Happy Holidays

Since I'm currently still not writing anything for paid publication, I decided to continue the holiday theme, giving you guys a taste of my meditations during this joyous season. I know I'm not the only person enduring horrific sadness inspired by midwinter celebrations; our numbers give rise to the phrase "holiday depression syndrome" with good reason. In my case, I'm a writer. I cope with everything at least in part through writing. So here is what I wrote today.

Grief is so odd. It has individual life and rhythm, independent of stages, schedules or expectations. It can hide away for years, lying in wait until it decides to ambush. It dons camouflage, blending with other issues, passing as something less acidic if not completely innocuous. The unexpected break from cover is part and parcel of the devastation, even when you logically know it should be there. Even when you know you’re grieving and why—even when hell and havoc are familiar, when you’ve already done this so many times—even then grief outwits you and repeatedly destroys you. On days you expect to mourn so hard as to be nonfunctional, you sail through with flying colors because grief changed the plan. On days which pose no obvious problems, presenting no identifiable triggers or potentially painful encounters—you collapse, besieged by a random Blitzkrieg of anguish.

Grief has no mercy and no antidote. The only way out is through, and after enough hours, days, lifetimes of despair, it begins to feel like home until it doesn’t anymore.

Grief has no redeeming qualities. People talk about learning from it, but grief teaches two lessons only: endurance and defeat. A loss that leads to grief can perhaps teach from events surrounding it, or not. But the grief itself, the desolate void loss leaves, teaches nothing but how to blindly, doggedly continue struggling until bludgeoned into bloody submission.

And yet, you can’t hate it. Grief isn’t evil or unnatural; it isn’t the enemy. Aside from cause (loss) and effect (sadness, anger), grief is emotion and association neutral. It’s elemental; it just is, like cold in winter and heat in summer, earth underfoot and sky above.

Grief endures forever, imprinted on and permeating the heart and mind. It’s ageless, timeless…the wasteland underlies everything. Shrinks babble about acceptance; perhaps that’s what they mean. Once you understand life as sorrow and joy intermingled and indivisible, two sides of the universal coin, you’ve found acceptance. I wouldn’t know; I still spend days howling in the wilderness, yearning for what I never really had and will never have the illusion of again.

I think that’s what grief is at bottom: the end of all illusions. Stripped, stark, bare and defenseless, grief is a soul exposed. And it fucking hurts, y’all.

No random question for the day. I'm not in the mood.