The Jester (5)

Hello, me again, the personification of my author’s grief! I haven’t been around for a bit as my author thought she was doing okay, getting on a more even keel. At the moment, I am agitating her, though. She is realising that I am making myself much more complex now. For the first year after B’s death she pretty much experienced me at face-value, ‘what you feel is what you get’, the raw grief, the sorrow, the vulnerability. She had been getting used to me. I had become her strange friend, sometimes provoking feelings of terrible loss, sometimes comforting, mostly anything in between, but always there in the background whatever she was doing. Now though, I am making it all so much more complicated and I am confusing her. Her thought processes are whirling round and around, and she is wondering whether she is projecting me onto other things in her life, and if so why? I then make her question what is going on: “Is it because I’m finding it hard to express how I’m feeling now?”, “Am I trying to distract myself from my grief by focusing my feelings on something else (even though it doesn’t help and makes me feel worse rather than better)?” It’s all about feelings with her! I make her feel unhappy, and then she finds it difficult to stop the urge to vent her unhelpful and negative feelings. She becomes critical of others, and then critical of herself. It’s another of those vicious circles – if she’s feeling emotional it makes it all worse, which in turn makes her feel more emotional... It’s not difficult to get her spinning around! What is new, though, is that I am now prodding her to try to analyse all of this, which isn’t easy on top of everything else I throw at her! Don’t worry if this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s all going on inside of her and she doesn’t really understand it! Just be kind to her if she’s having a hard time (I know you are), she feels a psychological mess at the moment! Although she’s (mostly) learnt to break the cycle of rumination and regrets that I used to send her on, she hasn’t yet learnt how to stop me sending her along all these new convolutions…