My dog Sawyer’s death has turned my life upside down. In the nearly four months since I lost him, I’ve questioned tons of things I thought were settled, realized how much pain I still have to heal (both pain related to Sawyer and pain that’s been with me my whole life), and felt terrified to face a world full of mean people without my best friend to comfort me. I’ve also thought a lot about the apparent pointlessness of most modern things and wondered what’s it all building toward.
As many things in the outer world I’ve wanted to see change, I’ve found even more in my own inner world. I can think of at least a few times in my life in which I realized that what I was doing had either stopped working or never worked in the first place. The most notable occasions were 2017 and 2020. Losing Sawyer has brought me to that same realization this year. In the past, I didn’t know where to turn or what to do; all I knew was that I had to stop doing what I had come to realize was making life worse for myself and others. That brings me to my big question: What next?
I wish I had a good answer. There are plenty of small projects I work on each day and even a few big plans I have for the immediate future, but long-term plans or plans for who I want to be as a person? Incredibly fuzzy. I can say for certain, though, that I’m beyond done with the pattern my life seems to have fallen into over the past year or two: endlessly pouring myself out for others to no avail, “socializing” by talking endlessly about shallow things without some greater point to the exchange, and getting drained or dragged around by negative humans. No more of that.
For more than a month now, I’ve been in a phase of hating humans, especially those who make life miserable for myself as well as the few humans and the many animals I love and care about. This has resulted in me mostly keeping to myself at home, along with working through lots of pain. When I do interact with other humans, it’s usually briefly and in shallow ways to avoid the risk of further pain. Fortunately, the few deeper interactions I’ve had lately have been overall positive.
I’m finally starting to embody the fact that I don’t exist to please others and that I can’t pour myself out or endlessly restrain myself just so someone doesn’t feel feel slightly upset or uncomfortable. That’ll either kill me from stress or give me a life so miserable that I’d prefer being dead. I’ve understood this intellectually for years but have been unable to fully practice it until relatively recently. This is both scary as it’s new territory for me and exciting as I’m finally making real progress in an area where I’d always previously felt stuck.
Along with this, I’ve spent the past few weeks working through an enormous amount of rage over how others have treated me throughout my life (from the violence in my early years to the yelling, intimidation, mockery, and other kinds of cruelty in the years since then). I’m determined to put a stop to that. I’m upping my boundaries game, avoiding any and all toxic conversations and situations, and prioritizing those who treat me as I want to be treated. I’m also working hard to refrain from adopting the bad behavior of toxic humans so I don’t sink to their level.
All of that inner work has me feeling closer to where I was emotionally from late March through mid April of this year. Some days, I’m even getting the same sensations I had back in late August through most of September last year. While I’m not feeling exactly like I was during either of those time periods, I am feeling much better than I’ve felt for most of this year. Steadily increasing peace alongside the courage to face even my most painful emotions are always signs that I’m on the right track. That gives me hope that I’ll eventually get back to those places or, perhaps, even better ones.
Despite what I said a few paragraphs ago, I don’t spend huge amounts of time dwelling on the negative stuff. I’m more concerned with making good use of my remaining life so I have few to no regrets at the end. I’d hate to turn out like some people (both fictional characters in cautionary tales and real humans) who doubled down on their character flaws, gradually got worse over their lives, and died miserable and alone. Should that happen to me, even if I were to accomplish most of my goals and attain success by worldly standards, I will consider myself to have been a complete failure. Someone who had small victories in trivial areas but lost in the most important parts of life. I won’t let that happen.
I’ve become convinced that none of the ideas I would love to see take place will ever happen on a large scale. Those ideas all depend on enough humans healing their trauma, practicing effective communication, and choosing the high road almost all the time, none of which I can imagine happening now or anytime in the future. All my desperate efforts in that direction seem to have been totally fruitless so I’m going to stop them. I’ll still talk about and encourage these ideas through my blog and my eventual books as I enjoy writing about them, and I’ll still help my loved ones where I can, but I no longer expect any of that to transform the world. I certainly no longer feel the pressure to single handidly solve all the world’s problems and save everyone in the world, which is a huge relief. My only remaining hope is that these changes will happen on a small scale, such as my close friends and family members finding lasting healing, peace, and wellbeing. I don’t know how to get there from here. I barely know my next steps at this point. I simply hope that, with everything I’ve learned over the past five or six years, I will be able to move away from what isn’t currently working and move toward something that does work.