Milestones & The New Woman

I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen today. It probably doesn't seem all that impressive to you, and it wouldn't have impressed me either about two months ago. But today, it seems like winning the New York Marathon, reaching the summit of Everest, and swimming the English Channel, all rolled into one big accomplishment.

It's been a little over a month since everything fell apart. I've only just begun to feel sort of like myself again, and only for a little while each day. But it's a little longer each day. Eventually, instead of counting my "feeling like myself again" time in hours, it'll be days. And then weeks. And then months.

Today, it was about ninety minutes this morning, and maybe another hour at some point in the afternoon. The rest of the time is still weird, unfamiliar and surreal. Six weeks ago I had a certain reality, a specific life with specific routines and trappings. Now, I'm not quite sure what I have. It's something I'm having to figure out all over again, hours and days at a time, but without the youth, self-assurance and cockiness that were there in me the first time around. Where the life I set out to build in my twenties was defined by possibilities and expansiveness, this new one seems distinguished by limitations and losses. It's easier to think about it in terms of what it isn't, and never will be again, than what it is and could be someday.

My friend Paula (remember her? the wise, web-developer one?) tells me this kind of thought process is called "catastrophizing", and it's a normal part of the cycle of loss and grieving. It's like your mind and heart have to imagine the worst case scenario, you almost have to feel that pain, to bear a future reality that's actually nowhere near as dark as your imaginings, but is definitely different and sometimes pretty awful. For now I have to take it as an article of faith that my new life will be better than the old one in a lot of ways, because hard evidence of that won't be forthcoming for a long while. For now, it's about coping with loss, and grief.

Make no mistake, I am most definitely grieving. I feel like I'm grieving not only for my old life, but for the old me too, because that woman is dead now. There's this new woman in her place, but I've only known her for a little over a month and she's been a useless wreck for most of that time.

The dead woman was a dynamo of productivity, energy, hope, caring, organization and good humor. And I miss her. She could get more done by 9am than the new woman can get done all day. She was always full of good ideas and practical solutions. She loved to laugh, and talk to people about common interests. She loved to learn new things and explore the unfamiliar neighborhoods of her town and the nearby college campuses. She was the sort of person who'd get a notion and act on it, just like that.

The new woman only shows glimmers of some of those things; blink, and you'll miss them. She's sad, and tired, and has a lot of trouble focusing on the positive. She's not sure there's much positive to be had yet. She doesn't eat much, because nothing tastes good. She rarely smiles, because she doesn't feel good. She sleeps a lot because she's healing, in every sense of the word. She casts about for distractions, but nothing can hold her attention for long because nothing seems very interesting.

But today, she cleaned the kitchen and did the dishes. She did these things because she remembered that it's in her nature to be neat, and she realized that having a clean kitchen might make her feel a tiny bit better. More like herself. She also realized that the act of cleaning it might make her feel better, too. More capable, more normal.

And it did.