Reflection: When I Lost You

I was given an opportunity with this particular prompt. Quite an obvious opportunity, really. See, the obvious idea would be for Isadora to be the one lost. She is, after all, the romantic interest of the main character, the one whose loss would hit Grey the hardest (Callie would barely affect him at all, and Diego’s loss, while hard, would be something he’d recently experienced by losing the connection to his mortal friends). 

Losing Isadora would be the expected, typical way to have the main protagonist be forced to deal with loss. Which is why I chose not to do that. As I brought up several times in past reflections, each of the members of the coterie represent something about myself that either I don’t like and wish to grow from, or something I do like that I wish to nurture. Grey, himself, is of course the full blown self insert character, which usually would be cringy in my opinion, however, unlike Bella and Meyers, I’m openly admitting he’s a self insert rather than protesting against the obvious. 

This obvious truth also left me with a brilliant opportunity. What character in our lives do we feel the most pain from when they are lost? A lover? A family member? A friend?

Nope. Worse than that. 

Ourselves. 

See, this is something I’ve been struggling with for years. I lost my sense of home when I left New York, and only for the briefest of moments did I find it again, only to have it taken from me. The career path I thought defined me and would be what I followed for the rest of my life became too much to even try to suffer through anymore. My hobbies, which had at one point been my whole world, became less interesting and less fulfilling, leaving me with weeks where most of what I do is work I never planned to do in my life followed by passive consumption of food and entertainment until sleep took me and I repeated the whole unfulfilling process again the next day. 

Now my whole life isn’t some void of joy and purpose. There are still things in my life that are good and positive and fill me with hope, they’re just fewer and further between than they used to be, and I feel that’s something that many people today can relate to. The world seems bleaker than it once did, and the joy that once seemed promised to us seems dead and buried. Most of that comes from the promises made by this world that were broken upon our growing up. I can’t ever afford a home, so I’ll be bled dry for the rest of my life renting; I can’t ever afford to retire, so the purpose of my life seems to be to grind away until I die; hell, I can’t even afford health insurance so I can’t properly afford to take care of myself. Under all these stresses and pressures some days it feels like we’re just pinned between a rock and a hard place, being bled dry by every company and crook who thinks they can syphon something off of us. 

Somewhere in this mess, I’ve lost myself, and what it means to be who I am, all because I’m struggling to survive in a world that doesn’t care if we do or don’t. There are many people who will respond with, “Well, the world isn’t a fair place, it doesn’t care if we live or die, we’re just supposed to pull ourselves up by our boot straps and survival of the fittest and all that…” 

Well, to you who say this, you’re fucking stupid and apparently don’t know anything about what makes humanity powerful. 

Humans are frail, weak, stupid creatures that had no business making their way to the top of the food chain. If we were the same as any other animal out there, we would have been extinct a long time ago. What made us powerful wasn’t our physical strength (a gorilla or chimp could rip us in half with absolutely zero effort), it wasn’t grit and determination (though that certainly helped us along), and it most definitely wasn’t our minds (you can have all the knowledge in the world on how to build a proper building, but if you’re alone when doing it, it will never get done). Humans were not made powerful through rugged individualism, but through our tribes. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have our tribes anymore. We have been told that we need to struggle and survive alone, by the sweat of our brows, and that asking for help or expecting someone to reach out a hand to support us means we’re weak or we failed. 

And we’re being told this by people who tell us they got where they got all on their own (while they used hundreds and thousands of other people as stepping stones), people who tell us we can’t trust others (because they surrounded themselves with other users and abusers just like them, who they know they cannot trust), and built a society based off of backstabbing and ladder climbing that requires us sacrifice our relationships for success. But every accusation is a confession, and each time they accuse us of being weak for wanting connection, the most human aspect of our personalities, over a bitter, soulless grind, they are trying to justify the choices they made to become wealthy dragons, hoarding enough resources to make sure each and every member of their supposed tribe is taken care of, while simultaneously becoming the most despised members of it. 

Somewhere along the way, we lost ourselves as people, and we lost our sense of humanity. What it means to be a tribe, and that moment when we have been torn away from our tribe, when we are alone in the dark, pinned under the heavy pressure and pain of loss and loneliness, we feel the most lost we ever will in our lives. It's only through connecting to those we love and those we build with, can we hope to ever find ourselves again.