The Rising

There is a hierarchy of shit in life.

I'm sorry, sometimes there's no other way to say that.

You have the low level stuff...paper cuts, forgetting your grocery list, bad hair days, stepping in a puddle and soaking the hems of your jeans when you have to stay in them for a while longer.

Then it escalates, bringing you to flat tires, reflux, arguments, forgetting to pay a bill.

From there, it shoots into another stratosphere full of malfunctioning body parts, bureaucracy designed to drown you in minutiae, familial dissolution, bankruptcy.

And then there's the really big stuff.  Terrorism.  Disease. Natural disasters. Suffering.  Death.

 This year has brought a little bit from each tier.  More than I'd like from the last two, especially the death and dying.

ALL SET.  WITH THE DEATH. AND DYING.

I've been absent for five months, not because I've been tooling around Europe, refining my French skills, learning Italian dialects, photographing the rooftops of Prague, clicking my heels (hahahaha) on the cobbled avenues of Bruges, visiting the British Isles in search of familial roots, not redecorating the country house or using Pinterest to plan my elopement, but because I've been busy trying not to go off the friggin' deep end.

In case the previous decades hadn't got the job done, for the record, may I just state that this year.  Has kicked. My. Ever loving. ASS.

Again, there's just not a better way to express this.

The year began - on day one - with the death of a former schoolmate, which shook me to my core.  January ended with a death which rattled me even further with the unexpected loss of a most beloved friend.  Two more deaths between February first and March 31st.  My uncle died in April after a years long battle with cancer.  The hits just did not stop.  Come November, and word of the death of another friend from High School.

Can it just stop for a little while?

Can the suckage just STOP for a spell?

I realize at a certain age, these things begin to happen to people the age of our peers, rather than our parents and grandparents.  Or should I say, in addition to our parents and grandparents.

Apparently, this is that age.

I'm not enjoying it.

Because the wrinkles and the white - I say, WHITE - hairs, and the other physical indignities of aging belie my inner age.

Inside, I feel pretty much the same way I did at age 16.  With a little more cynicism in the mix, maybe, and less wide-eyed optimism...certainly more worn patches on my psyche, and scars on my body, but mostly, still me.  And no more capable of grappling with so much change, so much loss, so much worry any better than I was then.  I might be a slightly better actor now, but when I lose the ability to act and hold it together, I REALLY LOSE IT and go entirely to pieces.
There has been a certain beauty in the raw honesty of losing it and having to rebuild, recreate, reestablish myself.  But no matter how I shift or reshape my perspective in an attempt to better navigate the world, I am still me.  The falling apart?  Is going to happen.

I'm fortunate to have people in my life who will stick by me through the perpetual cycle.  I'm sorry, incidentally, if they are reading this. I don't like being this way, but it is what it is.

It's all very phoenix-y.  Getting ragged, smoldering, then bursting into flames, being comprehensively destroyed from the inside out then rebuilding from a tender, vulnerable renewed state.

Anyway.

Personally, my gains have been fragile; the losses have been robust.  And I will not be sorry to see 2014 leave.