On ways to deal with loss

Sometimes I wonder why 2011 is a year of so much loss and turmoil for me.

Fortunately, no one I love has died, so I don’t mean loss in that sense.  I mean loss in the less of losing two people from my life that meant so much to me for so many years, two of the people I was closest to. (One person I left and the other person violently, without warning ejected me from her life.) Lost ideas of how to construct a happy, full life for myself. Lost my comfortable home and my beautiful dog (I left my home and my dog.) Loss of a fantasy about a relationship that turned out to be a mirage. The loss of so much that I thought I knew about myself, so very, very much. I feel like my heart has shattered.

There are days (well, most days) that I wake up in my empty, beige summer sublet apartment and I’m not sure how I’m going to get out of the bed and face the aloneness. I often feel this almost vertiginous, floating feeling, like I’m not connected to anything on the Earth… like gravity isn’t going to hold me any more and I’m going to slip outside of the Earth’s atmosphere into vast, cold space.

A good friend of mine told me that, in those situations, I should do something grounding, like stitch, do 10 push-ups or masturbate; all three at the same time if possible! (He has a fabulously wicked sense of humor and approach to life.) But, despite the joke, there is truth in there.

So for now, all I can do to try to get through all of this loss, confusion and sadness is stitch and live in the moment. And I desperately cling to the belief (at times, this belief is just a flickering candle flame, barely staying lit at all) that all of these changes that I’m trying to make in my life are going to lead me to a new place, full of possibility and opportunity and, at least for a few moments, joy.

For now I stitch. Very slowly. But I stitch.