A Familiar Stranger

I live in Frankfort, Kentucky. In the same house my wife and I once lived, in a town that once felt like home. I know the buildings and the trees; I can take the backroads just about anywhere I need to go. I know this place, or at least I once did.

The truth is that I no longer understand Frankfort, and it no longer understands me.

In fact, the same principle could be applied to the world as a whole.

I’ve been fortunate to travel widely, seeing and doing many wonderful things. But often all I see are shadows. I look out my window and see the willow sway in the evening wind, watch neighbors walk their dogs down the street. I recognize them, but something is askew. Something isn’t right. There’s a scratch on the lens.

At first I thought it was someone’s fault. I blamed my friends for abandoning me, my family for feeling estranged, my church for being inadequate; I lashed out at the perceived injustice, felt gratified in my righteous anger.

Grief is no one’s fault. But if fault had to be assigned, I could look no further than the broken man staring back at me in the mirror.

The lens wasn’t scratched. I was.

Everywhere I look, I see familiar strangers. I recognize them, at times, but they aren’t the people I remember. The roads curve in the same places, the trees still bend in the breeze; the problem is with the input, the perception.

Loss restructures the soul, and pain reroutes the neural circuitry. We cannot love and lose without being changed, and we cannot expect change to be asymptomatic. For me, it manifests in the subtleties. The small things.

But small things add up. Given enough time, they invade everything, like a virus overtaking its host. Suffocating and inescapable.

The cure lies in becoming familiar with the strangeness. We must own the shadows, claim them as our own; we must look past the scratch.

In complete candor, the scratch may never go away. My wife died nearly three years ago, and yet, most days, Frankfort might as well be France. Sometimes it’s a struggle to find anything familiar. On the worst days, even my best friend, my dog, looks at me through the eyes of a stranger, making me feel an impostor in my own skin.

Maybe you’ve felt this way. Maybe you’ve defined yourself by your scratches. Maybe your grief has overtaken you like a virus, leaving you to wander the earth as a blurry-eyed castaway – an anachronism in a story no one wants to read anymore, a broken and unwanted thing.

Don’t believe these lies.

You’re hurt, but you’re not broken. You’re scratched, but you’re not unwanted.

Own the shadows this week. Claim them as your own. Become familiar with the strangeness. Because the moment you accept the newfound strangeness inside yourself, the world will start to look familiar again.

We’re familiar strangers, you and I. But our story isn’t over.

A fellow journeyer,

Bryan