Balancing a Return to Life

In the going on 3 years now since Ian's suicide I've formed varying opinions on the act itself.  Just like with his addiction and how I became obsessed with understanding addiction, such is the same with his suicide.

Went to therapy, watched documentaries, read books, joined support groups, mulled it over in my spare moments of having time to think.

I'm conflicted.  If someone wants to die, it should be their choice... but it gets complicated when you start to think about the "why" they want to die.  Someone with a terminal illness, the why is pretty clear - wanting to die before you become completely unable to care for yourself and not wanting to burden your family.  I've always wanted to interject there and say.. "well what if they find a cure, or a treatment that makes life more comfortable or manageable in the month after you decided to pass" - I'm full of hope for such things and often disappointed.

It's those same what if type of questioning that torture me about Ian.  And I question if I'm being selfish about being so affected by his death.  Am I more sad about the fact that he isn't here to comfort me when I need it, or am I more sad that he felt so low that he felt he had no other way of escape.  why do the two have to compete?

We comfort ourselves by saying.. at least he's not in pain anymore... mental and emotional pain can be just as bad as physical pain.. perhaps even more-so because it's harder to substantiate...

When I was younger I used to cut myself because that pain is the kind of pain that made sense to me - I could see it...it helped me and turned into a comforting act to relieve the metaphysical suffering... that is long past me now, I've learned other more healthy coping mechanisms - I even exposure tested myself after Ian's suicide by leaving a shard of broken glass by the bedside for a good solid month and it was never put to use.

I can't remember a lot of the time in those first few months following - it was all a shock response, insomnia, only able to eat toast, gut wrenching crying, sobbing through therapy and apparently fixated on the imagery - then all of a sudden every movie I watched included someone taking a bullet to the head at their own hand - it was everywhere without me seeking it... people putting two fingers to their head at work and pulling the invisible trigger out of frustration... panic attacks, dreams of "saving" him or him being "alive" and having to wake up and face reality all over again.

I often question myself, would I be less bothered had it been a less violent method?  There was a time lapse on the death certificate, did he suffer? was it not instant?

So many questions that will never be answered - and the only thing I know for sure.. I will never be the same...never.  But I need to find a way to be better than I am right now.. I'm sinking inside while just barely functioning on the outside.

Choking on Vulnerability

I've caught myself on several occasions asking myself, or is it telling myself?...basically allowing myself to blindly wonder if the closeness I seek is even obtainable.  The thought that what you have been searching for, for what feels like your whole life, just doesn't exist....then today, I added: or what if it does, and you just never find it.

Either of those imagined realities can be a hard pill to force yourself to swallow - I always end up choking....What a bleak outlook...then after some time I just shuffle the thought to some deep recess in my brain and continue on my journey believing it does exist and reveling in the fact that I may have found it.

This is not how I want to be, this is now how I want to feel.... I've spent the morning in and out of crying sessions... the kind that feels like your insides have been crushed, twisted and squeezed.

Raw vulnerability..deep fears of abandonment..I catch myself and play an internal tug-o-war between shutting it all down and keeping myself wide open.

Maybe cutting my therapy back to once a month was a bad idea. :/

Limited Edition Writings...

I want to write about forgiveness.. and how good it feels to be able to truly forgive.


I want to write about how much it meant to me that my friend sent me an article about how women that are 31, are at their most beautiful at that age, when he witnessed me worrying about 'getting old' as my birthday approached - and how remembering that one simple thing made me decide to forgive him for a poor lapse in judgment at the worst possible time.


I want to write about chance, coincidences, the butterfly and ripple effects...


I want to write about how happy I've been...how happy I've allowed myself to be....


I want to write about how vulnerable I feel because of that....


I want to write about the overwhelming sadness and still lingering guilt I feel when I think about the suicide


I want to write about my frustrations due to feeling as though creativity is completely stifled, and how unaccomplished that makes me feel.


I want to write about music and what it means to me...how it weaves into my life...


I want to write...


I want to write....but I want to limit what I share, and who I share it with....

Nights in White Satin

I don't know what happened between yesterday and today....with all the sleep I got over the weekend I should have felt prepared to handle anything.  Yet when I arrive to work, I'm feeling anti-social, then the radio decided to play The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin...and I lost it...I tucked myself into the corner of my desk and wept into a tissue I held to my face.


