We all suffer losses all the time, but some are sticky. This one is like that.
The center could not hold and now everything feels too bright. I am too open, too raw.
I'm doing what we call in our house "free crying," when you are overcome by tears anytime, anywhere. I have cried in the shower, cried in downward dog and cried upon hearing songs that are embarrassingly not cry-worthy.
Bad feelings come in unbidden and I want to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind it all out of my brain. When they're not there, it almost feels off, and I let my thoughts edge towards/around/near the area in my brain where the Bad Feelings live to see if it still hurts, like touching your tongue to a mouth wound to see if the sore is still there.
When someone dies (which did not happen in this particular case), my mother says that for a period of time "the veils are thin." I asked her what she meant and she said, "the cosmic spiritual communication is more open than usual." She says things like that. I take it to mean that the boundaries of reality don't quite apply as they normally do.
Right now the veils are thin and the world looks different. It's all just more. More sad. But also more moments of awe. On a recent walk, my eyes filled with tears when I saw the neighbors whose dog who died on a sidewalk right in front of me a year ago, then again upon beholding the insane beauty of some tree bark. This was in the space of like two blocks.
Being so fucking open to both the beauty and deep sadness of life all at once is not pleasant, exactly, but it’s not entirely unpleasant. It doesn’t feel sustainable to feel this much, all the time. But I can live here a little bit.
Maybe sometimes it’s good to get the world rocked off its axis. Because the last several years have been a fuck of a lot. Reading about a good five or six completely horrific things before even finishing a cup of coffee is just...I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? It's too much. At some point, I went numb.
Finally feeling again--even feeling weepy and sad and that everything is almost unbearably beautiful/terrible--is still feeling and I've missed it.
If you, too, are inhabiting the Land of the Lost (sorry, man), I will pass on some advice from my friend Sandra, "Feel, but don’t dwell."
It'll get better. Or better-ish. My particular brain chemistry is such that I have a natural equilibrium towards a solid state of meh. If things seem too good, I reel it in, so that I'm safely back at meh. When things gets too bad, same deal, back to meh.
The status of meh will return soon enough, I expect. But it feels okay to linger here in this tentative space, being way too open and feeling too much. While I'm here, I'm gonna to take the time to have a look around. Maybe see if there's anything I want take back with me when I return to the state of meh.
I think a lot about that picture of Johnny Knoxville up there at the top of this. In it, he's been shot out of a cannon and is hurling through space. He's clearly scared out of his wits and is desperately trying to ride forces beyond his control. But for one brief and glorious moment, he arches his back and just fucking nails it. Perfect form. 10/10.
The takeaway? I guess if you, like me, are hurling through space and don't know where you're gonna land, take the moment to throw back those non-functioning/for display purposes only set of wings and fucking nail it.
xoxo
jill
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