When I asked in Monday’s post how to survive this, how to go on, the response from many of you was to just put one foot in front of the other. So that’s what I’m doing here, with writing, because I still don’t have a clue what to say, but I feel like I have to keep writing or I may just stop entirely, and lose this thread I’m holding onto connecting me to a network of support I know I can’t afford to lose right now.
I might end up sounding slightly incoherent. I might sound that way for a while. I apologize in advance for that.
There aren’t enough words to thank all of you for your comments, twitter messages, and emails. I’ll never be able to respond to all of them, but know that every single one made a difference, makes a difference, and has truly helped me to keep my head above water the past few days. Who knew the internet could be used as a flotation device? For me, right now, it is.
Everyone keeps asking me how I am. My standard answer is: I don’t know. That seems closest to the truth of things. Much of the time I feel like I’m underwater. That I’ve been dropped into this dim, sound-muted alien world, my surroundings rippling in front of me like a mirage, like something that seems real, but isn’t. It takes me twice as long to do anything as it did before — every movement seems labored, the simplest thought like a puzzle I have to break down and process bit by bit. Everything feels strange and different somehow. I don’t know how to explain it.
Sometimes I find myself involuntarily staring off into space. I’m cycling pretty rapidly between emotionally dead zombie and flailing, overwrought basketcase. I don’t know if that’s normal or not, or if there is a ‘normal’ for all of this. It’s weird, the things that make me crumple into the fetal position are oftentimes small and trivial-seeming. I’ve been busying myself with trying to cut some of my expenses down, knowing that financially we’re soon going to be stretched pretty thin, supporting two households, and in the process of trying to see if we could downgrade our internet provider’s hosting plan I noted that our account had been created in 2002. And then I was sobbing, just sobbing. It’s the year our daughter was born. The year we bought our first home. It’s so hard to think of those things now. To think that life became this one.
We haven’t yet sat down and talked with M. The thought of doing that, it’s like examining a diagram laying out your own personal hell, knowing you have no choice but to create it, to summon into being the worst possible thing you can ever imagine. On the advice of a friend who’d recently been through this, we’re waiting until we have a concrete plan in place, so that we can explain to her in very specific terms what this means and how things will be different. In the meantime, we’re trying to maintain normalcy as much as that’s possible.
But I know she knows something is wrong. Of course she does. On Monday I saw a strange expression drift across her face at one point, and so asked her “What’s wrong?” She looked at me blankly for a moment, and then her brow knotted in confusion: “I don’t know,” she said, plaintively. I put my arms around her and pulled her up onto my lap, and tried not to cry.
