Every once in a while I’ll catch myself looking deep into these brilliant blue eyes, seeing my soul shining back at me in the glass of the mirror, and hearing myself randomly whisper “Gods…I’m not the one who deserved to live” from somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul.
The worst part of it is that when I stop to remind myself that I’m just spinning down and need to spin myself back up, I realize that it’s harder to do that when you actually believe yourself.
It’s a normal part of the grief process and, I think to a larger degree, a normal part of the moving forward and creating new things in your life process. I think to myself that I’m messing things up (like I’ve been doing my whole life), that I’m insufferably dull, that I’m annoying and just TOO MUCH of almost everything. I notice it in how I pull back from the people in my life that I really want there because I don’t want to overwhelm them with too much “Sara” time. I think about how awful it must have been for Alex to have been stuck with me all the time before he died and I think about how awful it must have been for my Dad to have a child that was such a roaring disappointment to him. I think about how I disappoint and let them down every day, and I think about how I disappoint and let down the people still here with me every day. I think about how I will do it with the people I meet in the future, the relationships I’ll create, the life I’m creating, and it is enough to make me want to hit the pause button almost instantly on everything.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste away in.
What I noticed today, however, was that I finally have this super loud voice in the back of my head telling me that I’m a fucking idiot if I think any iota of any of those thoughts are true. I’m finally spending time reminding myself that I’m strong, that I love hard and care hard, and that the people in my life are lucky to have me. If I’m too much, that’s not my fault. That’s not something I need to concern myself with. And to say that I didn’t deserve to make it…that I don’t deserve to be the one standing up every day to face yet another dawn of unknowns..is complete and utter idiocy. The universe doesn’t understand our concept of “deserve”. There is no cosmic order being kept somewhere. There’s no win, lose, or draw in how things happen, much as I think we all hope there is. I can’t beat myself over the head hard enough to give life back to the people I have lost.
I’m ready for the good things in my life. I just hope this new louder, more confident, more…well…ME part is going to stick around for a lot longer. The trains of negativity have already been around long enough.
