008 SHACKLES

The External Pressure



Grief in a communal setting operates as a competitive audit of time, a period where my healing is measured against in invisible social calendar that I never agreed to sign, yet one I am forced to inhabit.

There is a biting irony in a mutual loss. 

The very people who stood in the wreckage with me have now decided that time has served as a cure for my despair. They shift their gaze from empathy to quiet, judgmental impatience, simply because my continued pain has become a mirror to their own discomfort. 

They treat my lost light as a biological necessity but as a FAILURE OF CHARACTER.

They use their own speed of recovery as the standard by which my insolvency is judged, entirely unaware that their moving on is often just a shallow tolerance for the silence. 

I am bound to an emotional pace that is not my own, shackled to a timeline where my refusal to perform a return to normal is viewed as a choice rather then  systematic failure of the mind

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