The problem with putting things aside sometimes is in not just in the sense of loss and absense, but in the taking them up again, especially when those things that were misplaced represented a continuity of sorts which has now been broken. Rather than muddling over what was, or worse, what wasn't, it is probably best to just start.
I lost my voice for a while. I could not write, not here, not in a journal, not even on scraps of paper destined for immediate shredding. Words came but they were like a maelstorm, spinning around, taking control, eating me alive. Not being able to write is like losing your voice, as if you cannot speak, and if you are like me, a person who often can't pinpoint exactly what is going on in either my heart or head until I can put words to it, it was in a sense like losing oneself.
But even though I felt lost, the fog of silence was preferable to the tempest wroght by words. In that silence I was groping, waiting for a beacon of light. In words I was driven toward panic, toward anger, toward despair. I was clearly not ready for the conversation that words imply, the putting right and "making sense" of conscious reckoning.
I tend to be a leap-first kind of person by nature, despite being somewhat thoughtfully and philosophically inclined, and the ongoing struggle with patience has been, and undoubtedly will continue to be, the most difficult of life lessons to master. I probably never will master it. I thought I had made great progress. Losing a loved one slowly, over a long period of time, forces one to reach some accommodation with waiting. If one cannot embrace patience, perhaps one can achieve detente. But of course, detente is not a solution, merely a postponement. Patience with others does not imply patience with oneself.
I did not anticipate being blindsided by confusion. Knowing intellectually that moving forward often involves a step (or two) backward was no preparation for the actual fall, does not prepare one for the constant questioning of how one came to be the person one is, for the challenging of assumptions, for the clamoring of forgotten emotions, thoughts, wounds and joys that bound up threatening to overwhelm the fragile structure one has spent a lifetime creating.
It seems that there are times when silence is the only answer. It seems that I had forgotten that the seed must rest in the cold damp earth before it can martial enough energy for new shoots to emerge. Sometimes it is the attempt to take control that causes the most confusion, and the letting go that gets us what we need.
I am fine. The holidays were good. This blog is here, and once again so am I.