In all the other sections of this blog you’ll read about things I’ve gone through and the negative affects they’ve had on me and how I have, and continue to, look for ways to turn those negatives into positives. I try not to strictly focus on the negative. I guess you could say it’s the hopeful side of me. Trying to find the best out of bad situations. Or maybe I’m just trying to sugar coat my pain.
This section, this is dedicated strictly to the dark side and to everyone who is in or has been in the darkness. These are the things that are hard to say because if you haven’t been there you can’t possibly understand the depth of it. You hurt, you’re sad, you need to feel better about whatever it is you’re going through or what you have gone through so you reach out to a friend or a relative for a life line. Then they respond to you in ways like “a lot of other people have it way worse” or “well at least….”. These responses come across to me as telling me I shouldn’t feel the way I feel or that there is no validity to it. That causes struggling people to crawl inside themselves. Adds self hate to someone already struggling.
I wish I could tell you what is wrong with me. I know I have severe anxiety but that’s the only thing I know for sure. Do I have depression? Maybe. It’s like my light is out. I’m not unhappy but I’m not happy. I’m sad. My life has been about 85% darkness. I’m not talking about being depressed, I’m talking about growing up in an abusive household, being abandoned by my own father and then let down or abandoned about every father figure I had afterwards; 2 step-dads, 2 other almost step-dads and several other male figures that were supposed to protect me but hurt me instead. At school I was bullied. I didn’t have a safe space in my daily life. I couldn’t protect myself, I couldn’t protect my family, and nobody protected any of us. I spent my childhood and teen years feeling mostly invisible at home and wanting to be invisible at school. Being seen was rarely pleasant for me.
As an adult I’ve tried to climb out of that hole. You know that phrase “take one step forward and 2 steps back”? Most of my life has been “take one step forward & get knocked 10 steps back”. As Albert Einstein said “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. This is why people stop trying to move forward, why they give up on life. At least it is for me. I’m not suicidal and I would never do that to my family. It’s just like I’ve lost the will to live. I just tired of trying. I want to live. I want to be happy & enjoy life. It’s just not how my life works. It’s like it’s not meant to be in the cards for me.
I told my new therapist that I don’t know if what I have is depression, just that I’ve been broken so many times and I’ve never been able to put myself back together before the next hit came. At what point is something so broken that it can’t be put back together? That’s where I’m at. Pulverized. I destroy everything I touch. I feel like all I’ve brought to my husbands life is darkness. I can’t imagine how hard all this is on him. I wonder how many people that have committed suicide did so because they believed their loved ones lives would be better off without them. I know I have certainly felt that way.
And here goes the vicious circle.
I want my family to be happy. I’ve tried to make up for being a basket case by making myself as small as possible. I blame myself for him not having a child of his own, I cannot forgive myself. It wasn’t my choice to get endometrial cancer and have a hysterectomy instead of having a child with him, but at the end of the day, I’m the reason he doesn’t have children. That’s on me. It wasn’t in my control, just like every other shit storm in my life. Always a wrecking ball. So, I’ve spent the last 12 years putting what I really needed & things that would make me happy on the back burner. Made myself small to try to make him happy in any way I possibly could. But we all know how that works out. You can’t make somebody else happy if you are not happy.
Here’s the shit about that. I haven’t been able to work for the last 3 years. Right now I’m not even functioning enough to take care of myself, let alone try to hold down a job. So we are living on one income. We are getting by but just barely. Mental healthcare is expensive and it takes forever to make one inch of progress.
So, money is tight, my husband is our sole income, he’s stressed out because he carries the majority of the weight right now. What I need to get better takes money we don’t have, so much time that there’s no end in sight, requires me to put myself first which means putting even more on my husbands shoulders than he already has.
And now comes the guilty conscience. The 1st step dad I had abused every member of my family. Except me. I watched him hit my mom so hard that her glasses flew across the room. He threw a plate at my brothers head, missed, shattering the plate on the wall, because my brother asked for seconds. Verbally, physically, mentally abused them all. I’m the baby. My siblings are 4 & 6 years older than me. This period of my life was from age 4 to around 10. I tried to help. I told an adult that should have protected us something that happened and I wasn’t believed. I feel guilty that I couldn’t protect them. I feel guilty that my siblings were abused by this man and I wasn’t. It wasn’t fair to them. That’s survivors guilt right there. It didn’t help that guilt when I survived my cancer but my mother-in-law didn’t and then there’s been a couple since then that were much better people with much better lives than me that lost their lives to cancer at way too young of an age. They were much more deserving of life than I.
Losing my friend to cancer this year broke me. But it’s also what has made me ask for help. I have to live my best life for her. And I’m trying really fucking hard. But as per the story of my life, that’s not working out for me. As soon as I got to the point with my 1st therapist that he knew the traumas I’d been through so we could start making some progress, he ghosted the practice. Since I have abandonment, daddy and male role model issues it knocked me 10 steps back & now I had to start all over with a new therapist which meant reliving every trauma again with someone new. When I was just about done reliving it all again with her, she tells me she’s leaving the practice. 10 more steps back. I found a private therapist after that (the previous practice is a community counseling center that I didn’t have to pay for, private practice isn’t free). I’m once again in the phase of reliving all the traumas. 4 months. 4 freaking months is how long I’ve been trying to get help. I’m worse now than before I started.
Trying to get help & put my life back together should not be the definition of insanity. So, do I stop trying or do I drive myself more insane by continuing to try?
