The Long After: a different kind of climate change
As a well read person, I am confident of your awareness that there is a perilous shortage of online content. I am here to help by adding my voice to the billions out there.
You’re welcome.
Why do I have an uncontrollable urge to stand in the middle of an enormously populated planet and launch my voice into the empty spaces of the web? Because I lost my person, and my heart needs to pour into something true. They say feelings are the way we feel about the emotions we have. Feelings, like the weather, come and go. Our emotions however are our climate. The climate of grief and loss is vast, and I am the kajillionth person swimming in it - both ever, and right now.
Grief aligns nicely with the analogy of boating in a storm. The humans aboard are gripped by terror, holding on for dear life as unpredictable forces whip them around. Some are lost overboard. We feel unmoored; like we can’t breathe. I know my words have helped temporarily change my own emotional climate, bringing me from days of tear squalls and grief storms to post-sobbing, temporary islands of quiet reflection.
Clearly you’ve noticed that the storm analogies work really well, until the point they become distracting, like lyrics to a totally predictable love song. “I’m lost without you/in the storm of my grief/I can’t live without you/I need some relief/my heart is tossed/in a sea of tears/come back my darling/I am so a-feard.”
A professional writer would know the line between conceptual overuse and the perfect balance. No doubt, #AdamGrant or #AnneLamott would weave in a brilliant analogy with the timing of a Bruce Lee karate chop: precise and with the perfect weight, amidst a building story line. As I am not that person, reading my writing may best be paired with a beer, or a small measure of disregard.
I am writing for me, with the small chance others may find it helpful or entertaining.
There’s a chance that I may select and arrange words in a way that ring deeply true to others, as well as myself. I seek out and collect narratives that deeply ground me, and calm my internal weather.
Feel free to share a meaningful narrative, or make up song lyrics about grief storms. All I ask is that you are kind, because I am a real person, and being a dick is not helpful to anyone. I also am fully capable of being an asshole when I’m on the cusp of brokenness, so I get it. I ask that you direct fierce energies to your journal. Trust me, you don’t want to make that shit public when you’re feral.
“My mast is broken/my radio too/I rage to the wind/what can I do/I’m in the long after/without you my love/with no ground below me/what holds me above?”