Preemptive loss

debs/ September 18, 2021

My biggest takeaway from Machiavelli is that every virtue is a balance between two equal and opposite vices: vice of deficiency, and a vice of excess.

It’s a virtue to be timely.
It’s a vice of deficiency to be a procrastinator.
It’s a vice of excess to be a precrastinator. <– That’s me, I am a precrastinator.

In school, I would start problem sets as soon as I got them just to minimize the possibility of “unknown unknowns”. When I foresee periods of high social activity on the horizon, I preemptively ration my energy. When I have to go on vacation, I pack weeks in advance and live out of a suitcase for, well, weeks. The fact that I bemoan having to go on vacation…

Recently I noticed that I also precrastinate grief.

 
More frequently than I’d like to admit, I get weepy while petting our bunny. I try really hard to commit to memory of all the sensations …her passionate licking, her shedding fur, her simultaneous sensitivity to some stimuli and cluelessness to others, her derpy movements… in preparation for the time when bunny and I are separated by a rainbow bridge.

And then, while I’m in the mood, why not think about the inevitability of having to face rainbow bridge separation from my parents, my partner, etc.

For the record, all aforementioned beings are alive and kickin’. Mostly kicking my ass.

Pre-grieving as pragmatism

There are some perks to pre-grieving. Namely, dealing with grief-the-emotion preemptively can help me be a little bit more resilient when it happens and can deal with the logistics of loss without totally losing it. I’d rather have grief as a familiar–albeit annoying–friend when it happens rather than a stranger in an unknown land when loss changes my life forever. Basically, reducing the possibility of “unknown unknowns” is a high priority in my life.

Pre-grieving as love

Come to think of it, I’ve never felt love without simultaneously feeling grief Given that (1) Grief is not enjoyable, and (2) I cannot feel love without grief. Therefore, (3) love is not enjoyable to me. If love is a feeling (and it’s not), it really doesn’t feel good if you’re a precrastinator.

But I’d like to think that love is still worth it!? I precrastinate grief because without it, I’m not conscious of love. And I suppose I’d rather know that I love while I’m loving than once I’ve loved. Love doesn’t cause grief, grief just makes love known.

Like love, is it possible to feel gratitude without contemplating loss? I wouldn’t know–as soon as I beginning feeling the shadow of gratitude, grief is already RIGHT there. You could say that gratitude is my friend and grief is her annoying +1. But again, pre-grief makes me aware of how much I have to be grateful for in a sucky world full of real-grieving while I have the luxury to pre-grieve. I grieve preemptively because I have too much to lose.

So I might hate him, they might be freaking annoying together, but if grief and gratitude make each other better versions of themselves, who am I to object?

Precrastinator in a procrastinating world

As a precrastinator, procrastinators are my bane. You see, another reason I started problem sets as soon as I got them is so I can be the first to get the easy problems, the low hanging fruit, and have something to contribute while I waited for smarter peers tackle the hard problems. Of course, all the truly brilliant people I know are procrastinators and my blood pressure still reads high from the anxiety they put me through back then. Sometimes I feel like they started late is because they I know I started early and have some of it done already. Can you imagine? My precrastination creating procrastinators? The cosmic injustice ٩(╬ఠ༬ఠ)و!

So the real plot twist is that all this time we’ve been part of this problem set to reverse human induced climate change and plenty of group members haven’t decided whether the problem set exists. We’re past the point of pregrieving. The problem set was due yesterday, the smart group members aren’t showing up, and we’re eating the -10% daily late deductions like it’s cake.

We squandered any opportunity to cherish what we love before we lost it. As a result, we’re having process the emotional and logistical implications of loss simultaneously. Forget the pragmatic benefits of preemptive grief that I’m accustomed to having, forget my petty drama of trying (not) to befriend grief for gratitude’s sake, climate anxiety has crashed …and burned …and flooded the party.