Pink
It has never
really been my favourite colour, and even when I made this blog I still hadn't
developed the appreciation for it. To this day I can't find a definition, or
justification behind "Painting Life Pink" other than it was the only thing
to bounce into my mind when I bounded my thoughts online. I guess I
wished for warming theme to not only align what I would write about, but to
embed it in my mind. Come almost three years later and maybe pink has done just
that, but not how I could ever imagine.
This pink has followed
me across the world and back, yet the pink that I wanted to take over my life
faded when I came back from London. I took back to hitting save, never publish,
and let my thoughts rattle between my mind and the documents on my desktop.
I never stopped writing though. I became better at imagining, and seeing,
and pulling sentences out of scrupulous mind games to find the right way in
punching the pages together. I taught myself to take my darkest moments, and
create anything with the slightest dash of colour so it can mean something.
My days soon wandered from the grey clouds over my head, into the
colourful sprinkling of the sun over water to finally see my face. I was done
punishing myself, I was done throwing stones and getting hit in the face, I was
done wallowing and hanging on to what could have been. I was ready to forgive
myself. And that was the hardest thing I have had to do. It was much
easier to be miserable.
I took all of my energy
into being productive, to get the good grades everyone preaches about, to have
the important work/life balance, and to have people around me who generally
care. I lifted myself up off the bathroom floor, and yesterday I stood at the
top of the hills in front of miles of oceans next to the man I love and I knew
right then. I had turned my life around, and I was happy with where I was
going.
I took a social media
hiatus. It's been six months since I withdrew most parts of my life from the Internet.
I wondered what the point of posting my life online really was, and why that
mattered to me so much. Some people say that trauma is the biggest reason for
having the will to change your life, whether that be packing up and flying
away, or trying to figure out what life actually is all about. To me it was
the latter.
My last Facebook post was on the 6th
of July, eight days before it happened. On the 6th of July I was Icarus. I was
flying through the sky as fast and as erratic as I could. I had finished my
exams, I had overcome what I thought then to be a monumental defeat, I was
falling in love and I was ready to indulge in being free. I was flying so
high I had no choice but to be melted by the sun. Seven days later I hit that
metaphorical ocean floor as the literal plane I was on landed back in New
Zealand. The next three weeks were anything but indulgent, and my heart
was broken.
I was 11 when I was first faced with
grief. I remember what my brain wants me to remember; that day in colour
picture, my broken arm throbbing, my Mum sitting me on an upside-down empty
bucket in the garage. She told me I had to be strong. I didn't know what that
meant. I didn't know how to do that, but I figured it out. I guess 11 year old
me taught 20 year old me, all these years later, how to do that again. A broken
plate, even when glued back together, will never be the same as it was before.
I was shattered, and one by one I had to pick myself back up and glue myself
together. I lost parts of myself in that process. But I gained some dustings of
gold at the same time.
I am learning how to go on with my
life, but the small things are what I miss. When I would post a photo and the
comment "my beautiful grandbaby" would always be under it, or when
I'm up late at night and I get the "Why are you awake, missy?"
messages, or when she would share our photos for all of her friends to see. It
was her way of telling us she loves us, even when we are countries apart. The
most heart wrenching part for me is now that she is gone, and her Facebook
has gone, all of those things that I loved so much went when she did. I can't
look back on those like I can old photos, or letters, or anything tangible,
because the Internet is not that. Facebook is not the same as having those
keepsakes with you forever. I understand that letter writing is obsolete,
and this is what life is like now. Living through social media. But there is an
ultimate price for that, and you could call this one of them.
Grief brings outs the most
irrational thoughts, one of mine was this fear of posting to social media. It
became a counting game, "It's been this many months since I've
posted" as if that were something to be proud of. Or "I can't post
anything because I haven't posted anything since she died." I kept this
mind battle up for 6 months, and it was because I knew I had to post something
about it some time, but I didn't want to. I didn't want to write about how I
experienced this for other people to critique it. Yet I knew people were
waiting for it. It's a double play game, which I feel I couldn't win.
I was given this quote well over a
year ago and looking on it now I understand so much more that what I did when I
first read it, and I hope it explains a lot to what I have said in this
post.
"Put simply, grief is the price we pay for love, and a natural consequence of forming emotional bonds to people, projects and possessions. All that we value we will someday lose. Life's most grievous losses disconnect us from our sense of who we are and can set in train an effortful process of not only relearning ourselves but also the world. For many the desire to 'make sense' and 'find meaning' in the wake of a loss is central." (Hall, 2014)
Yesterday, when I stood on top of
that hill I realised that I needed to move on from this, I needed to process
this and move on with my life. I need to still find what Pink actually means.
Every day I'm getting closer and closer to that. And every day it's getting a
little less hard not being able to pick up the phone and call her. But I know
now, that I am able to see the sweeter future, and given time I will be able to
look back on what I am feeling now and understand why that is so important. I
will be able to understand why feeling everything is so important because I
know that I can only grow from this and continue to be happy with my life.
For her.
Always,
em.
