mashatupitsyn:

If you really let yourself mourn you can recover (and keep) what is most important.

Last year, when I wrote GameSpot’s February Game of the Month writeup for Left Behind, I was very deliberate about the lede I wrote for that piece. It was this:

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Writing about Left Behind at the end of the year, I said:

Left Behind leaves me haunted by big questions, real questions about grief and loss. What does Ellie do, what does a person do, with memories of love when faced with the possibility of never knowing love again? Do you find strength and joy in the recollection? Or does it just make facing your reality that much harder?

Left Behind is a beautiful and heartwrenching story about loss, and about the things that stay with you.

Today, my phone shuffled up a song by Peter Gabriel that I usually skip, but today I listened to it.

Usually I find the song too dreary to listen to. But the thing about it is that there’s this section that starts at around 4:55 that I love, when the dreariness gives way to exuberance. 

Life carries on in the people I meet 
In everyone that’s out on the street
In all the dogs and cats
In the flies and rats
In the rot and the rust
In the ashes and the dust

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Life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on

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It’s just the car that we ride in
The home we reside in
The face that we hide in 
The way we are tied in

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Life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on

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It’s a celebration of life, and of how loss is part of it, the rot and the rust, the ashes and the dust. And it only works because of the way it punctures the dreariness that surrounds it. It gives me goosebumps.

It’s not just people that we love and lose. Sometimes a job can feel like a part of us, too, part of how we understand ourselves and our value, part of how we identify our place in the world and our relationship to others.

Yesterday I was at a party with some people I used to work with, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. When they asked me how I was doing, I’d say something like, “Well, sometimes I’m in one place. The place where I’m thinking about the inescapable reality that I’m not making enough money to stay afloat in the long term. And then I start to panic and to feel like my life is a complete disaster. At other times I’m in another place, a place where I’m excited by some of the work I’m doing, where I feel liberated to explore angles in my writing that I never could have done at my last job, and in those moments, I just feel so damn lucky to be here at all. It’s real life. Sometimes it’s incredibly lonely and sometimes it’s terrifying but I’m here, it’s a beautiful day, and I am so fortunate just to have ever even had the chances I’ve had.” 

My time at GameSpot may be over and that was a loss I grieved at the time because I gave that site so much of myself and believed so much in what it could be. But there are things from my time there that I get to keep, the most important things, and while I don’t really know what moving forward looks like and the future is still uncertain, I know that I don’t want to be at GameSpot anymore. 

Tonight in Berkeley, a man said to me, “It’s good to see you again. You should come in for a healing and a reading.”

I don’t think I’ve ever actually met this man before but I smiled and nodded. 

“You’ve got good energy,” he said. “Compassionate.” 

“I try to be,” I said. “It’s not always easy in this world.”

“All we can do is hang on,” he said.

Life carries on and on and on and on, and that is beautiful.