In the weeds

I am having another day in which thoughts of Ken and how much I miss him interrupt me every five minutes. When I had a therapist she always gave me good advice for coping with these difficulties. Since I don't have her to go to anymore I plumb the depths of my memory to try and figure out how she would tell me to cope with this. When I am in emotional pain my learned response from my upbringing has always been push it away and scold myself for not being stronger. However, my therapist taught me that pushing the pain away isn't dealing with it, it is just delaying dealing with it. I was watching Private Practice last night and Pete told The Captain that "There is no pill for grief. You're supposed to feel it." That reminded me that what I need to do is allow myself to feel it instead of my instinctual reaction which is to run and hide from it. It sucks. It means that I don't go anywhere because I don't want to be crying in public. There also is not guaranteed timeline as to when it will stop hurting. In the past my biggest hurdle was to stop blaming myself every time a relationship fails. I just heap all this anger, hatred and responsibility on myself because I'm unloveable, I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, I'm worthless...this list can go on and on and on. It eventually leads me to being on the subway platform and seriously contemplating jumping in front of the train instead of going home. That is not me admitting I'm going to do it, it is just me admitting the idea has crossed my mind on more than one occasion. What stops me is the idea of traumatizing the person driving the train and the other people on the platform. That wouldn't be fair to them, in fact it is cruel to put that kind of thing on to someone else like that. So don't worry, I'm not about to do that. So that leaves me the only choice of facing my grief and pain and moving through it. In all this thinking that I have so much time to do I have realized that I put too much effort and thought into a particular outcome to this situation. I have several oracle card and tarot card decks and when I am emotionally messy I pull them out and they don't tell the future as much as they show me where my patterns of thought and behaviour are. So the message I keep getting over and over is that putting too much thought and attention on a particular outcome will rob me of a full experience. So instead of thinking about Ken and this broken relationship I am trying to find a positive response to the grief and pain. Which brings me to refocus my efforts on cleaning out my apartment. There is too much stuff everywhere and it is crowding me out. It leaves no room for anything new. I want to get rid of what I don't need. I feel like it is as good a place to start as any. I can't do what I really want to do which is talk to Ken, so I'm going to get into the weeds of digging myself out of the hole I'm in.