Emotional mumbo jumbo. Grief.

I wrote a post 2 weeks ago saying that I was feeling suicidal… a very hard post to write and I actually felt really badly for posting it because I like to be the one offering help, not the one showing a need for it. I am sure most of you understand that.

I had an appointment with my stellar therapist the following week and told her about the sudden crash, the reason for it and my shock that I seemed to crash so far down so quickly. I told her that I really felt like I was past that head space. Why would my brain just jump back to suicidal feelings so damned quickly after 3 years of working my arse off to heal and NOT think like that any longer?

Her answer surprised me. She said that “You don’t really sound suicidal to me although I understand that suicidal is what you hear and what you think you are feeling. I’d like to offer another opinion. I believe you are grieving.”

You could have knocked me over because she was right. I was not suicidal although that is exactly what it felt like. My “why bother to go on?” was far more of a grief response than anything else. When you lose someone in any way, it can be very hard to make sense of it all. Whether by death, distance or disagreement, loss can feel the same at times.
Why go on?
What’s the point?
Nothing will ever feel right again.
It’s too hard.
Life is too empty without him/her.
I can’t take it.
That sure all sounds suicidal doesn’t it? Grief takes us there faster than almost anything else and the next time that I feel that way, I hope I can stop to ask myself if I am truly suicidal or perhaps this is another burst of grief?

I was blessed in this life with 4 children. The first boy, Marcus is gone. Taken away by evil. I will never be able to forget him and I never wish to but his loss is not so close to the surface any longer. It bubbles up now and then but I am able to deal with it the best any parent deals with the loss of their child. It is not easy but shockingly, it is possible with a lot of time, usually therapy, and some really hard grieving.

Years later, I had 3 more children who are all young adults now. Over the past 15 months they have all decided to have nothing to do with me. They liked me before I got help. They did not like me afterwards. In their defence, it has been a HUGE change. I am truly not the same person who I was before I got real help 3 years ago. I left home for 4 months that year and returned to them in a whole new mind-space.  I’d never shared opinions, now I do. I’d never said no or wait. Now I do. I was very unhappy yet settled in the fact that they came first, my husband came second, the dogs came third, the house, bills, other pets, mowing the lawn, and ensuring that we always had toilet paper came next in various order depending on the day. I came after all of that. Dead last. This was not their fault. This was no ones fault except the people who raised me to believe that my own needs were supposed to be non-existent. I was supposed to function at peak capacity at all times but only for others. Never for myself.
This is not my children’s faults either because this is how I taught them to treat me. Then I went away, got help, and then came home with the knowledge that I needed to come first so that I could take better care of all those around me. Without being healthy myself, I could not really keep giving for much longer without a crash.
It is hard on children (and most adults) when someone in their life changes so drastically. Add in to the mix that my children were all teenagers when this big change occurred and disaster is not too difficult to find or  imagine.

A long story made a tad shorter is that they all have left and refuse to speak to me. I hope it will not last for many years but I can not wrap my brain around the idea that they will ever return. No one else in my life ever has. I will have to leave hopefulness for a big change in the hands of my husband and other who feel this is a temporary thing. To me? This is the end of our relationship. I can not convince myself otherwise.
I dearly hope to be proven wrong and I will be over-the-moon to admit it but in the meantime, all I feel is incredible grief.
I’ve lost all 4 of my children now and the pain is unbearable. I quite often do not know how on earth I will survive it but that is where the grieving process comes in. I think that my “suicidal feelings” 2 weeks ago were confused with the devastating acceptance that I have lost them. To lose one child was unbearable but losing my 3 living children is a pain that I can not even explain. I see light in my life but it has been dimmed since they left. I work hard to find that light each and every day but this is a loss that even the most emotionally stable person would struggle to maneuver.

This brings me to where I got the name for this blog. Emotions are tricky little buggers to figure out. Some people seem to really get it and they can even name their feelings while experiencing them. I do not really have that skill all figured out just yet. I have a few down pat and I continue to work on others but it isn’t easy to go from someone who forced herself to feel nothing to this new me that feels almost everything to some degree. Add in the fact that my Helpers also hold many of my emotions and do not allow me to feel them YET, and it gets even more confusing. I think I will end this blog here for today but I will talk more about emotions and how to recognize them in blogs to come.

In the meantime, I would like to thank all those who reached out to me during the time when I felt that I was truly doing a free-fall. Your support was a huge part of the reason for my much quicker turnaround.

I truly hope that none of you are grieving right now but if you are, please know that you are not alone. In that deep pit of “Why bother to go on?”, there are answers. You just have to wait a bit longer to get them. There is a reason why we are all still here.