Being Brave (part 3)

Oh, OK. There it is.

A faint whispering, of missed opportunities and things that might have been, has started. The ghosts of regret are beginning to arrive.  It's funny how a tiny piece of new information can summon them up; one minute you are absolutely fine and then suddenly there they are, starting to poke you, daring you to listen to them, and luring you into a wallowing pit of gloom.

(I say absolutely fine, but that's not quite true. It has been a tough, tough week; so hard I can't even begin to explain.  I have learned a lot though. Mainly that learning important life lessons is EXHAUSTING. )

I'm trying to fight the regret ghosts off for now, almost on principle, but I'm not sure how long that will last.  I've learned, over the years, that sometimes the only way to deal with pain, sadness, hurt - any of those horrible emotions - is to let them take hold of you for a while.  The trick is to let yourself feel them, wait for them to wash over you and trust that eventually they will pass, and be replaced with something else. (God knows what though. For me at the moment it really could be anything.)

It hurts, it REALLY hurts, but if you can let it hurt for a little while, your brain inevitably finds itself feeling so sick of being in pain that it somehow chases the emotion away. That's my theory, anyway.

It is literally how I've spent my weekend, and most of the past week really -  letting emotions arrive when they want to (and boy do they pick their moments),  watching them hurtle towards me, waiting for them to crash and implode then just riding them out.  Waiting, not knowing which one is going to come next, or how long it will last.

I had no idea when I wrote that first post, and made that resolution to go and do something, that there would end up being three parts to the story (The Bravery Trilogy. It has a nice ring to it, no?) but here we are.  It's a classic three act structure, and this third act has seen the very thing I was protecting myself from in the first place still sort of happening but in a way which was out of control and messy, and forced by circumstance. And so, with nothing else to lose I ended up doing  the thing I'd first decided to do, and then not to do, after all; knowing exactly what would happen, knowing exactly how much the outcome would hurt, and without the benefit of hope.

And it was f--king HORRIBLE.

Those moments of sadness still happen, and they are about a million times sadder than before, but they still lift sometimes.  And when they do lift, it's because they've been replaced with an angry energy, a fierce determination to get through this, and to be better for it, and to Just. Keep. Going.

I laughed today, for the first time. That's a good sign, I think. And I have begun eating again, which I wasn't really doing much of  earlier in the week. Some hard, hard lessons have come from this particular situation. Which is the silver lining I suppose. Plus, those in-between times have been surprisingly productive; frighteningly so in fact.

But the regret is circling.

I keep telling myself to ignore it, because after all, what's the point?  That's thing thing in life; there are no bad decisions. Not really. There is no knowing, anyway, if a decision was a right or a wrong one, because you can't possibly know that. There's nothing to measure against. You don't know would have happened it you had taken that other path, if you'd just waited a little bit longer or perhaps if you hadn't waited for quite so long.  It's so easy, and tempting, to wonder about that. But that's not the point.

At the end of the day there are decisions.  Just decisions. You make them, and sometimes you make them by default, because you don't do anything else, and then there are consequences.

So I'm trying not to listen to the ghosts.  I don't know how long that will last, and I expect that at some point I'll just have to give into them, for a little while at least, and let those feelings of regret take hold. Not forever, just long enough to give them a chance to pass.

Because eventually, of course, they will.


(I don't know why I am writing about all of this, really.  It helps to write about it though, and maybe reading about it will help someone, somewhere, too.)

Being brave part 2

So. That tiny-but-huge act of bravery I was gearing myself up for? In the end, I didn't do it.

I KNOW.

The particular act in question has now, for reasons I won't go into, been rendered more than little bit  redundant. Windows have sailed, ships have been bolted, horses are now closed.  Or something like that.

I keep waiting for the regret to kick in but - somewhat surprisingly -  it hasn't happened. There are plenty of other emotions swilling around in my head and my heart;  hurt, disappointment, anxiety, wounded pride.....all the really fun ones. Then there's the occasional bout of fear that things will always feel like this; that I'm doomed to be miserable forever (they won't, of course, I know they won't, but right now it's a little hard to remember that) and a general sense of confusion, interspersed with the occasional flash of anger - often irrational,sometimes not - directed at everything and nothing in particular all at once.

Mainly though,  I'm just sad. It's a constant, low-level sadness that just sort of hovers around like a mosquito, buzzing just loudly enough that I know it's there. Sometimes it settles over me and makes it impossible to think about anything else, other times it lifts for a while and I find myself surprised to be joking with strangers, smiling at shopkeepers, getting on with my day as if life were perfectly normal.  And then the buzzing starts again, and we're back to square one.

And yet, no regret.

I think perhaps it's because it was never about not being brave enough. There are risks and there are calculated risks and sometimes when you do the calculations, you get an answer you really, REALLY didn't want. You can check, and check again and triple-check but the answer is still the same, and  at some point you have to admit that it's right.  And if you're really honest with yourself, deep deep down, you knew that all along.

And so, if you're smart, you don't act.  For your own sanity, your own safety, your own peace of mind. Because there's a very fine line between being brave and being stupid; actions which are risky and ones which are downright foolhardy.  And sometimes, giving yourself permission not to act is the bravest thing you  can do of all.