When Things Fall Apart

There is an unwritten law, according to which, when you are going through a crisis in your life, everything starts falling apart. Little things and big things. Everyday, you wake up with that heavy weight squashing your soul, but still with the hope that something good is gonna happen, or at least, nothing bad. And it lasts few hours. Then, another piece of your life falls on your head, mostly before that you can find shelter anywhere. It is one hit after the other. One punch after the other. There is no escape. You are there, like Rocky Balboa on a ring, unable to move under the unbearable violence that is hitting you hard. You feel dizzy, in agony, exhausted and you want to give up and finally cry your despair. But you don't give in. You don't even cry. Crying requires a certain amount of peace: crying is what you do when something is eventually over, done, devoured. Then, you can cry and you do cry and  cry to find some solace, some consolation. But when you are there, on that ring, with the only urge to resist, to survive, you cannot even cry. Simply you can't.

So you do all the useless things that human beings do when they feel hopeless, broken: when a smile looks as something you will never achieve again. You buy cigarettes again, you pour yourself a drink and a second, you stay up all night, you eat junkie or you don't eat at all. In order to feel better, or at least trying to feel anything anymore - anything - you need to keep hurting you. May be to prove to the universe that life is yours and that you should be the only one allowed to cause you harm. Or you start to look restlessly for a distraction: anything. You stay up late with friends partying, you talk and talk and talk even with strangers, going through the same details, thousands times, feeling the knives digging in the wounds, again and again.

I don't do that. Not the last part, I mean. I have learnt that we can only share grief with people who can deeply "feel" it. That don't even need too many details, or reasons or explanations. People - friends or family - who are part of your life and so they know. They can feel your feelings. They don't' need details to decide to wait for you at the front door, at night, offering you open arms and quiteness.

I don't look for "forgetfulness" as much. I don't believe in distractions. I truly believe in the necessity to metabolize the pain, face it, accept it and grieve. If you don' t do that, the pain that you are hiding behind the distractions, will be back soon, hit you again and hurt you again. When everything seems to fall apart in my life, I do a lot of unreasonable things: I smoke (not being a smoker), I drink (not being a drinker) and I don't sleep. And I look for friends who can hold me tight, silently. No need for words. Friends who, you know well, are not going to pronounce that rethoric and pathetic sentence: "you are strong, you will make it just fine". Of course I am strong. And brave. Being in pain, if life is kicking your butt,  doens't mean that you are anything less than extraordinary - just means that you are human. And a rebel.

The worst sign, when I go through one of this time in my life, is that I am unable to write. Words on the paper (or computer) are needles in my flesh. They don't come easy. And when they do, they are slaps in the face. In Italian or in English. Living in a foreign country, speaking another language can really add to the torment, the frustration of being unable to express yourself in a proper, polished and correct way.

But then, it comes a day, when you wake up and you feel that your misery is still there, still the same, but you slept through it few hours. Without a drink. Without a cigarette.  And your bones hurt but you still want to take your bike and go for a ride. You still feel sick and nocious towards the bastard who hurt you, stabbed you in the back and run away. You still see all your worries for the future lined up. You still look at your dog, sleeping peacefully on the rug, feeling unable to accept that her weak heart is gonna take her away from you. You still feel that you would like to be away, faraway, on a desert island without the need to talk at all. But, there comes a day when you know that you survived the fury. You survived the disrupting wave of "pain" that broke your sky and made it fall to pieces. You suvived and you are back on your feet. Still shaky and unwell. But up.

And that is the moment when we have to do something for ourselves. Something important. We have to swipe away any temptation to think of ourselves as someone 'less fortunate'. Fortune or misfortune have nothing to do with the core of our being. Our actions count, instead. Even with events that we cannot connect to our responsability, our actions count. Even if someone that we trusted, acted as a lousy lice with us, our actions count. We have to take responsability and understand which kind of person we are trying to be and what lesson we get from all this, a lesson though that is not going to make us unfeeling and emotionless, but that is gonna help us to thrive.

So, when that day arrives, when the pain is just a little lighter, enough to leave us some room for something else, we have to show ourselves some love and put together our remaining energies to understand where are we at that point and which direction we wanna take to honor our faboulus journey. People die and a part of us die with them. The part they hold, the part we shared with them. People that we loved hurt us, badly, unable to manage their weakness and selfish attitude, they hit us as they don't care at all. Probably they don't. Dogs, our most loyal and beloved buddies, have always a life too short and we can never be prepared to accept their pain and say farewell. Still we do.  Jobs fail and we worry because we have to support ourselves and we are tired to be back out there looking for new opportunities. Shit happens. And we cannot stop it. We can stay still, hold the pain, rebel and survive. And we can, when the agony turns to something sweeter, love ourselves and, for once, hit something back in the face, hard, with all our energy: the feeling to be a failure. Because we are not. We are indomitable, audacious and reckless and we don't hide from life. We are not coward. We are precious imperfect resiliant and fragile stones. And we'll always shine.