Floating between bliss and anguish; carried by reverence and fortitude; each day we live and we die within this same realm; as much as we strive to break this habit, we are one or all of physically afraid, emotionally protected, or psychologically incapable; breaking down the defenses we have built, those that keep us within this limbo, is disruptive but in time you will see, is necessary.
It's like an untamable animal clawing at a cage, an unchartable storm with ceaseless thunder and lightening, an eternal hangover full of transient thoughts and half hearted efforts. It's a chronic condition, lingering in your system and attacking you at all the right and wrong moments, removing you from a world you once knew and contorting your soul into a foreign object. It's having all of the windows down at 27 degrees, watching the snow fall into the car and onto your skin, and feeling none of it. It's a numbness so raw that many will never engage; if not told it was necessary to sit with it, I myself would run as far away from it as possible. It is debilitating, exhausting, never ending, and relieving all at the same time. Grief isn't sadness, it's not anger or shock; it is an all consuming longing for something or someone who does not exist in the physical world anymore, it is learning how to navigate the world again after being broken down and torn apart, it is an acceptance of a new reality, a new normal, where your life is drastically while effortlessly different. I sat in this spot for two hours with grief, then I took a left, drove another 30 minutes, and found myself back at the same spot I began. You can't escape it, you can try to avoid it, you can try to distract from it, but no matter what, you will always come back to it, therefore you must make friends with it. Accept that grief is a part of your story, it is an inevitable dead end you will encounter throughout your life. Treat it as you would happiness, or anger, by recognizing, accepting, and internalizing it. And so my birthday was great, and I do feel older because I finally had enough courage to let it in, I finally made friends with grief, and I'm still standing.