Learning to dance with the limp.

Loss has caught up with me. That deep, resounding knowledge that something or someone is gone has embedded itself within me and I cannot shake it. All my life I have connected too freely. I have fallen in love too easily. As time went by, these connections fell or ripped away. In the years since marrying and having children I have experienced a haven of love and comfort, but unfortunately, that haven couldn't last. As a person suffering from depression and anxiety, I should have known the peace would not last. 

There are walking ghosts in my life. The presences of those I've loved and lost haunt me now and I cannot shake them. I am gutted and I feel I have lost my ability to connect with myself and overcome as I once did. To quote a lost friend, writing was how I survived. It was how I dealt with everything that happened in my life. I wrote down everything. In order to understand my own thoughts, I had to write them out and study them, go back and edit, keep writing, keep editing, until my mind made sense. I used to write five to seven hours a day. For years, I barely write anything at all. It's as if a section of me has been cut off and my mind has not yet reconciled its loss. So now, all loss deepens. I see faces I shouldn't see. I see them in the cars driving next to me, I see them around the corner or in line at a shop, and then I see them far away: in reality, far away from me where I couldn't possibly see them except for in my mind. That sudden realization that what my eyes merely hope to see is not really there sends a rush through me. I shiver and I feel alone. 

I listened to a program this morning on writing and I cried throughout. It shouldn't have had this effect but it did. I realized that a part of me was missing. The part that made everything else make sense. The part that connected my past and loss with what is now and real. I've been neglecting the very part of myself that can lift up the rest claiming I don't have the time or the talent or the strength. I don't know how much I'll succeed in bringing back the part of myself I was most in love with but I must try. If for no other reason than to turn these ghosts into joyful and grateful memories. To usher my past into the past and wave every now and then instead of dragging it along, holding tight. To those I've lost: I miss you but please, please let me be.

"They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up.
And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg
that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold,
but you learn to dance with the limp."
- Anne Lamott