“… that’s what grief is — a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.” [‘Wintering’ by Katherine May]
It’s snowing again. After a week of sunshine and progressively warm weather, this soft white blanket falling over the world feels nice, soothing, and especially gentle — something I really need today for my own “wintering”, for some recovery of my own.
After some events this past week that have been very troubling for me and the breakthroughs I had after breakfast, in rapid succession, yesterday and this morning, today’s psychotherapy session was hefty. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m ready and even eager to address some older, deeper issues of mine, but sometimes they get triggered and/or clarified without my trying, like a volcano erupting. In the past two weeks I feel like I finally started doing the heavy-lifting in my therapy sessions, and heavy-lifting is tiring. As an athlete, I know my body benefits from the right amount of weight-lifting: it helps strengthen me and thus avoid serious injuries, in appropriate ways/quantities. But it’s also tiring and not really fun.
Last Sunday, I had a fall out, almost a fight with one of my dearest friends in California who was temporarily looking after my pet snake that I couldn’t bring along to Colorado with me. This event really upset me, for days. But apart from pain and anxiety, it also triggered self reflection and, ultimately, some deep and invaluable understanding about myself, my past, my behavioral patterns and relationships.
After this fall out or break up or fight with this particular friend happened, I realized that I have found and lost many friends and other types of relationships along my winding path: but while some of them ended painfully, others just faded almost unnoticed, despite maybe having been just as deep or important. What was the difference? What brings on the pain for me in some relationships ending but not in others?
I realized that the key was conflict.
I am terrified of conflict. It might be the thing I fear the most in the whole world. Because when conflict arises between me and someone whose acceptance or affection or approval is important to me — be it a friend, a romantic partner, a family member or a coworker — it is intimately and indissolubly intertwined with rejection. If conflict arises between me and a person whose approval/acceptance/affection is important for me, then I feel responsible for the conflict, as if I were its only cause; I feel that I’m a “bad person”, a “monster”, and that as such I will be rejected. Although rationally I may very well know this is not at all true, this vicious circle feeds on childhood trauma so deeply ingrained within me that it’s really hard, almost impossible, to keep at bay. And I had never articulated it so fully, so completely, so openly as I did today: first, while journaling this morning; then, with my counselor’s help in my therapy session; and now, opening up here.
I have also come to understand that profound, unfathomable, almost cosmic or existential sadness from earlier this week: it was grief. And grief precisely in the sense outlined by author Katherine May in her wonderful book ‘Wintering’ that I’ve just started reading.
Yes, for me grief really is “a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.” And that’s why I was feeling so abysmally sad this week: because of a conflict with a cherished friend who was then avoiding me, thus refusing me that “one last moment of contact that would settle everything”. This, in turn, brought up old feelings of rejection along with the unhealed wound from another relatively recent conflict and/or rejection (or something that felt as such to me) with another person who in some weird, confusing ways was dear and close to me, and with whom I wasn’t able to get the closure that my heart would really need. The closure that, for me, would come only from “that one last moment of contact that would settle everything”. That settling of everything which for me would mean the confirmation of “not being a bad person”, the confirmation of “not being a monster” — which wouldn’t need to come necessarily from the other person telling me as much explicitly, but rather from my own actions, doing one last thing which for me would finally represent “that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.” To help me feel good again, once and for all.
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[Opening up like this is terrifying, but much less terrifying than conflict is for me. This opening up, especially after having done it with my counselor this morning, is therapeutic and I know it will eventually bring me full healing. One step at a time, one layer at a time. And now that this scary step of writing here is taken, now it’s time for self-care: time for the warm, cozy self-care of “wintering”.]
The Little Prince and the Fox 