I learned a new word recently: Omphaloskepsis.

While its main meaning is to gaze at one’s navel, literally, in aid of meditation, its less literal and more relevant meaning is: lack of will to move, to exert oneself or to change.

There really is a word for everything. I’m sorry to say that of late, this word is my word. I should have it printed on a t-shirt or a trucker cap. I could have it tattooed on my neck. In short, I am flat out of hustle, verve, joie de vivre. Every time I feel the tickle of such energy, it is immediately overcome with a sense of cringing dread; the anticipation of dropping shoes, which keeps me hunkered down, safe and immobile.

Our friend, Joe, died a little over a month ago, one of those unreal, unfair and tragic losses—a 48 year old man in perfect health, except for that undetectable heart condition that resulted in a sudden cardiac arrest—that tend to throw one’s view of everything askew. As I mourned with his wife, his family, our friends, and partook in the celebration of his life, I knew what was in the mail for me. It was nothing compared to the grief of so many others he left in this world, but everyone experiences loss in their own way, and I knew this despair, this dread was coming for me, manifesting in this cold front of darkening weariness that hangs low over my personal coastline.

I’ve always had an expect-the-worst-hope-for-the-best approach to life, and in my general contentment over the last three or four years, this has been gently transmuted to a more optimistic bent. I have become comfortable with the rash idea that maybe everything will more or less be okay.

But tell that to Joe’s parents and sister, to his lifelong friends. Tell that to his wife, married to the love of her life for all of three months before an unbelievable turn of fate. As true as it may be that “everything will be okay,” the shape of that okay-ness is now forever changed, and it’s no simple task coming to recognize and understand it in its new form.

Then again, who’s to say everything is okay? Terrible things happen all the time. Proliferating evil in the world abounds alongside bad luck and bum tickers and rogue cell mutations and freak accidents. The shoes, they drop, they rain from the sky for all of us. I have been fortunate to dodge them the last few years, but I know, I always knew, whatever reprieve I get from the vagaries of an indifferent universe is temporary. My peaceful run will end, as everyone’s peace and happiness is shelved for inevitable periods of upheaval. Balance must always be restored. Flying high in April, seriously shot down in May, as they say.

I’m not sure if it’s my nature or the result of my experiences or a bit of both that makes me withdraw at the first sign of that sad turn. Joe’s death, its affect on all of us, was the first event in a long time that jolted it awake—this desire to remove myself from the people around me, to withhold myself inside my own mind and space and not let anyone near, for superstitious fear of some sort of fallout, like they or I will be overwhelmed by the undertow of bad or sad; for fear that if I set myself up for any measure of comfort or peace or happiness, then I’m taunting the universe, daring it to yank it all from me.

I experienced this most acutely when my dad died. I listened to him take his last breaths, the only sound in the house on that sad, gray morning. I’d lain awake all night, leaving my mom alone at his bedside, terrified of his dying, more terrified of her grief, hearing his labored rattling breaths, unbelievably loud, counting the many seconds between them. When finally they stopped, all of my fear slipped through a trapdoor in my mind, along with almost all other emotions—all the sadness and shock and despair—sucked into the subbasement of my consciousness where I could ignore it all. I shut that door tight, covered it with a ratty rug of fakery while I showed up for the practicalities. I organized catering and cooked spaghetti. I drove to the mortuary and picked up his ashes. I drank. I listened to and shared stories of his life. I went back to work. I proceeded with life. But it was as if I was performing these acts, with me as my only audience, watching myself do the things I was supposed to do, act how I was supposed to act. I kept an essential part of myself removed from all the proceedings. It was years later that I finally cracked that door open and found the full breadth of myself inside, dusty and creaky, blinking in the sudden light.

This is my process, my coping strategy for when things go to shit. The injection of tragedy, hardship, loss, grief, betrayal, sadness is met with a fearful withdrawal; I must remove myself, because this is bad, but what’s next? It’s those fucking shoes, waiting to drop on us all the fucking time. They’re never not there, waiting to fuck shit up.

But this time around, it’s harder to remove myself. I don’t live alone anymore for one thing. It’s harder to fold in on yourself when you have a partner gently unfolding you, inspiring you to articulate the complications of all the fear and feelings. For another there’s this sweet little fucking dog, oblivious to all human mishaps, living out his own tragedy daily as he watches mournfully aghast as we leave for work, his sadness forgotten the moment we’re home, his cycles of woe simpler, faster. I can’t remove myself because my closest friends whom I love the most also lost Joe. I need to show up for them—or try to, no matter how inadequately. So I’m trying to sit with it, be present, and not be fearful of whatever is next. Calamity, hardship, injury, sadness are all teachers. The lessons are hard but they are necessary and unavoidable.

Peace wouldn’t be so peaceful if not in comparison to the storms, obviously. Joy is joyful only when you can compare it to despair. Clarity and levity are defined by their depressed opposites. Action is meaningless without the experience of immobility. But knowing this does not necessarily unstick me from this anxious bog, where I am wreathed in mundane and fantastical imaginings of all that can go wrong. What will be my next life-altering fuckup, tragedy or mishap? What inescapable and terrible news is coming my way next? What will unmake my life so completely?

Whatever it is, I know I can’t hide from it, so I may as well move myself, change myself, shake myself free of this fearful paralysis, feel my feelings, witness and hold the feelings of others. Some days, lately, it feels impossible. But I know that is the way. So I show up and pretend I feel fine. And someday, I will feel fine.