Girl Interrupted

"Now I am returning to myself these things that you and I suppressed." Joni Mitchell, Hejira

Two months ago I prayed that I would let myself fully experience the pain I was in, that I wouldn't try to circumvent or outrun it...this time. I saw that pain as the doorway out of what truly ails me...the door that one must walk through. There was no other way. If I had grieved all of my past rejections and disappointments, it is possible that this most recent incident of my personal history could have been avoided. But, there is a point at which such musing is futile and self-indulgent. It did happen. So I asked myself what I was going to do with this non-negotiable truth that was staring me in the face.

Brass tacks. My mind came back to me, it seemed, quite suddenly, as though I'd been mid-blink for 6 years and when my eyes fully re-opened I was dismayed to see the mess that had been made of things. Or, rather, I was satisfied, finally, that every angle had been tested and my hypothesis was not correct. My faith in impossibilities was finite. Determining the analogy that is most accurate is a purely academic concern. The point is, there I was holding the bag of implications and loose ends as a souvenir yet again. Who the hell was I, anyway, after all that? Who was going to get us (me, myself, and I)through to the other side of this experience?

Minor hiccups notwithstanding, I have true lingering glimpses into a restored, ordered existence that is not filtered through the lens of wanting the man I wanted, spiritually, emotionally, artistically...

The first weeks were excruciating. A dull weight on my chest, streaming every piece of information, hearing every song, watching each television show through the filter of that despondency. I would awaken in the morning, and it was my immediate point of awareness. I worried the facts of my despair like rosary beads.

Rilke counsels us to live the questions now, because if the answers we seek are not present it is because they cannot yet be fully apprehended. I may never understand the anomalies that existed in the construct of that relationship. I am sure I will never know what I imagined and what I didn't, but I am no longer staking my life, my sense of value on rightly readng aberrations, miscues, and asymmetrical longing.

I didn't lose myself in this situation. I lost myself more in the context of this situation, but it was simply the final episode in a long series of similar episodes.

It seems that I can discern the end of this sorrow, and that too, scares me. I don't know if I can keep it all going without the formal feeling that comes after great pain, and yet I don't want sadness to become my de facto concept of myself, either.

So, I'm figuring out my life as it would have been had I not taken these crazy, ill-conceived detours. I'm realizing I couldn't be where I am without having taken them. And I find that impossible to reconcile, too. It would have been better to have not done as I did for as long as I did, and yet everything that is true now was entirely predicated upon my having done so.

Well here I am. Resuming my existence as though it never happened, on the one hand, while acknowledging that my emerging construct of who I can be is completely informed by the fact that it did, on the other.