{"id":2986,"date":"2012-10-22T20:28:22","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T03:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/?p=2986"},"modified":"2025-05-23T17:31:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T22:31:25","slug":"what-it-feels-like-sometimes-monday-october-22nd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/what-it-feels-like-sometimes-monday-october-22nd\/","title":{"rendered":"What It Feels Like (Sometimes)- Monday October 22nd"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Tragedy strikes us all at some point in our lives. When it happens to other people, we think “ugh I can’t imagine, how do they get out of bed in the morning, how do they go on?”. \u00a0Then it happens to us, and we realize (at some point) that we go on because that’s what we do. \u00a0The human experience is hard, but it doesn’t kill us. \u00a0There’s only a very small portion of people who decide to stay in their pajamas, or to drink themselves into a permanent numbness, or to stop answering the phone when their mother checks to see if they’re ok. \u00a0We all think we’re going to be in that small group of people, then we go through what we go through, and we just aren’t those people. \u00a0We are the people who keep going (even if we take a few weeks or months to be numb, and ignore phone calls, and live in our PJ’s). \u00a0We are the people who can’t help but notice that there is beauty in the harsh world we’re stuck in. We are most of us.<\/p>\n

A broken heart seems to shatter some timing device in our lives. Everything gets reset. \u00a0Time moves differently, and our memories are reorganized.<\/p>\n

When it’s all over (it’s never over, but there is a time when your heart doesn’t actually hurt anymore, and you can breath without thinking “breath in, breath out”) we think that now we’re equipped with a special knowledge. \u00a0We didn’t act right when our friend\/cousin\/sister\/co-worker went through their tragedy, but now we know exactly what to do. \u00a0We send food, we never say “well at least…”, we try to listen and not offer advice unless we’re asked, we call long after the funeral when we know everyone else has gone back to their regular lives.<\/p>\n

But it’s not enough. \u00a0We’re so helpless to save each other. \u00a0We hate that part of our special knowledge is knowing that we can’t fix it for other people. \u00a0We can’t convince anyone else that they too will be part of the group that keeps going. \u00a0They won’t be destroyed by their grief either. \u00a0And it’s not because they are “so strong” (because no one feels so strong, and hearing that is confusing when you spend hours every day crying or plotting to run away or throwing things at the television when certain commercials come on, or pressing sharp things into the soft skin on your arm just to feel a more manageable kind of pain) it’s because that’s what we do. \u00a0We just decide we aren’t going to give up, even when we’d rather decide to be the people who give up. \u00a0We are most of us.<\/p>\n

It feels like we are alone. \u00a0It feels like no one understands us. \u00a0It feels (eventually) that we have to hide our pain away so we don’t scare people. \u00a0As we heal we grow afraid that the people we lost are fading away, as if we have to exchange our selves for their presence. \u00a0It’s not true. \u00a0We grapple with guilt, and we monitor our thoughts with hyper-vigilence, trying to find prof that we didn’t deserve to be happy or that we weren’t good enough to keep them. \u00a0It’s not true.<\/p>\n

Years later, we make new friends who don’t know what we went through. \u00a0Sometimes we tell them, sometimes we don’t. \u00a0We wonder if the guy who snapped at us in the coffee shop was going through his tragedy. \u00a0We try and give people a little more room. \u00a0Because now we know. \u00a0We are most of us. \u00a0And sometimes it feels like we are all together, and sometimes it feels like we are completely alone.<\/p>\n

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Tragedy strikes us all at some point in our lives. When it happens to other people, we think “ugh I can’t imagine, how do they get out of bed in the morning, how do they go on?”. \u00a0Then it happens to us, and we realize (at some point) that we go on because that’s what … Continue reading “What It Feels Like (Sometimes)- Monday October 22nd”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2986"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3290,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2986\/revisions\/3290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.poorluckyme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}