Monday 28 December 2015

Happiness and sadness

I recently found a journal I started in mid-2013. In the first entry I attempted to describe the kind of life I thought I would be living in January 2016. In some areas I was off the mark but in others I was more than right. I mostly talked about my transition and how I thought it would impact my life. However, one of the things I wrote stands out to me today more than the others: 'I will have been very sad but I will also have had many moments of happiness'. In this prediction I could not have been more Nostradamus-like. I know, it's not really a prediction. It's kind of like saying that the sun will rise and set each day or the 732 Express to the city will arrive at 8.07 on weekdays but, there is something in that statement which reminds me more about the beauty of life than any of my expectations back on that wintry Canberra day in July 2013. Happiness and sadness live together in me. There are times when I feel so full of joy thinking about the wonder of life that I almost burst and there are times when my sadness seems so deep that I think I'm going to break. Last night I finished binge-watching Season 2 of 'Transparent'. I won't reveal any spoilers but here's the thing, I realised how much loss I have had in my life. More than that, the understanding of my own losses brought a greater understanding of the loss of others in my life. My son lost a father when I transitioned. My father lost a wife from dementia. My mother lost a life from the same illness. My brother lost his belief in family love when he experienced conflict from coming out as gay. My children lost a mother through death. This reflection of loss landed on me like a soft wave. It grabbed my soul and pulled it out of me so that I had no choice to feel the pain, feel the emptiness, the ache, the tears streaming down my cheek. Yet, from within that flood of feeling, I felt myself rising up. I could see the sun above the surface of the water that covered me and I broke through, driven with the desire to write; to somehow capture the wisdom I felt had been passed on to me by the soft-hard sorrowful pain that had worked its way through me and morphed into a feeling of joy at what we, as living beings, are capable of feeling. Somehow, my feelings had built a cathedral of sorrow in my heart and whilst kneeling within it, my heart healed.