It’s not depression. My experience of depression carries the weight of hopelessness, like I’ve forgotten how to breathe and I can’t imagine ever being happy again. It’s not grief, at least not entirely. Grief carries the weight of judgment, a plaintive cry that It Shouldn’t Be This Way. I’ve seen too much and understand too much about humanity to be surprised by the violence and horror people can inflict upon one another.
No, what I’ve been feeling is sorrow, a deep, empathic sadness for the anguish, rage and fear that has been roiling beneath the surface of the world for so long and is finally bursting forth into the open, jagged and screaming.
It hurts. Oh, God, it hurts.
It seems everyone is bleeding, to one degree or another. Illusions of safety and security and control are being swept aside, the veils we hide behind torn asunder as we cling to them like a child clutching its ragged blanket.
It hurts.
And yet, I know better than to try to “fix it.” Not all brokenness is pathological. Sometimes the Old must shatter to make room for the New. Caterpillars don’t grown wings. Instead, they dissolve into amorphous goo, messy and disgusting, before re-forming into something completely different, beautiful and wondrous.
Our society is breaking up and breaking down. People are dying because of stubbornness and fear and an inability to step back and question the stories in their heads.
And yet, everybody dies.
Everybody.
I don’t know what will emerge from the chaos. I am hoping for something beautiful and wondrous. But for now, in this time of upheaval and dissolution, I give myself over to sorrow.