“Would you prefer to be blind and live without knowing, or would you prefer to know?”

I was asked this question today while stumbling around in a wave of depression. My mouth had that cotton ball feeling that we get when we wake up dehydrated, in stale air, or hungover.

“To know,” I said as I looked back down at the jewelry on my fingers and began to move it from side to side as if it was out of place.

It was almost seven years ago that I lost my boyfriend to a rare form of sarcoma. Three years after that, I lost my mother to breast cancer. Just as I felt like I was getting better or “fine” or telling myself that I was “fine” enough that I was starting to believe it, something else would catapult me into the pits. I was constantly overly sensitive and emotional, and I cared way too much about what everyone around me thought about me to the point that I hollowed out my own sense of self.

I can’t begin to analyze the steps, hours, days, or pivotal moments that made me feel alive again, but slowly and surely, I felt that I could finally see. I started forming my own opinion again, I began to rationalize more than antagonize, and I started to become more confident than anxious. I never could put together whether anxiety was a side effect of loss or if I was an anxious individual to begin with, but it did start to lessen as the grief faded, or so I thought it was fading.

All of these gradual awakenings began to turn sour inside of me. One would assume that I would be gratified, but I felt that I was grieving all over again.

I was arising into myself, once again, lifting up above the darkness and facing the one and only thing that I couldn’t escape—reality.

I began to grieve the darkness. Why, how, and when did I ever allow myself to get there?

I began to grieve the people who I allowed myself to get too close to when I stopped noticing the red flags because I had become one of them.

I began to grieve humanity as I had known it since I had allowed it to descend right before my eyes without a care in my heart because my heart had already been taken.

I began to grieve for those who were also blind and unaware of reality as it really is because the trenches had never taken them there, but I also grieve for the idea of them having to go there in order to comprehend.

I don’t wish to go back to those dark days of perplexity, where I lay in my own suffering, hoping that the world would take me with it. But, I do still feel insurmountable jabs of it while looking back at the road I went down in order to get to where I am, and I am realizing that reality is not what you make of it; it just is this.

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