It's been an interesting time. All these months, two years worth of months, and I think I am finally losing my mind...and my will.
I'm not sure what is happening to me, my anxiety level has reached epic heights. I am paralyzed. I am turning inward. I'm losing my words. My brain won't ever stop running. I cry all the time. I can no longer put one foot in front of the other...and I'm scared. All. The. Damn. Time.
I spend all day, every day, alone. Well, except for weekends. Weekends I still manage to drag myself to visit with friends. I don't want to half the time, I have nothing to say. I just can't carry on a conversation with anyone anymore. My friends, they don't know, they wouldn't get it, and why would they? This hasn't happened to them and they have families and jobs and lives. I do not. They know nothing of how I feel, how I am. They don't ask and I don't tell. I am a friend who once had everything they do and now has nothing. I don't talk because they won't understand, can't understand. I just don't fit in this puzzle anymore.
To say that I am lonely is laughable because what I am is a prisoner inside my head and no one can hear me scream. I thought my life had been spared because I was needed here but that was just a stupid lie. The kids don't need me anymore, they are too busy building their own lives, as they should be.
I don't want to play this game anymore.
Oh boy, does this sound familiar. I have checked in here periodically since your graduation post and there was quiet. But as I see you have been busy….busy trying to figure out how it is possible to continue like things are "getting better". Trying to make sense of senselessness.
ReplyDeleteEverything you write I am experiencing and I am a bit ahead of you. 32 months. My meltdowns are fewer but when they do come there is now no bottom to the hole. I used to reach a place and then go back up slow but I would find a bottom from where I could go up. Now, all I want is to die. Seriously, I want it all to end. Even during the times when I am able to function and I do much much more than I used to I am furious that I am obligated to keep breathing. There is just no purpose to this life for me now. Not without him. I sound like a spoiled petulant child but he was everything to me. It's not an anger about the grief but a fury that there isn't a way for people like me who have no other recourse but to wish for death as life keeps the revolving door exit closed.
When I allow my thoughts space to actually think about what this is I go back to square one. I try all day to not run into a trigger but they tend to just pop up. Then I cry and it is now so depleting. It can take me a full 24 hours to recover from a cry.
And as for engaging in conversations. It is why I isolate myself. I just cannot explain how hard this is because no one other than those of us who are dealing with the death of our beloved understand it. By now most people think I couldn’t possibly still be so overtaken by the pain. And yet I am and after this long I realize that I will always be this way. There is no forgetting or moving on or living normally ever again.
Which is why like you I am tired of trying to fit in. I am tired of being without him. I am beaten up from all the crying. I don’t want to be in this pain anymore. I don’t want to face more time. I can hope for a heart aattack from the stress or choke on my bodily fluids when they build up when I cry so deeply or maybe some day I will just be so tired a way will present itself.
I am not as totatlly debilitated on such a constant basis as I was. I can go almost 30 some hours wihtout crying which is a big improvement and if I find a really good movie I may even laugh. But most often I just go around sad, tired of living without my beloved. And I need to make one thing clear. It isn’t that I cant live alone it is that I cant live without him. For me that is the biggest difference in how I look at what will be to come. How to do that is now the million dollar question and will I.
Hello Mrs. C. I was gone for two months after graduation, I've been back since mid August. Upon returning I have felt a shift, and not for the better.
ReplyDeleteI keep trying though, I don't have a choice I guess. I don't want to succumb to this grief, I want to learn to live along side it with some kind of happy medium. I'm trying to become un-stuck. I seem to have gained an overwhelming amount of anxiety or whatever it is. It seems to have taken over my head in that a simple phone call to make becomes hours of thinking and stress and anxiety. I feel like everyone wants something from me that I do not have to give. I do not work and I have not for almost 18 years. For the last 6 months I have given up looking, the judging and constant rejection have taken their toll. I need to start up again but can't put that one foot forward, I'm stuck. I'm broken. I'm damaged goods that no one seems to want to take a chance on, even for the most mundane tasks. Being told by rejection that I am 'Not good enough' so many damn times has finally sunk in. In my weakened state I now get it...I am not good enough for anything.
I don't know, but something has got to give.
I've thought about you so often, your words embedded in my mind. I worry for you and hate that you feel so desolate. I understand that you can't, or don't want to, live without him. I do. I can't help think though that it is him that has helped get you this far, all the hard hard work can't be for naught.
'They' say that we come to be with a set schedule already in place, that our clock starts ticking with that first breath...God's thumb hanging heavy over the stop button. It is up to us what we make of our block of time. Have you heard this too? I don't know what I think, I'm too tired to figure it out.
Today is September 11th, that horrible horrible day in our history. I wonder which one persons time was up that took the rest of those souls with them, or doesn't that count. See what I mean...who the hell knows?