Ian and I never had a 'song' - we didn't actually have anything like that really...he didn't even like most of the music I listened to...but when I was in the hospital I asked him to bring me some music...he made me a CD and that was one of the songs on it...I remember when I played it, I was surprised he put it on there, and then I wondered if that was his way of telling me he loved me...you see we didn't say such things to each other until the near end of our relationship.  I held back because of the risk of feeling too vulnerable...he held back for reasons, I'll now, never know.  I ended up being the first to tell him, and that was when his mother passed away...I thought at that time it was important for him to know, for him to hear it...up until then I had convinced myself that it was an unspoken understanding expressed through collapsible long lasting hugs....but even those started to grow futher and far between......I told him, he didn't tell me....he didn't tell me until permanent damage had occurred that left me un-trusting of his words....words I waited 4 long years to hear...words that at that time, sounded desperate and empty.


And now he's dead.  I don't care that we weren't together anymore - he didn't deserve to feel that way, to do what he did....no one does..


So I hear that song, it had played at a time where I could have felt it was genuine, and now having to wonder if I'll ever know such a feeling to be genuinely felt for me, if such a thing could exist or if it somehow died with him.  Better yet, do I, or can I believe that I'd be so deserving?

Sadness

That was the subject line of the lengthy text message I got this morning from a friend.  He was informed this morning that his partner's nephew had committed suicide...he was in the disbelief stage and I could tell by what he wrote that the hamster wheel had started spinning.


He said he reached out to me cause he was feeling slightly lost...He knew about Ian and knew I'd understand...and I have to tell you, as shitty as this is, I'm really glad he has me to come to...cause I know what it was like to have no one understand...it was lonely and isolating and I felt an overwhelming sense of abandonment...from everyone.


So today has been... hazy...


It's bad enough that it's happened to you.. one of those things most never fathom would happen to them...but then to find out that it's happened to a friend of yours not long after you have just experienced it yourself is a total mindfuck.


My poorly constructed sutures were weakened by this news...mourning Ian and feeling helpless for my friend...who so very unfortunately, like me, won't quite be the same now. 

Finally - Validation.

"I just remember feeling...like everybody else in the world was functioning going through their life...and I... I had a landmine that went off in mine..and I just felt like everybody else was different than me... I was different from everybody else... I was not connected.. I was...nobody understood how I felt.. no one. I didn't feel like no one cared..but I just felt like...just sort of a foggy..you just..and then when you're alone...when you're alone you're so apart.. when you're alone you're not part of the group...you know, the world was meant to go in twos and you're a one..." 
- Kim Bermel



An Isolation Unchosen from Andew Maclean on Vimeo.


I stumbled onto this video one night when I was searching the keyword suicide... I had sat in on a Survivors of Suicide webinar - which was only days after I was informed of Ian's passing.  Perhaps I was too much in shock or confused  to find any relation to what was shared there...and no offense to them, or their story, or what they feel/felt...but it felt to me, at the time..too staged.


Listening to what Kim describes in this video her thoughts/feelings following her husbands suicide, I completely broke down.....for the first time...someone explained exactly how I felt....they knew...finally.  My therapist says it's validation.  It's weird to me because it feels good to be 'validated' - but I feel so horrible at the same time that anyone else.. anyone...would have to know what this is like.


A lot of people don't know, but Ian had attempted suicide twice in front of me while we were together living in Seattle...I took them seriously at the time, but he was also struggling with a serious drug habit - I guess I dismissed that it would ever happen again after he had been clean so long...and certainly not the way it happened.


I remember watching a documentary about Kurt Cobain some months after me and Ian had split...and I remember thinking... wow... it sounds like they are telling Ian's story...it's honestly really eerie..but at the end...I remember thinking.. Ian would never do that. Never. I was wrong. 


I only got his death certificate a couple weeks ago...that was hard - to read 'self inflicted gunshot to the head' as cause of death.  I get the feeling that people think I should be over it since we were no longer together - but he consumed 7 years of my life..we were only split 1 yr before this happened and I still cared about him as a person...that never goes away.  I would have done anything for him if he would have just reached out to me.


