The Nature of Loss

Why a Forest?

Simple. Loss is more than just losing someone. It's losing oneself in a way. Imagine you find yourself in a Forest. With another person there beside you. It's nice, beautiful, maybe even poetic. However, if that person leaves you alone, you become scared, confused. Lost. Adrift in a now alien landscape. The trees you knew and loved have become foreign and unfamiliar. The world you knew loses potency and becomes frayed at its edges. Now all of this is just metaphorical for a very literal issue; however, the justification of image is important in order to understand the frame of mind from where this article stems.

We live in a society that very much condones the act of throwing something away. Friendships, partners—hell, even phones. If it's broken we throw it away, ergo we are in a perpetual game of lost and found. Hide and seek on a global scale, seeking out new partners to replace the old, new friends to step up from the last batch. Social media and the internet acting as an endless production line, churning out formatted and acceptable replacement people for the ones you threw away.

You think I'm overexaggerating?

How many times do these appear on your timeline?

How many times do you laugh about them? Or share them, tagging your newly appointed best friend saying "Literally me."

Think. How many of these exist? How many times do you breathe them in and laugh about them. Ironically we never normally cut negative people out. Think how many times we run back to exes we shouldn't. Loss is all around us and encouraged to certain degrees so...What's the point here? What am I getting at? Well, imagine we acted like this one someone we loved died. Think of the people these memes and paragraphs are aimed at. Imagine if every time you "snipped" someone out of your life, they died. What harm would that do? You pretend they're dead anyway once you cut them out, so what's the difference?

I'm not trying to make the point that we should never cut anyone out or that these pictures of pop icons with brief sentences are anything other than idiotic humour because inferring they are directly responsible is lunacy. And how does any of this tie into actually losing someone you loved more than anything like your partner, or your child. How can Rhianna with scissors possibly have anything to do with a mother screaming until her vocal chords fail over the corpse of her six-year-old daughter? Is there even a link? I'll leave that for you to decide as I have my own views. The question everyone asks is "How do I get over it?" or "Will I ever be okay?" or my personal favourite "Does it get easier?" If you want a simple answer, then stop reading here because those answers are you don't, no, and sometimes. But the answers are much more complicated than that and somewhat linked to the way we perceive and frequently encourage loss in our society. Which I suppose does loosely tie Rhianna or Edward Scissor Hands into all of this.

So if you have read to the end of this, I commend you for struggling through my penmanship. I also extend to you an invitation. If you have experienced loss, which we all have, know someone who has experienced loss, or are simply curious about how society's ability to encourage losing people affects the way people react when they lose people then keep reading. I'll be adding three more articles following this introductory article elaborating on my three questions and the answers that follow. In the meantime, stay sharp and don't get lost in the woods.

Blue.