ah the winter

walking to work in the rain. cranking the heater. eating chocolate and shrewsberry's instead of dinner and putting my curtains back up to keep the heat in.

note...my curtains fell down initially, i didn't pull them down.

winter also usually means drinking lots of wine... i am not allowed wine currently and boy do i miss it. so much. can't wait for my first glass.

meanwhile... warmth and happiness in other forms.

gaps. oh the gaps.

i miss my dad.

i have gaps. and i just want to be ok. to not feel so much loss and pain. i want to be able to look back at a year and cry over the happiness that graced that year. i don't want to look back over twenty-one years and mourn because all those years were sad.

i am grieving. for my dad. for the friendships lost. and for me. for all the things that i missed. for the gaps in my life and all the hurt thats happened.

i am grieving. and i miss my dad. and the person i used to be.

tears.

"...if you think back and replay your year and it doesn't bring you tears of joy or sadness it was a year wasted..."   John Cage (Peter MacNicol) in Ally McBeal, season 1, episode 23.


my years have not been wasted. when I think of the first years of my life I am struck by a deep sadness. A sadness so strong that it always brings tears. when i think of last year i not only feel the sadness but the pain that came with it. there has been a lot of sadness in my life. and i'm not saying that there has been no happiness. i'm not saying that my life is devoid of good moments. just that for me the sadness is overwhelming. i have had perhaps more personal adversity relating to sadness. i'm not talking about situation. i'm talking about loss, grief, hurt and the melancholia of my everyday.

it is hard to feel happy when you feel a sense of loss and abandonment. when you really try to understand why you might feel this way. why you might be lost. happiness can elude you.

i thought i had wasted these years being sad. and i did wish that i could erase the years of my life that made me feel little, bleak, hurt and disparaged. but erasing the years would mean that i would go back to a mental age of one and a half... the first time a black cloud swooped in and hit me. forever lying there.

the years are not wasted. they are hard but they are not wasted.

one therapist i saw asked me to draw my life, my emotion, all the pain and hurt and where i was inside it. i drew what can only be described as a jungle full of thick cutting vines, a jungle so thick it was almost impenetrable. and it was all black. i couldn't see the sky because the jungle was so heavy. it was hard to breathe because all the oxygen was being cut out by these tree's. everything was so black and so dark. closer to the center of the jungle it became thicker and blacker. and at the time she asked i was only just moving into the jungle.

my time in the jungle makes me look back and cry. the times i tried not to exist anymore, the times i tried to forget everything and turn around. because it was easier. and it would have been easier. i look back and i cry. tears of absolute despair, a grief so strong that it is pulling me back in. and i'm still not out of the jungle. i can almost see the end. but its like a big black fog comes in periodically, trapping me and suffocating me and then releasing me. i am so close to the edge and yet so so far away.

i may be affected by grief, trapped in my own melancholy soul, my own losses, but my years have not been wasted.

last night i cried myself to sleep. i tried to imagine my life with my dad here. and i couldn't. i can't imagine the advice that he may have given i can't think of how he might have done this or that or that he might have been proud. because i don't know those things. when someone is taken away and you are so small you can't imagine them and what life would be like. there is only loss and blaming them for leaving you. even when they didn't get a choice. if i could imagine my life with my dad in it who knows, maybe i would be happier or maybe i wouldn't be.

i will never know. i miss him, even though i can't imagine what life would be like with him here. i just know that it would be different. and i miss him. i miss someone that i never knew. and that is so much harder than missing someone i know. someone who i can imagine. if you knew someone you know what it is you're missing. you aren't just missing the idea of a person. or the possibility. the possibility of a person that for me would have been the greatest person i could have ever known.

and that is saying a lot.

so i cry, but my years and my tears aren't wasted. they are a celebration of the humanness of me. that i can miss someone so deeply just on a possibility when i can't even imagine that possibility. that i can try to heal and that i can reflect and still feel the pain, as if everything happened just yesterday.

that i am still here. waiting for tomorrow and living for today. crying.

the animal instinct is revealed...

we think we are so evolved. we imagine ourselves to be these super sophisticated bodies. we think we can control everything in our lives. 

and not everything is in our reach. we can't change how we are or the things we do and how we react to things. we really are just a reflection of the animals within. 

each of us have a different animal hiding out inside us. sometimes more than one. 

at the moment i feel like a combination of a lion, a fox and a kitten. i want to maul someone, i want the thrill of the chase and the snuggling that comes after. the overwhelming sense of satisfaction running through my entire body. top to toe. 

and i have my eye on a wolf. so the kitten the fox and most of all the lion will be snuggling up in bed all alone. frustrated as hell. damn those animal instincts.