Learning to Live and Letting Go...

But I think I'm starting to realize that I've never really dealt with it. It's trite and cliche, but I have never properly learned how to let go of people and places to which I've been close and emotionally invested. Like much of my bevahior, from career direction to investment ideas, I take the safe route, avoiding big risks, and avoiding any undue loss. The main reason is that I have never faced real life- threatening (or at least livelihood- threatening) adversity, and thus never properly learned how to deal with loss, having had so little. When someone I love dies or when I move away from people to whom I'm attached (or when they must move away from me), I universally deal with it by subconsciously pretending that nothing has changed except perhaps the frequency of my exposure to those people. I will verbally acknowledge that my Grandmother is dead - I saw her body on the hospital bed only moments after she died. But by failing to really register the fact that I will never see her again, instead preferring to fantasize that I just can't see her due to distance, schedules or other interefering phenomena, I'm spared entirely the grieving process. It's my replacement for religion or supernaturalism: rather than thinking they've moved on to a different plain, I think they merely moved on and I lost their address.

When I moved away from my home town, I avoided the loss of my friends and family by failing to establish any new social connections in my new home. Rather than make new friends and find social things which met my needs in San Francisco, I kept razor-thin ties to the friends and family I had known in Fresno. I visited Fresno one or more times every month, and socialized with my remaining friends there - essentially, I went to Fresno to socialize. At home in San Francisco, I isolated myself in my daily routine, and maintained that isolation by building a vehement loathing of the social opportunities San Francisco offered. The primary factor remained my inability to let go of the past I'd had in Fresno. Rather than learn how to socialize and meet new friends in San Francisco, every time I went out, I tried to experience Fresno. Thus when I encountered the crowds, the impersonal and high-turnover scenes and alien venues, I ran away screaming - I was looking for the old hang-outs I knew before, and found something which failed to fit that expectation. As much as I try to blame San Francisco for being unfit to entertain me, I am in fact, unfit to find entertainment here.

When friends and loved ones move away, I manage to convince myself that nothing has changed. Ironically, my social bonds break ever easier because of this, since avoiding the obvious changes allows me to ignore the necessity for making better attempts at keeping in touch and maintaining bonds which whither without constant attention. Thus I lose contact with even the closest people and blame it on distance, when in fact the real culprit is the fact that I have yet to really acknowledge that any distance exists. When relationships are altered by distance, new methods for keeping them alive must be created. One must find what is possible for people to share and experience together when they cannot actually be together. I fail on this count, instead choosing to pretend that nothing need change, that distance is an illusion.

In other words, I deal with grief through denial. On one hand this spares me an immense amount of emotional stress. It allows me to function on a day-to-day basis without any debilitating feelings of loss. On the other hand, it dissuades me from moving on and creating new connections and associations in life - whether in the re-creation of old relationships to make them more secure accross time, or forming new ones to help me love where I am here and now. I become permanently tied to some hybrid social self, which never really existed, and I perpetuate and mutate that self by constantly finding new ways to deny change as it occurs.

Despite the firm planting in reality which I style myself as being rooted in, my social isolation and ambivalence are direct products of the denial of reality. I pretend I'm still involved in the small social circles to which I adhered years ago, despite time, distance and lack of evidence of their continued existence. I deny that my life has changed, which makes me while away my time waiting for the next trip to Fresno or the next holiday. I fail to fully appreciate the wonder and joy in my life today because I'm stuck fantasizing about the past and how to maintain it.

Learning to live means learning to let go. What kind of life would I have if I continued this perversion in the decades to come? If I live my life by clinging to a past which will never be reincarnated in the present, and which offers no connection with any realistic future, what kind of happiness will even be reachable for me? The choice is between living in isolation and a haze of memories, or learning to properly love and live in the present and let go of the past and accept loss. At only 27 years old, if I stay in the habit of living in the past now, I'll be a numb, emotional wreck by the time I reach old age. The very elderly tend to fixate on the past because it helps alleviate the grief of fully acknowedging all the loss they've experienced and the death which is drawing ever nearer. But by performing this dance so soon, I'm setting myself up for a life of missed opportunities and ever-hazier memories. This isn't a promising future, and perhaps my excitement about life and its possibilities have been somewhat deadened by my habit of focusing on the past and avoiding all else.

The pain of acknowleding loss and learning to grieve as it comes is frightening to someone who has never really done it. But the alternative is to remain numb and feel neither grief nor joy. I need to see where I am as new and different; as something I must explore and conquer. I need to let go of the past and stop endeavoring to recreate it in every new locale and situation. It's a tough job changing the habits of a lifetime and the only ones I've known, but actually learning to take pleasure in where I am and what is in store for me will make it worth it.