Jewels from the Dark

“When you think you’ve hit the bottom, and the bottom gives way…”
Steven Curtis Chapman

I thought I hit the bottom many times in my life and many, many times in the past 5 years. Every time it felt like *that* was all the loss I could hold, I was handed another loss and the bottom gave way again. It wears on a person… It wore on me and it wore my relationship into the ground.

I have been reading a lot, trying to make sense of my internal landscape – my attitudes, actions, choices, fears, inner monologue, etc. I am always looking for a way to fix, or heal, or control what feels overwhelming and uncontrollable. A few years ago, I told a friend it feels like I am always trying to strong arm the ocean. (You can’t do that, by the way…the ocean will have its way with you no matter how much you try to control it).

The way I chose to strong arm my life’s ocean was to get really angry and really bitter. I started churning and churning in negative thought patterns where I fought against the waves of anger, fear, sadness, grief, hopelessness, and despair. But you can’t strong arm the ocean. Those waves took over. Not only did they take over – they consumed me. And the cost was very great and very painful.

How do you hold space for the fact that your losing battle with the ocean was a very large part of losing your relationship? The relationship that held you together as you watched the rest of your life collapse into ruins? That you took for granted and thought would be there forever, despite who and what you had become? How do you navigate the fact that you, in the moment before the end, were the toxic one?

You sit. You feel. You stop trying to control every flipping thing in your life. You look and see that you finally are at the bottom because you choose this to be where the bottom is. You stop digging a hole. You begin to relax into the waves and you learn to float. Soon, shipwrecked pieces of your life start drifting by and you get to decide what would be helpful to build a raft, then a vessel, then you start to move toward land.

I know…mixed metaphors..ruins and shipwrecks. Eww. But they work? The point here is that I had to get to a place where I have now lost everything I held so tightly to. What I put my hope and identity into. What I thought I was here on earth to do, in the only way I was willing and wanted to do it.

That last sentence is important. Since I was 7, I have wanted to be a cop. No clue why that little seed was planted in my heart, but it was. I wanted to help people, save people, do the job in a different and better way. I wanted to make a difference and I wanted it to matter to someone that I showed up, that I was there, that I came when they needed someone. And I decided that being a cop was the only way to do that.

I tried doing EMS first and that was fulfilling to a point. But I didn’t like staging while the cops “made the scene safe” so I again turned to pursuing my “purpose” in life. But life knocked me around a little bit and I ended up with a failed marriage and two young kids before I was able to see that dream realized. Finally, I was a cop.

For 10 years, I lived my purpose and passion and made a difference. I felt alive…whole. There were rough days, other injuries, other surgeries, and the heaviness that comes from walking with so many through the worst days of their lives. I saw the effects of violence, death, pain and suffering, and did countless death notifications, becoming the “destroyer of worlds” as I told loved ones their person was never coming home. But in everything I did, I took a whole-person approach and tried to do the job differently than what people typically think cops do from movies or TV or the media’s portrayals.

I treated every person I encountered, even those who had just committed heinous crimes, with dignity and respect. I had a “one choice” rule – we are all one choice away from getting into the back of a squad car in handcuffs – even cops – so we better be humble and treat everyone kindly. We (cops) are no better than anyone else. We simply made different choices in life and we don’t know everything that led up to meeting this particular person in this particular moment in time. We can’t approach people from a place of moral superiority – we need to have strong morals and values for sure, but not lord it over others we encounter. That’s how I did the job. And I did it really well for 10 years.

Then I got hurt and the bottom gave way. I found the next level down held surgery and pain but I pushed through and got back to full duty. Then the bottom gave way again and I had more surgery and pain and then complications. Then the bottom gave way again and my employer decided not to offer me any way back, even in a “light duty” capacity as the injury would not let me ever get back to working full duty. I was out. Out of the department. Out of a job. Out of my profession I loved so much. Out in the dark. None of my co-workers reached out until almost 6 months past when I had left when a single person asked when I was coming back. That hurt…a lot. Only one more reached out a year or so after I was gone and I helped them through a similar path, but their treatment and outcome by the department was vastly different and much more positive than mine.

