Every day, someone complains about something, like a long shift at work or your food order being cancelled.
There’ll always be something to worry about, and someone will curse themselves for always being so unlucky.
I think humans are quite lucky. We get to feel everything so deeply, every emotion coursing through our veins and nerves. We feel happiness and anger and pain and everything in between.
We get to experience everything and nothing all at once, and not every living creature gets to do that.
Jellyfish, for lack of a better example, have no brain, and their responses are likely to only be pure reflex instead of emotional states.
Ever since I was young, I’ve always been considered someone who feels everything so much more deeply; I just don’t know why. If this is a gift or a curse, I don’t know, but what I do know is that there was one day where I wished I couldn’t feel anything at all because I felt everything any human could, all at once.
My father’s death while hospitalised, only four days before his 44th birthday. My world came crashing down that day; my life shattered before my eyes.
It had seemed like any other morning until my mother told me the news that my dad, one half of the people that gave me life, was gone, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
I’ll never forget the feeling of my body hitting the floor and my heart feeling like it was physically sinking into my stomach.
I began to flick through the last few interactions I had with my father, like files in a cabinet, fearing that the memories would soon fade away.
My brain was a mixture of fear and anger and grief, and I felt like I was being swallowed up whole underwater, clawing at the surface that appeared so near, but being unable to inhale any sense of oxygen.
As the exceedingly hot water trickled down my bare skin in the shower, turning patches of my body red, I felt as if I couldn’t move. As if this was just some nightmare and I’d wake up in a few minutes, and it would all just have been a bad dream. The feeling I felt of the water burning my skin, disproved that.
I didn’t cry at his grave, as they sank my father six feet under, forever to rest under a pile of earth, never to read me another bedtime story again or tuck me into the covers, as he did so often, no matter how old I got.
I didn’t cry in the mosque when his childhood best friend who used to tie his shoelaces put a hand on my shoulder and gave me his deepest condolences.
I didn’t cry when we gathered in my grandmother’s house to pray, her eyes swollen and puffy with what I knew was the deepest sadness a mother could ever feel.
I cried under the dark blanket of the night, when I reached for my phone to text my father "Good night, I love you" and got smacked in the face with the realisation that I would never get another response.
I cried when I realised I could have done more to get him to take care of himself, his health.
I cried at school when I saw my best friend with a lingering look of sadness in her eyes, not because she was feeling sad with me, she was feeling sad for me.
Grief is one of those in-between emotions that humans feel. It’s something that can’t really be put on a scale or measured, because grief can be felt in such a myriad of ways.
Grief can feel like relief, that the person who tortured you for years is finally, finally gone for good, never to hurt you again.
It can feel like nostalgia, when you hear AC/DC playing in a restaurant and think "Hey, this was their favourite band".
It can feel like regret, because you never said what you have always wanted to say.
Grief can also just feel like downright woe, when you just want to curl up into a ball, hide under the covers, and never speak to anyone again.
Or, it can feel like all these sentiments all at once, and that’s perfectly sensible.I guess that’s what it’s like, being human.
It’s the privilege of getting to feel all the emotions to ever exist and being reassured in the fact that we won’t go through life feeling numb all the time, even if we never realise this.
We get to feel joy and we get to feel pain, but being human is just one big rollercoaster where we don’t know when the next dip or fall is. That’s what it means, right?
