After my last piece, I felt more connected to humanity through my writing. I’m generally someone who likes to process out loud. So this piece is part of a larger series I’m working on.
It’s been a month and a day now since my grandmother passed away.
I call my grandfather sometimes and we talk a bit. He cries; he misses my grandma. I try to comfort him, but it’s not the same. We still cannot visit or hold one another. Another layer of cruelty.
This feels… inhumane and yet, somehow familiar. I’m not a stranger to illness and isolation. This is just a new and awful version of that experience.
The day after my grandmother died, I woke up to the news my beloved donor mom, Denise had passed in the night as well.
Denise was my kidney donor Timothy’s mother. She’s the one who made the decision to donate his organs. In the years since meeting her, we had become incredibly close. To me, it felt like not only did I receive this gift of life, of my actual transplant, but I got this amazing mom figure as well. I felt blessed beyond words. But I took every opportunity to try, to tell her how much I loved her, how honored and grateful I was to have her in my life.
And now she’s gone…
These two incredibly important women in my life are gone, and with them, went the ground beneath me. Everything I thought I could control, manage, all the coping skills I had built over a lifetime, just… gone. In its place is this rawness, exposing every fiber of trauma and pain that’s built me up. I’m like a house torn down to its structural beams. The memory of my loved ones is still there in the wood, one might say I should be grateful to have that. But I can’t feel it when I’m busy fighting the elements.
All of this put all the losses I’ve experienced over a lifetime up-front and center. Cruel reminders of all that I’ve lost.
And the survivor’s guilt.
How do I even begin the describe the complex grief that is survivor’s guilt? It feels like it will swallow me whole, the burden of just existing, overwhelms me. Under the sea of gratitude for everything done for me, there’s a darkness that leaves me feeling so unworthy of it all.
I made a mutual choice with my therapist to go to a DBT partial program. Dialectal Behavior Therapy is like the sibling of the better-known “CBT”. (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). One is more internal processing and self-examination, another is more outward. I’ve done this program a couple of times before, and I will say, it’s been helpful.
But it turns out, the previous times, I took the wrong lessons. I decided that “processing” my feelings is a simple four-step process.
- Make a google spreadsheet.
- “Acknowledge” your feelings. Such as “I feel sad.”
- Write down exactly what “made” you sad, so you can compare and analyze it against the other times.
- Now you can file it away with the others and carry on! DONE.
This google doc sits right next to my organizing/Kondo method doc. Because to me, that’s what feelings are. They are things to be organized. If they do not bring me joy, I “toss them”. Well, not really, because we cannot just toss them, so I put them in the way back, where all my middle school Algebra skills went. I try to rearrange them all perfectly so they’re in their right place and I do not have to “deal” with them. Minimize them, until I’ve cultivated what I think is “appropriate”. And then, as with Kondoing, get all surprised when I struggle against my own logical choice (because sometimes you really do NEED that weird pink cow shirt, even if you don’t believe you do).
To be truthful here, I do not enjoy my emotions. I do not enjoy “feeling”. I think of it as a nuisance. Unless I can use it in a productive manner, it’s useless. I mean, what am I going to do, sit on the couch and cry?
Absolutely not. Nope, not me. I have survived too much, I am too strong, for such silly human things. And if I stop and do such a thing, the world might fall apart, well, at least my world. No. Unless I can utilize them in a “productive” manner, they no longer exist and we’re moving on.
Crying and feeling is something other people do. It’s something other people deserve. — Not me, I do not deserve that. Feelings are something self-indulgent, and I cannot permit myself to indulge.
If a loved one told me they thought these things, I would be so upset for them. I’d likely try to do whatever I could to help them. I would know how processing emotion is meant to be done, for them. So I guess here I am, trying to show that same compassion to myself. Be my own friend.
So here I am.
Allowing myself vulnerability.
Sitting here five hours a day, with a bunch of women I’ve never met, working on myself and making space to be human. To feel, without judgment or guilt.
Reaching out more readily to friends, asking for support, help, and understanding. Allowing friends to hold me, even if we’re miles apart.
In the lingo of DBT, I am radically accepting that this where I’m at.
I’m accepting that right now, this is where I am at. Allowing my raw self to just… exist. As I am. Here I am. In all my humanness.
Right here, I am.
