I have this thing - and in the beginning I thought it was kind of a normal thing, but eventually started to clue in that it's more like a defect. I know that everyone has to deal with loss and heartache in their lives - some more than others, some sooner than others. It's inevitable, and as we get older it becomes something we are faced with more regularly, so we all develop our own little ways of coping. So far, my special coping mechanism has been to completely and utterly refuse to deal with death at all, but now that a fair amount of time has passed, I'm starting to think my plan might not be the most effective.

You know how some people like to have photographs of lost loved ones out on display in their home, or maybe at work, or even in their wallets? Other people listen to certain music over and over because it reminds them of the dearly departed. Some people like to keep something personal of their loved on them all the time, like maybe a watch or a necklace. All of these people choose to have daily reminders of the people they miss, because they enjoy thinking about them and keeping their memory alive. I think this is wonderful, and very healthy, and have no problem with it at all, as long as it applies to other people.

What I personally like to do in the way of remembering special people who are no longer in my life is to make sure there are no photographs of them on display anywhere, even in places where I might accidentally stumble upon them. I also try to not listen to any songs that remind me of those people, which means having to HASTILY change radio stations, or remove certain music that I really like from my iPod. I also do my best to not think about those people for colossal amounts of time, like say, more than 30 seconds per thinkage. And the reason I do these things is not because I wish to rid myself of these people, but simply because I can't take the grief. I mean, right now, typing that one line made tears instantly spring forth and shoot down my face, which is humiliating and inconvenient any time it happens while away from my home, and can even be humiliating and inconvenient sometimes in my own home.

I do not wish to be The Girl Who Cries. I did not used to be The Girl Who Cries, and I dislike the lack of control over my emotions that has developed over the past couple of years. That is not to say that I am always crying...I'm not. But in order to avoid always crying I had to make a plan of action for myself (e.g. absolute refusal to voluntarily think about Sad Things) so that I wouldn't accidentally start bawling at inopportune times around any and all people, which would eventually lead to me becoming The Girl Who Cries, aka The Girl Who Makes People Uncomfortable, who eventually becomes The Girl People Avoid Because She Might Cry At Any Moment. I mean, I would avoid that girl, so I expect everyone else would, too.

By now, I should be able to talk about the people I love who are gone if I want to, right? SURELY by now I should be able to look at pictures of those people and smile, remembering good things about them and their lives. I am not a special case who has had to endure overly traumatic and excessive loss - there are people who have been dealt heaping amounts of grief and unfairness in their lives, who have been forced to survive losses so great that my brain can't even fathom the pain, and yet, most of these people dig down deep inside themselves and find the strength to not fall apart every time they think about something that punches them in their grief bone. Which is why I think maybe I'm faulty.

I'm concerned that whatever part it is we are supposed to be born with - the part that helps us eventually become steady after the violent rocking a big loss causes - might have been left out of me. Like there's some kind of iron bar located just to the right of our stomachs that our innards grab hold of whenever we start to feel emotionally wobbly, but mine never developed, or it fell out into the potty at an early age. It turns out that no matter how many anti-depressants one might shove into her cheesecake-hole, medicine does not make an inner-iron bar sprout into place.

So now I am left to wonder how long I'm going to be this way? It can't be forever, because there are still so many people that I love, and I have to face the fact that I am going to lose a lot of them in my lifetime, which means I need to go ahead and restore myself back to full health, like in a video game, so I can be better prepared to handle bad things when they come, because THEY ARE COMING. My emotional immune system that is supposed to help fight kicks to the gut is really low, if the fact that just last night I cried like an idiot when surprisingly faced with a photograph of my Dad's recently-killed dog (DOG! Not even a person! A DOG!) is any clue. So what I am in search of is some of that stuff that other people use to make themselves not cry as their knee-jerk reaction to sadness. Anyone know where I can get some of whatever that is? When all my tiny friends cried after Bambi's mother (SPOILER ALERT!) got killed, Tiny Me didn't even get misty. I watched Terms of Endearment as a young girl and felt nothing. "Beaches" did not make me cry, it only annoyed me. I want to go back to being like that - cold and black-hearted. How does one achieve that without doing hard time in prison?