Sadness. F#@*, it sucks!

We are all just humans muddling our way through life and trying to figure out our place in this world. Some days are beautiful and others knock you for a six. Heartbreak and loss are those experiences we have to go through and can send you at Mach speed into a pit of despair.

So what do you do when you’re in a state of overwhelming sadness?

Well, I’ve started to share and to write. And let me state I’m not a full time writer. I can string a copy together when required, but it certainly isn’t my current day job. Forgive the misplaced commas and all the broken syntax rules. They’re as messed up as my current emotions.

I’m hoping writing stops the hundreds of thoughts that are running amok between my neurons and causing a debilitation in my body. I’m hoping it creates some order and structure to what I’m feeling and helps me to somehow just feel a little bit better. Even if it’s just for a moment.

You see, I lost the person that I believed was the “one”.

Yes, the “one”.

Quite a proclamation in a world of so many possibilities, and highly questionable from the “one” looking back at our journey from his experience.

Just to provide clarity it’s a break-up. Not death. And not to make a comparison between the two. Loss for any of us is traumatic. Just fucking horrendous. Heartbreak is violent and torturous to your existence. It beats you every which way and the pain you feel inside is excruciating.

I get that I am grieving. I understand the process. I can intellectually comprehend the human condition of grief. One can simply search on Google and there are thousands of articles and videos that can tell you how to deal with this terrible affliction, and how through time it will eventually subside – I will state though, sadness never goes away in its entirety, it’s always lurking in the shadows.

You see I’ve been here before; I know this feeling. It’s familiar.

So, my question is, if sadness is familiar to me, why does it get worse each time I experience it?

Besides the current situation, I think the answer is two-fold. Residue and surrender.

I’m a quite a flawed human that makes and has made so many mistakes, some consciously, some not. I admit that a large part of this loss is directly linked to my actions, decisions and shortcomings. So, the sadness is not only at the loss and failing the person I love, but also a sadness for failing myself. So, sadness often has a root in one’s own recurring self-blame and running script.

For me it’s the familiar failings that are the residue. The sticky remains of previous failures and losses that are subconsciously stuck somewhere in you. The small amount of sadness that always remains after each time you have managed to find your way out of the darkness of the last trauma.

The residue resurfaces with a great force and knocks you for a six, adding additional chaos to your already derailed mind. As if the ‘why’? The ‘what if?’, the ‘if only’ aren’t enough to bare, you are now dealing with the absolute loathing of self. Doubting your value and self-worth and recounting all the failures of the past.

The thought of carrying on is at war with your mind and sadly, some of us don’t carry on. I admit, there has been one moment in my life when this did seem like a viable alternative and an option this time that crossed my mind when the sadness has been at its worst. I found the inner strength the last time not to succumb by calling a friend and I did the same this time.

‘I should have’, ‘I could have’, are re-occurring beratements. (When in truth the words are, ‘I should not have’.)

You feel like an outright failure in your sadness, and that just makes you even more fucking sad! If you don’t feel like a failure to yourself, you feel like you failed the other person. And the ultimate admission to self is you simply failed again! As you get older I think it may be a bit worse, the cumulative effect of age and time. What the fuck!

The residue needs to be scraped and this re-occurring failing script needs to be shredded.

I want to be practical and logical about this all. The Google search self-help way. But it’s a bit difficult to feel better reading and following a ten point ‘getting over it’ list when you surrendered so much of yourself in a deliberate attempt to never experience this feeling of sadness again. (I get that it’s Utopian to never experience sadness again, but I contain the sentiment to this experience).

That part where I said, ‘I’m flawed’ and ‘make mistakes, some consciously, some not’. I really did try and surrender in overcoming my flaws and be very conscious to my shortcomings. Granted, I’m forty-five and the adage, “Can’t teach a new dog new tricks’ may apply, but fuck, I worked damn hard in surrendering to my internal opponents. I did kill a few. But I made a lot of mistakes still. And these mistakes will provide for a lot more introspection and self-correction in my healing process and life going forward.

More importantly, I surrendered at a relationship level, into another human, way deeper than I have done before, and that makes the failure of this really disheartening and desperate for me. To surrender into another person requires letting go of a lot of your own and natural desire for control. I admit, surrender is slightly skewed because it’s measured by yourself and not necessarily something seen by the other person. For it to be seen, your actions have to match your sentiment.

So, yep, I didn’t get it 100% correct, I didn’t even pass. But if surrender is about accepting, receiving, about breaking down those inner walls that block your ability to see what is in front of you, I was getting better at it. I had effected the change. I still made mistakes, held up parts of the wall, and got so much wrong, but I was hoping I had more time on my side to surrender even more into the “one”. I thought this relationship was the ‘forever’ one. That the journey was going to be longer. Longer to allow for more surrender, more evolving and growing.

So, when I combine the residue and the surrender to the reality that he is no longer in my life in the way I had pictured, hoped and longed for, it is the most horrendous feeling of sadness and despair. Hard to deal, hard to comprehend and hard to survive. It just fucking sucks!

I am at best in this sad state able to fill a swimming pool with my tears, at my mediocre, barely functional, and at worst trying to purge, claw, hit, rage against and numb the feeling inside.

I have always said when the feeling of sadness hits at its worst, it’s like the scene in Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, ‘Alien’. The scene when the creature jumps out from John Hurt’s stomach. Its horrific, grotesque and just darn right scary. That’s sadness for me. It’s this feeling of this this alien lying in your core waiting to break through and devour your life force, and when it does you are lifeless to its existence and presence. Pretty much fucking dead!

This ‘Alien’ scene is my reality. But the sadness is not isolated to just that. Every moment I’m dealing with something else. Sadness in its quietest moment is raging an internal war. Shooting explosive shrapnel that is ricocheting and breaking through every part of my mind and killing every part of me that is seeking shelter. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to seek cover.

Whilst seeking cover one is dealing with;

Hysteria. Every second, thousands of questions, thousands of memory playbacks, thousands of conversations never had or to have, thousands of adventures never going to happen, and a million intimacies just gone.