I did a lot of the hamster wheel thinking that Kim talks about - including trying to find meaning in coincidences...i.e. the last time he txt me was exactly 5 months before his took his life..to the day... The night he did it, Freshy got stung by a scorpion...trying to find any and all connections...blaming myself for what happened...like if I hadn't come into his life he'd be happy and this wouldn't have happened...if I had just let him stay with me... ugh. it's disgusting how much you'll beat yourself up.


I can say I'm doing a lot better - trying to refocus my thoughts/energies on other things - as Kim said... "...everything's hard...but not impossible.... I'm so hopeful..."

Tossing Pennies in the Well

I almost forgot how theraputic writing is...I felt near immediate relief after I had posted the last spilling of my heart. 


A record of an extreme low.


I'm happy that I am blessed with what seems like an endless well of hope, and an ability to pull it back together and start over.


This trip back home is going to be an emotional one...it's on the heels of Ian's suicide, and will be the first time I will have seen/spoke with my Dad in 8 or so years.  I also have preliminary plans to go to San Francisco and see some old best friends from as far back as elementary school that are now, like most of my friends, only loosely connected through Facebook.  I know when we get together it will be almost as if no time has past.  It will mostly consist of recalling the past, past events - and a lot of laughing (and boy do I need that)....Our lives since have been disconnected...of course mostly my fault..I'm the one that pulled out and away...but I guess we all did.


It's a new year..and I'm hoping facing some past demons will allow me to heal and transcend to a new mind/emotional set.  


Wish me luck.

Selfish/Selfless

A gunshot to the head changed everything, and nothing will ever be the same.


I feel guilty without feeling guilty..if that makes any sense.  I've never known pain like this..and wouldn't wish it on anyone. I read anger will play a role in my process of emotions...but I don't know what I'm supposed to be angry about.. I think feeling angry would just make me feel more guilty..how can you be angry at someone that felt so hopeless that they chose to end their own life?  I have to learn to accept that I'll never have an answer to why..I have to learn to accept that I'll never have closure..I have to accept that I may never get a sign that he is ok now.  I don't even want to get into the where did we come from/where are we going process of thoughts cause that never ends well for me.


I have been up night after night questioning the past 7-8 yrs of my life, wondering about my purpose...trying to convince myself that no one can or will love me, in order to feel as though I don't need it.  Need/Want...quite a blurred line for me.  I value my independence..but at the debt of being this lonely hardly seems fair.  Harder felt after such a bright glimmer of hope that someone could care about me and now I feel as though I lost that in the midst of everything else.


My heart aches, this is worse than any heartbreak I've known, and trust me when I say I'm quite familiar with heartbreak...I don't think anyone has any idea....well, maybe except for his sister, when I heard her cry on the phone last time I talked to her, I knew she knew how I felt..an unfortunate feeling to have to share.  Everyone else accepts "ok" as an answer to how you are doing.  I'm managing...overall I guess you can say I'm "ok" - but there are moments or sometimes whole days where I'd rather you slammed a brick in my face than to feel what hits suddenly and without warning.


I want my life back.  I can't say I've ever known happiness the way I did from July to November...then boom...worse than from where I started..all that hard work to change my thought process.. to feel better about myself.. to find value in myself - fucking gone. I know the process..tell yourself you are worth something..blah blah blah.. but it just feels so fucking fake.  Instead you look in the mirror and tell yourself you are worthless and no on will ever love you...that feels much more accurate.. in my 31 years...where's the proof that it's anything other than that? ...I'm selfish because I want love...selfless because I give all mine away and keep none for myself...what good is it anyway??..it didn't save or stop Ian from doing what he did.


I envy people who have life-long close friends.. while I struggle to have semi-acquainted friends.  No one to really talk to besides this fucking notepad on my computer and a therapist.  She is awesome though I must say.  But she is paid by the hour, and I can't afford for her to come over and stay up all night with me just talking...just talking...oh how I long to just have a conversation right now.  To feel normal..and comfortable...and happy.... to sleep.


I'm just having a really bad night.  I hurt. I'm lonely. I could use a hug.