5 Stages

This morning I got a ticket for running a red light. Yes, the light was red, but it was yellow when I was in the intersection, and I think that should count for something. The cop told me to plead not guilty and to go to court and fight it, but I really just wanted to punch him in the face. I don't like cops. I feel that in a kind of universal way. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but when enough cops have been assholes to you, you start to feel a certain way. I would like to take the time now to personally single out the cop who pulled me out of a snowbank in my Madrigal dress on my seventeenth birthday after I hit another car and spun the fuck out. He was a good cop and he didn't give me a ticket.

But besides that, my run ins with cops have been less than delightful. In their defense, I have not shied away from illicit activities, I have met them warmly and openly and thoroughly enjoyed them. I have always maintained that there earthly rules and ethereal people, and I am certainly not down here on earth with the laws. I wanted to cry today, to make the cop feel bad for me, and to hope that he would take pity on me. But I couldn't, I wasn't sad, I was fucking pissed. This marks a transition. If there are truly 5 stages of grief, I have experienced them all out of whack.

In the beginning, there was denial, as it's supposed to be, but not how I envisioned it. When my relationship ended, I had a solid two month period of wildness. I drank a lot, I went on dates, I went to work hungover and cried my way through. I saved my sadness for the quiet moments before I fell asleep or in the shower. I numbed it with attention and affection and a blunt refusal to see that my actions were prolonging the part where I'd feel it. Eventually I recognized the ways in which I was self-medicating, the unnecessary male attention, the excessive drinking, the refusal to eat or to do yoga like I usually do. I wanted to be reckless, I wanted to be broken, and I wanted that to be romantic. And it was, for a while, but soon enough, I just wanted to be me again.

When the bargaining came, I didn't recognize it either. I had finally recognized that I was still in love, that I still wanted that love, and I didn't care at what expense it came. And so I fought with the universe, and my friends, and my family, I fought because I thought something righteous was slipping through the cracks, I thought I was losing my soulmate and that if I let this happen, I would regret it forever. I ignored everyone's advice, I ignored all of the signs, and I ignored my own intuition. I thought that if I could will what I wanted to be true, eventually it would be. I still believe that, in some ways, but I think you have to be willing something you truly want for yourself and not something you have grown accustomed to wanting. I did try to go back, I tried to believe that that truth could be valid. But eventually the begging and the pleading and the wondering and the hoping started to feel false. I started to realize that whatever I was fighting for was never going to love me back the way I needed or wanted or deserved. And so the words shared started to matter less and the actions started to become more and more glaring.

I saw myself in two dimensions, the person I was inside of the relationship and the person I became when it ended. When I went back, I could feel my new self looking around and thinking what in the fuck? And eventually, as time passed, more and more of me felt like her. At this point I feel a steady ebb and flow between anger, depression, and acceptance. While my mind and body have accepted that my life is new, different, changed now for the better, there are still flare ups of sadness, doubt, and anxiety. There are still moments of rage. On Sunday night, I drove home from Ohio and cried the entire way, I haven't cried like that lately, but something in me needed to mourn, something in me was grieving. And there are still times when it scares me, when I am afraid that I'll never fall in love again, when I am afraid that I have failed somehow.

But I read an old poem I had written the other day that said this, "I loved with the entire spool of thread I was given, and then I loved beyond that." And that's what happened, I gave all of the healthy love I had to give and then when that wasn't enough, I started digging parts of myself out and using them as collateral. I wasn't whole, I wasn't healthy, and perhaps the most important thing to realize, is that I wasn't happy. So I guess this is acceptance. This is the part where the soil is no longer too toxic to grow inside of, the part where you can't steal bits of my soul just by looking at me the wrong way. This is the part where I remain a whole person regardless of what anyone says or does, regardless of whether or not I get pulled over for running a red light, my self worth remains intact.