The Only Way Forward is Through

I have isolated myself. 

Hannah is gone. All that is left of her is a deeply sad, scarred place. I hear and see things that I want to to share with her, that I remember she liked, and there's no her.  The fiction that I gave myself when she first died (that word hurts), half hearted even at the time, that if I talked with her she could hear me, that she would try to reach out to me somehow, in the glow of lights on the wall, that is faded and hopeless now.

On my living room wall, a captured light.

Covid happened and I felt that I couldn't ask for help from people. Partly due to covid, but partly because deep inside me I knew I didn't deserve to be helped.

Joe and I split and his friends went with him.

I had 6 surgeries for what was a small cancer but led to infections and complications.

The insurance was switched and I have had to find a new oncologist, a new surgeon, a new GP, each taking three to four months to see me after I made contact.

My boss was horrible.

I lost my job.

I was strong, independent, a warrior - alone. Lone.

I have missed every walk, every grief group in the last year, knowing they were there. 

It was "too much": distance, time, effort.

Was it fear? Am I afraid, even in my time of need, of being seen as an imposter?  I ought to be a warrior, strong and fierce?

My younger son has a girlfriend now. He waits on her hand and foot. She had surgery - a pretty big one, I admit - and he gives her all the care that I didn't receive, and I covet that. I was so busy being strong that no one thought I needed to be held up until it was too late, and now I need to take the sadness, grown stiff, painful and handicapping, and figure out how to become who I want to be with where I am now.  

I've been swimming in the river with my dad. I confess it's 50% about him and about 50% about me trying to reach out into the world and be a part of it. I am weak, slow, but I am okay with that for the most part. I talk with strangers casually, but make no friends.  

That's not entirely true though, is it? I have reached out: to Glori, to Mallory, to Toni. I've eaten with them. 

I've eaten with Joe, though it makes me feel angry that he feels so superior that he "is still friends" with me, as though that mitigates the verbal abuse, the terror of being on the road with him, drunk driving, the shutting me out when he felt like it. 

I am looking at more surgeries starting reconstruction at the end of October. I need to get healthy. I need to eat better. I need to make better choices, to reach out to people and make friends.  I need to figure out how. I want to dance, I want to swim, I want to feel joy. I remember joy, the feeling of being a fish in the water, a graceful dancer. That is the part that I have left behind, except for gleaming seconds that make me remember they exist. There was a moment in the river last weekend when I felt like I could be wholly there, and then the anxiety hit, the fear of the unseen in the water, the green and the slime and god only knows what else. Blind panic for a few seconds.

There's a lot here to think about, but it's late and I want to cry. I need to cry.  

I wish I was not only writing to myself. I wish there was a keyboard, a pen, a voice at the other end of this conversation.

Whoever you are, I want to love you.