On Mourning Yourself, an excerpt

by SLY on January 18th, 2011

An excerpt from a letter…..

You talked a bit about depression and how at times you feel like a flood just hits you out of nowhere and that you think you should have dealt with it by now and how it feels intense and you asked if its that way with me.

Well, I don’t know the way in which you are mourning. I can guess but I’m not sure. And are you asking my experiences as it relates to mourning and death of loved ones or of the abuse? I suppose no matter, at times I do feel a flood of intensity that takes my breath away. I mainly feel that with the various deaths I’ve experienced. Some days I just miss James so much and I can’t focus or I’m so sadden by the loss of Tinu and I just don’t understand it. Or I just want my grandma back. I want her in her kitchen cooking tea cakes and pound cake. And it is intense and I guess I’ve learned that the intensity grows if I feed it. But if I feed it, it just gets darker.

Basically its my choice to mourn and to let that mourning dictate my life or just barely affect it. I hope I’m making sense. Some days I choose to be sad and a bit depressed and other days I choose to acknowledge it, experience it and move on. That lasting depressed feeling doesn’t last as long these days because I simply know better.

I know what I look like at my worse. I know what depressed suicidal Sheena looks like and its so not interesting. I can’t die because I’m overcome with grief or because I’m so miserable because my ex step father use to molest me. It used to seem like a great reason to be depressed and broken but its not good enough for me now. I just can’t give the darkness that power. So I push through it until I’m back to Sheena.

I imagine myself at my highest. Who do I want to be? What am I about? What do I love? And I try to stay there or keep moving towards there. And staying in the darkness doesn’t allow me that.

The whole, should you be over it by now? You can’t put a time frame on mourning or healing. You may be healed in one area but then you find years later, that this other bit you didn’t even know existed needs some major healing too. I think mourning and healing comes in phases and stages. Its not linear. Sometimes it loops around. It dives and flies back up. Its jagged and prickly and its definitely not easy.

You mentioned that you feel like you can’t get pass it unless you are fully honest about what happened. I can’t answer that for you. You are in a unique situation. A very unique one that I don’t know if I’d have the strength for so I don’t know. Maybe you do need to be honest about it? I don’t know…….[excerpt edited out] Who the fuck knows?

But you should also know that being totally honest about it doesn’t magically fix things. That’s just one step in growth. It gets painful after that. It gets murky. Healing isn’t pretty all the time. But its worth it. So, I don’t know. You have to make these choices for yourself.

I wonder if I would have ever told my mother had she not read my journal. Probably not. It had been going on for five years before she read my journal and not one person ever suspected anything. I would have carried that secret to the grave probably and my death would have been premature.