the last burnt sienna crayon

I don’t think I’ve had a normal emotion in 12 years. Until now.

Grief is a normal emotion.

Grief is a normal emotion, and this time, I am experiencing it in a different, ‘normal’ way. And I’m finding it very confusing. I don’t know what it’s meant to feel like. I’m not quite sure what to do with these ‘normal’ emotions yet. It’s very new.

As kerensa commented here awhile back, grief looks and acts very much like depression. And, as I have written here before, over the years, I’ve experienced a lot of grief. Now, I’m not claiming that I’ve not been depressed as well (that started 16 years ago, and besides i have an illness that takes chuncks of tissue out of my brain, so something’s got to get muddled up in there along the way), but if you look at those last 12 years, they are peppered with death, loss and ill health.

8+ deaths (including my father and grandmother), 4+ house moves, emigration, several unrenewed job contracts, 5 years of unemployment and application/interview rejections, 2 unfinished degrees/qualifications, diagnosis of chronic, lifelong illness, 3 lengthy hospital stays with following convalescence and housebound times, loss and recovery and loss then recovery again (etc.) of eyesight, walking, speaking etc. . .

I’m not going to go on, but it does. And this isn’t a pity party, and I’m not looking for you all to read that and heap loads of sympathy and kind words and such, i mearly list all that there to make the point that it never stopped! And everytime I began to go through the grief process, for whatever loss I was trying to grieve for, a dr. jumped up and said “You’re depressed! Better give you some pills! We can make these things better now, you know.” Maybe I was meant to be feeling depressed. God knows, I’ve had enough reason to be. Maybe I needed to feel the pain, the denial, the anger, the depression if I was ever going to accept anything about this painful world we live in at all!

Because when I was a child the storybooks told me that everything had a happy ending, and it doesn’t. Because every dr. I’ve ever met has told me to take a pill and I can magically have that happy ending.

It’s a ****** LIE! (sorry, all this grief stuff must be starting off in the ‘anger’ stage. thank you, i’ll try to control my outbursts from here on.)

You see, they have never fixed it, they can’t. I’ve spent 12 years popping various different pills and suffering the consequences and in the last 3 years it litterally ruined me and took something so important away from my daughter, her new mum, any possibility of her having a new mum.

How was I supposed to have normal emotions?! How when the chemicals were quite literally pulling my strings? I do have anger about that. But something tells me that that’s normal. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s ‘normal’. But I think I’m going to try to find out.

I left something behind when I came back from my journey to my homeland last month. I knew when I left on that trip that something would change, and it did. But I have imposed on your time for long enough, so that’s a story for another time. I’ll probably delete or edit this later anyway.

But a few weeks ago, I started to feel like a mother for the very first time. And that feels so good, so normal.

Then R died. Now I’m grieving again. And I’m not sure if what I’m feeling is normal, because I’ve never felt something quite normally. I’m not sure what it’s suposed to feel like. Because there was always a dr. saying ‘well, this isn’t normal, so we’d better fix it.’ Ok, it was painful, but I suspect that it was normal. This time, I’m determined to let it happen, ‘normally’, somehow. No matter what happy ending the doctors try to offer me.

Tags: depression, drugs, grief

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under musings and meditations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.