Well hello there...

I've heard child death described as an amputation by those trying to find the words to explain how it completely changes your life. I think this is as close as you can get to explaining it in a physical way. Except it's a double amputation performed without anesthesia, you're wide awake and helpless, feeling every single stroke of the blade.

For me, the pain knocked me out, for a year.

I've said before that I was something resembling comatose for a very very long time. I screamed and cried and agonized. I remember very little of that year.

Now, four years later... how has it been four years? I rarely have panic attacks and I can function pretty normally. I laugh and I mean it. My legs are gone forever and the pain never ever recedes but I've learned to function and find moments of happiness.

I find myself hesitant to talk about the good moments because people latch on to them like they are being sucked into a jet engine and refuse to acknowledge the swirling agony that underlies every smile. "I'm glad you're doing so well!" Um.. I'm not doing so well. I'm not all better and I'm so done with a society that glosses over pain and grief and the reality that is death. We will all die y'all. But I digress...

I tend to think I've reached a plateau of learning to live after Damon's death. Just learning to leave the house was a straight up vertical climb. Grounding out panic attacks, having conversations... seriously this was insurmountably hard for a long, long, long time. It was so damn hard to talk to anyone about anything. I could not do normal. I've worked so hard to get to a place where I can converse with other human beings, take my son to the park, laugh at my husband's terrible jokes, lecture a classroom full of undergraduates, present at scientific meetings... all of these took concentrated, purposeful effort to recapture, and still do, every time.

So, it has been a weird, uncomfortable surprise to realize that, without purposely striving for it, I've reaccessed a part of me that I didn't even realize existed. Now that this part of me is growing I remember, of course, but I didn't.

I don't know how to explain what this new/old thing is other than to say I want to do things... with people.

Um... yeah, everybody wants to do things Jodie.

Nope, not everybody. Not me, not before about a month ago. If you saw me doing things it was because I needed to do those things. There was a conscious effort in doing those things. I need to do this for my career, I need to do this for my kids, I need to do this for my husband, I need to do this because I care about this person and they've asked me to participate in the thing. I didn't want to. I wanted to go home, always. I wanted to go home and be safe inside my walls with my little family and dis-a-freaking-ppear.

I first noticed this weird new/old sensation when I was at TJ Maxx a while back. There were a few women there, obviously a group of friends just out spending the day together, and I ached. The moment was weird and disorienting. I didn't understand what I was feeling or why I was feeling it. Things like this kept happening, pictures of friends hanging out on social media (I know, it's the devil but there it is), mentions of going out to dinner, or some event participated in and I ached.

I can remember my close friends (most of them very far away physically) saying things like "I miss you" over the past four and half years and not being able to access those emotions. That part of me just wasn't there for me yet. I honestly didn't think it ever would be. This weekend when texting with a friend, who has undoubtedly considered just throwing her hands up in frustration with all the effort she has put in to staying in the relationship with almost no reciprocation, and I realized that I miss her.

I told Hubby this weekend that it's as if this part of my personality lay dormant longer than my consciousness and only now awoke to realize I've stranded it on  deserted island. Because I did. I withdrew from everyone and everything. There is nothing wrong with what I did. I had to but it has certainly left me very alone and entirely unsure of what to do about it. The fact remains that I'm super-dooper-crazy levels of broken. Even without the broken I'm super-dooper-crazy levels of introverted. Long story short, people freak me out, people in groups horrify me. Still, I want to do things... with people (or maybe person, maybe no more than 3 people at a time, did I mention I'm broken?).

So there it is world. I'm lonely... weird.

Until next time...