The bottom kept giving way. I had to take a 55% pay cut and struggled to find a job. I had to sell my house and move into a small apartment as my kids finished their childhoods in very different circumstances than they had known since I had had to claw my way out of the bottom of my divorce. I had to try to keep my head above the waves, but I felt like I was drowning (see my post “Lament” for more).

Then the bottom gave way again and my hand failed to respond to any surgical treatment. I was looking at being maimed and in excruciating pain with endless surgeries to “save” my biological hand on the horizon, or I could have an elective amputation and move on with the hope that medical science and bio-engineering would continue to advance and I may find a way back to function. I chose the amputation and life became so much better and yet infinitely harder. This world is a two-handed world…

I stuffed all my grief and sorrow into a box and shoved it into the closet of my heart. I thought if I ignored it and went back to “normal,” it would just shush and I could deal with it later. I threw myself into my job and school and raising my kids to adulthood. I didn’t see that a storm was brewing over the ocean and the waves were starting to get bigger and more unpredictable. Inside my heart, what I had shoved in a box had festered and started to leak out – slowly infecting my attitude, my words, my interactions with others, my greatest relationship. I was exhausted and exhausting to be around. A little black hole of yuck.

I started telling myself and my man that I hated my life. I was not in a space where I wanted to or tried to end it. I just did NOT want it anymore. Any part of it. That’s what I kept saying, in my outside voice, over and over and over again. It was true. I hated the losses I had faced. I hated the sorrow and grief and purposelessness and fear and anger and effing damn hope that kept stubbornly holding on and the ruins and the wreckage and… And people can’t take that forever. It was incessant and too much. I told him I didn’t want any part of my life but I didn’t mean that I didn’t want him… I took a man who is an eternal optimist and exhausted his capacity to love and then took one more step away.

The first week of October is always rough. It holds several “loss-iversaries” for me and this year was a doozy. I disappeared from my relationship. I withdrew. I was so focused on me and consumed with my little world of hatred for my life that I took the wrecking ball and knocked down the last standing structure that had provided any shelter. And then we were over. And I add another deep loss to the first week of October. And the bottom gave way one more time.

My man has always offered me space and grace to grow as a person. I think this ending was the greatest kindness, although so deeply painful, for both of us. He had been desperately trying to not let the bottom give way, but it was going no matter what. So he let go. I don’t blame him. I needed to have the bottom give way. I needed the space and time and I needed the need to look back and see that I had become someone I don’t even recognize. Maybe there is a way back to us in the future, maybe not.

I have never been a sunny, optimistic, bright shining light of a person. I probably won’t ever be. But I had not seen just how dark I had become and how much of a black hole I was for those closest to me. He gave me the opportunity to see that and I will be forever grateful and forever regret that the cost of finding me was him and us.

I have rebuilt my life several times. I am fairly decent at it, except that my foundation has never been deep enough to withstand the bottom giving way. I have an opportunity to sink a firm foundation of who I want to be and what I want my life to stand for, now that I have truly hit bottom. I get to ask myself questions, here in the dark and at the bottom of the pit: who do you want to be? what will you stand for? how do you want to show up for others? who will you become now, here at the end of all things?

I sit as a semi-empty nester in my 40s, alone. Trying to create a new life for myself. I don’t like what my life has become – any part of it. So it is time to relax into the process, float on the waves (that will likely still take me under sometimes) and grab on to the pieces of flotsam and jetsam that will work to repurpose into the life I want to rebuild. It will be a process and a hard one at that. I have friends and family who are willing and able to help me in the process. I am alone, but not alone.

I have reached the bottom. And I will now lay a firm foundation for the life I do want, here at the end of all things.

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If you are in a crisis moment, please reach out for help. In the US, dial 911 for emergency care or 988 for the National Lifeline. In the UK, dial 999 for emergency care or 0800 689 5652 for the National Helpline. If you are in another country, please click here for a list of emergency and crisis numbers.

*Disclaimer: This blog is for my own personal processing and does not offer nor replace any professional psychiatric advice or psychological therapeutic care. If you are struggling with mental health challenges, please seek medical attention, counseling, or crisis help.*