I can choose today to focus on all the hurt, and all the people who were so dedicated to imposing it for so many years, or, I can choose to focus on things I want to do from here forward. What they have done to me, their cruelty, their lies of omission, their silence, their secret language and how betraying that was, none of that will ever go away. Do I give them more power by focusing on their betrayals today? Or, do I try to focus on how I want to spend today? This is a day of my life I'll never have a chance to relive. I'm not sure what day it is, something like 47(365.25)+62+33. I think that's day 17,261.75. Who knows if I'm at the 90th percentile distribution of my days or the 50th or whatever. All I know is I'm here right now. What's something I can do today that is about something I need or want in my life?
Make some pie charts Elizabeth Kubler Ross is an expert on grief. According to her work, the accepted first stage of grief, generally, is denial. The second phase, as I recall, is anger. I keep waiting for these to happen. It has been many years though, and at this point, while I know I can look up the other three stages, and that some include mourning and sorrow, and guilt, they still, years later, seem irrelevant to my personal and professional situation, because it is all somehow blocked; the whole process feels oddly inaccessible to me because I keep failing to understand the awful cruelty that I never, ever deserved. In certain circumstances known as traumatic losses, Ms. Ross hypothesizes that the first stage isn't actually denial. Sometimes, we can't even begin to grieve because the trauma or injury isn't comprehensible. There are various circumstances where this could be possible: maybe it was somehow hidden from us what happ...