list no. 24 :: true confessions

1. I've thought that I'm depressed, but I think it's grief masquerading as depression. 
2. Meaning, I feel happy and I'm excited and enthusiastic about life and all that we have going on, but I'm fucking sad. 
3. My happiness has a continual gray cloud, very much like this old school cartoon when I was a kid. It was a Yogi Bear cartoon, (here I date myself), that was based on ecology and the earth. Do you remember it? Anyway, there was this one episode when there was a smog villian casting his grayness over all of the park and Yogi and Boo-Boo were on a mission to stop him.
4. That's what my gray cloud feels like.
5. I think because I've had a bit of a reprieve, (the cloud wasn't as heavy), I'm able to look at my feelings objectively.
6. That's not to say that this cloud doesn't beat me down, or make it seem like I'm moving through an impossibly strong invisible web.
7. I've been pretty good at pretending that I'm doing alright and that's because it is what it is. 
8. It's a choice to sink or swim. 
9. It's amazing what grief will do for you. 
10. Layers peeled back to raw, there's no where to hide from any of it and the process is deeply personal.
11. How I grieve isn't how you grieve, nor will you need the things that I need.
12. Learning that has been invaluable. 
13. It's almost two years to the day that we landed here in Los Angeles and it has been 104 weeks of transition. 
14. In medias res. In the middle of things. 
15. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, I feel scared a lot, but I trust that I will figure it out. 
16. I still have a lot of shit to sift through. 
17. Big stuff and little stuff. 
18. I'm quite skilled at avoiding the big stuff: what the hell do I want to do with myself?
19. Instead working over the small stuff that isn't worth all the time I've devoted to it. 
20. I've tried to talk a good game, but here's the truth: I haven't gotten over it.
21. I'm trying, but my co-dependent self likes to replay those moments last year when I felt most abandoned, (and misunderstood), and those moments replay again and again. 
22. Time has softened the blow, but it's there.
23. Some habits are hard to break.
24. And some aren't even worth the trouble.