Tag Archive for 'Grief'

Loss

We found out today that a very dear friend of ours from years ago that we lost contact with, that she passed away by suicide 2 years ago. She was a survivor and multiple as well. We tried off and on over the years to find her again but we didn’t have any real luck and then today we felt the urge again to go searching online and we located her via her daughter’s myspace page. Someone inside remembered the other last name our friend had at one time versus the last name she had during the latter part of our time together with her years ago. This is what helped us locate her daughter and subsequently her myspace page. Information on her daughter’s site hinted that she may have passed away and so we emailed both her and her daughter and her daughter replied with the news. We are so very saddened by this– the grief definitely surprised us in how it overwhelmed us with choking and sobbing tears that were quickly prevented from coming forth and spewing out uncontrollably. I wish whomever inside is preventing and controlling and pushing it away wouldn’t do that, but I guess they are doing it out of some kind of fear or something. Caryn was a friend that left deeply embedded footprints along our heart and touched our system greatly.

There is so much more to say about her passing, her loss, our grief, and our processing of this news. I guess we aren’t quite ready to delve into it and we are also just utterly exhausted and overwhelmed at the next few days and everything else externally that is screaming at us that needs our attention immediately with energy we just don’t have, and yet we have to find it, as it has reached critical emergency problematic levels.

Most of January we were out of town with Sean visiting his grandmother and other relatives as his grandmother was dying and then she did pass away. She was a great woman that I didn’t have nearly enough time to get to know and whom Sean was pretty close to. I’m just glad that I was able to meet her and spend time with her a little bit in visits since getting to know Sean. I didn’t see her at her best, but there were times when she was more ‘present and coherent’ than at other times we visited, and I feel touched to have known her delightful self.

Leaving the house is a hard thing for us to do, but leaving town is even more challenging. We always need many days or lots of time to recover from being gone. We didn’t have access or convenient access to the Internet while we were away and so that is part of why we haven’t been back to journal until now.

We wish to thank everyone for their responses and we will respond more directly very soon. We’re still just trying to get a handle and grip on life and regaining some ground since coming home.

In many ways we’re still divided about journaling, but it does seem like the shift is more towards journaling and taking the risks that our mother or someone (that we don’t want to know) finds it and just trying to take the ‘screw it’ attitude if they do. The purpose of this journal is supposed to be for us and then for anyone else who may find something helpful or useful to them. There is more to say about that. Perhaps instead of trying to process it internally we need to just process it externally in our journal about the process and divided thoughts and feelings about journaling openly here as well as scanning our handwritten journal here. Ha. What a concept. Journaling about our attempts to process something internally in order to sort something out, particularly as it relates to journaling here.

So much going on, but we’ve been wanting to update, and this was our attempt to update. I guess we’ll tackle the journaling processing as well as the processing of our loss of our friend, someone we’ve been wanting to reconnect with over the years.

Julies (and others around too, just not sure who)

sadness, hurting, and also body stuff

we are having a really hard time.  there’s just no energy and no ability to get anything done and yet we are surrounded with so many things we need to do.  there’s even some pressure (mostly pressure we put on ourselves but not necessarily so far off of reality that the pressure is there in other forms outside us) to get some things done around the house and stuff.  it’s just so damn hard  lately.

i think it’s cuz we’ve been working so very hard in therapy and it is taking its toll on us.  i guess we’re supposed to expect or at least be able to cope with the after effects of therapy but it is so so hard and painful and so exhausting.  we are wondering if we need to pull back some and slow down some of the stuff but we think others inside are just focused on pushing harder and pushing forward on things and that we can cope with it.  well some of us think not!  the sadness entrenches us.  how do we get rid of it? i mean besides making it go away but really it doesn’t go away just somewhere buried inside.

we think too all this therapy and crap is just too much for the other Julies as they just get so worn out easily by lots of stuff and especially since they are kind of working through some of this with us, well ya know, vicariously working through the stuff they know about and are aware of.  it doesn’t take too much emotions and therapy stuff to totally wipe out the Julies if they can’t stay far enough away from it.

we are wondering if we need to do a forced dissociation in order to get stuff done but not sure how long it would really last.  but like in therapy when things are too much or have hit a strong triggering point where the ones pushing to do the talking and telling and emotions and stuff have pushed as far as they can against the ones trying to keep everything silent and nothing happened its not true and all that stuff, well, a weird kind of jolt and snap and jerk of the head and boom we are totally fine and nothing happened, it’s not true, no feelings, nothing, just utter and totally fine and okay and perfectly normal with no problems and no issues.  so like maybe we need to try and use that as sort of a forced thing when we’re like this.  not sure if we can but maybe we could try and see.   and we have no idea if we can control it like that but guess it is worth trying.  but doing any of that by itself takes energy too.  and we have so little of it.  so little physical and so very little emotionally at this point too.

it really sucks being anemic too and we need to schedule an appt with our regular dr. because looking online it talks about how it is important to find out the cause of it.  maybe then we can actually get our vit b12 and folic acid and vit d and whatever else needs to be checked as possible causes of anemia.  we’ve been wanting our vit b12 and vit d checked for so long but always afraid to just ask outright and afraid if the dr. says no b/c for whatever reason it isn’t “medically necessary” or they don’t want to b/c we didn’t convince them enough that it is merited then we are screwed in the future and will have to prove so much harder that it is medically necessary to have evaluated.  we are pretty sure they are totally low and we need vit b12 shots and special vit d pills.  we just suspect it is also contributing to our problems.  our sleep dr. tested and found the anemia and we’re taking supplements but we’re still exhausted and we know it’s going to take time and we’re also looking at upping the double dosage he is already prescribing to us.  we are thinking of taking a different brand and type of iron supplement in addition to the kind and mg he prescribed.

and for all this time, for many years, we’ve thought that our fatigue was associated with our depression and just being a fuck up and stuff.  now we’re wondering if we’ve been anemic for years now.  our regular dr. checked our iron when we went in to see her awhile back but she didn’t do the extensive testing.  the sleep dr did and he found it that way.  she just diagnosed us with chronic fatigue syndrome and maybe we have that but maybe we don’t.  i don’t know.  we just hate being tired all the time.  and this has been our life for years now.  having no energy to do crap and any small thing (taking shower, emptying dishwasher) wears us out and puts us back to bed to lay down which often leads to several hours of sleep.

so whine, whine, whine.  we’re having a hard time.  we hurt emotionally and sometimes physically but i think we still dissociate a lot of our body pain.  we get weird ass pains in various places in our body but we just cope with it and deal with it.  we’re emotionally exhausted and physically exhausted and the depression is just doing its damndest to suck us up and really, we think with the therapy stuff we’re doing lately, we think we’re experiencing a lot of grief even though we’re not sure what exactly it is we’re experiencing other than deep sadness and just our system is struggling.

we can’t put into words yet quite what is going on.  sorry this is so stupid.  just we hate things right now.  it’s so crazy how we can plummet so far and so fast and we forget sometimes how very easy and very close we always are to this place.  we’ve been struggling but getting through and we’re used to that… things being hard with varying moments of coping ok and varying crappy times, but now things are not just hard and barely getting through, they just fucking suck and we feel like we’re falling with nothing to hold onto to stop.

stupid us.

julies, and others we think