Standing on the backs of the bruised.

And we don’t shoot the wounded.

There’s plenty of folks have it worse than us, if we’re to be honest, and for as bad as we may feel. Some have it better, many have it worse. The one’s who are worse, at times can benefit from our help. And when I say help, I certainly don’t mean clinical solutions, or even solid answers.

I’m talking about simply listening, because we’ve learned the value of being able to talk freely, without being judged, without having solutions thrown at us, without being belittled or ridiculed. We don’t shoot the wounded. Because we’ve been there. Because we are there.

For all we’ve been through, on our own journey of pain and suffering, it might be because in the end we can handle it, we can carry it, we can get better, and maybe, just maybe we’re an example another person can use on their own journey.

We may find in trying to help others, we help our selves in the process. We get out of our own way long enough for our own healing to take place. We help, listen to, and support others. Because we have the unique opportunity to do so based from our own experiences.

We don’t stand on the backs of the bruised. We don’t shoot the wounded.

We try to help somehow. Because we may be the only one’s who do.

The infinite sadness of being…

I’ve been having an unusually tough week. I experienced some traumatic events, followed up with a sudden, unexpected death of a friend of my wife. The traumatic events hit me hard. Very hard. And just plunged my mind into a very deep, dark hole of overwhelming sadness and despair.

For several days I felt the sadness envelope my mind, my being; I felt changed almost at our most basic level. I felt the sadness just moving through my body, and grinding me up. Like a large, black mass, with razor-sharp teeth. I went past being numb. I went to where the sadness caused both mental and physical pain… It was bad. Bad bad.

And my brain just kept repeating it over and over in my head. My brain was torturing me. Trying to kill me. Interesting paradox about depression and trauma; your mind try’s to kill you, while your body fights to live. It’s more than exhausting.

I’m also naturally very empathetic, to a fault even. To the detriment of my mind, of my well being. So when something cause pain and/or sorrow, fighting through it is like fucking warfare inside of me.

I’m not built right for the evil in this world. I don’t even know how to cope with the recent events, but I had to survive it, I had to get out of it. So I chose the very wrong way to deal with it, and I stuffed it. Way down in the dark with all the shit I don’t speak of, so I didn’t have to “see” it anymore. Essentially what I did was feed my depression and PTSD, until I can get a grip on it. With any luck I’ll get to it before it gets to me. It’s gonna be ugly when it comes out, by my choice or not.

And this is the very thing that perpetuates depression; the stuffed things that can’t be held suddenly explodes out of you.

I did what I’ve always done, to survive and keep going. Hopefully….well, hopefully.

I just admitted it outloud. Maybe that will help.

It’s been a tough week. Ugly, tough, heavy, overwhelming, traumatic, and painful.

Thanks for reading.

What’s it like?

It’s like this…

Everybody’s pain is different

  

Temporarily unavailable, PT 7. (the committee has voted)

We have a “running situational comedy/drama” here at home called the “Committee”. The Committee is a make believe group of people, (attitudes/feelings) who reside in my head. When I have unexplained mood swings, unexplained thoughts or words from my mouth, unexplained actions, partial sentences, verbal outbursts, etc, we always blame the “Committee”. It just sort of illustrates some of the complications within my own head. One point it was actually funny; my teenage daughter was at school in a mental health class, and they were talking about people who hear voices. My daughter had heard us talk about my committee and began to wonder if I was actually hearing different voices. LOL. She even came home and mustered up the courage to ask us, if I did in fact hear voices. LOL. So we had to give her the detailed explanation of the committee. Anyway, the committee seems to rarely want good things for me, and usually they stay “quiet”, but now over the past two years of depression, they’ve become pretty vocal, and even a little happy it seems that part of my mind has checked out. They like to feed me denial, and other thoughts and feeling that help keep me sick; it isn’t that bad, you’ll feel better soon, you don’t need anybody’s help, it could be worse, nobody can help you, you’re very much all alone, nobody cares anyway, and on and on. The Committee has voted, and they have all agreed that its important I stay sick as long as possible. (as some added comic relief about the committee, my wife has gone so far as to actually give names to a few of them-Grumpy man is Walter. Troublemaker is Billy.  Etc,etc)

And so it goes with depression, anxiety, panic. Depression keeps you mostly paralyzed with a huge lack of energy and motivation, sadness, loneliness, dark ugly thoughts, and random chaotic feelings. Anxiety and panic add false fears into the mix which further run you into the ground. You fear things that aren’t true, have no basis in reality, and have no prior reason to be afraid of whatever it is. Your mind creates it, then your mind and body believe it, mostly without question. More parallelization. If you’re lucky, determined, and able, you can learn and practice grounding techniques to help minimize these mental traumas. But you have to work at it. And its best to start when the attacks start because if you wait until your in full blown freak out mode, you pretty much just have to ride it out at that point, and that’s hard on the whole family.

