…for now…until the next one…

And good thing, too, as all life comes to a standstill as I sweat it out.

Woke this morning at 4 a.m. with the word grieving on the tip of my mind and realized the past few days of hitting the pathos button was all about grieving.  (the obvious always escapes me)

After the boy abandoned me, and each of my friends, one after another walked away, (perplexed by my love for him and the mistrust / disconnect / negativity I have with people at large and their anger at me because I wasn’t opening myself up to their mundane and simple-minded analysis, and for questioning my coping mechanisms – each of which is pretty precious under the circumstances, I should add.)  I found myself forced to choose between checking out or therapy.

I told the therapist I needed grief counseling, and asked her how one goes about that.  She told me it was only through relationship that we can heal.

Great, I thought to myself.  I’m fucked.

Because she knew I didn’t appreciate psycho babble, she was very respectful and instead gave me source research material to read about the effects of early trauma on the brain and studies about negative feedback loops and post traumatic stress syndrome, etc.  She focused on all the empowering things I have done in my life and the empowering things I did not realize I did, such as not acknowledging Leanne as my new name.  She also catered to my intelligence by talking in a poetic manner about where we derive meaning from life.  She gave me a beautiful non self-help book to read, entitled, A General Theory of Love. Yes.  We need relationship to be human.  She was a lovely person.

Her specialty was incest survivors, but she never really understood what it was to be adopted and perpetually abandoned.  In regards to the boy, she told me that sometimes love isn’t enough, and I disagree.  I have to believe that love can conquer all or what is the point.   And she never really told me how to grieve.  And with my pocket book hemorrhaging and still in mourning, I said goodbye to her.  I needed three of her to deal with this huge pile of losses.

All these losses.

And I realized last week that I’ve lost two mothers, which I will be writing about on my other blog.

So I guess this is my process.  This is how I grieve.  I shunt the pain off onto the page and hit replay again and again and again until there are just no more tears left.  I guess the page is the closest approximation of an intimate relationship I have.

What I’ve done, by coming to Korea, is more than just handicap myself socially.  In this rarefied and isolated environment each and every one of those unattended losses is exacerbated and magnified, while more pile up.  Each loss is relived anew in the negative image I see in the vitality of every relationship, every mother tongue spoken, every esoteric unattainable cultural legacy, every mother with every child,  every couple holding hands, every…everything I see that I am not a part of;  that I am excluded from here or discriminated from.  There is no way to escape from negative thoughts here.  Because there just aren’t enough possibilities to balance them out.

I have one thing I can be thankful for, though, and that is that I am aware of what’s going on with me.  Because if I wasn’t, I’d be one of those KAD suicides that you don’t get to read about.

Does this mean I feel sorry for myself?  Not at all.  It means I am grieving.  It means I’m handicapped and frustrated and it’s all hidden and unacknowledged and I’m weary as Atlas.  But not sorry.

And today, freezing my ass off at this school, in so many ways, it means I’m really really pissed off.  I am so done with Korea.  And it’s nothing against Korea or its people.  It is that it no longer has anything to offer me.   Except its money.  And I resent that.