When It Keeps Coming Back

It arrives without warning. A song, a smell, a particular quality of light in the afternoon, and it is here again, as present as it ever was.

Sometimes it is recent. Sometimes it is from a very long time ago, and the fact that it can still do this is its own kind of shock.

What we are taught to do with it

Three things, mostly, and all three are a way of not feeling it.

Organise it. Break it into parts, understand it, place it in a sequence. This works beautifully on a heavy week, where one solid mass becomes separate pieces and pieces are carryable. It does almost nothing here, because this is not a pile of pieces. There is nothing to sort.

Find the lesson. Ask what it taught you, what you have grown into. Sometimes that is real and it arrives on its own, years later, unbidden. Sent for early it is just a way of turning something unbearable into something useful, and the being-useful is doing the work of not feeling.

Assume you should be further along. This is the cruellest of the three, and almost everyone does it. Enough time has passed. Other people seem to manage. So on top of the thing itself there is now a second layer, which is being wrong about how you are carrying it.

You are not behind. Old things come back because they still matter. That is not a malfunction, and it is not you doing this badly.

What actually helps

The opposite of a fix, which is why so little of the usual advice fits.

Give it a name

Unnamed, it is a fog, and fog has no edges you can hold. Named, it has a shape. It does not have to be the perfect word and it will not be. Just say what it is.

Then the feeling, not the story around it

There is usually a story attached, and the story is easier to talk about than the thing underneath it. Set it aside for a second. Sad, hurt, lonely, angry, tired, numb. What is it actually.

Find where it sits

It always has a location. Heavy in the chest, tight in the throat, hollow somewhere under the ribs. If nowhere stands out, everywhere counts too.

This one sounds like a small thing and it is not. Locating a feeling in the body puts you one step outside it. You are looking at it rather than being inside it, and that step is most of what makes it survivable to stay.

Then the part almost nobody does

If someone you loved were carrying exactly this, you would know what to say to them. You would not tell them to be further along. You would not ask what it had taught them.

Say that thing to yourself. Out loud if you can.

Most women find this the hardest part by a distance, which tells you something about how much softness gets pointed outward and how little of it comes back.

Nothing gets resolved

I want to be plain about this, because a lot of writing on the subject quietly promises otherwise.

You will not finish. Some things do not resolve and are not supposed to. The practice is not a way of making it smaller, and if it were, it would be asking you to lose something you are not willing to lose.

What changes is not the size of it. It is whether it can be here without knocking you over. Whether you can be with it for a few minutes on purpose rather than only ever being ambushed by it.

That is a real difference and it is worth having. It is also, honestly, the whole of what is on offer.

And afterwards

Come back to something solid. The chair, the floor, your own breathing. Do not go straight from this into answering emails.

It will come again. It comes in waves and there is no limit on how many times you are allowed to go through this. Whenever it is loud, you can do it again.