Thursday 30 July 2015

Angst

Its been a very crazy week. I have a book to finish, in the middle of trying to be there for the family in this difficult time and dealing with a new thing I'm calling feelings for lack of a better word. I had my weekend really well planned; close the door, sit at my laptop and write. Finish this new story in record time; make a list of people who'd bought Between Death and Heaven that I knew of so I could gift them The Swamp is Full of Mystery. It was a very full, well planned schedule.

Then shit happened and the rug was literally pulled out from under me. I didn't know what to think, what to feel or what to do. Its like whoa, here's a bomb, catch; as its lobbed into your hand. You know its about to go off but you don't really know if you should put it down slowly or throw it far away or even if you're just not going to have enough time and its going to explode in your hand. You're just in this place of suspended belief, offline, without frame of reference or protocol as to suitable response to this.


I lost my mother fourteen (FOURTEEN??? Feels like last week sometimes) years ago but it was different for her. There were just so many things that had to be taken care of; lives were changed; there was almost no time to wallow in emotion. I remember doing a lot of running away from feelings; not so much wallowing in them.


But this time, there was really nowhere to hide; although I have observed his family doing its best to do just that. I don't blame them. My cousin was just thirty four. THIRTY FOUR. He has a one and a half year old daughter and his marriage is just seven months old. Its a suckfest any way you look at it. We tell ourselves that its not the days in our lives but the lives in our days...and we tell ourselves that he was remarkable already, and he has a huge legacy and he'll never be forgotten. But the truth is that those things just make the loss bigger, not more bearable.

So I'm sitting here, trying to write and I'm restless and annoyed and unsettled. I can't really settle to anything, my limbs hurt, my head aches; its cold, its hot. I don't like it at all; I'm confused.. I want to escape from my body but more importantly from my mind. I'm thinking that this would be a good time to start smoking weed but I don't want to be arrested. Supernatural, my go to escape doesn't work. Neither do the fan fictions I like to get lost in. But then I start to pay attention to a word I'd previously dismissed because I never really understood what it meant; Angst.

Supernatural fan fiction writers like to write about it a lot; which makes me assume that they're all a bunch of teenage goth girls. They love to wallow in it - I never understood the attraction. Still don't. But I understand the word now; I understand what it means. I can at last label this mass of unsettling...stuff that's been happening in my head. I am filled with angst.

Strangely enough, it makes me feel better to put a name to the emotion.

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