Part 5: Acceptance

This is part 5 of a five part series on grief. Given the five stages of grief never come in order, neither will these posts. 

Tonight I passed my ex and his girlfriend on the street and it reminded me of this, a piece I wrote several months ago shortly after we broke up. 

DEFECTIVE

When I was 15, I became defective. 

Lose the romance, lose the drama, lose the statistic. I became defective

It wasn’t really something I did or said and yet it wasn’t really something that happened to me. It just was.

It was that when I looked at myself in the mirror years later I saw something that had occured without existing.

That to say I was defective, broken to begin with was somehow easier to understand than what had actually happened to me.

I remember at a Hare Krishna Service once and hearing them talk about how modern knowledge was trying to interpret and understand experience whilst veydic knowledge gave a complete understanding. That’s what it felt like to me and that's what I'm still searching for. This is a whole thing to me, not just a piece that others perused over and tried to equate and comprehend. 

I always took great comfort in statistics, except when it came to this. They say 1 in 3 are defective, and so, so many times I would sit there with my friends and the knowledge that I was the defective one.

“It wasn’t your fault” is the mantra of everyone- from your therapist, to your best friend, to the guy you just tried to sleep with. But you never see it that way. Least of all when you realise what happened has made you defective.

Sure we find ways to laugh about it, smile and repeat the story like we’re reading off an order at a restaurant. In time we form comfort in the siblinghood of statistics and a tainted warping of “Solidarity Forever”.

For a few years the victim card is a comfort, a curtain to hide behind when the fear of attraction knocks on your door. But as time progresses you inevitably find yourself seeing it as a prison, the past a devils snare that infects you with an inability to relax.

You find yourself sick to the stomach, crying and pleading with life to make you normal. This entrapment infects you with other things. Mental things, that like the defectiveness itself you become dissolved in hiding.

And yet you also play scientist and engineer. Constructing your own little crutches to try and fix it. Seeking ways to survive medical examinations and partially repair other systems damage, or at least build up an arsenal and ready weapons control.

I wish there was a happy ending, and for a moment I thought there was. But a brief antidote became more venom of the snare and once again I was left staining the sheets and crying for forgiveness, pleading for absolution from this personified hell.

Those who tell you dying is easy are probably right. I won’t say my life is easy or hard. Yet it just is. 

.....................

Tonight when I passed my ex we stopped momentarily. In that second he looked at me a said "Wow". Wow it is indeed, that even though I felt like dying when he left me, tonight I accepted that it happened and I am ok.

Things happen in our lives that are hard and painful, but eventually we gain that the acceptance of life and that our life is as it is. For all we've lost, for all we've gained. It is. We find our serenity