Life happens.
If you're lucky, life happens joyously for the most part. Sometimes it happens lazily.
Sometimes if trouble occurs it's navigable, doesn't linger or leave too many scars behind.
Sometimes though, life surges in with cyclonic force, picking you up and shaking you around the way a hyperactive Dachshund might shake a favorite toy. If you're lucky, it doesn't last long. If you're not lucky, then you hold on for dear life until the upset ends, and are allowed only the briefest of inhales before it starts all over again. And again, and again.
A decade ago I had plans. The decade itself, however, had other plans. Ten years later, I'm working on stitching my life back together and not quite sure I have enough thread. There's only so much shaking a toy can take
Hence the reason my blog has been neglected for as long as it has. I apparently made a valiant attempt to attend to it in 2018, popping on 5 posts (as opposed to the 23 I put up in 2013), but even after only four years, 2018 seems like such a long time ago. Let's see if I can be a little more frequent this time.
Let's start by discussing anger, and bitterness, and, grief, and frustration. You know those complicated emotions that rise up to slap the crap out of you for hours or days or weeks or years. The power of these emotions terrify us because they're so uncontrollable and yet sometimes they're all we have to roll on. They're all the energy we can muster.
When you're knocked down enough, hope evaporates. When hope evaporates, faith struggles. Your belief in anything comes under fire. Love and joy come to seem ridiculous by virtue of their sweetness. There's nothing even remotely sweet about what you're enduring and in the midst of it, it doesn't seem as anything sweet will ever find its way back into your life.
So, after enough of this, there comes a point when anger truly is the only thing holding you together. It's the only thing getting you out of bed and forcing you through life every day. And it's the only armor you have to protect you when life beats you down again.
The power of anger is glorious and it can serve you well, though sometimes at a great cost to others. It can lead to the creation of great works, it can lead to movements, and change for the better. Even on a personal level, sufficient fury can help you vow, "I'm so pissed off, I will not go down without a fight!"
But only if channeled correctly. Which can be a difficult thing when you're in the maelstrom, still raw and ragged from the struggle just to hold on. Will you control anger or anger control you?
And once you make it through that maelstrom, if you make it through that maelstrom, will you be able to leave that darkness behind? Will you be able to reconnect with that person from so very long ago who was sure everything would be okay before it wasn't okay and continued for so long? Negativity becomes a habit hard to break. An instinctual response when you've lived for years waiting for the next shoe to drop. Can those bits you've allowed to freeze over be warmed back to life?
There's the person you were, and the person you became to get through. The challenge after all this time will be to find the real you.
