Tonight I sat back and spent a little bit of time just thinking about the condition of my heart. I tried to let the images and feeling just come to me. My brain is equal parts scattered and exhausted these days; any sort of meditation is difficult. One thought did come to me that was new: my heart feels a bit like a sloth (the animal) right now. Out of sync with the rest of the world. Tomorrow will mark 17 months – 1 month shy of a full year and a half – since Sara died. Time feels so strange now. I know that life is still going and the world is still turning, but my heart is operating at a different pace, on a different wavelength, a different vibration.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m not going to be someone who “rebounds” from the losses I experienced quickly. But even 17 months out from Sara’s death, and 20 months out from George’s death, it still feels like it could have been yesterday.
In some ways, it feels like it’s getting harder – another image I got was that of my heart in armor, or in a protective shield or box or sorts. Not just protecting it from the world, but from me as well. Life feels so much more ordinary now – 17 months out, 12.5 of that working from home – days blend into each other and I find myself being hard on myself. (I talked more about this in another recent post, about how I need to be kinder to myself.) Sometimes I have a harder time connecting to my grief even when I want to. The pandemic, my grief, current events, my anxiety-prone personality with perfectionist tendencies… it takes it’s toll, and my heart needs some protection.
I almost feel like I’m splitting into two – the “ordinary” me who is stuck trying to function in the day to day world on one hand, and my armored sloth of a heart on the other, just needing to do its own thing at it’s own pace, and needing to be protected. My poor nervous system is on overdrive trying to figure everything out and keep all the pieces together – and that’s probably driving a lot of my exhaustion. My last therapy session actually evolved into a discussion of the vagus nerve and some things I might do to try and provide some relief.
Relief would be nice – I’m not entirely sure what that would look like, but I know my heart and the rest of me could use some. For now I’ll just focus on turning in to bed for tonight and taking a page from my dogs’ book – they’ve been snoozing on the loveseat for the last half hour.