Grief is a Kaleidoscope

Anger is one of the stages of grief, or at least that’s what literally every self help book says. This week I’ve been angry. Easy enough, right? I know that my temper will be shorter than usual, and I’ll be mad at people who don’t deserve it. I’ll take my emotions with a grain of salt, and try not to put myself in stressful situations. There’s ways to deal with this.

Except that anger doesn’t always come out in those clear, straightforward ways you expect. It distorts things. It makes harsh lines and colors where the world is really soft and confused. I have been numb to politics and injustice for months now, too drawn up in my personal anxieties and sadnesses to expand my empathy beyond immediate family and friends. Yet suddenly, I am strident, passionate, full of declamations about mental illness and President Trump and self harm. Somehow grief has turned into this righteous anger at the state of the world.

And then there was the funeral, and suddenly the anger was turned to religion, and it felt righteous, and I know that it was just sadness. Anger seeped away, and my throat went tight. I haven’t been able to swallow properly in days, the tightness in my shoulders edging upwards until it feels like I’m going to puke out emotion.

Yesterday I had to admit to myself the hard truth. Grief is turning to my familiar friend depression. I’m beginning to lose joy again. It’s the first thing that goes when depression appears. It’s the empty sucking hole of inert disinterest. Why bother to go on living? It barely feels like anything anyway. The books tell me that depression is a stage of grief too, but perhaps that’s easier to bear when you haven’t lived for years under the weight of depression. Any return feels like an ending. Fear overwhelms the depression, and I begin to panic, wondering if the reprieve of the last two years was a blip in the larger flatline of my life.

What’s hard to explain is the way that the grief turns things. I thought I knew anger, I thought I could predict the path of healing. But it splinters your life in ways you don’t expect. I find myself sitting at work, reading the same line over and over again. I’ve never done that before. I get home, and my head hurts, my body aches, my chest feels hollowed out. I have no energy. I have always been active, but not today. Grief is not the same as the depression that is so familiar. Depression is a dark lens, but a predictable one. Grief is a kaleidoscope, turning some things bright and some things distorted and breaking others into a thousand pieces. It is the essence of unpredictable.

I am splintered and scooped out and empty inside. And where yesterday was righteous anger, today I can’t write a word about impeachments or intelligence leaks, all I can write is this emo bullshit that does nothing but lets it out and lets you in.

I’m grieving, and waiting for acceptance.