On Friday, I had a bit of a rough day at work, with a host of things culminating in me bursting into tears in a team meeting. I was so embarassed, even though my colleagues were nothing but kind and understanding. (The job is good, it was just a lot of relatively minor things, coupled with some anxiety about the upcoming first day of school and some homesickness and other stuff. You know how it is.) Anyway, when I got home from work, I wanted something to lift my spirit. I saw that Nish Kumar, one of my favorite comedians, had a new special out. (It came out in back in March, and I had missed it.) That oughta cheer me up!

Lol NOPE!

It did, however, provide me with some catharsis and a lot of stuff to think about.

The thread of this show is about an incident back in 2019, when Kumar was heckled at a charity gig in London, and the horrible fallout from that, which culminated in racist abuse and death threats. You can read more about the incident here. One of the things Kumar addresses in his special is the PTSD he suffered as a result of the fallout.

One of the things Kumar talks about is how he didn't believe he had PTSD because he was fine! He wasn't dead. His career has generally flourished. He's got a long-term partner and a relationship he's happy with. Nothing really happened to him. So he can't have trauma!

Another spoiler alert -- he did experience trauma, and his unwillingness to deal/inability to recognize it/many many reasons why people don't think they need therapy/etc exacerbated the initial problems. In addition, his therapist told him, he has very likely been dealing with depression and anxiety since he was a teen. So yes, he really did need to get some things sorted. And he did. He's gone into therapy, he's making progress and healing. It's a nice end to the show.

It also really pinged some things for me.

I have really been resistant to the idea that I've experieced trauma. To me, trauma is what results from war or something really, really horrible. I haven't experienced anything horrible! I know that I have chronic anxiety and depression, and that I haven't been able to deal with it properly for the last six years or so. It started before the pandemic, but the pandemic definitely made things worse. (As it did for everyone, which makes it easy for me to discount its effect on me.) It really hit me -- I lost my home during the pandemic. I was really lucky to have my mom's place to go to, so I wasn't unhoused, but I did lose my home. I lost my home and a bunch of stuff, but since I wasn't unhoused, and since stuff is just stuff, I dismissed the pain. Then, I moved to a politically unstable country. When war broke out next door, I left my home again, not knowing if I'd be able to come back. But since I could come back, since my city wasn't bombed (unlike Kyiv, where my friends lived), and since I wasn't in danger of jail or enforced conscription, like some of my coworkers, then I equated getting through the difficult time with coming through unscathed. Then there was the abusive job. But since I chose to stay on, and since I had a lot of good times while I was there, then clearly, I didn't actually suffer any abuse.

I think you get the point.

Right now, I don't have the capacity to do anything substantive about it. But I really need to, soon. As soon as I pay down some credit cards and save some money. You know how it is. But thanks to a fucking comedy album, I don't think I'll ignore it any more.

So that's fun! Thank goodness classes start tomorrow, so I can at least focus on something else. And maybe I'll go back and listen to my favorite Eddie Izzard albums for some laughs.

We had a new work thing thrown at us today, and while I will deal and do the job I am paid to do, it threw me totally off balance again, just when I felt like I had a stable place to stand and breathe for a minute. I had two really productive days, I felt capable, and then the rug was pulled out from under me and I was punched in the stomach. So to speak.
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It’s been six years since I lost my dad. It wasn’t unexpected. He’d been sick, had cancer, and then got pneumonia and died. There’s a lot I still carry regarding my dad. A lot of things I really need to put down because there’s no other way to get closure because he’s gone. Every year, it gets a little easier to put things down, although this time of year will always be a bit of a slog. Today’s extra not great because I have a headache that’s not going away.

Anyway. Six years. I don’t feel like I have a lot to talk through this year, not in the way I’ve talked through other anxieties. But I would like to share something that my friend Pip wrote about death and grieving. Pip lost their dad about a year before I did. Pip’s also Jewish, and they wrote about conceptualizing grief. I copied the text of the post and have kept it in my phone notes for the last four years. I’ve lost the link to the original post, but what they wrote struck such a chord with me.

todays my dads yahrzeit … the actual gregorian calendar anniversary is on monday tho
his ghost is 3 years old!!! Wtf.

sometimes that feels like a good way to conceptualize it though bc… …it’s sort of like, the trauma& grief of having someone you love die is a little like having to take care of an infant, constantly… 24/7. IT JUST STARTS SCREAMING SOMETIMES AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHY. you have to schedule your whole life around it and it ruins a lot of your plans and it takes so much ENERGY to look after … it’s like you have no time whatsoever for ANYTHING ELSE. you have to carry it everywhere so you never have both hands free to do anything

but then it gets weaned and learns to walk on its own a little and its still following you around, you gotta drag it behind u in a little wagon, and maybe it bites you bc its teething and sometimes it has tantrums but it very rarely wakes you up at 3 am screaming anymore

eventually it gets big enough that you can kind of just leave it to its own devices for the most part & check in on it every so often to see how it’s doing

like it doesn’t go away but… …… it gets less. overwhelming.

Grief is such a strange beast, but Pip is right. It has gotten less overwhelming.