Rough Week

I still haven’t sorted out how I feel about God, but this week surely hasn’t pushed me in any direction. I feel like my emotional endurance is being tested, run through a wringer. The very day I start to believe I can handle what’s been happening to me, some new element is introduced and things get harder again. Most recently this happened the evening of two Thursdays ago. Curiosity had got the better of me as I sought and discovered information I had previously hoped to avoid until I was ready. Turned out I wasn’t ready. I tried to react and deal with it on Saturday, but instead I learned a greater sense of the shape of things and everything got worse. Much worse.

I spent the next few days absorbing this new reality and getting back on my feet. My world had been spun and unraveled once more, and it was time to take new measures to rebuild myself as a solid and stable person. Sometimes you get sick and have to throw up before you can start feeling better, and I had a few rounds of this state both physically and emotionally in the intervening days. I was just starting to feel a reemergence of stability when a wholly unbidden event happened early Wednesday evening. It shook me, but I didn’t derail. Then it happened again Thursday morning, only longer. Then it happened again Friday morning, with a twist. After that, a word like “derail” can’t describe how I feel without the accompanying sounds and imagery of a train slipping off its track, flaming steel twisted and broken and mangled beyond recognition.

It’s as if someone is repeatedly dragging me to the limit of my tolerance and endurance and dancing all over it. I find myself wondering if I’m being tested, my actions and reactions being gauged and measured and weighed. I’ve been sized up to such a degree my auditor could fit me with a perfectly sized suit or coffin with equal aplomb. But to what purpose? How long does this test last? Am I being prepared for my future, or is this punishment for my past?

It’s a common human reaction to take for granted our fortunes, but we seek explanations for our tribulations. Selfishly we forget about previous days of our lives and start counting our karmic balance beginning only with the recent misfortunes, and we feel ourselves in disproportionate debt. We wonder why this happens and what we’re supposed to get from it and whether and when restitution will be paid. We feel owed, and why shouldn’t we? I’m not the only one who can speak to the experience that the worst days and events of my life in no way measure up to the best. There is no single happy memory that has impacted me in the way the sad ones have.

So I’ve come to a few conclusions. Primarily I’ve learned that happiness and sadness are cousins of creation and destruction. Happiness is built over a long period of time, made up of elements large and small. In a relationship happiness is built upon kisses and holding hands. It is built over dinner tables and glasses of wine. It’s kissing your loved one goodnight, and seeing that face first thing in the morning. It’s supporting and being supported through physical illness or emotional despair. It’s sharing experiences like a restaurant, a walk, a sit in a park, or a political debate. It’s all this and a thousand other elements that take months and years to build, and their slow progression makes it a simple matter to take it all for granted.

But taking happiness for granted can allow happiness to rot, and in the space of one conversation it can all come crashing down. All the building blocks crumble and can never again be used to rebuild. Nothing remains but a pile of ash and debris upon a cracked foundation. A relationship’s worth of broken experiences and charred memories that took two people to construct cannot be reconstituted with the efforts of just one.

Which leads me to my next conclusion.

There comes a point where “why” is irrelevant. Philosophical debates about the nature of existence no longer matter. If I’m being tested or not, I still have rent to pay and a cat to feed. Perhaps I’m being galvanized in preparation for some future hardship, but prepared or not it’s still happening and it doesn’t change my day-to-day routine. There may be a greater purpose, but if there is I can’t see it and if there’s none I’ll never know for sure and either way I still have to clean the laundry and the dishes and the floor. I still have to go to work tomorrow. I still have to find a new apartment and start school in September and if God has a plan or purpose for me it makes no damn bit of difference to these facts and realities and challenges I have to meet every day of my life. Only when the facts and realities and challenges are handled will I allow myself to lament over what I’ve lost, what I’m missing, and what I do not have.

I took our relationship for granted and it rotted and crumbled. I’m sad over it and I suffer for it every day. If I were wise enough to discover the words and deeds that would return me into her heart as solidly as she is still in mine, there would be no effort too strenuous or tedious or painful for me to attempt, nor a path too arduous or dangerous for me to traverse. The pain of losing her and living without her is far worse than any pains I may take in the process of getting her back.

I’m not that wise.

But I refuse to allow my pain and loss to negatively impact the rest of my life. I will not fail to live up to the accomplishments and dreams I’ve borne into reality. I will not lose more than I’ve already lost.

I’ll do what I have to do, and I’ll be proud. Just don’t ask me to be happy.