So this was pretty much all of 2014 for us here at home. My wife and I were not fully aware of what we were dealing with, and as such, had no coping mechanisms in place, or even any real communication about any of it. This makes it all harder on everybody; the family takes all the mood swings and such personally, can’t understand any of it, and as the depression sufferer, you can’t think or talk clear enough to explain yourself. So tensions mount. The very best thing that helped me was when my wife and I finally learned what we were up against, and began working together, but that was still several weeks away at this point.

I mentioned earlier I was making all my doctor appointments, but like everything else I did manage to actually do, I was simply going through the motions. So the doctor visits were short and sweet, and it was hard for me to communicate my issues, and my doctor at the time, seemed more interested in getting me out of her office than actually helping me. So she just kept increasing my meds-meds that were not working anyway, so I was just getting worse. (I think I mentioned this already too-sorry if its a repeat).

A couple things of importance, and this can be applied to all medical issues; its up to you, and/or a very close family member to be your own medical advocate. Ask questions, get answers, if you don’t like the answers, ask again, press for the answers, keep fighting for your self. Doctors are smart and mostly know whats up, but they are only human, and some are not really all too interested in health care or healing. Having said that, if you don’t like you doctor, find another. If you don’t like that one, find another again. Keep going until you find one you’re comfortable with. Its not about getting answers you want to hear, its about answers that make sense, and provide healing without unnecessary suffering and waiting. Do your homework, be your advocate, get healthy faster. We could have probably shaved 6 to 8 months worth of suffering off of our back had we thought of this or had it suggested to us sooner. Its hard to think clear in the throws of depression and its suffering, so if you’re not paying attention, the suffering lasts much longer than it needs to. Depression doesn’t clear up in a week or two, but I spent one whole year in the worst of it and continually dropping lower because we just were not educated.

The at home support system is very important too. I hate to think where I might have ended up if my wife and daughter were not caring for me, and for our home. It’s a strange paradox being depressed, you struggle, really struggle to function, and you’re aware that you’re not doing anything or much. Everyday you make a few plans in your head of what you’d like to do, then you spend the whole day doing nothing but thinking about how you’re not doing you “plan”, and that just makes you fell shittier overall, because you start to feel unreliable and useless. This all makes the depression worse. And this cycle just repeats itself daily. I was very, very fortunate, because my wife and daughter carried me and my responsibility’s which allowed to to just try to work on surviving my ordeal. It was an ideal arrangement, but again, given the info we had on hand, it was the best we could do at the time…..

Coming soon, PT 8, in this “I don’t know how many parts” series.

Where the hell have I gone? Pt. 5

So being diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety/panic attacks, my life, especially working had become a huge challenge. Huge. And after struggling with my illness and work, I figured work was the primary “cause” of my mental ill-being and decided to quit my job, to relieve that pressure and just try to get a grip on myself before finding work again. I was about this time I signed up for some college classes, because I thought since my job was gone, my illness would go. That turned out to be some really faulty thinking. After leaving my job I entered what we here at home call the “zombie” or “sleep” stage.

This means I pretty much did nothing most days except stare at the TV. I managed to get out of bed everyday, but some days that was the big event. Other days I could maybe walk the dog, or clean up the kitchen. The one thing I wasn’t doing was talking to anybody about the massive wreckage happening in my head. I was pretty much ignoring my wife and daughter, but this was not a conscious decision on my part, I simply was no longer “there”. I was only vaguely aware or their presence and only on some days. Overall, most of the time, I felt, believed, I was all alone.

When I did manage to “remember” my wife, I felt no connection to her anymore; anything she might have been doing didn’t register or matter to me. As for my daughter, I had become certain she just flat out hated me. And of course because my lights were on but I was not “present”, she was walking around thinking I hated her too. It was an unfortunate problem that was growing each day, but at the time I had no idea. Overall, I was just simply not aware of life around me. In my head was loneliness, sadness, darkness, suffering, questioning, try to survive what ever was eating me up. On the outside, what my family got to see everyday, was the empty shell of me. In a chair, almost completely checked out. And we were all helpless at that point to change anything.

I should mention here; I did manage to attend some family functions. I did go out on occasion with my wife to a store or something. I went to some college classes. And I keep going to my doctor appointments. Now of course I remember none of these things, and none of these things helped me feel better. They tell you when you’re in depression to make yourself do stuff, it will help you feel better. This was not true in my case. All that was happening to me was a growing fear of actually leaving my house, and fear of the people and traffic outside my house. I managed to do some stuff, but all it did was stress me out more.

