Befriending the Bear
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship and connection lately. Actually, before I continue, a fair warning: this post is probably going to be about loss and discovery, about coping with loss and the process of trying to find myself on the other side of it. If that feels too prickly for you right now, it might be best to skip this one.
Disclaimer disclaimed, let’s continue.
I’ve been thinking about friendship and connection a lot lately. Growing up, life felt a lot like the old saying about running away from a bear: you don’t have to be faster than the bear, only faster than the slowest runner. But what if you are the slowest runner in this metaphor? Aside from dying to the bear, you learn to become invisible.
I never dated growing up - running far enough away from the bear to have time to don the invisibility cloak and then feeling invisible will do that to a person - and the woman I ended up marrying I met accidentally. The sister of a friend who I played video games with in the dawning years of online gaming, I lived in the UK and him and his sister in different parts of the USA, and the way she saw through the invisibility cloak scared me. Marrying her was a fait accompli - asking her almost a formality in the course of events.
So far this sounds amazing, and to be fair, it was. Lots of things happened, the usual stressors in any relationship combined with the unique problems of immigration and naturalization, and a bunch of other circumstances wholly unique to our situation. To shorten the backstory, her health became unstable, and after a long series of various attempts at stabilization, she passed away just about three years ago today. Well, tomorrow actually.
The last three years have been weird. My two best friends at the time gave me everything I needed to survive and I leant hard enough on them to break our friendships. It’s nobody’s fault: each of us has our unique lives and you can never pour into each other forever. They both poured into me more than was healthy for them and even then I barely survived. But I did, thanks to them. And my own resilience, of course, but we’ll get to that.
It really has been three years of survival. As in, all I’ve been doing is running from the bear the whole time.
This particular bear is, of course, the bear of grief, but there have been many bears in my life, all of which are valid and also all of which are unimportant to the story. The details are unimportant, is what I mean, because ultimately all the bears have been the same one: the bear I created.
Part of surviving loss is giving up. At least for me, anyway. At some point the tidal wave of grief feels overwhelming: too tall to scale high enough to avoid, too wide to skirt the edge of, too fast to outrun, too all-encompassing to be invisible enough to hide from. The grief is inescapable, and so you give up and let it consume you.
It swallows you whole and you find yourself clattering about inside of it, not really knowing where you are, or who you are, or how long it’ll take before it’s all over.
Then three years go by and you realize you’re still here. Three years of fun and laughter, and a lot of emotional pain. Bad days, bad weeks, awful months. Moments of utter despair and unspeakable thoughts. Times when it didn’t seem worth continuing, because what were you continuing for? And then one day it’s three years later, you wake up and you’re still here.
The bear of grief swallowed you whole and somehow, you’re still here. And now it’s not enough to survive. You want your life back. You want to live.
The way grief simplifies life is frightening. The realization that you’re 46 years old and you haven’t been living for most of those years. The realization that you’ve been running and hiding from the bears for basically all of your life.
It’s that realization that has me examining the other bears in my life. The one that says I’m not shiny and handsome and smart and funny, and so nobody will like me or want me unless I can provide value in their life. The one that says I’m not worthy of speaking to people, because nobody cares.
I’m letting them all swallow me whole.
One of my goals for this year is to have one hundred silly interactions with total strangers, for no reason and without any context or expectation.
Yesterday I was out walking and this woman in probably her mid-20s was having a lot of trouble holding back a very excited black Doberman puppy. He just wanted to say hi to everyone, adults, children, other dogs, even the butterfly drifting by a few feet in the air. She was leaning back on the leash with basically her full bodyweight and the puppy was still dragging her excitedly towards whatever subject interested him.
As I got closer along the trail to them, there he was, tongue hanging out, eyes shining, front paws scrabbling for traction as he tried to drag her over to me. I couldn’t help but think to myself “Somebody’s excited.”
As I drew level with them, she made an embarrassed and apologetic gesture, and so I smiled and looked up at her said, “Somebody’s excited!”
She chuckled and rolled her eyes, we passed each other in opposite directions, and the interaction was over.
A hundred silly interactions with random strangers. Being swallowed by the bear of unworthiness, one silly interaction at a time.