(Or, Personal Grief, Collective Despair, and Finding the Will to Survive)
(CW: Depression, grief, anxiety, and loss – Please take care of yourself, and only engage if you have the emotional capacity to do so)
Can I be honest? I mean, can I be brutally – if not painfully – transparent? I am not okay, and I haven’t been for a long, long time. At what felt like the height of my professional achievements, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV endometrial cancer. She died less than a year later. Her sister, my aunt, died six months after that. All of this happened less than a year after my Nana’s passing and only four years after my grandfather’s death.
I’ve been suffering in silence, isolating, struggling to grapple with loss, grief, fear, loneliness, and even shame. The past four years have been the hardest of my life to date. I’ve felt unbalanced, untethered, and, at times, completely broken. I cannot count the number of mornings I struggled to pull myself from bed, nor can I specify the number of nights I cried for the elusive relief of sleep. I’ve been sinking into a depressive spiral – overwhelmed with the burdens of living and paralyzed by the eternal challenges of just being.
“come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”
Lucille Clifton writes about surviving the thing that has tried to kill her, but there have been days where I have felt like death is winning its war with me. With every phone call, text, email, private message, and letter to which I struggle to respond; with every bright, clear day that feels shrouded in darkness; with every ruminating thought that pulls me from the present and traps me in the sadness of the past or uncertainties of the future; with each of these things, I have wondered if this is what it feels like, to stop living before your death.
I warned that I would be brutally honest, but I didn’t expect to divulge the ugliest bits in the way I have. It’s clear that my mind and heart were begging for relief.
I’m writing, in part, because I need to. I have to. Writing, for me, was once (and, I think, still is) a part of my survival. It was – is – as vital as breathing. But writing also requires an honesty and openness that I haven’t been brave or bold enough to bear. That is, I think, why I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been drowning, struggling to articulate just how I’m feeling and why. I’m writing this, primarily, to save my own life. But I’m thinking about our collective survival too.
Continue reading “On Honesty” →
On Becoming 