When Grief Revisits: The Painful Journey of Building a New Life After Loss
This week I learned about the fragility grief recovery through the process of trying to build a new loving relationship. I thought three years was long enough, I felt stable, generally happy, motivated and confident.
But… this week it came crashing down!
It has been my belief for sometime that people respond better to positive stories, hence I have tried for a long time to show positivity and growth. However, life is never perfect and we all stumble from time to time!
Today I’m going to present weakness, because I need to be heard, and to show the true side of recovery from grief when it all goes wrong.
I have been in a relationship with a wonderful women for the past six months, but this week we decided that there were certain challenges we could not easily overcome and it was best to go our separate ways. It was an amicable split, even a considerate split, but regardless painful.
It was an amazing six months, I had fun, I had companionship, and I grew. I had a partner to share with. I was confident and felt I could take on the world.
However, when two people come together later in life and having had their own lives, it’s not always easy to combine those lives mentally, or physically. We tried and we worked hard to build something, but ultimately it wasn’t meant to be.
Today, I crashed, I have anxiety and severe emotional triggers that have sent me back two years. I have feelings of dread, of hopelessness and disinterest in life. Not to mention, this is just a week after the third anniversary of Duggi’s passing.
I remember these feelings of despair, and I never imagined they would visit me again; hello darkness, my old friend.
I also remember the good feelings and the positive times, but they are on an extremely high shelf, totally out of my reach.
The loneliness is crippling; the embrace of a partner, a simple breakfast, a movie on the couch, sitting by the water, cooking together, sharing personal moments, talking, intimacy, and waking up next to each other; all gone in an instance.
It’s hard to open my heart to another, but even harder to suffer a broken heart again. There’s no blame, we tried, we fought, but ultimately we took the mature decision to end the relationship, and it hurts.
How do I get past this? Knowing how much I had to rebuild, how hard I had to fight to get myself to a place I could be happy.
Today is a dark day, a day I can’t see past. Emotional triggers play nasty games. I keep talking so I don’t have to think, going from friend to friend. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.
How can life be so cruel? All I want is to love and to be happy. I tried so hard to reach that point, but emotions are fragile. The recurring trauma is debilitating, isolating and so fucking hard!
Sometimes life seems too much to handle. No matter how much I have to deal with, it’s all on my shoulders and there’s no simple way to ease my burden!