Connection and separation

Grief has connected me to more people than any other experience. I don't know how anyone else feels but I can get close by empathising. Empathy is useful in that it places me imaginatively in their position but it doesn't let me know how they actually feel. If I have experienced loss of almost any kind I can exprapolate that experience to a level similarly experience by others. Everyone has had a broken heart or been let down or refused a job or lost a relative and therefore everyone has a shared human experience with every other human.

Grief has enabled me to experience varying depths of separateness. It ranges from shallow, short-lived rifts to sharp-edged fissures that travel all the way down and will never reconnect. 

Daily, I experience little stabs of detachment that jolt me away from my immediate surroundings for a few seconds. Sometimes I become aware I have disengaged only after I come to, a minute into wandering nostalgia. This mostly happens when I am in the busiest company- in my office at work or a bustling shop. 

At its worst my severence is an absolute negation of human connectedness as if I am forcibly caste out to a faraway desert. It can last hours or days. It is dry, forbidding, simultaneously too hot and too cold, a killer of growth. I imagine pariahs in enforced solitary confinement or interns in a gulag isolated by cold and distance. I think I can feel despair but during those times of deep disassociation I try to remember I have great connection to others through universally shared experiences.