“The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.”
Life events are difficult.
When I was a kid, an imagination was something I developed to pass the time. As an “adult,” I’m seeing that I might have let it grow beyond the healthy levels for someone my age. I live what is probably close to 65% of my life with my head lost in the stars. Walking to classes, being in said classes, sleeping (literally perchance to be dreaming), sitting through mass, driving to get coffee… I’m far from the grasps of the real world, off in the midst of my wonderful daydreams.
But I’ve created a dependence on my removal from reality; a reliance, if you will. It’s a huge part of who I am as a person, which I’m not necessarily sure I feel is a bad thing – it just also happens to be a huge part of how I cope with life around me. Real moments occur and suddenly I’m caught between how I’m supposed to deal with them and how I want to deal with them. Don’t tell the right hemisphere of my brain that I’ve caught on, but I think it might be putting in some extra hours lately in an effort to protect me. That’s code for “I’m not really sure it’s hit me yet.”
I don’t think I’m going where you think I’m going, I just wanted to share some thoughts.
So set-up over, here’s my point: there are no specific steps to cope with anything in your life, be it a breakup or a rejection or stress or death. There is no one-size-fits-all and I think people forget that. They assume that if you don’t want to talk to them, you must be depressed. If you don’t go out, you’re antisocial. If you just aren’t in the mood, you’re a hazard to yourself. To the masses, there is a set way to grieve or to move on or manage but – that’s their way not your way, so why follow it? It’s okay to not answer a text simply because you have nothing to say, or to tell someone that you don’t want to go because you just don’t want to.
Seriously, deal with it how you need to deal with it and don’t for a second feel like you owe anyone an explanation for that. Sit by yourself drinking gallons of apple cider and reading complex Russian novels and playing solitaire if that’s what it takes to cope with a real moment. I want to remind the world that nothing about that is not okay. In fact, the very definition of coping features absolutely no stipulations as to how it’s done. According to Google, all that’s needed is to deal effectively with something difficult. Read: get from point A to point B however the hell you want, as long as you get there eventually. I cannot shut down my life, I understand that. But I’m going to need some time to “let it hit me” before I can even think about point B.
Abrupt change here, but I like quotes. Apparently Mike Tyson once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Well, I had a lot of plans. And this real moment punched me square in the heart. It got me in a deep, permanent way and while that damage will never be fixed, or healed, it has to be coped with because that’s what life means. We all go through these things, there are no specialties here. It’s just the first time I’m going through it too, and my imagination and I don’t really understand exactly what it means to start coping yet. But eventually I will, and eventually I’ll continue on in the same way that we all do because life keeps going, and whether we understand it or not, we all keep going with it.
Life will not wait for our broken hearts, but it will try its damn best to ease them along the way. We all get to point B eventually.