When Big Things Happen

There are things that happen in your life. Things that you discover. Or rather, things that discover you. Things that happen without your willingness to say yay or nay. Things that seem inevitable, tragic, fated. All those big words. And even if what happens to you always seemed destined to happen to you, you are not prepared for it when it does happen. Because what we expect will happen never feels like we think it will feel. It feels real. It feels non-dramatized. It feels like the true story that the film is based on. It’s undiluted life.

Nothing bad has happened directly to me but to someone close to me. Something health-related. Of course, when something bad happens to someone you love, you feel it. Not like they feel it, but how you imagine they feel, in a way, digested, revised, translated through your heart and mind. I imagine their toughness, their strength, their resolve, being tested. And I know how hard that must be for them. Or I can imagine. Because when something hard happens to a strong person, it is sorta like, the ways in which they are weak are revealed. But underneath that weakness lies their strength. Their vulnerability is their strength. Their ability to show their wounds and say, this is how I have been hurt. And this is the way I am going to heal. The open air, the openness, will create the emotional scabs. So to speak.

Again, nothing bad has happened directly to me. But to someone close to me. The strongest person I have ever met. And the person who has given me so much of my own strength.

There exists a zillion and a half unknowns at this point. Anxiety, therefore, is the enemy. We are taking each bit of information as it comes. Digesting them, making conclusions, or more accurately, assumptions. It is not logical, emotionally or, um, logically, to make leaps ahead and start thinking about the terribly and terrifyingly grand “What Ifs.” What if my laptop exploded right now into a thousand chocolate covered sprinkles? What if my mirror turned purple and revealed my image as a 60 year old? What if the capital of Alaska was Honolulu? It does us no good to think about such things. Because it doesn’t provide solutions for the present. It doesn’t give us the options we need to feel differently about things. It just presents us with impossible situations that have not occurred and need not ever occur, really.

I can’t go into specifics here. I can’t say who has the health problem or what it is or anything like that because, well, it’s personal. Well, it’s personal because it’s not about me. I will say pretty much whatever about myself on here. But when it comes to people I love and their non-kink, non-sexy related affairs—I feel the need to be somewhat silent. In fact, I’m weary of mentioning even THIS much on here, because it really doesn’t have much to do with the thesis of this blog. But I needed a platform to display some of my feelings. And this seemed like a good place to do that. For whatever reason.

It is the strangest thing when something BIG happens. And all the other things you thought were big suddenly become very small, and actually for me, quite manageable. It’s not that things become less important, but their importance just shrinks compared to the big thing that just happened. And I really start to use all my faculties, like all my LIVING faculties, to the best of my ability. I was talking to a sibling the night I found out, and I said that right before I discovered the news, I was starving. Now I couldn’t eat a thing. But I felt alive, alert, awake. And he told me, You’re in warrior mode. Which was so true. My caveman self felt: There’s a lion chasing you. Or the barbarians from the next village over are pillaging your land, you must take action! That’s what my body was thinking. That’s what it was doing. Warrior mode. I started cleaning my house like a madwoman. Fast. Sweating. I started throwing things out. With tears running down my face. But strong. I know, it sounds silly. But I was in warrior mode, and my apartment was my land that I had to protect. Then my boyfriend came over. With movies, brownies, a flogger, himself. And it was somewhat like someone had come to save me from the lion. Or at least treat me after the lion had bit me in the leg and scratched at my arms and legs. In real present life, what happened was this: I could be present with my sadness while unloading some of it on to my boyfriend. And that felt very good. He continues to impress me. He really does know how to step up.

Yesterday was only the day after I found out the big news. It was a very long day. I was very tired. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I sort of hid away and spent hours doing very little. Thinking only about the crisis. A perpetual lump in my throat. I felt the need to go shopping. It’s interesting that such age-old gendered activities like cleaning and shopping would make their way to the forefront of my coping mechanisms. But then, finally, after what seemed an extremely long day, I had dinner with my best friend. We hadn’t hung out in a long time and we had much to talk about BESIDES the current crisis: vacations, weddings, work drama, new jobs, etc. It was good to hunker down with her and spill my guts and laugh about the absurdity of it all. About how these things can happen to anyone. They happen to me. They happen to the ones I love. They actually happen.

That really goes back to what I was saying way up there at the beginning of the post. That when these things happen, nothing can prepare you for them. You hope you will react healthily: with a good dose of sympathy, patience, and logical problem-solving. But you never know. These kinds of things elicit strange reactions from people. So far, everyone I know has reacted as expected. But we’re only at the beginning of the journey of dealing with this. The event has already changed our lives. And now it is time to continue on with our lives, as we were, and yet, as completely different human beings. To be attentive to the crisis, and yet to demand normalcy. I hope I can do it. I hope. I hope. For them. And for me.