I honestly don't know how it can possibly be May already.
There are friends I have not seen in four months. New babies I haven't met yet. Phone calls I haven't returned. Emails I've ignored. Recitals I've forgotten to attend. This fog, this haze, has consumed me now for almost three months.
And yet, I'm better.
I guess me realizing how disconnected I've been is part of the being better. We can thank my patient, loving family and my awesome therapist for that.
Susan isn't coming back. My grief isn't going away. I have to find a place for both of these, and I'm getting there. Slowly.
If you knew Susan at all, even "just online" (which we all know she valued tremendously), then you know that one of the beautiful things about here - what drew people to her - was how she made you feel about yourself. She was selfless, kind, and even in her scientific socialness, she was a wonderful friend.
Now. Imagine that person was your best friend for years and years and heaped that love upon you like she did even her "just online" friends. Now. Imagine that love a million times stronger.
That's what is gone from my life.
The wake up call in therapy has been that I value myself so very little, and I spent a good part of my life surrounding myself with people who didn't value me either. Susan always valued me; she valued every living creature (I say as I shamefully admit I flushed a bully algae eater fish without a second thought because he was being a jerk to the other fish. Woosh. Goodbye.).
I get it now. Get, as in understand, not have adopted fully and graduated from all further therapy. I get that I have to start here. Deep within me. I have to realize that I wouldn't have had a friend like Susan if there wasn't something valuable about me.
Find the way to love myself. Sounds so trite and textbook doesn't it?
Maybe, but it's my calling now. Because when I can do that for myself, I can teach my children to do it to, and I want that very much. I want my children to know how valuable they are.
So much work to do. So so so much work.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
The work at hand
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You ARE so valuable. For so, so many reasons. I'm happy to send you a list if you want one. It's long.
ReplyDeleteGlad you are moving forward, life is so hard sometimes. You can do this!
ReplyDeleteI remember reading Susan's comments on some of your older blog posts written on hard times--she loved you so very fiercely and beautifully. And what she saw was true! I hope you find a way to see yourself as Susan did. What a gift it is to have such a friend.
ReplyDeleteMarty, I only know you'online' through Susan but even I value you. Even when you admit the 'not so perfect' parts of yourself I see that as beeing strong and brave and honest, and I think more of us need to be honest, and I think Susan saw that in you more than the rest of us. I am sorry she has gone from your life but totally agree with your therapist that Susan wouldnt have been your best friend since schooldays if she didn't see someone wonderful, the real you. hugs long distance
ReplyDeleteI believe that you INSPIRED Susan. A woman of such honesty and courage would not have surrounded herself with people who didn't inspire her, so it's not just that she saw worth in you because she saw value in all living things; you inspired her to live up to her ideals, which all her readers know were very high.
ReplyDeleteYou were thinking so deeply about the "work" ahead of you; valuing yourself now; creating a legacy of self-worth for the next generation. Could the "work" possibly be about honoring your value in the past, also, even if you the choices you made don't always sit so well with you?
Since Susan was such a lover of great literature, I'll take the liberty of sharing a poem, by David Ray, "Hope for the Past." (My apologies for the formatting not being the same as on the printed page.) Thank you for the role you played in making Suan who she was, a woman I didn't have the privilege to know, but still love. Susan has enriched my life deeply in many, many ways.
--Em
Thanks, Robert Frost
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
PS
ReplyDeleteHey, the poem formatting doesn't look so funky, after all, after I hit "publish"...It's the little things...