Grief

      I think I used to have a sense of dread that at some time in my life, I was going to lose someone close to me, and it would hurt so much.  I could see that mourning was a part of life for everyone at some point, but I did not want it.  Like a child waiting in the doctors office to get their shots, only compounded much stronger.  I never wanted to hurt like that.
     And it does hurt so much.  It took awhile for me to accept that what I was going through was grief, because no one had actually died, so no one around me said anything or went through to motions of acknowledging to me that it was grief.  In a span of five years, I lost my health and the closeness of most of my relationships, including to my parents.  My  grandmother did die, but I was by then too numb to feel anything and for my safety was unable to attend her memorial service.  I was throughout discovering lost parts of myself with their own horrible past I had until then been unaware of.
     I never called it grief, I never called it anything.  Depression maybe.  That's a clinical term many people seem happy with these days.  Everyone in life goes through hard times, and survivors of sexual abuse all have a trial period of reclaiming their soul, and perhaps the presence of DID prolongs that.  I would have weeks and months of being completely numb, and when sensation returned it was to awake unable to move or breathe, feeling as though my throat had been cut.  No physical cause, just grief.  That's the word for it.  Perhaps not acknowledging it postponed the reaction and stretched it out longer than it would have otherwise been.
    I was never able to talk about it much.  I don't know if I could now.  Discovering a different life than the one I thought I had has been I think the worst shock my brain has ever had.  I have a sense of being incredibly strong, having a soul that can withstand this, but that does not make the grief less difficult to go through.
    I have been, as a sexual abuse survivor and someone with DID, someone with a very difficult time coming to terms with being female.  It is still something I work on, I refuse to simply take the definitions offered to me by society, I will research and witness for myself what it means to be a woman, and what the feminine side of every yin/yang balance entails.  What I have found so far is that the feminine knows how to accept life, all of it, the good and the bad.  This I think is key to accepting grief, being able to accept and absorb the facts and the emotions so they move through you and transform into something beautiful.  For me this is the key to grief, it is hard, but it transforms into something beautiful.  Grief is in this way a gift.