A Honest Talk About Grief

I’m gonna talk about this here because I have to talk about it somewhere. I haven’t written a word on a project in about a month. I’ve barely read anything. Haven’t even attempted a blog post. The motivation just isn’t there. I find myself hiding away in a darkened room and immersing myself in games – and arguing with people on Facebook but I would be doing that regardless.

The question is why. I mean… not why I’m arguing with people on Facebook. I’m an asshole. That’s what I do. But why I’m not writing and here is where I run out of jokes. Today is the 1 year anniversary of my grandmother’s death. That wound is raw. I am not close to many people. No one has ever accused me of being overly empathetic or overly sentimental but this is the woman who basically raised me. The one who made me feel like a normal person. Losing her is more like losing a mother for me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have a mother and when I was younger she did her best to be there for me but she had problems of her own. Mostly an attraction to men who could be charitably described as dick waving fuckmuppets with the sole exception of my little brother’s father who was actually cool. He and I didn’t get along all the time but we got along despite my nature. He was there for me while I was still in my pupal stage working my way towards blossoming into a beautiful butterfly of assholery (Okay… maybe I haven’t completely run out of jokes) till he he had a heart attack. However my mother and I have had a split since. Apparently my supporting a different politician than she did was a moral outrage – more outrageous than yelling at me about this while I was currently dying from an undiagnosed illness when she hadn’t even bothered to ask how I was doing.

I would say that I’m not bitter or salty about that but I did call this an honest talk. I am salty enough that my existence is classified as a threat to survival of the common garden slug. Still less salty than the average League of Legends player. So there’s that.

Okay I am rambling a bit. I’m not really comfortable being like this. I am not used to feeling sad. I am not used to missing someone like this. She was a part of me. A part that connected me to the humanity that I find so distant on my own. Losing her was a gut punch. I sit here with tears in my eyes and I don’t really know what to do. I try to move forward but there is so little motivation to work because I am missing one of the people who I wanted to show my work to. One of the few people who’s opinion of me actually fundamentally mattered to me – and now I cannot even share this grief with my family because of idiot politics.

I know she was proud of me. She wanted nothing more than for me to be happy and to be myself. To never stop learning or reading or creating. She wanted me to be able to connect with people but understood that there was a limit to how well I would ever be able to do that. She understood to the best of her abilities that I would never fit in with any group and did everything in her power to make it feel like that wasn’t true.

Most days I am cold or angry. Some days I could reasonably be called inhuman. Today? Today I am just a man who misses his grandmother.