Trying to cope with grief.

"You and me, we used to be together
Everyday together, always.
I really feel, that I'm losing my best friend,
I can't believe this could be the end.

It looks as though, you're letting go,
And if it's real, well I don't want to know..." - "Don't Speak" - No Doubt.

~//~

Loss is unfortunately an unavoidable part of life.  Sooner or later everyone loses something precious to them.  Be it the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, life changes such as moving to a new town, or even the dissolution of a once cherished friendship.

The biggest thing about grief is that no matter the reason for it, we all experience it and cope with it in different ways.  For some people, counseling or talking about it with a loved one helps.  Some people write, some people exercise.

I tend to write about things.  After all, Ernest Hemingway said "There is nothing at all to writing.  Just sit at a typewriter and bleed." And for me that's true.  There's something cathartic in being able to pull my emotions out of myself, using words to give them a form that I can observe and wrestle with.  And hopefully conquer.

This year so far has been downright awful in the grief department.  In early February, my beloved cat Mischief was attacked and mauled by a dog.  She died at the vets.  And even now, a month and a half later, I am still tormented by what-ifs.  What if I'd gotten her to the vet faster?  What if I'd kept her inside that morning?  Some nights I wake up because I hear the curtains in the bedroom rustling and keep thinking she's about to jump down from the windowsill and up onto the bed.

It's really hard.  We adopted her from the shelter and on the day we went in, I took her out of her cage there and she immediately put her paws around my neck like she was hugging me and held on as if to say, 'you're going to take me home.'  She chose us.  And even though she was annoying at times, we loved her to bits, so to have her ripped from us so suddenly was just...awful.

However, life goes on.  And so did I.  Until last week.

Here it becomes necessary to give you a little context.  I have this friend, let's call her P.  She and I became incredibly close during our last year of high school.  We had so many interests in common, bitched with each other about the people in our lives who were making us crazy.  At one point I considered her more of a sister to me than my own full-blooded sister.  And even after high school, we still remained close, despite how far apart we were.  Exchanging emails and even a snail-mail 'letter book' which we'd use to send each other gifts and other tidbits from wherever we were.

But then I moved away to resume my university studies, moving in with the man who became my husband and making a new circle of friends up here.  And though we were only a 2 hour drive apart, eventually I noticed that there was a distance starting to grow between us.  One that I feel I tried to close time and time again.  But I got married, she stayed single.  I had my daughter, she has no intention of ever having kids (which I DO totally respect).  It became difficult because, being a stay at home mum, I don't really do a lot else with my time so a lot of what I talk about is centered around my daughter.  And if you're not a parent yourself, I can understand you not wanting to hear about my daughter's latest escapade.

P finished up her own university stint and decided to head overseas as she's always been a bit of a dreamer with a wanderlust.  Which was fine as I figured we'd just keep up to date via instant messenger and Facebook and other things.

But then one of our IM conversations went off the rails.  I won't bore you with the full details, but the gist of it is that we were discussing the fandoms of a TV show we were both watching and I basically said that the woman/woman pairings weren't doing it for me and that I much preferred the male/male pairings.  I theorized that this was because I've moved more towards the hetero end of the sexuality spectrum (I see sexuality as a spectrum.  For those who care, I identify as bi, leaning more towards heterosexual).  But for some reason she got offended at me using the term 'hetero mindset' and accused me of basically perpetuating society's ingrained homophobia.  And the more I tried to explain that it was simply how I felt at that time, the more upset she got and then the more upset I got until I had to simply walk away from the conversation.

And I didn't give it another thought.  Until I recently started watching the latest season of that show again (I was way behind because I hadn't had much time to catch up).  And when I finished the season, I went over to P's Facebook page to see if she had any thoughts on the finale.  However, when I got there, there was the message at the top of the page 'to see what she shares with friends, send her a friend request'.  And I wondered if I hadn't accidentally unfriended her when I had been playing around with my settings earlier (after the aforementioned conversation I stopped following her as a 'close friend' on Facebook and thought I might have unfriended her then).

So I sent her a friend request.  The next morning I woke up to an email from her.

Turns out she had unfriended me.  And not by accident.

I won't paste the email here.  All I will say is that it was basically a list of all my past crimes that according to her have been 'piling up' for the last few years.

