Rewriting the Chapters

I feel as if the recent chapters of my life have been characterized as tragedies.

Beautiful and raw and poetic but at the same time a lot of it just really sucked.

All of the small talk conversations have become avoidable conversations.

Marriage, kids, work, more kids? All turn into a serious conversation with pitied looks.

And at times concern on how I am so casually bringing up traumatic life altering events without falling apart.

But the truth is I had to learn not to. When the words "cardiac arrest" are among the words in your daughter's medical history, you learn to plow through through events so you can get to the next part of the visit.

And at times its become a dread not because it brings up the hard moments, but because it makes people uncomfortable. It turns into me reassuring a new acquaintance I am okay and they are okay so we can all move on to the topic.

It makes me feel like I am trauma dumping when I am trying to answer a simple question.

It makes me question if the posts I make are annoying or if everyone is tired of hearing about what happened/ is happening.

I am still learning the new person that was shaped from all of this grief and I can tell loved ones sometimes are as well.

I have attempted to rewrite these chapters, tell them in a more palatable way, become an easier to digest version of myself.

But I have realized, if you label a tragedy a romance, the reader will still discover the truth when they turn the pages.

I cannot rewrite what has happened, but I can add as many joyful chapters as this life allows.