How am I actually doing?

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024.

2:55am I've been reluctant to write. Thought about it every day but some things have happened since the last entry that added to my overall state of overwhelm and I'm not sure I want to write about any of it. It's not entirely my story to share but I am very much affected by the situation and it is part of my own experience - just far too big and serious of a matter to even appear to flippantly write about it here. I have 49 GB of screenshots and screen recordings on the subject matter that are now saved to an external drive. I'm not sure what to do with it still. The fact I kept that stuff was a trauma response and the fact I can 't delete it yet feels like it's for the same reason. I've written about this some in my paper journal but I don't feel like I can pour any of this out yet. I don't know why I'm surprised when I learn yet again that I should have trusted my first instinct about a person, that I shouldn't doubt the gut feeling when it says something is off, when the truth of someone showing you who they are causes that feeling of repulsion or fear --- but I was vulnerable (I'm still in a vulnerable state) and I gave too many chances and my repeated thought to myself is how thankful I am that they don't live anywhere near me. The unfortunate part of that is that they are near other people. To go into details about the circumstances of it all increases the anxiety. I could probably write an introspective piece about the correlation between having been abused as a child and to being vulnerable to those who abuse others, but the link is so obvious and the pattern so devastating that I can only feel embarrassed that I gave any attention or time to someone who could be violent, so cruel, so sick in the head. I can understand being broken or lashing out or having issues as an adult - completely relatable - but at some point, one has to take full responsibility for who they are in present day, and the actions they choose to take, and how they treat other people. If you're in your '40s and you can't take accountability for who you are now and what harm you inflict on other people, I think there's something messed up about that. At some point, it's a choice. Harm becomes a decision.

All of the forgiveness we so easily have extended to others who hurt us, who have intentionally harmed us, repeatedly handing the olive branch over to the tyrant - but when do we stand up and finally turn that forgiving kindness inward for ourselves, and tell the other person to fuck all the way off?

25 July 2024, age 46, Toronto, ON

3:37am How am I actually doing? I've been stuck for some time now on a withering raft in a vast ocean of grief. I have not been able to cry or weep about it - even one good sob session might help me out - but there is a thick layer between myself and that well of sadness and I might be afraid of it. The tears are there in a moment like this - just there = but I won't cry and I wish I would. Maybe I need to put a sad movie on or something to help because this isn't healthy, this isn't working out for me. I need to have one of those shake the body out type of cries and I can't even sniffle. I feel it though. I think I've been bracing myself against some metaphorical damn as if my arms and hands could keep the levy from breaking. So far, it's worked, but at what cost? The closest I get to crying is when I speak with anyone from Hospice for grief counselling. It's as if my mind has decided that only others who know this kind of sorrow are allowed to hear even a hint of it. And yet, most people have experienced loss and it's not like this is anything special. Even I, myself, had losses before the slew of them in the past few years. Was it the importance of the figures in my life or was it how the deaths happened so soon after one another, with no chance to process any of it, to the point where I didn't let myself process any of it? In my retreated seclusion, I am in that rare place where time is perceived in that 2020 / pandemic shutdown time sort of way - only that's how I've lived for years now - and I've no doubt that has kept me suspended in my grief. I pressed pause but it's on one of the worst parts of the film and I haven't moved past it yet. Grief doesn't go away and they say that life grows around the grief but I have been reclusive in such a way that I've kept most of the living at such a distance that nothing is able to grow around me but the grief itself. I'm aware of this. I'm fully conscious of how this has not helped me in healing. Even just a walk would do wonders in helping to move the grief through my body, in having the trauma of my experiences to detach from my insides and pass through me - but I have not allowed myself to walk or to breathe the fresh air or to see past the screens I have in front of me. There is a part of me that wants to live that is throwing themselves at the glass, trying to break through, to get out of the observation room, to emerge from the depths of some immense body of water that has a layer of ice, wailing on it, desperate to survive, to reach the surface, to live.

It's all on me to save myself. I'm frantic inside, wanting to know what it will take for me to get up - are we not at that arc yet? What am I waiting for? Am I a coward? How is it that I can be brave for others and not for myself?

