On Identity and Grief: I Am Not One Thing

I realized today that I struggle with consistent blogging because I’m never sure where to put it, or under what umbrella. As a kid, I always just wrote in my silly little Livejournal, diary-style, but with newly-lashed privacy concerns criss-crossing my heart… that seems rather unwise.

This particular blog, lately, is largely is a capsule for complicated grief, for my medical woes and triumphs, and for random thoughts that don’t belong anywhere else, but might be of interest to someone, somewhere.

But I am so much more than that.

I wonder what it’s like to not compartmentalize my life into random sections.

It feels as though there is little overlap between caring for my parrots and dogs, navigating my own autoimmune issues, teaching WordPress, partnering someone beloved with a chronic illness, writing silly romance novels, watching and grieving over the complicated deaths of family members and relationships, my deep and unending rage over the continued monstrous state of the world, navigating work with ADHD, cooking spicy food, and finding joy in travel.

I am a Jane of many trades, master of next-to-none.

Writing it all in one place is bad for SEO, I’d imagine. Not that it matters for this bit of silliness in my one tiny corner of the internet.

Who wants to read from every chapter in a very jumbled and random book?

It’s then that I realize: there it is again, that very complicated grief.

The only person who’d want to read that book would be my mom.

I feel her absence in these jagged moments. But her absence has been a close friend my entire life.

I wish I could talk with her today, on this third, fourth, fifth most recent hardest of days.

I knew her so well that I know precisely what she’d say. And there is no comfort there, only continued absence, the one I’ve always known.

I wish I could ask her: When do the hardest days become those days that are behind you?

Do they ever?