This is a difficult post for me to write. To be honest, I don’t even know if it’ll ever get posted publicly. I’m not particularly good at this sort of thing, and the idea that people use their blogs to kind of…I dunno…bleed out all over the place gives me the squickies. So I don’t know why I’m even writing it. Maybe it’s just time for me to get my Internet leech treatment.
The past two years have been incredibly difficult. Probably this has to do with one a’ them…whattayacallems…big life changes. It’s been a time when many of the people around me – the people I care deeply about love have gone through some pretty intense periods of stress. And, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve gone through some difficult shite too.
I mean, we all do, right? This isn’t one a’ them …whattayacallems… calls for help or big neon signs flashing “pity me” or “soothe me” or even “look at me”. Feel free to stop reading now and go find something awesome to do. I encourage doing so without pants!
It started with the loss of a friend. It was silly, really. But here’s the thing – I’m one of those people who doesn’t form close relationships very easily (Depthless Gemini might tell you it’s at least in part because of my Geminosity), and so when something happens with a good friend, it kind of blows apart huge chunks of my life in psychologically astonishing ways. Actually, to be honest, it started with some pretty serious issues between His Nibs and I. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that because there are some things I’m just never going to bleat about publicly. I will say that things were really, really shitty for about six months, and in that time, I was the loneliest I have ever been in my life.
(Which is saying a lot, actually.)
During that time, and the next six months, I had to work really hard to figure out what was most important to me. Also during that time, there was a strange …well it felt to me like an ostracism, but I’m sure that’s just because I was having a nervous breakdown. I’m sure it was more like a simple growing apart happening. A normal thing, the sort of thing that happens when relationships evolve and change. But to me, who was already feeling like the tiniest thing on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, it seemed like the camera filming my life panned out so far that you could see that it wasn’t really an ocean but an entire planet covered in water except for my wee rock.
Then I lost a friend. We had been very close – at least in my heart – and I don’t even really know what happened. It was like a switch was flipped and all of a sudden it felt like I was being cast aside. Glob almighty this sounds ridiculous. Anyway, I was really hurt. So hurt, in fact, that I couldn’t even talk about it for a couple of months. So hurt that I couldn’t even figure out what the hell was going on for a few months. Once I figured out that what was going on in my non-rational heart was “you’ve been dumped, dumbass”, I started to see that all my attempts at retaining that friendship were in vain. In all truth, our friends go through their own shite all the time, and assuming it’s our friends’ responsibility to shore us up in times of weakness really isn’t terribly fair. So I have a huge part to play in the loss of this friendship. I think I was needing or wanting something that my friend simply wasn’t able to give – through no fault of their own. But it was devastating.
Part of the fallout from my Troubles was that I refocused a lot of things. I pared back a lot of what was scattering my focus (again, as Depthless Gemini might mention, we Geminoids are particularly terrible for scattering our foci), and I started to really listen to what His Nibs needed, and to what our children needed. Not that I’d been ignoring them, but there came a time when it was pretty clearly written in the sand that they needed me to be much more present. Part of this refocusing was to stop having huge games at the house, to stop having guests one weekend every month. We (the children, His Nibs and I) wanted to have our friends over when we had time to visit, when we would have time to really make and maintain those one-on-one conversations that connect us together. I know that decision was hurtful to some of our friends. While on one hand, I was trying to rebuild the sanctuary we all needed, I was tearing apart the haven that so many of our good friends enjoyed.
I still feel bad about that, actually. Perhaps I handled our decision poorly. Perhaps I was unclear about why we made the decision we did and why it was so vitally important to us to make that decision. I know that for at least one person, the way I handled that communication really blew. He had no idea how bad things were, and I found it difficult to really *talk* to him, even though I desperately wanted to (and didn’t know how to tell him how much I needed him), because there were always other people around. And, this may shock you, I’m not very good at asking for help. Particularly when it comes to emotional stuff.
So to him, it must have looked like I just snubbed him and basically told him he wasn’t welcome in our family anymore. I didn’t even know how to deal with that when it happened, and was still so goddamned sore from trying to climb out of the loneliest hell I’d ever experienced, that I just kind of…well, I fucked it up.
Then all hell broke loose.
A good friend found himself in hospital in an unexpected mental health breakdown, and while I was trying to help him through that, one of my close friends, David, succumbed to mental illness and committed suicide.
I didn’t know how to deal with THAT, either. I still, a year and a half later, can’t believe he’s gone. I’ve lost people (even family) to suicide before, including a different friend four months earlier, but this one…this one hit really, really close to home. I couldn’t stop thinking about David. I couldn’t stop being sad.
During this time, I was incapable of reaching out. I was just numb all the time, and sad the times I wasn’t numb. I knew it would pass, and His Nibs and the kids were wonderful. It took a very, very long time to start feeling myself again. I don’t think it was until last summer that I started to. I remember hearing the news that I’d be getting a new baby cousin, and I got to know some pretty amazing new people in my family and I realized I was never really alone; I’d just been trying to grab on to something that wasn’t there.
By the time fall rolled around, it felt like things were just starting to get back on track, and then one of my best friends moved away (I miss you like crazy, MrGod). He had been a real rock, and an amazing confidant, and someone I could just be comfortable with. He didn’t move a little ways away, either. He moved halfway across the country, so hanging out is REALLY HARD.
Here’s what I don’t want to say: I have really needed a lot over the past two years, and I’m not the sort of person who asks for help. When I do ask for help, it’s usually understated, and it’s been very, very difficult for me to not take “rejection” personally. I put that in air quotes because I don’t really know what I mean. I don’t even know how to ask for …Christ, for attention I guess? Not in the “Bitches be givin’ out attention over there” kind of way, but more in the “hey, I’m really having a shit time of things and could really use a movie night” kind of way.
And here’s what I do know: there have been some amazing people who have shared their lives with me, and I am deeply, deeply grateful for all of you. Even those whom I have hurt, and especially those I’ve lost. For those of you who have gone out of your way to share your time and your spirit with me in the last year, I can never thank you. I just can’t. You have shared yourselves with me in a way I can simply never repay.
So there it is. A super long, really kind of rambly talk about how my life has fallen apart over the last two years, and how I’ve gone from being completely and utterly lonely to starting to discover that there really are folks out there who want to spend time with me. That looks really bloody stupid all typed out like that. Maybe sometimes it’s okay to look stupid.
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