Personal Journal

Untitled

I think I'm reaching the point where the trauma is something I'm starting to reconcile. I'm not one to describe anything I've experienced in my life as "traumatic." And I had a hard time with admitting this experience was traumatic, but it was. It did and does from time to time still wreck me.

The trauma wasn't solely watching Jean die. It was being helpless to do anything about it. And it was losing her, and being unable to do anything about it. I had no idea the kind of pain - emotional pain - that would deliver.

So somehow there's a bit of an acceptance of that, and I find myself having to put my life together. The life I had before is gone except for the furniture (my job, my home, that's the furniture of a life).

The biggest problem right now is an absence of friendship in my life. I hesitate to write this in my public journal because of the chance that it comes across as a "poor me" type of entry. But I've done enough looking in my life and in my private journal to realize that it's true. Those who were once my friends are now acquaintances, because too much life has transpired for them, and for me, for us to be able to pick up where we left off.

And there weren't many of those people, frankly. Cindy, Deb. That was really it in my circle of friends. I don't see how, and I don't really feel like trying anyway, to go back and try to make good friends of them. Deb is about to get married, I think, and Cindy is going to be living on her own for the first time since I've known her, and I just get the feeling I don't fit in with her anymore.

So I'm isolated in my life for the first time in a completely new way. I don't have any friends - only acquaintances.

I view it as temporary. But it does suck, this place I am right now in life. Not unusually, I'm optimistic that it'll evolve over time, even as I think of this life as so meaningless that I wouldn't mind dying almost every day. Strange, I know.

I would trade everything I've ever had in life, and everything I could ever have in the future, to switch places with Jean.