Grief has made me stupid

I really can’t blame it all on grief.  It started with grad school, 3 1/2 years, all year round, and a 60 page masters thesis.  I remember talking with a friend who graduated with me two years out, and she asked if I felt like my brain function was worse since grad school, to which I replied with a resounding YES!  Then there were the children.  With each one, I joked that the placenta and brain got mixed up on the way out. Yes, I know, gross.  But seriously, true. Continue reading

Distractions 101

When one is faced with living with the mind numbing horrific trauma that I have seen, one learns to distract themselves.

At first, when everything is fresh, you walk around like a zombie (which after seeing dead bodies, you really don’t ever want to see a picture of a zombie or have to explain to someone why you cannot watch The Walking Dead). You do random things, like clean the kitchen, organize a box, pay bills.  This is like the next day. Because you cannot sit still.  Your brain is trying to wrap itself around what happened and it can’t, because it is so fucking unbelievable.  A quote that I heard after was “you cannot make sense out of something that never will make sense” plays around, because we are mostly rational in our day to day.  We want to understand, make sense of things. And this, this thing, you cannot. Continue reading