I was moving some media around, organizing stuff last night.
In lieu of blogs (I rarely post here) or hand-written logs (I’ve tried), I started keeping personal vlogs on my phone, going back to around 2020, off and on. Even more so after 2023.
These are usually just 20-30 minutes long, talking to a non-existent audience about what’s going on in my life. It’s all personal stuff. Things never intended to be posted. Though, I assume someone might see them after I’m gone, if they rifle through my stuff. Fair play. There’s nothing outrageous in there. (Like I’d commit that to record.)
But the other night I was sorting these recordings into folders by year, finally cleaning up the messy video dump I’d accumulated.
As I was doing 2024, I remembered that I recorded one the night my mother died. It was literally as soon as I got in the car, outside the hospital just after it happened.
This is the kind of thing a creepy influencer might harvest for sympathy clicks, but I did it because I simply had no other outlet, primarily… I was alone just after midnight.
But secondly, and more important to me, I recorded it because I didn’t want to forget. So often our memories fade, morph, soften into a vague, hazy shape… yet I badly needed to permanently freeze the moment in time.
The vlog is full of incredibly raw, unfiltered emotion and anger. It gives me chills looking back on it, because I do remember what it was like. The memory didn’t fade.
But as I watched, I wanted to reach through the video and console myself. It felt like such a black empty pit. A surreal dead end of confusion, unsure if what happened was real or just a nightmare. I was staring down a future completely alone for the first time in my life and it was nothing short of sheer terror.
I wish I could tell him that it would be alright. Eventually. The hole in your heart will always be there, but you’ll adapt. Forge a new way of life. Do new things. Doing them for yourself, and for them.
And you weren’t as alone as you felt in that moment. As soon as the next morning, your friends would be there for you in your darkest hours, driving out of their way to give you a shoulder to lean on. And it meant everything.
In the year and a half since then, I’ve been through so much… coping and forging this brave new life, as the rest of the world goes to hell around us.
But I feel strong. Renewed. Improved. Powerful, even, at times. The adventure is just beginning…
I just wish I could share even a glimpse of that with my former self.
