STOP CRYING CAPITALIST SCUM

The business closes tomorrow and I have a very good attitude about it.

I am suiting up and I am showing up and I am being entirely too shitty at everything, but I’m here, in real clothes saying reassuring, normal sounding things like “It’ll be nice to make some money again” and “It’s a relief to have options” and “The experience is what really matters,” which are true but only half true because for the first time ever, I completely missed my period and while I’m acting like a level headed super mature adult woman about this, I have alternating panic shits and rolling nausea. Because my body thinks I died and doesn’t understand what I’m still doing here since I put all of myself into a thing for more than three years and now it’s dead so I must be dead too.

I’m crying alone in the bathroom like a responsible professional and I’m wearing things that make me feel strong and not weak and I am not going to let this get me down, no sir.

After all, I have no right to be sad. I have financial stability. I have love and friends and Career Options. We just put an offer on a house and it was accepted.

I have a husband who is nice and quietly consoles me when I come home without underwear sulking and feeling utterly disgusting. 

I am a pale shadow of the strong woman I am supposed to be. I’m a ridiculous house slut who’s vanity project didn’t work out and so now I have a weird hope that maybe I am pregnant so this baby can alien-style murder me and finally I can die doing something other people will actually think is useful, even if the act and practice of unbridled procreation fills me with dread.

Fortunately for all of us, I am as barren today as I always have been. I took two tests and made a joke about hemorrhaging to death so my husband will not worry about me.

I have had way way worse shit happen to me than this literal shit. This is just a thing, a temporary condition of gut wrenching sadness that makes me want to puke. Why am I acting like this? I have been here so many times before, but not this exact version of here.

This is a kind of alternate dimension version of loss where I can lose so much and still have so much more than I have ever wanted. More than I thought I deserved, to be honest about it. This business was just a part of me. A huge fucking part of me, but a little piece of my life, which is both mine and not mine. But in a good way.

I never had external structures before. I mean, I did, but not like this. I used to rest so lightly on the world because I know what a burden I am. I am so heavy. My emotions, my issues, my body, my everything has always been too much.

At a certain point, I just started holding myself in. Just hold this weirdness inside. But it comes out. In gross ways. Physically and emotionally gross ways.

I have lost everything so many times. So why does it feel so horrible to only lose a part of everything? Why am I not walking this off?

I never had the luxury to lick my wounds before. And I felt so much resentment towards anyone who did. I still feel it. Which is why I am so angry at myself for this weakness all of a sudden.

I used to have Good Days and Bad Days. I had a black and white view that fit my two-dimensional life and that was that. I didn’t have anything, I didn’t want anything, and it was just a coincidence that those two balanced out perfectly.

The problem with paradigm shift is that it can be as traumatic as the thing that caused the shift to begin with. I happen to be smart, but that doesn’t mean I was ever meant to have depth. I want so badly for there to be a bad guy who I can blame for these feelings and there isn’t. It’s just a shitty fucking side effect of having a life worth living.

If you never build anything, you’ll never have to feel the pain of it being torn down, or worse falling apart under the weight of it’s own inertia. You’ll never have to put on a Ninja Turtle shirt just to go outside because that’s the level of cold sweat anxiety you are experiencing that morning and Donatello, unlike you, is a good monster. Or maybe you will, but you’ll miss out on the building, which is so wonderful by contrast that at least there’s some justice in this horrible pain I’m in.

Hold on. I think I just realize something.

Editor’s Note: I did realize something: There is no such thing as avoiding grief. There are not enough superhero shirts or necklaces my husband gave me or yonic rings my great-grandma made in a million million earths to make that happen. This post has been slightly edited for mentions of stress shits (yes, it was worse) but otherwise will stand as a monument to this day, which had lots of sucky parts but also several really good parts too. Thank you people who told me I am a good monster, in all the ways you told me that.