Welcome to Stupid O'Clock Again

Ooh, look at the time: it is stupid o'clock.

And strange rants usually occur at stupid o'clock.

A Redditor (u/strydar1) wrote this (replicated here for reference):

I didn't write this. But it's true.

As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything... and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

He's not wrong. The waves never stop coming, and we don't know what's going to trigger them.

Perhaps that is why it is said that it takes at least as long as a relationship had been going on in order to recover from that particular break-up. I am definitely in much better shape than I was nearly a year ago today. When she told me that she was going to break up with me, it hit me so hard that there was nothing that I could do but cry. I cried, God knows how hard I cried. That kind of ripped-out-my-heart feeling... can probably only be matched by the death of a close loved one. It was that gut-wrenching.

Life was less meaningful from that day on. We were in the middle of a pandemic-induced ``circuit breaker'' scenario, which basically meant that everyone was isolated from everyone else. Work was a jerk, night and day had no difference, and I had to keep it together still because I had an intern to guide through. I made my acquaintance with the Lord and started walking in His footsteps as well as I could. I did contemplate death ever so often, mostly unintentionally and intrusively, but sometimes there was some actual deliberation involved.

I talked to some of my friends, but I realised that at some level, our interests and synchronicity have diverged. And I really didn't have the right words to convey what I was really feeling, because I didn't know what I was feeling any more.

No rehearsals meant no way of just getting back those much cherished routines of life that give the man drowning in his own depressive thoughts an anchor point of normalcy to start again from.

Today, nearly a year on (I could, in theory, look it up to confirm the date, but I don't think it productive to do so), I find that I'm still numb in that region of my heart. I am still an equal-opportunity ``hater'' of people, which also means that I am an equal-opportunity ``lover'' of people, because being neutral is also, by definition, equal parts of both antagonising perspectives. But that part of me that normally would have the angst of having a mate, a companion, a comrade-at-arms, that part is still numb; can't feel anything other than an occasional sadness that I do not know how to articulate.

I don't know if it is still just me grieving, or if it is just a tacit understanding that this type of longing is no longer necessary nor needed ever since I turned my eyes upon Jesus:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
  In the light of His glory and grace.

The things on earth do grow strangely dim for me---that is one big reason for the sabbatical; to find back that sparkle that would have led to a spark and then flame of enthusiasm and vigor. Somehow, somewhere along the line I lost them---I don't know how. Perhaps it was the exploitation, or perhaps it was not being true to myself, almost always just going with the flow, even if it feels bad. Or perhaps it is because I know that had I followed the original trajectory I was on, whatever I might have done will not actually bring honour to God, or to put in layman's terms, is not morally defensible.

But I digress far from the metaphor that was offered by u/strydar1. I think I mentioned something similar before, but instead of talking about waves, it was more on the auto-triggered memories, and the need to form new memories to re-contextualise the memories so that the newer ones without the significant other overrides the old one and thus reducing the level of grief and other bad feelings. However, new memories do take time to take proper root, and in the process of trying to create these new memories, the old ones are still lurking just beneath the sub-conscious, ready to spring out and spoil the whole day.

The trick, it seems, is to let the old memories come out into the open, but pay it no heed, letting it ebb and flow accordingly while actively recalling the new memories as much as possible. It is a concept that comes from the mindfulness form of meditation, and also from the various error-propagation protocols used for training neural networks.

Meaningless drivel at stupid o'clock... it's not as though what I have written here has any hope to have coherence in the first place.

Till the next update.