This thought came about when I lost a very detailed post yesterday, the android app likes to delete all the text you've typed when you stay out of the app window for too long... but I digress.
Loss is a part of life, but I think it happens way more than we acknowledge and we (in the english/western world) seem to not know how to handle it... what is loss anyway?
The emotional aspects associated with investing and the negative sentiment associated with recognising a loss.
That's one definition I looked up....
My definition... loss is the absence or withdrawal of something you perceive to be of value.
the key word for me is perceive... you can ague 'reality' all you want, but you can't argue someone's perception, because it's theirs.
How do you handle loss? I'm trying to learn to do the pop psychology method of ...
>acknowledge>feel>time>acceptance.
but how much time do we need? and what is time anyway... what makes it time? lots of other losses or other events... why does it take so long for the brain to let go? I think when it's a part of our identity... when that's lost, it is very difficult to just grieve and let go as you need to build or fill that loss with something new, and that does take time for a lot of (to me) obvious reasons.
I had a very close friend ... distance themselves from me, for reasons that to me don't seem plausible, but regardless, this person was a big part in shaping my adult hood and how I think today... and now they are not there... a lot of time has passed and the worst thing about the whole process is, i'm not sure what I've lost... I have friends come and go, but this has really effected me. Another thought is that, although I am a massive advocator of 'hope'... there are rare circumstances where it is counter productive and maybe that's in play here... I can't do the process of grief because I have hope that it will be all back to how it was. so hope is the deferrer of the grieving process... Then I guess it just comes down to choice... what do I want to do? what can I control? and if I do move on... what's stopping me from letting them back in as time passes again?
So for me maybe there's a couple of types of losses...
Those losses that are absolute, ie, someone I cared about died.
Those losses that are intangible losses ie the early period of a job prospect that you don't ever hear back from.
So the first style of loss... for me, is easy to deal with, I use the modern Psych method, but what about the second style? I guess apathy solves a lot of problems, but some things you just invest to heavily and all your doing is pretending not to care. I guess this is why in the dating world it's 'safer' for your mental health to be dating multiple people to avoid caring too much about one person.
It doesn't sound like much of a solution, but maybe by trying to figure it out how to move on is one of the best ways to move on..... maybe.
