Eight years ago, I began a several-month period of mourning that was the most intense of my life up to that point. Embarrassingly, the thing I was mourning so intensely wasn’t the death of a loved one, but the end of an 11-month romance. At least on the surface, that’s what I was mourning.
At the moment I took this picture, the grief hadn’t quite hit me yet. It was the morning after a mostly calm, but decisive discussion (okay, decisive on her side anyway). Thinking I might skip past any difficult or vulnerable feelings, I decided to go for a run. I took this picture of the Greenwood rail yard, feeling pretty on top of the world. The relationship hadn’t been working, and there was a freedom in its ending. Then I got home, and, having run out of delay tactics, I curled into a ball and sobbed into my pillow. I remembered what it was to really cry, a full-body experience that made me feel like a child again.
On my side, the biggest trouble in our relationship had been my non-acceptance of myself. This attempt at romance had been hobbled by the constant need to feel worthy of it, as if I wasn’t intrinsically. “Worthy” meant something like, “confident,” “in control,” … basically, “manly.” Even when it was over, I still wanted to feel in control. It was like I could accept the “failure” of the relationship as long as I could make the break-up a “success” – i.e. be magically and immediately okay with it.
It’s impossible to dissect the exact composition of the grief that followed, but looking back, it’s clear that a lot of it was about letting go of my ideas of success and failure, and my concepts of who I could be in a relationship. I had previously had this “manly” image of who I could be, but that was now a failed concept. Letting go of it was grief, because I knew no alternative. I missed the good parts of the relationship, not only for what they were in themselves, but as symbols of my personal validity as a social animal. (Of course, that had kind of been the problem.)
And yet, looking at this picture, I feel gratitude. It reminds me of how my friendships deepened. Each time I shared a little of that grief with a friend, and they still accepted me, my “failure” felt a little less like failure. And it reminds me of how the other half of this relationship, even in ending it, treated me with kindness and dignity, helping me get started on an important personal journey. Many more missteps followed, but still, so much of what is strong and wholesome in my life today feels like it begins in the moment captured by this picture, starting to let go, and wondering who I would be afterward.