to have a right to be miserable again. We need to stop wishing everyone without fail a happy day and to sleep well. Some days there is no room for happiness and some nights are sleepless as a last expression of fondness for the ones taken away from us. To me this is sacred and I have a hard time understand why this wouldn’t be sacred to anyone who is mourning. I also have a hard time understanding why mourning as another castrating act needs to be limited to the physical death of blood relations or you who is already in a rather dire phase better be ready to justify yourself to the grave that may or may not exist and back.

 

I see us being so cruel to each other and I see this planet being made inhabitable as a result of us locking our empathy with ourselves and others away and some days I just wish the human species would just find its selfish end already. The skeletons in our closets will not stop haunting us unless we stop our frenetic flight in a hamsters wheel and turn around and face the ugly truths we will find. Personally I consider it an extreme failure of evolution that there is any species who attempts to forget that simple mechanism.