Tag: grief

loss of a friend

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, suicide

Loss of a friend

I found out tonight that a friend of mine died Tuesday. We don’t know how she died and she had been sick for a while. She was one of my CES buddies. I have known her since the early days of my diagnosis. It’s so sad that she is no longer with us. My friend in Canada is having a hard time with this. She and my friend were closer than I was to her. They talked all the time and had a lot in common. It’s a shock for all of us in the group. We have been through so much over the years. And now this. We have lost members in the past but this one is more personal because we all knew each other. Hell, back in 2001 there were only 25 of us with the diagnosis. Now it’s more than 100 x that, from around the world. And that is for those with internet capabilities at the time and currently. My blog “Knackered” gets read almost every day and it saddens me because I know another person has come down with this dreadful condition.

Those 25 members in the early days have moved on from the email support group and then we banded together when Facebook became popular. That is how most of us kept in touch with one another. Gone were the days of emails and now we had instant messaging and Private messages to keep us together. I still keep in touch with my friend in South Africa. Instead of emails, we now send PMs. It’s all the same thing, if you think about it. Just keeping in touch with one another is the important part.

Pain had shot up again with me tonight and I was once again thinking of ending my life. I texted my therapist but got no response. I don’t think she is in the office. I often wonder if my friends on Facebook would react the same way if they found out I had passed away. I came really close to ending my life this week, again. One of these days, I will go through with it, if I could ever get a hotel room and can get there. Mobility has been my hindrance these past few weeks.

Daily Word Prompt-Tiny

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mood disorders, suicide

Daily Word Prompt-Tiny

Today’s Daily Word Prompt is Tiny. I have been thinking of what to write for this. This is a side of me that I am embarrassed to share so please bare with me.

For the longest time, I felt like I was a tiny person. I know my outward appearance is nothing but tiny, especially since I have gained significant weight over the last twenty years. But inside, I felt small, like I didn’t matter because I was so tiny. I don’t know when this happened and I certainly don’t know when that has changed.

I remember when I was in therapy in the early years with my current therapist, I wanted to explain to her how small I felt inside, that I didn’t matter because I wasn’t big enough to handle things. We never did talk about it because I was afraid she would laugh at me or give me some other condescending talk. I never felt valued, that I was disposable. I still sort of feel this way at times, especially when my family wants to just dispose of my things that I cherish because they think it is “junk”. My middle sister often calls me a hoarder, though I am not. I just have clothes and papers everywhere because I have no place to put them or I am too lazy to actually put them somewhere other than the floor of my room.

If anything, I am a hoarder of books and research articles/journals. But being called that makes me shrink. It makes me feel alone and not being able to talk to my family about what is troubling me. Hell, my youngest sister thinks all I need is a clean rug to make me feel better. WTF. I do have a collection of boxes from Amazon. I don’t know how it accumulated. I have been lazy to put them in the recycle bin. Even though they are near my door, I never grab them as I am leaving to throw them away. It’s like I have just one thing on my mind and that is to leave to where I am going, which is usually to catch the bus. Therefore, I can’t be bothered to dump things in the recycle bin. When I do, it’s usually when the bin has been cleared by the recycling people that come and empty it.

It gives me a certain comfort to be surrounded by my things. It might make me feel insignificant, but I feel a kind of comfort in that place. It still makes me feel small, though. It’s like I have these huge piles of things surrounding me and I am in the middle of it. Sometimes it is suffocating because I have so much space to get around but it’s not enough to get by. I feel miniscule when that suffocation hits. It doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen.

The person that most made me feel tiny was my father. He would say things that would make me shrink away. There was no way to stop his abusive ways. For years he would make me feel insignificant and small. Like I was a tiny bug that should be stepped on. That is when he would feel his best and I would feel the worst. When I was older, I realized that whenever I would climb the ladder to get out of the pit I was in, he would take the ladder away and I would fall back into the pit. There was no way out. I guess that is why my suicidality is so strong. I still feel like whenever I am in that pit, I feel hopeless about getting out because someone is going to take away that ladder. It never fails. And you can only fall so many times before you realize why bother getting up one more time. You are after all a tiny thing that doesn’t deserve it.

Perplexed

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicide

Perplexed

Today’s Daily Word Prompt is “perplexed” and I can’t think of a better title than that for the day. My eyes are so damn dry that I literally rubbed the skin off my lower eyelid this morning. I didn’t realize I did this until I washed my face this morning. Now I have to see my eye doctor to find out what can be done about it before I have no eyelids. As if I don’t have enough on my plate at the moment.

I got the car and went to Starbucks. When I went back to the car, I noticed some damage. It wasn’t a big thing, just some paint scrapes, no dents or anything, least none that I could see. I called and reported it when I got home after therapy.

Therapy was again difficult. She tried her best to have me look at her the whole time I was there but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t look at her. I just stared at the rug or played with my thumbs most of the session. We talked about the blog I wrote last night. I told her it was a piece of shit and she said it was anything but. She really wanted me to know that she cared about me and that she didn’t want me to die. She wanted me to take my date off the table. I told her I couldn’t do that. Who’s to say that I won’t have another pain episode that leaves me with the same feelings of being suicidal and I really want to go through with it the next day when I am able to fucking walk. That is the only thing stopping me right now. My inability to walk during intense suicidal feeling caused by intense physical pain. No, I have my own agenda and I plan on carrying things through this time.

