Haunt You Every Day

I've been annoyingly melodramatic of lately. Largely due to personal issues because it only makes sense that when your professional life is going great your personal life should be full of hair pulling and broken hearts. Not that the news helps. If I'm not tearing up over protestors being massacred in Libya, I'm at a lost for the devastation in Japan. Mix in your generalized discontent on the homefront and buying a meal for a homeless woman who tells you she plans on throwing herself off a bridge later that evening because she's in so much distress, you just sit around and wonder -- What on Earth is going on?

More after the jump.

There are people who think you can just think positive, rub some Jesus on it and good will happen. But there is such inequality in the world -- inequality of wealth, inequality of rights, inequality of environment, inequality of quality of life and education -- that it's kind of silly to say some Japanese woman wouldn't have lost her entire family in an earthquake if she'd just been "more happy" or loved Christ with all her heart. In fact, that's a pretty awful, unChrist-like thing to say -- that someone should just slap on a smile over awful crap.

Around the same time when things were going spectacular for me, career-wise, I had friends break up with horrible boyfriends. Friends lose jobs. Friends have family members in the hospital. Friends have their business tossed out into the street. Friends going through a bout of depression. Friends unable to pay their bills. Compounding it all is that pretty much all those things have happened to me quite a few times. And it's just hard to celebrate your success when your trying to be supportive as someone frets about getting laid off, about what they will do if their car finally dies or if they get sick, because, like hell if they have health insurance. 

I had a friend tell me she didn't like being mad, despite all the awful things that were happening to her, and I told her that was silly. She should just go ahead and be mad. You can't avoid anger. You can surpress it. You can ignore it. But, eventually, you will have to deal with it. You will have to deal with the pain, sadness and disappointment. You can delay it, but I never met anyone who was able to bypass it. I've known people who didn't have time to grieve and found themselves overcome with sadness years later because they finally had found the time for themselves to get upset. I say, why lose two years or more to high blood pressure and stress? Just write the bad poetry, bawl your eyes out, talk about it incessantly for the next month or two, then move on. I told her, it's fine to be mad because it's happening now and you're going through it now, but if you're still really hurt a year from now, she might want to see someone about it.

But even still ... sometimes it just takes a minute. Goodness knows it took me a long time when I was going through it. It took me every bit of eight years of tears and disappointments to get to today. Do I regret losing nearly all of my 20s to madness? Of course. But it really couldn't be avoided.

I'm going through an amazing degree of hurt feelings, personally, right now. And they could not be avoided. I was able to see I was going to get my feelings hurt from a mile out, back in the fall. But I ran right into that wall of misery anyway because, you know? It was there. I could pretend not to see it and suck it up and plaster on a smile. But who needs the stress induced heart-attack? So I instead settled into going from hot to cold to hot to cold to being wholly inconsistent as I vascilated between wanting to stab someone repeatedly and wanting to bake them a nice salmon.  

In the end, I chose to bake the salmon. Because I'm that girl. Because it's just so hard breaking up with people you're not really dating. And it's annoying to ride the bench in someone else's love life. And it's hurtful to be haunted by mistakes and words you can never take back and the things you can never undo. And there are people who want to be close and you just can't be close. You can't really be anything. So you don't feel anything. And disappointment is just another Friday night in a city you hate with Fake Tony Robbins telling you that bad things happen because you think they will. That if I just tape his picture to my heart the boy will be mine. Yet somewhere a horrible person is in love tonight and getting that love back, despite all the negativity surrounding them. Somewhere someone else is watching their love ones be washed away, despite a lifetime of doing the right thing and being good and being positive. Because it's either the universe has a sense of humor or is cruelly indifferent. Or both. And which one I believe depends on the day. 

Today it feels pretty cold. But in a few days? I don't know. Is there a way to make Tsunamis and loving different versions of the same messed up guy funny? 

Who wants a do-over? 

Comments

[Kandeezie]

I agree!! In the end, deep down, at the core, we know that we know nothing about why these things happen. We try to figure it out by blaming people in hopes we can do the opposite of what they did to avoid pain. But still, that means we know nothing. All we can do is keep doing what we're doing or change what we can.