I discovered Puddles Pity Party over the weekend and have become addicted to him. It isn't enough to just listen. Otherwise I could listen to the songs by the original artists and find the same relief. No. I need to watch. And not just casually. I need to fixate on his body language--facial expressions, hand gestures and shoulder shrugs and slumps. When I do that, I find I experience for a time a sense of relief from my grief.
I don't know why this is but I have a suspicion it has something to do with the autism spectrum issues. It's like Puddles is giving me lessons in how to grieve. 'This is what sad looks like. Do you see it? Do you feel it? This is how to express sadness. Can you feel me? Can you show me?'
And yet I get that it is exaggerated and because of that it also elicits unexpected smiles at the incongruous juxtapositions of humor with what seems ought to be its opposite.. Humor that feels alien at first but then settles in like an old friend reminding me that Yeah. The sad is real and strong but it isn't necessary to be swallowed by it.
A smile is not a betrayal of the reason for the sadness only proof that there will be a new song to sing when this one has run its course. And though it might be a sad song too it doesn't have to be and eventually the next song to come along will have more of Joy in it.
This experience reminds me of a period of time in the mid 80s when I was binge-watching 70s and 80s sitcoms and after some hundreds of hours of it my social skills had improved and I had begun to 'get' jokes in real time and had visceral understanding of satire, irony, and sarcasm. And tho it was still difficult I was able to translate much more of the non verbal communication around me though it was likely to be hours or days later as the 'tapes' replayed in my mind.
That was decades before my High Functioning Autism diagnosis but my reading on the spectrum has developed my understanding of what must have happened then and what might be happening now. I'm sure it has something to do with the exaggerated manifestations of emotion coupled with extreme repetition contributing to a rewiring of my brain.
Meanwhile, I continue to add to a lengthy to-do list of tasks related to the the aftermath of Ed's death. From unpacking and putting away things I brought back from his apartment, to making calls to inform those who need to know of his passing, to sorting his papers and doing his laundry. I'm adding to the list faster than I'm checking off but I'm requiring of myself at least one checked off item every day.
Fix You covered by Puddles Pity Party
As for my #ROW80 goals and #NaNoWriMo?
Well..
Sleep 7.5 hours per night has been iffy since the September 28 phone call and had degenerated dramatically the twelve days I spent at Ed's apartment cleaning and packing. But I dedicated this past weekend to catchup sleep and have maintained an average better than 6 hours so far this week. In response my mood has begun to stabilize.
Read/study craft. If I count the daily coaching Letters from Abbie I signed up for for NaNo month and the NaNo site pep letters... I'm good.
Read fiction daily. I'm reading Game of Thrones nearly every day.
Storydream in my storyworld. Yeah. Decent amount thanks to NaNo work
Scavenger hunt my files for creative writing drafts and bits and pieces worthy of hardcopy. Not since Mom's stroke in July.
Gather all my poems from files and blog into a single file to prep for self-pub. Not since I got news of Ed's death.
Journaling. yeah got this covered. Bigly.
NaNo novel Abiding Hope. Still running about 50% word count and it is still looking more like Preptober notes, outlines and sketches than actual scene work.
This has been the roughest week yet to muddle through. Yes even rougher than the 12 days I spent cleaning and packing up Ed's apartment. That is partly due to tension of waiting for the election results but that would have been a breeze if not for the emotional mine field that my days have become since I walked out of Ed's apartment for the last time a week ago last night. There are still just so many ways the grief sneaks up on me and hijacks me body, mind and spirit.
I thought I knew everything about crying. It was like, my thing. It was also one of the things Ed found most disturbing about me--how much and how often and how long and about how many different things that I could cry about. But until September 28, I had no idea that crying could be a full body workout.
I keep getting sucker-punched by the unexpected. Like overhearing a message being left for Ed on our phone. One of those was from his doctor's office concerned that mail delivered to him had been returned. So I had to call them to inform them of his death. And cried all the way through the conversation.
But I managed to also make an appointment for myself--first one in well over a year--while I had them on the phone because I was sure I would chicken out if I didn't and if I learned one thing over what happened to Ed it was that I too was gambling with my life by neglecting my own health issues. Maybe mine aren't exacerbated by alcoholism but they aren't negligible. Blood pressure being the primary concern.
One of the hardest things to deal with this week was having no one to talk to about the election. That was our thing--mine and Ed's. It's easier to talk about sex in my family than politics. And that isn't easy.
But Ed and I would spend hours talking about it, watching and reading news and taking turns ranting. But there is now a big black hole where there were once those lively and intellectually stimulating discussions. So I've poured all the election angst as well as some of the grief angst into my NaNo novel, Abiding Hope. But I'm barely clinging on with just under half the daily word quota. And truth be told it is more Preptober work than NaNo Noveling since my Preptober plans got so rudely swept aside by that September 28 phone call.
I began my blog in the aftermath of the 2004 election and was at first including political posts but I got scared off by the bullies in the comments and since I didn't have a good grounding in the facts or history and all the other contexts that make it possible to have a coherent conversation on an issue, I realized I wasn't contributing anything useful to the conversation just amplifying outrage and fear.
That could be different now as I obsessively read and researched all through the eight years of the Bush administration. My autism OCD hyperfocus was in full bloom. Then Obama was elected and I was relieved and needed a vacation from being on mental and emotional red alert 24/7 and Mom had her first stroke that November and I spent the first six months of 2009 helping my sister cope with that fallout here at Mom's where politics was a taboo subject. So the habit was broken and I barely paid attention to the entire eight years of Obama's administration.
The Trump candidacy snuck up on me. I did not even know he was running until the week of the Republican convention. That was the summer Ed was living in the tent in Mom's back yard having moved back here that March putting an end to the three years we were separated by 300 miles. (see early posts under the Lifequake label)
I had no extra mental or emotional bandwidth for politics that year until I learned about Trump's bid. After that Ed and I started watching at least some news together every day. But although we were disturbed by the tone Trump was setting that was mainstreaming white supremacy and denigrating democracy itself and all its institutions, we were not alarmed because Ed thought Trump was punking the party and I thought he was doing it as a branding ploy or to scam his donors by raising money for a campaign he had no intention of winning so he could pocket the money.
Then election night 2016 happened. I was in shock and have remained there ever since. I was catapulted back into the OCD research on politics and Trump and because I couldn't blog about it I stopped blogging. Over the final months of the Obama administration the drama in my relationship with Ed was heating up again as well and that too as it so often did contributed to silencing me.
I am so so tired of having my words bottled up by fear and shame. I don't know how I'm gong to handle it but I do know I am not going to make the same mistake as I did in 2009. I am not going to heave a big sigh of relief and then change the subject in my head. And since I risk stopping blogging and even writing altogether if I keep a self-imposed taboo on the topic of politics I will need to relax that restriction.
Meanwhile, I managed to experience some moments of joy yesterday while watching images of dancing in the streets all over the world when the AP finally announced the 270 electoral votes for Biden/Harris. And yes, I cried for joy. But it was bittersweet as I couldn't share my joy with Ed as I had in 2008 the moment Obama's win was announced and memories of watching that coverage together were nearly as vivid as the images in front of my eyes.
