Grief Hallucinations, Lennon, and Doom Scrolling: A professional rambling on honesty and negative writings.

    For a while, after so much death for so long, I began to think I was a psychic medium. Later, I found out, that the sensing of someone's departed soul is called a grief hallucination, and is a natural response to bereavement. I felt stupid, especially after picking up an old metal lamp in an antique store and trying to connect with its past owner. In my mind I had reached the other side and talked to some old dude named Richard, but truly it was my wild ability to make up stories about the deceased, and my wild inability to cope with the facts of life.

    You are reading this, and thinking to yourself, dear God, what has become of such a sweet girl (perhaps I think too highly of myself), and how has she come to dabble in such sin (I haven't). Who a person is, immediately after experiencing death, is not the truest version of the person. The truest form of a being comes after the death- how far after, is not for me to say. 

    At first, I was angry at myself, for only being able to sit and write about the passing away of life. Always death, the absence of breath, and burials, and grave yards, and sadness, and the color grey. And I was angry, because I figured that was not what I was "supposed" to be writing about. I was supposed to be writing things that would make people feel happy, that would cure depression, and I would go down in history as a great healer. However, now I have found that most writers (or at least professional ramblers), are not meant to sit down and write out their happy thoughts. Because, happiness is not what we always remember. I remember being happy on my birthday, but I could not tell you the details. I remember being sad on March 10th, and I remember what I was wearing, what I was doing, how everything smelt, and on top of that I was drunk. So, to write about happiness, would make me a fraud, not to say that I will never write about happiness, it is just that I feel the human race, is much more impacted by tragedy than victory. So, I will write what I please, and it may be about death and sad things, and though I may wake up tomorrow and find it all so embarrassing, I must remember that people connect with honest grief more than they do with overly positive, rich, naked, Instagram models. 

    All this to say, I have not dedicated my life to always being dissatisfied, and spending my days walking around in Forest Lawn, mourning dead celebrities so that I can be "inspired". I have dedicated this portion of my life, to writing honestly, and believe it or not, I am smiling most of the time. 

    During seasons of great loss, I have felt the most at peace. Why? Well, when someone dies and everyone knows it, it is socially acceptable to mourn openly. No one questions a bad day, or wearing the same pants two weeks in a row, or forgetting to shower, or starving. All things, that also may occur whether death had happened or not, but are suddenly socially acceptable during a certain window of time after someone has died. If Great Aunt Sherry has had ten glasses of wine at dinner, but her husband has just kicked the bucket, no one is truly concerned, it falls under the category of mourning. But if Great Aunt Sherry has had ten glasses of wine at dinner, and her husband is still alive (and not driving her to madness) people would tend to call her a drunk and irresponsible and perhaps a raving lunatic. So, great loss to me is comforting in that, I am able to accept having a bad day, or week. I can blame it on the deceased and not on myself. 

    You should probably get some help, you might say at this point. To which I would argue, yes therapists are God's gift to mankind (aside from extraordinarily hairy animals), but most of mankind, if they were being honest all of the time, would "need help". I hate the phrase, "You should get some help". Well, no shit- so should you, and your friends, and your family. We all need help. So why does "you should get some help" sound so degrading? Because we as a culture have cultivated a world in which everyone is to be independent, in not only their successes, but in their failures as well. If you fall down by yourself, then you get back up yourself. My parents used to say to me, "You got yourself into this mess, so you can get yourself out". But this is not how it "should" be. We know, as a society that no one can truly get better on their own. We need doctors, and nurses, and AA groups. Life was not designed for abandonment and exclusiveness, life was designed for community, which we have spat at. Not only was life designed for community, it was designed for honest community. Community as a whole, cannot work if it is dishonest.

    I was just on twitter, and a full grown man tweeted, " Took some big Ls in 2020 that nobody know about, and that's how it should be. Jus keep it rolling and DOUBLE UP!". Nope. That is, in fact, not how it should be. Holding in the "L's" is not how we make progress,  as humans, and especially as writers. Progress is not made by pretending everything is working out for your benefit, progress is admitting that life does suck, most of the time. Imagine, if everyone just admitted to it. We would get rid of a large portion of the looming and dooming isolation that plagues our generation today. The problem with depression and suicide, (and this is not the only problem, and I am not arguing that this is the "fix" either) is that it is often rooted in isolation. 

    There is a reason why "doom scrolling" is a well known phrase amongst younger people (though it certainly impacts the old as well). However, I believe that doom scrolling, is not just the constant intake of negative news (the original definition), I actually believe it to be the opposite. Doom scrolling, is the constant intake of overly positive media. If you have not, late at night, opened up your phone, and scrolled through Instagram for an hour, you're either a liar or you have achieved extreme enlightenment and I want to be you friend. But while scrolling, you may find yourself viewing hundreds of images of people's lives which are increasingly better than yours, and you find yourself looking like a dehydrated prune compared to the rest of the world, and in your mind, though you may not realize it, is the thought, that I am alone in my sadness and self doubt and in my experience with loss. And we continue to scroll, to confirm to ourselves, that we are dried up and unworthy, and possibly insane. And this, is why I no longer feel bad about writing honestly about death and drinking and consumption and loss. Because I have come to realize, that we as humans, are all the same, and we are not what we have tricked ourselves into thinking we are. I do no service to anyone, to write about only the positive and increase the isolation gap. 

    This is why I love comedians. Comedians take our shit-fest of a world, and are so honest about it, that we find it hysterical. At the core of comedy is honesty. And what do people identify with? Honesty. People feel at peace when we can discuss the bad and the ugly, because they can connect with the discomfort, and they want to. Why do hoards of people attend comedy acts? To laugh at something they understand and have experienced even if it has been psychologically damaging. 

    Unfortunately, John Lennon was way off. We can't just imagine away hell or greed or hunger. (I know I shouldn't bring Lennon into this, I could be black listed) but the truth is the closest we are going to come to peace, is if/when we stop pretending like the only things worth saying are the positive ones.