A friend of mine lost her husband recently. A wonderful man. Kind, compassionate, funny. They’re both the types of people emitting loving and fun vibes, the exact types the world needs more of. Looking around, standing in a room of people I didn’t know except for her, was a glimpse into just some of the lives he touched. Friends and family discussing his humour, his love for his wife, his personality. Favourite memories. I found the only other loner in the room, a woman around my age, and we shared a discussion about the same topics. She worked at the shop they owned. I frequented there. Sadly, the shop, like many, didn’t survive the pandemic.
I drove around for a while down streets that hold so many memories from my own past. Blasting music. The sun shone despite the nagging sensation of loss and sorrow, golden light spilling over the city a bizarre contrast to the harrowing sadness.
When I pulled into my driveway, and got in my door, I stood there, unable to stay within those walls. I took a long walk. Smoked some weed. Thought some thoughts. Soaked in the sunshine like the depressed houseplant I am, and listened to the birds sing. I can’t remember the last time I stopped to listen to it.
Life is so short.
Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay
And how much of this life do I spend inside my own head? For a long time, I haven’t felt or been terribly present in the lives of others or for myself. Days look the same. Work is always work. Writing is always writing. I fill my time and ignore the loneliness seeping in after years of isolating mental illness and a pandemic that’s kept people apart for the last two years. Even before the pandemic, I’d go long periods not talking to people. Sorely out of touch with what happened in their lives. Lost in my head, obsessed with trauma recovery and journalling and writing. I went from having no will to live, to hanging onto frays of meaning, to enjoying my solitude and being at peace with my past. The next logical step, of course, is to find my way back into a social circle and engage.
Yet, with the world reopening despite COVID still being rampant, I remain hesitant to step out into the social scene. Struggling to reconnect. Many people I’ve known for years feel like strangers I no longer know how to approach. Being at the celebration of life hammered home how badly I’ve isolated myself. It made me question what I am sure everyone questions after a death: who will remember me when I am gone? How many lives have I personally touched? Will it matter?
My relationship with time and death is unsteady at best. Having survived a suicide attempt, death feels both distantly inevitable and still helplessly soon. And when I meet the notion of death again, it reminds me of two things: there isn’t enough time and I am alone. Or at least, that’s what my mental illnesses tell me. I’ve sought to discover why this panic lives beneath my skin permanently. The trauma? Is it knowing that despite so many of us seeking a grander purpose than mediocrity and repetitiveness, we will die as mediocre at best? What will we be remembered for? What happens after our name is spoken for the last time in history? And if we’ll be dead anyways, why does it matter?
So many social media posts try to encourage us to live outside of our comfort zones lest we never be great. Inserting into our minds the notion that we need to be noticed and seen, that we must do something worthy of being remembered for. As a suicide attempt survivor, I too rue the notion that my life may never have any brilliant meaning beyond writing.
We are so pressured into being astounding that we no longer allow ourselves to be astounded and simply exist.
Existing is mundane, but is it always bad? To simply work and be with friends and have random adventures and moments we don’t always have to post online. Is the reason so many people are unhappy because we are constantly comparing someone else’s online life to ours offline? How hard should you push yourself to be TikTok famous or get a ton of followers or sell a bunch of books, instead of soaking in your current moments?
How hard are we trying to create the perceived better future, living in that vision, that we are no longer living in the current?
I have no answers. Only thoughts and questions. If all this wasn’t enough, a random old couple saw me talking to a random cat who trotted up to me, meowing loudly. I mindlessly stopped to chat with the fluffy black kitty and pet it, eliciting a chuckle from the lovely couple walking by. A perfectly normal moment where my mind is thinking on a weird, grander scale seemingly beyond my comprehension.
All I do know is that I am tired of never being present. Of being the suicide attempt survivor who doesn’t know how to live. My brain always feels like it is somewhere else, either in the past or in a future that isn’t even certain. Solutions aren’t so simple. But there’s got to be something more than a wandering mind and feeling so lost I’m never there for anything.
Life is so short. We face our mortality someday. Some of us for a second time, maybe more. The sun will set for us and we will face the permanence of death. I guess maybe all that matters is that we saw the light for what it was while we could still enjoy bathing in it.
Image by Jim Semonik from Pixabay