Life is Emotionally Abusive

 I wish I could say that I'm back and feeling great, but I'd be lying. This grief might be what finally takes me out. I just can't shake the sadness. Everything makes me want to cry. My prayers feel like useless words spoken into an empty sky. I feel useless and unloved. I'm lonely in a way even I don't understand. It isn't as though I just want to be around people. I have sisters and friends willing to fill space but it's not that kind of lonely. It's like an ache in a place I can't quite reach. 

I miss my parents. I miss Libby. I miss my pre-2020 life. I long to go back to a time when I just had regular depression and not this truly hopeless, infinitely sad, yet also numb zombie-walk through life that I feel stuck in now.

I want someone to hug me. Like a big, no holds barred bear hug like Daddy used to give me. I miss affection and someone who cared about how I felt. I miss spending time with people who just wanted to be with me and not because they needed me for something. 

My sisters care but they're struggling with their own grief and their own life problems. My friends care but my sadness makes them uncomfortable. I can't talk to them about anything in my heart. When I've tried, their faces scrunch up, and they quickly change the subject. And so I sit and listen to them bitch about their jobs and their husbands and their kids. I nod sympathetically and show an appropriate amount of indignation on their behalf. 

I pray and I cry and I put on a brave face for the world. I love on Milo and give him all the affection I wish I could receive from someone. I've tried going back to journaling, but I sit and stare at blank pages and don't know what to write. Do I really want to document the darkness that sits inside me? I hesitate even writing on this blog because do I really want public documentation of this?

But I need to speak it somewhere and nobody wants to really hear it. The one time I tried expressing my feelings to my oldest sister she panicked thinking I was suicidal and then suggested I get on medication.

Maybe I do need medication. But I don't know that medication can truly heal what's broken in me. It can't bring my parents back. It can't bring Libby back. It can't provide me with hope or a purpose. Medication can't fill the void that exists in me. It might dull the ache a little and maybe help me sleep but so does physical exhaustion--which is cheaper.

Work is moving me out of my safe little private alcove and into an open cube-farm area within the next few weeks and I am ready to climb out of my skin at the thought of it. The thought of being in that rat's maze with all those people has ramped up the anxiety. 

I hyper fixated on getting the lawns cut last month because Daddy wasn't here to take care of them the way he always did and my BIL was half-heartedly trying to hire someone to do it and I lost A WEEK of sleep over it. Like was fully obsessed over the height of the grass in both mine and Daddy's yards. It was never really about the grass, I know. It was about the visible proof of the loss of care. Nobody cares about me the way Daddy did. For all my independence, he still made sure I had everything I needed. I rarely had to ask him for help with things. If he knew or saw that I needed help he just did it. Nobody does that anymore. I'm truly on my own. I did eventually take the reins and find someone to do the yards and he's been fantastic so far about keeping up with them. But it's lonely knowing that this is the rest of my life. No support. Just me out here figuring things out on my own. 

You know, I keep seeing/hearing the quote that grief is just love with nowhere to go. And while that may be fundamentally true, grief is also soul crushing and that quote feels so dismissive. Kind of like how when Daddy was in the hospital the third time and anytime he'd have a spell of feeling as though he couldn't breathe the doctors and nurses would tell him, "Your oxygen levels are perfect so you actually are breathing fine. It's just that heart valve is working overtime to pump blood and it's making you FEEL as though you can't breathe." As though he was supposed to go, "Oh, okay. So I'm actually breathing. Cool. I'm fine then, I guess." No. Knowing what something is doesn't make the terrible sensations go away. It doesn't fix or heal or make it better. 

Grief is so much more than just love with nowhere to go. Grief is wanting to talk to my Mama and tell her about all the crap going on at work and having her listen and sympathize and get mad on my behalf but she's not there. Grief is wanting to take breakfast to Daddy on Saturday mornings and hear him laugh at the silliness the dogs get into but instead sitting across from his empty chair and trying to hold on to the memory of what he looked like sitting there. Grief is being afraid that someday I'll forget all the unique traits that made Libby so special. Grief is looking ahead to the future and seeing only a life void of all the people and things I've lost. Grief is sitting at my desk crying and knowing that my pain is mine alone to deal with and so I put on a happy face and participate in conversations and activities I couldn't care less about. Grief is listening to Taylor Swift on repeat and scrolling TikTok mindlessly for hours just to distract me from myself. Grief is volunteering to do anything and everything for the loved ones I still have left in the hopes that they won't leave but knowing that God can and will take them whenever He's ready.

Grief is hearing people praising God for giving them another day on earth and wondering why they think that's a blessing.