A Tuesday Tear

I cannot begin to articulate the sadness that arises if I truly allow myself to contemplate the disparities between the life I lived before I became so seriously ill for so long and the life I live now. I cannot begin even to attempt to get at the feeling that your soul is actually being sucked out of your body when you have gone through a prolonged period of time in which you have essentially been pulled out of society and everything you worked for or achieved was pulled from you. I know that is not the general outlook of this “blog” or how I ALLOW myself to think about things – especially given that the future is not a given. But I must acknowledge the presence of that gaping hole that touches absolutely everything that is in my life or could have been in my life or could be in my life.

There are days when it seems to crawl up from a deep crack pounded out by something I watched or heard or felt and suddenly life goes from just being life to the realization that the infinite counterfactual healthy “me’s” very truly could have done or had anything. There is nothing I can compare that sadness to. I do not mean at all to minimize the severity of the effects of losing loved ones, but in some ways it goes deeper than death because there is nothing happy in that emptiness. I realize fully the way things have worked out couldn’t have been otherwise (as far as we know now) and that I am a very different person today than I would have been otherwise – and that that might be an incredibly beneficial thing in the future – but it is just … awful. It is the deepest, blackest, truest sadness I know and I pray to God I never have to know any deeper or blacker or truer sadness.

I just had to get that off my chest. It’s been a rough week. And it’s Tuesday!

…

I’d say “I’m over it,” but that seems to have gotten me in trouble in the past for some reason….

Over and out, Beth