There are feelings that are too big for words.

Pre-Script: I just want to note that I know a lot of my posts are like this, but this one in particular is more of a journal entry than a blog post, so I’m giving it to you… not really for any particular reason, other than I thought it might resonate. I’m not asking you to comfort me, or for solutions, I just… wanted to feel seen, I guess. Or thought that maybe sharing would help somebody else who feels the same way for whatever reason feel a little less alone. But as I always say, but often do, I’ll probably take it down in a week anyway.

There are feelings that are too big for words. Too big for any amount of tears or anger to put a dent in. There are wounds that are too deep to touch, to even get close to, with the scalpel of language.

But eventually, even those feelings, the way-to-big-to-fit-in-your-chest feelings, even they, given enough time, get old. If you carry a burden for long enough, no matter how big it is, at some point it just becomes your new normal. You don’t get a choice in the matter, it just happens. 

It’s a matter of survival, it’s just what humans do. We adapt because it’s the only way we can survive. So we make our circumstances normal, no matter what they are, no matter how strange they are, no matter how different they are from what we’ve known before, because the alternative is giving up, and giving up just isn’t in our DNA. If it was, there would be no humans. 

We are descended, all of us, from a long line of people who no matter how much shit life threw at them, no matter how deep their suffering was, they didn’t give up. You might call it a virtue, you might call it idiocy, or maybe just masochism, who knows. But whatever it is, it’s in us, all of us, woven into the fabric of who we are from the day we’re born. 

But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. It doesn’t numb the pain, it just transforms that pain into our new reality, like we’re boulders rolling down a hill and bits of us continue to get chipped away until there’s nothing left, and then our story ends. 

But sometimes you lose a piece so big that you can’t even really roll anymore, you just clumsily topple in a generally downward direction, and you can’t ignore it because you’re not rolling anymore, like the other rocks, and you’re moving unpredictably, now, colliding with and chipping away at the normal, well-rounded boulders, despite your best intentions. You become the boulder equivalent of a loose screw or something, and you can’t control it, but you keep rolling because maybe you hope that eventually you’ll be the right shape again and you’ll be smaller, yes, but at least you won’t be a safety hazard, anymore. And maybe you just miss what it felt like to roll downhill at a normal pace, in the right direction, without all the chaos and confusion. 

Maybe you just hope, even though you don’t really believe it’s possible, that maybe one day you’ll roll over some moss or something that fills in the parts you lost, so that you don’t have to lose any more pieces of yourself just to become something resembling a sphere, again. 

But more than anything you just wish you understood why this had to happen, and you hate yourself, you hate everything you’ve become because you feel that you didn’t get to choose, that something was stolen from you that you’ll never get back, and you just want to remember what it feels like to be whole. And you’re so fucking tired of making excuses for the boulders who ran into you, that they also had pieces missing, because their missing pieces weren’t your fault and you were just to fucking naiive to notice that they might want to try and take a chunk out of you to fill in their own missing pieces. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t feel like me, anymore. I haven’t for a long time. And I see now that I never will. 

So… who am I, then?