Tetris arrogance, and why I hate strategy board games.

I mused to myself, a few weeks ago, whether trauma could be, in its barest terms, defined as a profound shift in perspective and direction. More pointedly: a profound shift in what one considers a direction; a shift in how one goes about recognizing and pursuing a direction, when the bottom drops out and you're facing the opposite coast when the dust settles. Mused about whether the questions that surround recovery can be distilled down to ideas of exchange: what was the world? what is it now? what did it give before? what does it give now? what was required of you, in your understanding of the world, before now? and what's required now? What do you do now? 

Except that there's grief. And grief demands attention.

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I've always treaded water too long in the big things that hurt me. I may not have said it aloud, much, but I let them settle on my skin and I poked at them like bruises. I know, now, why I did so.

Part of it was misguidedly trying to find an identity: 'your struggle is not your identity,' but is this who I am? or this, or this? is this where I find myself?

Part of it was knowing-without-knowing that there was more to be unearthed, more to recognize, more to process than what I was allowing. Knowing, without having known any fullness of recovery, that what I was allowing was still empty of something I couldn't name.

Part of it was, along those lines, the pressure on myself to dig down to the very bottom, and beyond, in order to find The Reasons And The Meaning For It All that I was obviously missing, since I never found it, and how could these terrible things be put away until I understood them? and how am I Doing This Correctly if I don't come to some sort of resolution about it?

And now I know: it doesn't work that way. It never has.

Distillation and barest terms. For someone who hates strategy board games, I'm great at intellectualizing. Fan-freaking-tastic. Strip it down to nothing, analyze the bones of it so you can navigate it. Figure out the ends, so you can tailor your means. Maybe even make the whole thing mean something different, if you can find a way to reconcile it to something that feels like resolution or epiphany or grace/God-approval.

Neat. Orderly. Controlled. And kind of arrogant-tied-to-pitiful.

No room for grief, which I don't think I've ever allowed. No room for raw self; only distilled.
No matter how much I write about these things, I'll never harness them.
The key is, I guess, remembering that that's fine. And so is being equally enraged and relieved about it.

_______

With all my heart, I don't want to be here anymore. I want my three years back. I want a do-over.

Thinking that I would be a person to positively impact the world, that the power of my respect and self-control, that the welcoming of my heart would be enough to mitigate the evil in yours; that I have never been so confused, and have never understood so clearly arrogance: of former certainties, and crafting a world
around the narcissism of expecting good for good from evil; deals with devils, banking on my even-keel as currency... Taking on the most essential expression of the battle of feminism in my own body, in ways I can't escape by closing the laptop or turning off the news.. my life, mind, personality, peace, soul uprooted and flung into the air by an event that people cannot place or name or, sometimes, even know as real....

I cannot do it. It's too much. The lights are burning out, one by one.

I want to think my way out of it, which has never worked before, no matter how hard I tried.
I want to box it up - this pain in that box, these words in this box, this feeling here - and fit them on a shelf, Tetris-style, to be remembered and drawn upon when a situation calls for insight or empathy, when enough time has passed that I, dry-eyed before the fresh weeping before me, draw on only the re-learned strategy of navigation; a strong presence. 

I know it's impossible, but I remember back to the early days of each major incident, before I really knew the world was changing, and I muse about whether I could have codified a strategy for each into law for myself, in those early days before all the changes I faced took hold and took over: simply placed myself into new shoes, possibly left everything I knew, and became reborn - perhaps stillborn - into nothing more than a direction. A strategy. A tourist, instead of a resident. It makes sense nowhere but inside, and, even there, I know it's impossible. Because grief overtakes. If trauma is going to invade my life, I want trauma to be merely another frame for strategy or direction. I want the clear, defined rules of legalism, except that the grief of trauma makes this devastatingly impossible by making it all so devastatingly real.

And it's funny-ish, in an unfunny, intellectual kind of way, how the same is true for Christianity: how the legalism of it seems, intellectually, as though it would be simple to navigate, except that to exclude grace nullifies the whole exercise: grace complicates the whole thing and makes it devastatingly real.

If grief is the underscore to trauma that offers the potential for authenticity and ownership, then grief is not an indulgence, but a mandate which overrides ideas of strategy.

If grace is the underscore that breathes life into Law... then I am too tired to consider all the questions this raises. All I know is that everything becomes more complicated than it was before.

I think this is why I hate strategy board games: for the darkness of what a flawed strategy represents.