Permission to Fall Apart

Selfishness, just like weakness, comes with a negative stigma. If you're selfish you're concerned with your own interest and have no regard for others. If you're weak, it must mean you lack strength, you're likely to break under pressure, collapse, you're frail and fragile. Negative energy and judgment is such bullshit. What our culture really needs is to make conscious efforts to be compassionate and feel empathy. Sometimes these are natural traits...but most times these need to be developed.

Everyone has a right to be selfish for themselves. I encourage selfishness, almost, because it can also mean that you are doing what you know is in your best interest or taking care of yourself. I believe that everyone is weak because it's a natural, human emotion. WE ARE HUMAN. We feel. We love. We have souls. We hate. We desire. We are selfish. We are weak. But we can't identify weak or selfish if we don't experience strength and selflessness.

I've felt weak countless times in my life when a situation was a challenge to overcome, when I've been intimidated by a new environment, when facing a different circumstance and even becoming a Mom for the first time. So when I look back at all that I bulldozed through, I can't motivate my current state of mind- simply put, I've never felt this weak....and I don't know how to come out of it. What I do know, is that I will someday. I don't know what it will take. I know that there isn't a magic day when I'll wake up and think Well, I'm glad that's over. Nope, I didn't just lose a job or a friend, I lost 32 years of someone who will never return. Sometimes I measure the depth of my broken heart to that of a broken heart. Let's see..I don't eat much, low energy, lack of appetite, sleepless nights, weight loss, uninterested in "normal" activity, endless crying episodes, triggers, can't listen to love songs, everything reminds me of Charley, and no end in sight. Looks like a broken heart, sounds like I'll recover when another man comes along, but truth is my heart will never mend and there is no other man like my brother. Sometimes I even think I can or may meet someone who reminds me of him and I'll supplement. But that's just stupid. So I'm back to mending my broken heart with aching memories and selfish longing.

I continually fall apart in bits, feathered pieces, slim splinters, a chunk of foam falls away and a patch of hair cascades down into the shower drain. When I'm sitting in the backyard watching Mia play, I'm also fading in color just as much as Charley's blue beach chair is. My skin is always dry no matter how much water I drink, my muscles ache as though I workout three times daily, my heart is sore from all the extreme beating and I'm just tired. All the time. Grief does that. It's uncontrollable and it occurs in waves. Up and down goes my blood pressure like an a bad apple bobbing in water. Head dizzies sometimes from lack of balance and thud goes my mood when I remind myself that Charley is gone. I have to tell myself that my thoughts, emotions and behavior are normal for me and abnormal for other sane, ungrieving people. Have to remind myself that I'm exactly where I should be..no rush. Like my brother, I need a marker or something to measure progress and retrogression. But with grief, there should be none. I am entitled to take my time and feel weak as long as it takes me to feel some sense of strength again. The thing about falling apart and ultimately just fall and hit the ground, is that I will put myself back together again. Even if I linger on the floor to comfort myself before reaching for some glue and quick-hardening love, I will lift.........and be someone different when I do. My pieces won't fit quite right and neither will my core, but that's the beauty of craft. I'm serious about life more than I've ever been. And with seriousness comes change. After all, that's what time does.