Reflections on Loss and Grief
Personal Reflections
A while ago I have been trying to work on getting my life together. To find a job, to make friends. To be myself really. I did find a new friend locally, that I might meet. Which I am grateful for. It actually made me cry and sob at night. Mostly as true kindness has been a rare thing for me. Let alone truly being seen. And this does not come out of nowhere either.
I have been since age 5 made the scapegoat by people in the Netherlands. Where peers and most adults did not accept my gender identity. That I am non-binary and femme-leaning (in how I feel), whilst having been AMAB. For a longer while I had a struggle between how I felt and my body. I never was a boy in the sense others wanted me to be. I always was more connected to what the Jungians might call the Anima, the feminine and emotional. The Dionysian and Artemisian wildness. Not this suffocating madness that is modernity. If anything, I have always been a child of nature, of Eros and Nyx. Not this hyper-masculine, patriarchal solar madness.
The Search for Understanding
I had been struggling with this for my entire life. Yet for so long I never had the words for it. I did not know about any of it. It took me studying Carl Jung, the Orphic and Dionysian mysteries, Neo-Platonism, and various such ancient ways of knowing, to truly begin to put into words, the true depth of my struggle. Which was something that I throughout my teenage years was suicidal over. Just to give all of this some sort of meaning. Yet how more I have searched and looked at the depths of this struggle, both for myself and many others. I have come to realise how the ego, and especially the collective ego itself, enforce this upon people. Society projects its own disowned aspects onto people like them, casting them as "the problem" instead of addressing its own flaws. Because Truth and Life contradicts the collective illusions that society maintains about itself. Their supposed “purity,” “morality” and “goodness.” Casting out non-binary identities, those struggling emotionally and emotional expression itself.
Fighting for the True Self
Yet, here I am knowing and seeing through it. Having fought tooth and nail for my Artemisian-Dionysian soul. To free myself from the super-ego. From the false ego-persona that society tried to impose upon me. That tried to make me into what I was not. Which made me feel so long as an empty husk of a being. Cut off from all I was ever meant to be. From all my soul is, and the collective can not see. As this soul of mine and its qualities resides in the shadow of this hyper-rational collective. Which refuses to see anything beyond its need to drive all what is Eros and Life, into death.
Grief and Loss in an Unforgiving World
I have seen this first hand with three people close to me and my friends. Corey (36), Christina (29), and Lor (23), did not make it. They were driven into death by a society that could not see their humanity. Last year they were murdered by a society that just refuses to see the suffering it inflicts upon those who need help the most. And yet I am still here. Alone with my grief. Carrying the scars of a world, that sooner sees me dead, and pity me as some number, as they have done to my friends. Then to truly see the dictatorship of hyper-rationality it really is. I already carry the loss of 8 more loved ones from the age of 10, whilst I am just 32 years old.
The Tyranny of Hyper-Rationality
Yet the world of numbers and dissociation from life, demands one to sweep it under the rug. To “give it a place” and “move on”. It has created a world of emptiness, really a soul-less existence, where all those who feel, and are touch with their soul, are left to fend and suffer. So those who deny their own emotions, can feel “rational,” whilst scapegoating those who actually can admit their emotional reality. Yet life demands one to work, to continue, to have jobs, to get back on the hamster wheel with razor blades, and to ignore how life itself is drained out of one, as if a mere battery. It is a matrix of empty promises, of distractions away from life, of what is true and matters. To distract from ones soul, ones humanity, ones dignity. Which is trampled by the boot of hyper-rationality and “progress”. Modernity demands compliance, and further relentless productivity. Those who do not fit within its expectations are thus not just excluded, they are actively harmed by its structures. As oppression is not just active harm but also the stripping away of recognition, space, and dignity.
Resistance Against a Dehumanizing System
Yet despite the demands of the world, I will not give into the demands to kill my own soul, so society can be placated, by the denial of my lived experience and truth. Just so Kronos (collective ego of society) can take away my humanity and dignity. I have not the last years painstakingly tried to heal from decades of trauma, to nurture that wounded inner child of mine, and to hold my inner feminine in a tender embrace, for all of this to be squandered and to lose my dignity and humanity once more.
I have tried to find a way forward in the world as it is. To accept this reality. And make it work. Find some job, and all this. Yet the system is not made to acknowledge my lived experience, or my humanity. It is the very same system I tried to free myself from, which now once again seeks to erase me. For this system to truly acknowledge what it has put me and so many others true, is for it to stop being this system. So I am left with a tension, though I sought to bridge it, by being free from the super ego (the internalized voice of societal control that enforces oppressive norms), and no longer internalising its projections. Still forms a system barrier for me to exist. As it still acts according to its projections, no matter if I internalise it or not. Systemic violence also operates not just through direct harm, but through neglect, forced assimilation, and dehumanization. To strip those it marginalises from their soul and humanity. As truly oppression is not just about laws, economics, or discrimination. It is rooted in deep psychological structures that dictate what is "acceptable" and what must be cast into the shadows. Not just within society, but within the very mind of those marginalised. My path had been about breaking free from internalized oppression, yet the external oppression persists. As it is the fundamental way the collective mind structures reality.
Which then begs the question. Is there for someone whose existence is tied to the forces that society wants gone and cast out, truly a way to exist? If ones existence is denied? I am not sure of that answer. As how can that what seeks to drive one into death, truly give one a space to exist. It goes against the nature of what modernity is. Yet even if it is such. As Carl Jung so famously stated. The privilege of a lifetime, is to be who one truly is. I will not deny my existence for the Kronian inner child sacrifice system. Even if my future remains uncertain.
Yet what gives me some hope is the few online friends I have. As they have shown me that despite how bleak things may be. Somebody in this world is glad you exist. Even in a system designed to erase us, there is still the possibility of love and recognition.