Hello, blog. Long time no write.
I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I’ve been meaning to update for just over a year. So why haven’t I?
2014 took its toll. Well, from October 2013 onwards, really. It’s nothing I haven’t mentioned before, just the usual Dead Parents stuff. Hence not writing about it. Hence the constant desire to write about it curtailed by angst about writing about it. Am I making sense yet? Probably not. This is why I’ve been so quiet.
I was expecting the anniversaries to be something of a problem. Perhaps that was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but perhaps it had to be. As I’ve said previously, I’ve always struggled to balance the desire to move on from the grief with the necessity of making that grief mean something. If the grief means something, if their deaths were truly significant in my life, then the anniversaries had to hurt me, and the more it meant the worse the pain had to be. Self-inflicted? Partly self-inflicted? A natural consequence, but one I need to feel that I could, in theory control so I convince myself it’s self-inflicted? I have no idea. Honestly, I have absolutely no clue how much of the pain I generate myself and how much is an inevitable result of the pain of bereavement. I can analyse, I can guess, but I can’t step far enough away from myself to get a clear view.
However, while I may not be able to get enough distance from myself, I finally have enough distance from the events. At last I can start to look at that period as a whole – which I need to do in order to lay claim to what happened and turn it into something I can use and take ownership of, rather than something that controls me. But it’s something I can’t do without feeling it all over again. Essentially, over the course of 2014 I had a very quiet, gradual and protracted version of the breakdown I probably ought to have had in 2005.
This manifested as paralysis and lockdown, which is typical for me. Back in the aftermath of the bereavements/injuries I would move between periods of being apparently functional and periods of shutting the world out. During the former, it looked like I was coping. In fact it was the lockdowns that were keeping me going and allowing me to process things. Making myself look functional has always been how I’ve outrun emotions and pain.
The trouble with pain is that it’s so bloody overwhelming. I can feel my way through it, learn to understand it and eventually control it, but doing so is all-consuming. I can’t do it and have a social life. I can do it and work, because I can plough all the emotional stuff into my writing. Fictional characters make excellent receptacles for anguish, and they’re great company. Other aspects of my work, specifically the ones involving human interaction, are less easy to integrate. Putting words in the mouths of non-existent people is fine, but conversing with real ones, whether in writing or in person, is harder. They’re a lot less easy to control, and when I’m trying to manage the pain I don’t have much room left over for uncontrollable things.
Which brings me back to why I’ve been so silent here. Firstly, I’ve written plenty about the Dead Parents and the grief here. There’s nothing more to be said. Except that there’s everything still to be said, so much that if I wrote a thousand posts I could barely scratch the surface. It’s futile and/or necessary, and either way it’s overwhelming. It’s self-indulgent and therefore unjustifiable, and/or it’s helpful to other people and therefore more responsibility and consequence than I can handle just now.
I’ve meant to write, and I’ve wanted to write, and again and again I’ve thought “I must write about this”. Then I’ve opened WordPress and found that I couldn’t. This is what I do with emails, too. I know who I need to contact. I plan the content meticulously in my head, then I open Gmail and can’t touch the keys. There’s no point, it’s all been said, or it hasn’t but either way the interaction will take up more energy than I have and it will make the pain worse. I really don’t want the pain to be worse.
So that’s what’s been happening. But now there are things I need to use this blog for, and I’ve started a project elsewhere that will (I think, or at least I hope) let me balance the pain and the output in a useful way. Cryptic? Hell yes, because I haven’t decided whether I’m telling people the specifics of the new project yet. It might just be for me, for the present at least.
Time to start writing here again. I can just about deal with interaction again. I think. We’ll find out. Welcome back to the Scenic Route.
jenmcgregor.com 