I told her I knew she loved me and that I love her. I questioned what the hell kind of relationship we have and she couldn’t answer it. She doesn’t know. Great. She was playing with my baseball for most of the session. I guess it kept her mind off things. I told her she should get a stress ball. Maybe I will give her my apple scented one that I have. It’s smelling up a drawer right now so it’s not like I use it.

She toyed with the idea of texting me so that I can know and remember that she cared for me. I was going to say something about this but held back. Dr. Jobes has been doing this with his patients for years. My therapist is not a texting type of therapist, nor is she a technological person. This would totally take her out of her zone of comfort.

It’s a perplexing problem because she obviously cares deeply about me after all these years and she doesn’t want to lose me. She can’t imagine life without me in it. I guess my constriction is so damn bad that I can only focus on the task at hand and that is ending my life, on my terms, in my own way. I have had enough. The boundaries have been crossed and I tired, so very tired, of fighting them day in and day out. I told her that no one will be there for me in the wee hours of the morning because I can’t sleep and am in horrendous pain. Sure, I can page my psychiatrist if I am in a bad mood but why bother waking her up in the middle of the night. I just done. I told my therapist today, there is no way I can’t promise anyone that I won’t take my life, even if I take my date off the table. There is a chance that even when that day has arrived, I might not go through with it. I have had plenty of dates in the past and I am still here. Some my therapist knew, some she didn’t.

I told my therapist that I should have left her 12 years ago when she first became “possessive” of me. She had gone on maternity leave and she left me a birthday message. Or some kind of message, I forget now. I still have the microtape of the voicemail somewhere. Anyways, she said that I was hers and it should have put up a big red flag. But then, no therapist had every called me that before so I let it go. Now this therapist cries when I threaten my life, and there were still a few tears shed today.

How am I supposed to live when I want to die so damn bad? It gets worse, it gets better, but no matter how afield I get, I always come back to being suicidal. This is the worse part of the year for me. For the last 11 years I have been suicidal particularly during the months of Sept and Oct. It’s the bipolar season for suicidality. It’s been documented by Kay Redfield Jamison. I don’t see a point in living a life that is filled with pain and disability. I just don’t. Walking used to be my everything and now I can barely walk a few blocks here or there. I used to be able to walk Memorial Drive from Government Center all the way to Central Street in Cambridge. I am lucky to walk from the T station to the Starbucks down the street now. Any more than that, and my ankle says goodbye jack.

It’s more than just living with the pain. I have a huge high pain tolerance. But I am burned out. I am traumatized every fucking night with pain and there is no escaping it some nights. My sleep is affect and lo and behold, now they are looking at sleep disturbances as a cause of suicidality. NO FUCKING SHIT. I can’t tell you the last time I had a decent night’s sleep of more than 4-5 hours. If I do sleep at least 6-7 straight, it’s during the day time hours. That is when I get relief from my pain or am just exhausted I crash. I am called a lazy bastard if I sleep during the day so I try to stay up until night time again, except there is no relief then. It’s not like I am looking for more meds or support or anything. I just want the pain to stop because what the fuck is it hurting for anyways??

Grief of my father

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, grief, mood disorders

Grief of my father

I some how came back to the middle of March’s blog of this year. I was reading through my awful depression and didn’t realize how bad things were while my father was dying. I have no idea how I managed through the pain of losing him and the physical pain of my ankle.

I didn’t want to read through the blogs I posted in April because that is when my father died. He had a quick decline. The nursing home gave us 20 days of full insurance and he died about 14 days or so before those days were up. I never finished writing the story I started when I was in the hospital, trying to process that day as it was so vivid in my memory banks for weeks after his death. It still is vivid but not as intrusive as it was.

My depression kind of protected me from my grief. Most days, I didn’t feel anything. I haven’t read the blogs following my father’s funeral, only the few blogs that had to deal with the stupid oxygen company that wouldn’t come to take its tank away. That was the last day I saw my father’s small apartment.

I still haven’t cried for his death. I was deeply sad reading about his death but I still haven’t cried. I don’t know if I ever will. He was a difficult man. I hated him but had to respect him. He annoyed the piss out of me, most of the time. He knew how to push my buttons to get a reaction out of me just to make himself laugh. How can I cry knowing that I don’t have to deal with that bullshit anymore? It’s a relief that he is gone, a sad relief. I never thought that I would miss the bastard. But I do.

I never told him my feelings. It was forbidden to talk about them, good or bad. He wasn’t the type to accept honest feelings. I remember when I was little, a friend of mine moved away and I was so sad that I cried. He saw me crying and laughed at me. Basically he told me to stop or he would give me something to cry about. I stopped crying because I knew what that meant. We never showed emotion in my house growing up. It was always a slippery slope.

He said that he loved me from time to time. I never believed him because the man was a pathological liar. I actually stopped believing in him when he told me to jump off the bridge when he found out I was suicidal at the age of 15. He basically gave me permission to end my life. I have been struggling with that the last 25 years or so.