This is.... a blank page. Kind of appropriate, given that my intention is to write about grief. The blank space left by loss is very similar to this white box.
I'm told I can choose how to view the blank page. Perhaps it could be inviting, an opportunity, a space to recreate, to start from scratch, to do something entirely new. It isn't, for me. It is currently an imposing, endless gap that I am obliged to fill with something meaningful.
Like the opportunity to be a child. I don't remember much about early childhood, and what I do remember is founded in 'the right thing', shrouded in fear and threats of greater loss, covered by anger, and weighed down by the immense responsibility that I felt for keeping people THERE. For THERE read 'alive', in one particularly significant case. I didn't really know what I was missing, but I did feel a wistfulness for it when I spent time in friends' houses, where they were parented, held, listened to, comforted. Or taken to do normal kid stuff, like eating burgers at McDonalds or flinging themselves around on bouncy castles. For some reason I pretended not to like that stuff. Denial of self, taking on the preferences of those who required me to be Not A Child. I didn't know how to talk to other children, and my friends were generally at arms length even then - adults were easier, their expectations clearer, and much easier to fit into.
But this isn’t meant to be a lament for the way things were, it’s an expression of the sadness and loss I now feel for what wasn’t. And it’s huge. I keep saying I need to let go of it, accept and move on, because nothing is going to take me back in time to rectify that stuff, and even now, as I battle with myself to try to give my own child what I missed, I am ENVIOUS of her opportunity to have it (even if I am, as I often suspect, failing to offer it effectively).
The blank space that this particular grief creates is different from that of the removal of something - it's not a blank page because something has been deleted - though I'm familiar with that one too, the at times gut-wrenching, agonising, loss of something that WAS there, and was precious. I felt more pain around that type of loss - but on some levels there was comfort, and there was an element of it being tangible and easier to understand. This grief over what wasn't has a more ephemeral quality - I can't quite pin it down, perhaps in part because there are no little pieces to hold on to, to remember. I hadn't thought about it until recently, until I did the very insignificant thing of watching a TV series where grief and loss played a central role - and noticed the snippets of laughter and joy as people remembered good things about the person who was gone. I know, even among the very messy situation around it, that those moments of laughter and joy sit in the blank space increasingly as time sands down the sharp edges of loss, where there is something or someone real to grieve.
But now, as I sit trying to make some sense of the enormous sense of loss I feel every time I try to be fully present with my bright, confident, spontaneous daughter, I can't get hold of any of it - there are no memories to draw strength from, no sense of what was lost, just a longing for something that never happened - but I don't know how to alter that, because I don't really know what it was. And I pull back from finding out because I'm so fucking scared all the time, and have such a strong aversion to being with my younger self - but it makes no sense because the feeling is disgust, and that has no place in a child's view of people - yet it can't be adult either because there are no real grounds for it. But I hate her. It feels so forced to try to take care of her, to try to connect with that wicked, whiney, self-absorbed child. And I know that isn't my voice, that voice came from somewhere else, but it takes over every time I try to sit with myself, in what should be a neutral space, where I as a child should be allowed the opportunity to be, to exist - and I shy away again as disgust takes over and threatens even more damage.
What am I looking for? I'm looking for me, as a child, to be taken care of. And it's my job. But I don't know how to do it, because it hasn't been done, really, and I somehow can't get past the rejecting response that immediately comes. So I keep looking for it outside, wanting someone to teach me, then I find it such a comfort to have someone else do it, that I want to hang onto that and soak up more, try to internalise it - and run into the angry, uncompromising, perfectionist version of myself that says I'm not allowed to take it, and have to learn to do it myself - which in the flawed perspective that lives in that mindset means angrily shutting out everyone else to snarl at myself that I can't even look after me well enough to be of any use - and help is rejected because I HAVE TO DO IT EVEN IF I DON'T KNOW HOW, and I grudgingly try all kinds of things that are supposedly looking after myself - like making lists, and achieving things and taking time to read a book and getting out to run and staying at home by myself for the sake of having 'space' which just makes me feel guilty and lonely.
...I've said enough. I moved pretty fast from grief to self-hatred there - which is no great surprise, since that's where it generally leads. Well actually it's pretty much where everything leads. Maybe grief is something that needs more of the blank space I defined it as. Maybe I don't actually need to fill it, because filling it led to something more injurious... Maybe I can just sit in the space, and let it hurt if that's where it goes to...
