Through the Looking Glass // Quest to Flynn

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

⭐

Dear Flynn,

You all right?

And I don’t mean that you should be telling me what the weather is like in the capitol or what the anxiety of the day might be. I mean: what are you feeling right now?

It’s going to be hard to be honest with yourself about what grief brings for you. I know we talked about how your past has made you feel, but we never spoke about the present. And, I had wished that we had gotten more time, which is partially my fault. I’m not good at reaching out and pushing people to address their feelings. I freely admit it took me a long time to figure out my own.

However, as your psychiatrist, if you’ll still have me, I wanted to make sure that someone was checking in on your mental well-being, and not offering you trauma-projected advice. No offense to your fellow victors, but a stiff upper lip doesn’t break you free from grief. It may bury it for a while, but if you turn around, you might find that it’s grown up toward the sky already.

Are you journaling at all? Have you spent time to register how all of this has made you feel? Again, I don’t expect any of this to be easy and wish that I could address it more directly. But watching Jack and Aurora fall so quickly can’t have been easy. I want you to spend some time to dwell in that feeling: do you feel responsible? Do you wish they had made it further? Are you afraid of what we’ll think back here in district six?

Have you taken time to start writing about any of it? I want you to do that before you read anything else. I’m serious. If you do I’ll know – I always know.

If you have chosen to take responsibility for their deaths, however big or small a part you feel you played, you will always be unhappy.

Is that harsh? Good. I want you to live in the anger of that for a minute.

When we take responsibility, when we hold ourselves accountable for acts of violence we did not commit, nor that we have any control over, we will always have grief to work through.

Which isn’t to say that you should forget about them or honor them for who they were (unless you didn’t like them, which is okay, too).

You can choose to help another person and not feel responsible for their failure, but that will be difficult. You can also choose not to feel much of anything at all for other people, too.

But you must be patient with yourself if you choose to take responsibility. Because when we hold ourselves accountable for the painful parts of life that we cannot control, we must work through how it makes us feel. The pain of loss, the grief of feeling that we did not do enough, the anger of the position that we’re in, and the hope that someday we may do better.

If this does not sound familiar then you can go on about your day – it would be much easier not to feel anything at all.

But I suspect that would be a very sad life, to go through all of it without passion, without knowing what it meant to form genuine connection.

I hope to hear from you sometime, and maybe see you in my office when you get back to six. Please take care of yourself while you’re away.

Sincerely,

Dr. Quest Hertz