Cocktail of confusing emotions.

This is a direct run in from my last post, so scoot on below if you’ve come here first. And why are you still here? It’s very puzzling to me. (But I do admit there are a few of you reading this, still don’t know why)
I run all of these through ChatGPT for project I’m doing and it suggested I should write about how I felt. Which is a good point.
I felt powerless. I felt sick. I felt useless. I felt that I’d failed in keeping her safe. You have to become skillfull in blocking off emotions. There was a huge huge amount of anger as well, and no-where to put it. Couldn’t be at Jill obviously and where else? Don’t believe in a god so I couldn’t shout at it. So it all gets bundled up with everything else and locked away. And you can feel it in your chest, burning away, and you have to do everything not to let it out. I only slipped up once I think, which isn’t bad in 2 years of hell. I’d just come back in after shopping. There was also a problem with the car, and some other big problem. I was cold and tired and dragged myself in, and Jill was sitting on the sofa. I went into the kitchen and she came in and asked me to make her one as well. And I totally lost it. I smashed my Everton mug onto the floor, shattering it and a floor tile and shouted about how about she make one for me, since I was the one who had been out all morning. Then I sat and sobbed and she comforted me, which made me get angry at myself for upsetting her in turn and letting down that guard.
So you have to stay on guard all the time. Even when watching a tv series if there was mention of cancer in the script we would find a good reason to not watch that one again. So there was stress trying to look forward to anything that might trip us up. And of course fear. Fear crawls through your body like a snake. Sometimes slipping around your chest, or curling in your stomach, or travelling to your limbs, turning them cold. Most often into your throat threatening to choke you, and you have to swallow it down pretty hard.
While fear is the most powerful emotion, those twin evils of desperation and hope come a very close second. You have nowhere to go and nothing you can do. It’s like being locked in a cage, and you circle your thoughts like s tiger in a small enclosure. Hope teases you by making you think there might be an item in the paper talking about s break through drug, and then Hope hands you over to her brother Desperation, as you scan every page, and run every search you can think of, and hope is crushed out again. At least you know where you are with desperation, but hope is like a beautiful squirrel that turns on you.
Grief is another emotion that comes up. Grief isn’t just for the dead, it’s for a way of life, a last visit to somewhere, the grief of knowing you’ve seen a friend for the last time. So you try not to think about it, but that means you have to block more and more of your mind away, until you’re working on bare minimum. Then you realise you’re close to being a zombie and try and get some sanity back. So in reality the grieving process begins way before the actual death.
It’s s seismic life event, as your life crashes down around you. I think it was at this time my anxiety rose it’s head again. You have to think of everything. Start using paper towels, not bacteria laden t towels. Require everyone who comes in to use hand sanitizer and the slightest cough means you’re out! I had to consider every single aspect of our levels; I knew I couldn’t make her live longer, but I wanted ti make sure she lost as few other days as possible. In other ways however it was liberating. Jill used the C word on every possible occasion to get us in somewhere ot get the other cheap. As for me… I would have hated to be around me. Every ounce of love, compassion and care went to Jill. I had nothing left for other people. It didn’t help that you quickly found out who your friends were as well. Some literally disappeared overnight. Vanished. Or would keep phone calls short and not be able to ring back. It was deeply upsetting. People with really close connections, just gone. We never mentioned their names, but I kept a list, and after she died I tracked them all down in text or person and told them exactly what I thought of them. What can I say? A grieving boy needs a hobby.
Despair is the worst I think. Fear is sudden and sharp but it’s at least action. Despair is manacles around your wrists and ankles in which you are rendered helpless. Going around the supermarket by myself and realising that in the future it would always be like that. It’s trying to remain happy and casual and relaxed as if nothing is wrong when inside you are angry enough to try and destroy the world
It’s late, I’m tired. ChatGPT will tell me off for having a blunt ending.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The retreat

  This is going to be long, but I promised you that I’d tell you everything, so that’s what you get. Fix a tea before we start… ready? Arrived in Amsterdam and two train journeys and two hours later I arrived at the station. We had arranged for 4 of us to then drive to the retreat which was in the countryside, really nice and peaceful. The retreat was in a converted Dutch barn. Downstairs was a long table and kitchen, with bedrooms off to the sides, stairs going upon the right with bedrooms etc to the right of that, a bridge across the dining area into the session area, which was quite large, and dark.  There were 9 of us from Ireland, the UK, Netherlands, South Africa, and Poland. I was just the oldest, youngest late 20s maybe? There were two facilitators from the Netherlands. We started by handing in phones and watches. That was a difficult thing to do, and if god himself asked for my phone he wouldn’t get it, but I was here for the experience so I gave the facilitator phone...
Read more

Where do we go from here?

  Thinking back to who I was in my mid twenties to mid thirties I loved who I was. As I’ve described in the past, we were wild, carefree and happy. We had good jobs, a great social life and we were always going out to clubs and parties. I’d stand on pub tables and sing to our group of friends and they’d all join in. I loved it. I loved the attention, I loved having the confidence to do all of the things, and we were so happy. Of course there were clouds, but they just made the sky look even more blue. I enjoyed smoking weed and getting high. Oh, I do wish we had had MDMA in those days, I would have loved to take it with Jill keeping me company and keeping me safe. Those days, in hindsight, were the happiest we ever had, and of course we didn’t know it. The irony is the chosen never know they are the chosen.  But over the course of time other things took precedence and we got involved more in jobs, careers, earning money, thinking about moving to a house and doing all the adult...
Read more

The aftermath

  I’m exhausted. It’s been a long few days now, and my head is still whirling with new thoughts and ideas. But I know I did the right thing. I believed in myself, and trusted my intuition and my brain came through and worked hand in hand with psilocybin to give me what I needed. I wanted to be able to say goodbye to the past. But I’ll admit it’s still scary; so many of us prefer to live in a familiar hell rather than explore an unfamiliar heaven. Not that it IS a heaven of course, but you know what I mean.  I’ve decided that this year I’m going to take a flight in a Spitfire. I’ve wanted to do so for years, but never have, for no good reason other than to punish myself by not doing it. Those days are, I hope a thing of the past, but for the next few weeks and months I have to be really cautious not to regress to different ways, old ways which are more familiar, so I’m going to continue to see my therapist.  I’m going to start wearing more colour as well. I’ll go through m...
Read more