Be good to yourself Mrs. C. Let the tears come as they will and memories blanket you in love. I understand triggers...being awake is mine. I think the struggle comes when we feel we should be responding and acting differently in our grief process than we are. There is no and should be no shame in our pain and sorrow it just means we loved and were loved big. One day I will make it all the way out of this ditch and I hope hope hope you do too. I think our 'boys' would want us to be okay. Don't you?
Peace to you
Kristen, (part 1)
ReplyDeleteI appreciate and understand your consoling words. On Friday I had one more traumatic trigger that has pretty much sent me to the edge. After successive visits to two separate vets trying to isolate the cause of my kitty cat's lethargy, lack of appetite and general malaise of the last ten days, last night at the third vet I was informed my kitty had cancer with pressure on her heart, spots in her intestines and had proceeded into renal failure. She died in my arms while the vet gave her a final injection. I am beyond broken. She was the last link to that visceral heartbeat of my only family.
I know that there is more to live but I have been so pummeled by living without my crucible of love with poor reconstructive surgery as the offerings to bring me fully out of that "ditch" that I am going to take serious stock of what this continuing beating is worth. It's not as though there is anyone who is that close to me that could do anything more than encourage me to stay alive. And for what? That is the question no one has an answer to. Why? You say all this hard work certainly could not have been for naught. As ambiguous as that interpretation of our pain might be I find myself going to battle all the time in my brain and I come out of it licking my wounds with no better understanding of what I am supposed to do to withstand what keeps coming down the pike. I am so exhausted, so tired of the constant conflict of thinking I should live while wanting to die. Of trying to pick myself up when I see another train coming down the tracks ready to drill me into the earth.
Right now losing my kitty cat has released me from any more responsibility to even get up in the morning and I can see myself accepting a rapid self imposed decline if I choose to up the ante. I think it is going to depend on how much I can defend against the waves of emotion. They have been pretty rough throughout these two and half years and they have drained any kind of real energy I may have to stand up.
(part 2) I am so sorry that the attempts you have made to get out, get up and go have been rebuffed. I think today in the world it is so much more a reflection of employers searching for the impossible and expecting the unachievable. I have an old friend whose husband has been out of work for over two years with multitudes of no’s. I wonder if going self employed isn’t a better option. With a good idea there might be something more accomodating to your grief as well as your pursuit of work. I’ve never been much for working for someone else so it is why I share the suggestion.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn’t be surprised if our lives have been preset , my study of physics has opened my eyes and been of some little comfort revealing such wild eyed science the likes of which if not repeatedlly proven would be subject to white coat residency. Whether it is preset or not the effects of what is a much larger cosmic energy must have some bearing on our very essence. It is there that I look in the hopes of reuniting with my family. The sooner the better. I just wonder how many other spirits need to be counted before my stop button is pressed and why. The eternal question……..why.
I wish for you the peace of mind that seems so elusive to those who have knocked on deaths door and had to deliver their most precious treasure. Now it is locked behind the veil of the unknown and disallows even the faintest flicker of recognition.
Right now I am angry and revengeful and ready to teach the universe a lesson. It takes from me, I take myself from it. I am not equipped yet to carry out that threat but right now I have full intention. The only qualifier is courage.
I’m really so damn over this. I don’t need to prove or do anything more to show others or myself I can live. I’ve done that for this long. What I cannot do is take assault after assault and call it living and without that resilient board that my husband provided for me I am caving in. I don’t want to continue this damn fight. I need to get my affairs in order as I have put them to the side while I tried to battle to live. Now I don’t care. The last part of me has been ripped away and there is nothing but four blank walls. And no, I don’t want to invest myself one more time for one more loss so no rescue pets. Nope, the devil wants me? He gets me.
This one is not going to sound too good but I need to get it out and I know that you will read it knowing how the feelings are. You know it’s always an unknown what might just send us packing. Hope life is going better for you as someone deserves to have a break.
Well damn! I'm sorry for the loss of your faithful pet, of that last connection, of your daily reason. I'm sorry for the pain that brings on top of the pain that is. It's a horrible day when we have to say goodbye to a beloved friend and companion that is our pets. It sucks huge and feels like one more kick in the teeth, I know, I've been there too. Two months after David died I traveled to visit family where I have a 2nd home, one week after I got there my little Chihuahua 'Jewels' decided she would rather live with Daddy...damn her! No illness, no warning, nothing...woke up breathing funny, took her to the vet where she proceeded to die.
ReplyDeleteOnce again Mrs. C, I'm sorry for the pain you are in. As for the rest, well, I have no words. Just know that my thoughts are with you and that I hope each and every day you find the will to live another day. To not find you here would be very painful.