“I found myself adrift in grief, struggling with my new identity as a single person in isolation. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Or what to do next.”
I can totally relate. I started therapy for the first time in my life this month. It’s been over 2 1/2 years, 900 days or over 125 weekends. I thought that, with time, it would get easier, instead everything is much harder. I guess I spent the first two years taking care of the aftermath and now that I have more free time, I realized I don’t have anybody to do things with. My goal in therapy is to address this but I am momentarily sidelined because my therapist doesn’t know anything about me. She has given me a bunch of homework to fill out and books to read. Time to practice patience.
In the meantime, last night I attended a dinner sponsored by The Grief House at the The Little Feminist Farm, an idyllic place on the tail end of a residential road in Stockbridge. Quiet, only the sound of trees & birds. There is even a trailer on the property for overnight stays. Good to know because the drive home in the dark was too stressful for me. Who knew there would be so much traffic on I-20 at 9 o’clock at night?
There were 5 of us at dinner, all with painful stories to tell and despite that, I instinctively felt very much at home with them right from the beginning. They all expressed their grief so eloquently. I realized that I see my life as a split screen, represented predominantly by a wide swath of static white noise and on the edge a tiny bandwidth in full color. The swath is my everyday interactions (survivng, meaningless/superficial conversations, going through the motions, doing things by rote/habit, eating, sleeping, rinse & repeat) and the sliver of color represents the meaningful interactions and the moments of joy I share with a very select few. I know it will always be this way but my goal is to widen the color bandwith just a tiny bit and fight for more joy.