You don't know me (and neither do I)

Who are you? Who, who, who, who?

There are things that you know about yourself. A personality and interests that develop over time; an identity, even.

Then the person you’re closest to in the world dies.

The person who was always there for you, who loved you unconditionally, who was your first home. Vanished.

And you can’t imagine who on earth you might be.

It’s surreal, to put it mildly.

It’s disorienting.

And it’s weird when other people treat you like you’re still the same.

They don’t mean any harm: in many cases, they’ve put in the effort to learn your likes and dislikes, to anticipate your needs.

But you don’t know how to say, even to yourself, that you’re not the person you were, never will be again and no longer want to be.

Let’s say, for example, that you found Taskmaster comforting while your mum was horribly ill in hospital, that at times it felt like the show was keeping you going.

That added up, because you loved TV and found watching it in bed or on the sofa with an electric blanket one of life’s great pleasures and wrote about pop culture for The Guardian and Decider and once, the Washington Post.

It makes sense, then, that when you spoke to a good friend, they asked what your top television recommendations were but you could only shrug because (with the exception of Nobody Wants This., which hadn’t yet been released) you don’t watch TV anymore.

You’re too restless, can’t sit still, don’t spend evenings in front of Netflix or Amazon Prime like you used to because it makes you feel like you might jump out of your skin.

You watch a bit of Taskmaster but can’t make yourself care, can’t shape yourself back into the person who used to watch it, who was excited for literal years about the Junior version with Rose-effing-Matafeo as the TM and Mike “absolute casserole” Wozniak as her assistant and now you feel like you’ve floated out of that entity and might never return.

You can’t make yourself care about many of the things you were once interested in: novels, Christmas, making your bed in the morning. It’s like grief has redistricted you, re-drawn all your boundaries, and you need to find out where you stand.

You don’t get weekly Sainsbury’s deliveries anymore. You have a hastily self-cut fringe. You want a tattoo.

You used to watch Wimbledon every year, with your mum’s mum and then your mum, and you probably won’t again.

These are small things of course but it’s weird to feel like a stranger to yourself, to think and write words you never thought you would, to feel so untethered and uncertain and like you’re being tossed around by the universe.

You don’t know what time you go to bed or when you get up (depends on the grief), what you enjoy doing (nothing, because of grief) and are stunned by how much time you now spend on Zoom (so you’re not alone with the grief).

Another good friend told you that the world as you knew it has ended and the new one hasn’t yet started.

You used to think this was stressful, and it is. But it’s more stressful to try to be who you were, to fit into your old routines, to not acknowledge the cataclysm that’s blown your life apart.

You experiment with allowing things to float past you without trying to cling on to them. Maybe this is who you are now: someone who doesn’t care about anything.

Someone who will rise above all the events of the world, sending love to everyone but detaching from the outcome, like a Buddhist nun (but with a lot more weeping).

Maybe you will become more assertive than ever, make a bunch of new friends, or find a new life direction. Maybe you’ll just write and write and write, depressed and hopeless but somehow enervated.

In one of the grief support groups that you go to, the one that saved your life in the days after your mum’s death, and still saves it now, every week, attendees sometimes equate grief to a baby.

That means you either have (or are, depending on your preferred interpretation) a three-month old baby.

A three-month old baby is still blinking at the world, new and angry and confused, wondering what the hell it’s doing here, who it is and what to make of everything it’s experienced so far.

Grief is like having your brain wiped clean and having to start again, as frightened and foreign as a changeling.