What kills me (besides the fact that she obviously never felt like she could say ANY of this to my face when they were actually happening) is that she was clearly NEVER going to offer me any explanation for unfriending me.  She only felt obligated to do so because I pursued the issue by asking her to friend me again on Facebook.

Apparently she's willing to try and salvage the friendship if I'm willing to listen.

But, if it's this badly broken, what's the point in fixing it if we no longer have that common ground?  Do I really want to be friends with someone who would rather quietly run away from problems than stand and talk about them?  Who doesn't seem to respect me enough to tell me outright about these things and sends a passive-aggressive email instead of, I don't know, Skyping me so we can talk face to face?  Because to be completely honest, this isn't the first time she's done this.  We had a brief falling out when we were 19.

It's hard.  It is SO painful to turn my back on a friendship that is over a decade old and once ran so deep.  But she's right.  We've both changed.  And I don't think either of us can like the other right now.

So even though it hurts and is going to keep hurting like a total bitch for quite some time, I HAVE to walk away.

I'm grieving so deeply right now.  I grieve for what we shared.  I'm feeling that I didn't try hard enough to 'know her' so that there wouldn't be such a huge gap between us.  But I'm also deeply pissed off because she's basically walked away like our history means nothing to her.  Which in turn makes me feel like nothing.

But as my husband keeps telling me.  It's going to suck.  And then eventually it will suck a little less until it reaches a point where you can finally live with it.

When I was in high school, I said that it's the ones closest to us who have the greatest power to hurt us.  And I guess she's proven me right about that.

But realistically, I know I'm better off without her.  I know who I am.  And even though I don't always like who I am, I'm still sure of my identity.  I think she still needs a little more time to figure herself out and do a little more growing.

I have my husband and a wonderful (if exhausting) daughter.  And that's what's really important.

It's the small things.  Those are what get me through what seems like crippling sadness.  Even if it's something as small as my daughter laughing at something completely mundane, it's enough.

It's always enough.

What depression feels like.

I want to start this blog off by saying that I get really tired of the stigma surrounding mental illness, particularly depression.  I've lost track of the number of times I've heard the line 'you're not depressed, you're just sad' or 'suck it up and stop feeling sorry for yourself'.'

I can't speak for everyone who has experienced depression, but I can speak for myself.  And in my own experience, depression is just so much more than 'feeling sad'.

For me it is like a tiredness.  But it is more than just the physical signs of fatigue, this is a weariness that goes right to the very heart of me, to the point where summoning up the energy to express any emotion, happiness, mirth, anger, anything is just too much effort.  I stagger through the day in a sort of numb haze, feeling oddly disconnected from whatever is happening around me.

But, beneath the numbness, everything is seething.  I feel tense, anxious, angry and like I just want to scream and scream until my throat is raw.  And then when that's done, I want to curl into a ball and cry and cry until my body simply withers.

I want to be surrounded by loved ones, but at the same time I just want to be left alone to wallow because I don't want my mood to become a burden or someone else's problem.

I want to be supported, but I'm scared of reaching for it due to the number of times I've been negatively treated in the past, that the support I so desperately needed from those closest to me was denied.

The worst comment is; "You're still up and doing stuff, so it can't be that bad."

Well, to that comment, I'd like to offer a sincere 'fuck you'.

I have a 2 year old daughter.  She depends on me to ensure her needs are met.  Depression doesn't give a rats ass that the laundry needs to be done.  Or the grocery shopping.  Or any of the myriad other chores that keep a household running.  But fortunately I care.  Because if I don't do the laundry my daughter won't have clean clothes to wear, if I don't do the groceries, she won't have food to eat.  And the last thing I want is for my child to suffer from cold or hunger because of what is essentially my problem.  That overriding sense of responsibility is sometimes the only thing that can get me out of bed when I'm in a depressive spiral.

Having said that though, the sense of responsibility does absolutely nothing to help the depression.  It's like throwing a poster over a huge hole in the wall.  Though the poster covers it up so you can't see it, the hole is still there.  And the moment the poster is damaged, that hole becomes glaringly obvious again.

So just because I seem 'functional' does not mean that I am coping.

Some days, all you can do is try your best to just make it till the end of the day.

Even if it means letting your child watch TV on a loop so you can grab five minutes of peace.

Even if it means locking yourself in the bathroom and crying for those five minutes.

Some days are better.  Some days you're not as tired and you can find the joy in the simple things, such as cuddling your daughter or listening to her laugh.

But mostly, all you can do is take things one day at a time.