4:19am I wrote about how on this day, 7 years ago, I met my Dad's birth brother Mike here in Toronto when he did a layover on a greyhound trip. The photos I took that day of Uncle Mike and I show how similar he looks to my Dad, how evident it was that we were directly related. This led me to write about family and blah blah blah but I backspaced and deleted it all. I feel like I've written it before. Uncle Mike passed in May of 2021. My dad died in February 2022. They died within months of one another just as they had been born within months. It set off a chain of grief and losses that would continue for two years, my having bookmarked it for now with the death of my step-father in December of 2023. Losses in between that included Dr. G and two of my cats (family to me) and other deaths besides. It was far too many in too short a time. Each one should have had a length of time for mourning and I didn't have a chance to even think about some of them, the weight of grief so heavy on me - my father's especially - I'm unable to process the entirety of it all. It isn't just the deaths, it's the reality of what happened while they were alive, when they were in my life, when things happened in childhood, or everything that didn't. It's not just the early exits. It's not just the unanswered questions or the lost stories or the sad endings. It's all of it.

It's the insistent reminder that life is finite and one day you'll die and what are you doing with your life because it really is possible to go a number of years and then die and have it come to nothing. Even the ones who love you will soon be dead. The futility of it all. The way all that existential angst you felt in your '20s suddenly turns into a deeper well of awareness that if you actually think about it too long, shouldn't it circle back around to, if nothing actually matters than why don't you go outside already?

There are no easy answers. Just hard living.

My step-father was crazy but when I was a kid, I told him about my nightmares in the car and because of him, I grew up with the ability to attribute meaning to my dreams --- and that is an important part of who I am and how I've pulled through many times of my life. I've had nightmares nearly every night since childhood with time periods of writing my dreams out, of pinning some of them down and interpreting them for myself, of solving puzzles from my psyche, of seeing patterns. My mother left me out of his obituary even though the man had entered my life when I was 5 years old. That's almost as cold as not telling me he had died and my having to find out by chance when I thought to reach out to Fred, someone who had been close to both him and my Dad earlier in their lives. Even from beyond, my sleeve was tugged on to find out something had happened. I have written about my step-dad and my Dad and even Dr. G in the pages of my diaries and journals. There is evidence that they were there through the view of devoted idolization to the breaking through of their downfalls from their pedestals of various forms of heroic father figure. I'm almost afraid to look back to read how I wrote them. To know how it all eventually came to end. But I must face it. In writing that, I had tears come up. It must be something I should do. Not today but soon.

4:48am I'm nearly finished with paper journal number 47 (the one that has Dr. G's obituary pasted on the inside cover, his smiling face in the photo, as I found out he had died about a year after his passing - unsure to this day whether I just didn't retain the information after my Dad's death that year or just the way things happened) and I'll be relieved to be through with it because I need a fresh start - those who journal know how it can be when you want to start a new one. I did something rare for me and that was, I wrote down something good that someone had said to me (actually, it was a text) and I put it down in my journal. I'm so often ruminating on the awful things that are said or the bad things I've thought that I don't seem to make note of the flattering things I've been told or the kind words, ya know? I really should pay more attention to the good things but it's tough to rewire forty-something years worth of negative self-talk but it's worth a try. So I wrote down word for word what someone had sent me and I want to share it here. I thought it was beautiful and sweet and since it was a writer who sent me it, it was visual and lovely. I like it because it's not too often that someone lets me know what they remember of me, let alone puts a photo up to me and says, this was you, or more - this is you, to me, how I remember you. And isn't it something, for someone to remember you? Even if you barely remember who you were, yourself?

31 July 2009, age 31, The Beach/es, Toronto, ON

Rob (Atari Shirt) text'd:

"I was just thinking about the first time I ever physically saw you. I pulled my car around onto your street, and there you were, sitting on your front step reading a book, all hair and curves, in a faded pair of bootcut jeans and sandals. Gulp."

All hair and curves. What a way to put it. I especially like that I was reading a book. I remember reading more. Reading everywhere. Reading all the time. Writing if I wasn't reading. I'm surrounded by books but I don't read enough. Too many screens. Thinking of being perceived the way my friend wrote about me above, I think of how it'd be something just to be outside again, let alone be seen out there reading a book!

5:05am I didn't know how this entry would go. I knew I'd have a lot to say and I managed to avoid discussing some of the big things going on right now while still writing about a lot. I hope I write again soon. Hopefully one of my posts will have photos from outside.