I am not doing well

“I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.”
 
And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt,  The Goldfinch

What you don't know...
What you don't see...
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What you don’t know is that when you say, “you’re doing so well,” I want to pounce on you, wet your cheeks with fat, hot tears; I want to beat my pain against your chest with clenched fists and scream, “I am not doing well!”

But, I’m not allowed to do that. Or anything close to that. There is no space here in our lives for me to lie in bed with the whiskey bottle for days or take to the dark tent with the other widows and wail our sorrows for the whole town to hear. There is no space for me to walk with lips quivering and legs shaking through cubicled aisles or weep loud and incessantly enough for your children to hear. It frightens you. It will destroy my livelihood and what few people can bear to be around me. And then, I will truly have nothing. But this? This false self that lives atop this hardening mask and the gritted teeth behind it, I’m not sure that’s better than nothing.

Because this mask is starting to stick and to rot, to seep into my soul. I am hard. I am angry. I am so very alone. You don’t see that I am dying behind here. What you see is strength and resilience. I fear you may even see flippancy. But, I am too tired of having my heart laid bare before you and all my darkness invaded by your light. So strength and resilience is not what you see. You see survival. Someone who is trying against all odds and her very will to survive. I am not doing a very good job. But, you don’t know that, and it feels like that’s your fault. I don’t know if it is.

What you don’t see is this:

Though the plane crashed, and you watched me escape the wreckage, singed but standing, you didn’t know that the plane crashed in the desert, and I am still in that desert. When you had to put out the fires and put salve on my burns, there was something for you to do, an immediate crisis to attend, a tidy problem to fix. Now, I am wandering through the desert, and it feels infinite. The sun is scorching my scalp. I’m thirsty and exhausted. The air is almost too hot to breathe, it makes me thirstier. Yet, you just see me walking and don’t know that I’m dying slowly on this hardpan earth. You think walking means I walk towards a healing that will make me a “better person” for having survived this. I do not. I do not walk to enlightenment. I walk for you. I walk because I cannot do to you what he did to me. So, I resent you for that too. For making me walk when I am so, so, so tired. You don’t see that.

What you don’t know is that I am not doing well. You want to talk about how to ask for a raise. You want me to have dinner with your in-laws. You want me to organize an audit and soothe stakeholders. You want me to laugh at your jokes and smile appropriately. You want me to sit in meetings where we talk about suicide prevention and not scream. You want these things because they allay your anxieties that at least I’m walking, that I am strong, that I am resilient, that I am doing well. I am not doing well.

You think I’m doing well because you need to think I’m doing well. You are pityingly uncomfortable with my not-well-ness, and I prefer not to be around your pretend she’s doing well-ness. Please stop telling me I’m doing well. You can’t see. You can’t know. Really though, I am not doing well.