My visits to the doctor pretty much sucked. I would go and try to explain how I felt like I was slipping farther and farther away, and she would just increase the dosage of the meds I was on, effectively making me feel worse as we went along, because the meds never did work in the first place. So I had resigned myself to just feeling like shit, trying to survive each day, and wait for the magic day that the meds would finally start working. That day was nowhere near in my future. By now, I was having very minimal contact of any kind with my wife and daughter. While I was not really aware of this, I’m sure they were, and while I don’t know how it felt for them, I can imagine it might have been scary, lonely, frustrating, and tiring for them. I was still very much stuck inside my very dark head though. I had very little awareness of anything around me. Every day for me became just a fight to survive, make it to bedtime, get up tomorrow and do it all again. Everyday. This was my new routine. Live to fight another day. And this is how we lived, for several months. And the only real change that happened during those months, was that I gained a lot of weight, and just kept slipping farther and farther away.

We were all pretty miserable, most of the time. My wife and daughter kept the household rolling forward, and I just kept breathing. This was how our Summer and Fall went. Not a healthy way to live for any of us, and no, we still were not near the end of it, the upswing/turnaround was still nowhere in sight….

The walking wounded.

A few days ago, was my 6 yr anniversary of my first heart attack. I was fortunate, I survived mine, (obviously) and many others do not get that chance. I’m aware of this, always aware of it. This fact was recently drilled into me with the recent passing of two close family members. Family members who were also friends; good friends. In spite of my “illness”, I managed to not have a complete breakdown during these two events, and the passing of both these people was very, very difficult for everybody, and just a couple months later, still painful for all involved.

The first one was my wife’s grandmother. She was “grandma” to a fairly large family, and acted like grandma to all of us. She was a good friend to me, and many others, she was what I called a “once in a lifetime” person; meaning you might me one person like her, and if you did you were very, very fortunate. She was grandma to most of the family, but one of the things that always struck me about her, was her ability to share a relationship with every person, that was different from her relationships with all the other people. This applied to family and friends. If you were family, she made you feel special. If you were friends she made you feel like family. As she treated EVERYBODY this way. Her and I had many conversations about many things, on more than just a polite, superficial level. This brings up another rarity about her; she actually listened to you when you talked with her. She didn’t just wait for her chance to speak, she didn’t talk down to you, and she wouldn’t make you feel like you were wrong or faulty for having a differing opinion or thought than her. She never complained openly about her various health issues, or anything else really. She always had a concern for others, always had kept her “tabs” on them. She was always happy, and in an upbeat mood. She was a pleasure to share a room with. Always. She was honest, and she was real. You always knew you were talking to her, and not some dressed up version of herself. She was all these things, and more, and she was just one person. My whole life I’ve never met anyone like her, and I’m certain I never will. She was a once in a lifetime person. If you think you have a person like this in your life, go be with them and talk with them. It’ll be good for both of you. Grandma was in the hospital wrestling with some health issues before loosing her battle and finally going “home”, and she did so with most of her family around her. I think of her everyday. She left too much impact on everybody she met, to ever really be forgotten. She was one against whom many others are measured, and we all miss her, every single day.

A few weeks later, we lost my wife’s uncle. Uncle Tom. He passed suddenly without warning and threw everybody into a shock that still lasts to this day. Again, another unique to the family individual, and another who left such a mark on people, he’ll not be forgotten either. He was my best friend, and we had alot in common. except for the great outdoors; he loved it, thrived in it, wanted to always be out in it being himself, and me, well I pretty much hate everything about the great outdoors. We used to joke about moving to the Dakotas. He could have his handmade cabin out in the sticks, and I’d stay in some nice hotel in the center of some populated nearby city. Uncle Tom was a “gentle giant”. Farily big physically and a bit imtimidating, but if you took the time to get to know him, you learn just how nice of a guy he was, and how easy going. You could count yourself fortunate to be close to him. He was another person who you didn’t hear complain. He didn’t get angry often, and even when frustrated he would keep it calm and under wraps. He was very even keel, and you knew with him also, that what you saw, was what you got. Honest and real. Ask him anything, and he’d be happy to share some thoughts on it. He was very smart, and also very funny. His humor was low key too, so if you weren’t paying attention, you’d likely miss the joke. He was very good working with wood, and a mechanic by trade. And no matter what work he was doing, he would work at “uncle Tom” speed, meaning he’d work at his own pace, and nobody or anything was going to change that. Uncle Tom speed was a constant too, it didn’t vary day to day. Just like the passing of grandma, he left a hole bigger than the person was.

The whole family is struggling with these losses, we are all the walking wounded. We’re mourning longer than they would have wanted us to do, but it’s very hard not to when you love people as much as these two were loved.

Not a day goes by for me. Two different types of pain and loss. Shocking and sad much the same.

I miss them both. Always will.