The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same.
My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I said, “That’s just not true. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized.”
He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, “It’s like wood glue.”
He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, “Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?”
I did.
“But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn’t hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we’d never fixed them at all. You’ve got to give these things time to set.”
It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that’s not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.
So my dad and I agreed, what doesn’t kill you doesn’t actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn’t made you stronger than you were before, you’re probably not done healing. You’ve got to give these things time to set.
Part of the joy of having a pet is being able to provide another being with the life of leisure that we ourselves will never have
Opening Task Manager to scare the programs into behaving again
we don’t talk abt how stressful buying new glasses frames is. ur shopping for your whole personality there. life on the line. do or die. all for two pieces of glass and some sticks
Love, Death & Robots (s03e09) - Jibaro
Do you ever get bored on the internet and then grab your phone to see what the other, smaller internet is up to?
Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England
Me in the year of our lord 2020.
