The Calm before the storm

Today was a difficult day, for no reason but it was. I had no temptations to smoke but there was no lack of problems. I started my morning randomly bursting into tears, for no reason, over the stupidest thing. And as long as I kept busy through out the day I was fine. I tried everything to avoid the unknown upsetting emotion inside of me; I cooked, I made candles from old candles, I sewed, and then I cooked again, but the moment I sat down to watch a movie with my family it was like the tears were waiting for an excuse to come out. After time with my family had ended and my alone time began the tears overtook me. I just started cluelessly balling. I started to realize that it is my overwhelming frustration that has built up inside of me begging for release that overcame my stubbornness. I also realized that I am apparently going through another stage of grief, depression. As like every person that deals with some sort of loss in their life we think that we are the exception to the rule, it wasn't until I looked up the stages of grief that I realized that I was dealing with them. I didn't realize it because before every stage there was the calm feeling deep inside that made me feel that I was over everything and then another stage hit. Well, today depression hit. Thanks! And it really makes me mad. Why you say, this is normal. Not for me. I pride myself on being able to hold my head up high and keep smiling through everything. I was able to for years in my terrible relationship, why not now? It makes it all the more frustrating for me. I know that life is not fair and I am not looking for a pity party but why is it that good people get hurt and bad people get all the riches of the world.
One of the things I have been doing is working with the homeless and the last outreach I worked this man walked up to me and was thoroughly upset with what we were doing for these people. This man had a warm, nice house in a not so cheap area of town and he was so mean to these people that had nothing but the the things in their hands and these are good people, that have had misfortune find them, yet this man was willing to destroy this brief moment of happiness we were bringing, why? Because it was out of his comfort zone. This man really upset me. I just don't understand people. This story reminded me of how mean people can be to undeserving people.
Back to the stages of grief. I was really shocked to read through the stages. Not because I had never heard of them before, but because I saw scenarios of my life playing out as I read each stage. The good thing is depression is number 4 out the 5 and number 5 is the one I long for, Acceptance.
In reading this article on grief two interesting things stood out to me. The first one being "nurture yourself, no one else can do it but you". Wow, for years I have been so focused on taking care of someone else that I forgot how to nurture myself and the past couple of months I have been turning to other sources of nurturing. The other point was "Allow yourself to grieve and give yourself as much time as you need to adjust to what has happened". This stood out to me because I have been trying to rush the process, convincing myself over and over again that I am over it, but I'm not. The one thing that keeps me going is knowing that one day I will truly be over it and abundantly happy again.

For once in my life knowledge is comfort.