Grief, Ten Years Later

The Year From Hell (2015, for any new readers) is now ten full years ago.

 

In retrospect, this was probably the time when we should have started to suspect my brain wasn't quite up to par. I was sending college update emails trying, trying, trying yet again to explain the depths of the pain I was in. I was writing five and six thousand word emails to everyone back home, trying to make sense of everything that was happening to me. And to be fair, it was a lot. How many other 21-year-olds are mourning three deaths in two months, two family-destroying divorces, and a late-stage aggressive cancer diagnosis (for one of the very few not-dramatic members of the family) while also trying to graduate from an extremely demanding program from a very tough college?

 

By all rights I should have been making friends and going on dates to find the guy to build a family with and starting a career. Instead I was losing friends, losing family and watching money divide what little family survived all the deaths.

 

I was such a baby adult, and instead of getting 'real life' drip-fed to me over the course of 30-40 years like everyone else does, I got a full lifetime (maybe more) of pain and betrayal in one three-month wallop. And I could not understand how everybody thought I should just pop right back up and continue on with life as if nothing at all happened. I still sometimes think if none of those things had happened and the only bad thing that happened to me in 2015 was some kind of romantic break-up, I would have gotten ten times the love and concern from home compared to the amount of love and concern I did get during the Angel Of Death rampage that actually happened.

As the anger from the readers back home mounted about my (rightful?) despair, my emails grew longer and longer as I tried to make them see just how bad things really were. But of course they never saw. I was still in that naive autistic phase of 'if I just explain better/more then they'll understand.' I know now that some people have absolutely zero intention of understanding and that explanation in general is essentially worthless. That's a big part of why I don't really talk to people at all anymore. I'm so completely done with the wilful misunderstanding.

 

I can't even tell you how many times people just sent a terse email saying 'you need counselling,' only for me to fire back that I was, in fact, in counselling twice a week. Two hours a week was not even close to enough time to process everything. I would sit in the counsellor's office, talking non-stop for the full hour (and sometimes a little bit longer if his next person wasn't there yet), and leave without any appreciable difference in my soul other than the tiniest modicum of relief that I didn't get scolded for simply acknowledging all the bad things that were happening to me, in real life, in real time.

 

If I wasn't neurodivergent, would my grief have been smaller, easier to manage? Would it have been easier for all the email recipients back home to relate to me and show a little kindness? Would the pain have gone away at some point instead of still lingering in the shadows even today? Would the angry replies from back home have added less hurt to the already-insurmountable mountain range of pain? Would I have a slight hope of ever being happy again... without looking over my shoulder, still fully expecting to see the Angel Of Death leering over me, scythe raised?

I dreamed last night about a child drowning and I woke up crying, with the ever-familiar ache of loss in my chest. I didn't actually know or recognise this child, but in the dream, in the story my brain spun, it was my brother. He didn't look like either of my real-life brothers, but when he died the pain was the same.

 

Ten full years and I still dream of death when I sleep.