And just like that, I wrote, after several seasons of unrelenting, crushing grief and depression, I am finally getting somewhere.
I still don’t know where I’m going, but there’s movement.
And I hit send. It wasn’t enough. Not really. Not enough to truly encapsulate what I was going through. The immensity of the feeling. I’d had a good day but not a remarkable one. It was more comfortable, I’d say. Productive. I felt real feelings — and mostly positive ones.
This good day came on the tail end of a string of similarly good days. None of them remarkable, mind you. But I had a feeling that once again I was on solid ground. That I could trust myself.
It was the self-trust that arrested me. That was one of the hardest parts of grief following a major loss: How little I trusted myself in those early days. Nothing felt stable because I didn’t.
I wish I could say it was a clear path forward. Linear progress and all that. But it wasn’t. Instead, there were a lot of fits and starts. I had jags when I couldn’t function, separated by times when I performed at my peak. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason.
Really, the one commonality is that things seemed strange and off. The world was forever changed because one of my favorite people wasn’t in it anymore. And I didn’t see a way that life could ever feel normal again.
I’d accepted that. And then a funny thing happened: My brain found its way back to a comfortable form of normality.
I am getting somewhere, I thought (and later wrote). And it’s true — I still don’t know where I’m going, but there’s movement.
It’s a little jarring, if welcome. It reminds me of the way that sun abruptly cuts through clouds. How the sky can be dark and overbearing and then suddenly so bright, leaving you to wonder does the sun come out all at once… or do you just notice it that way? Maybe it happened more slowly, and you only just realized.