no time to heal

I can safely say that the months of February, March and April 2008 will go down in the book of Greer as some of the most difficult days I have seen. All in one week, I was confronted with significant devastation: the death of a dear friend's father, the loss of a precious friend's younger brother, the passing on of my baby red ford explorer, the mysterious death of a high school friend, and the unexpected reunion with an ex-boyfriend. My apologies for being vague concerning details of each of these individual occurrences, but they each deserve pages and pages of attention that I can't provide. Needless to say, my heart was broken in about 15 places, my mind was in significant turmoil, my body was weak, and I was lost. This all happened within 5 days and I wasn't given the opportunity to grieve or mourn, let alone process all that was happening. In so many words, I was blind, deaf, mute, totally senseless. It wasn't 3 weeks later that I received the worst phone call in my life up until this point. One of my dearest, most precious friends was killed. WHAT? This isn't the kind of stuff that happens to me, only people around me. For the next 30 minutes after I received that call, I couldn't see straight. I couldn't understand life, I couldn't move. I was frozen in a bubble of confusion. What I thought must have been a result of mistaken identity, was in fact a reality staring me in the face. No time to heal. Late April, my mother calls me at 8am to inform me that a dear friend has suffered a significant bleed to her brain and her condition is unstable. WHAT? You've got to be kidding me. Once again. My mother had made a comment that really stuck with me: "Greer, in my 60 years of living, I have not experienced the kind of tragedy that you have faced in such a short period of time." Wow. For someone who as familiar with heartache as she is, that impacted me. Here I am at 22 years old, having really lived.

I have absolutely cherished my choice to move to Boulder, CO. It has provided me huge expansion of myself as a person, I have uncovered numerous layers to my personality, seen trends in my behavior, and been able to see where they come from (I am going to write an entire blog on that, behavior that is rooted from early childhood and parental influence FASCINATES me. Don't ask questions). But the one almost unbearable aspect of living out here is dealing with this roller coaster known as life so far from my friends, family, and community.

Sometimes I feel as though there is a common misconception about people not having time to heal and people not giving themselves time to heal. You know, I think personally that everyone has the time to heal. It is just a matter of how we prioritize our time. Some people find it better to "stay busy" so that they aren't reminded of the sadness, when personally I feel as though the periods of minimal stimulation are key to really discover your underlying emotions and to really discover what it is that is making you sad. So if you ever feel as though you are being confronted with more emotional storm than you would have liked, always know that at any point, you can have time for yourself. Give yourself time to heal, allow yourself the opportunity to mourn, sob, write, talk. You owe it to yourself.