Empathy Costs Nothing

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are: trash, construction, Elvis, without, retrieve

They were submitted by: http://Bakinginatornado.com

You might be entitled to your opinion, but maybe consider if that opinion makes you sound like an asshole before you spew it.
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I read a few articles recently about the documentary on Elvis that Priscilla Presley was recently involved in and stories a few months ago about suicide notes he left behind. It's a new revelation in his story that puts to rest all the conspiracy theories and mystery. After years in the spotlight, Elvis, like many others before him, felt the need or desire to take his own life.

Now, if you're one of those people who thinks it's weak or selfish or who questions how someone who seemingly has it all could still get to the point of suicide, my suggestion to you now is to close this out and move on. Your opinion won't be welcome here and is, factually, trash. My best advice is for you to retrieve your head from your ass and find some semblance of empathy within yourself and stop with the blame/selfish commentary because every time you do it, someone you know who has had suicidal thoughts realizes they can never come to you about their feelings without being judged. You're helping no one, and it is you who is weak and selfish.

But, what I really want to say is that suicidal thoughts aren't necessarily abnormal. Shit happens, and sometimes it gets the best of you. You have a bad month or a bad year and the depression sneaks up on you like a monster coming out of the shadows. It's not out of the ordinary when everything is piling on for that thought to lurk in the back of your head. It's there and gone like a morbid peek-a-boo session with your darkest self.

Sometimes you can't pull yourself back out of the muck on your own. And that's ok. I've been there. You get stuck on a loop of awfulness, and no matter how much you try to wiggle free you are just caught in it like a fly in the spider's web calling it to dinner. There's nothing wrong or weak or broken about asking for help even if you just need a quiet body to lean on who won't judge how long you've gone without a shower or how long it has been since you washed the dishes. Spider battles are not solo ventures. They're meant to be fought holding someone's hand with every available resource you can grab onto to help. Yes, even medicine. And no, not always more sunshine or grabbing onto your bootstraps and sucking it up--anyone who says that has never fought a spider like this before.

There's no perfect construction for how a person must be. Sometimes regardless of our station in life, our fame, glory, how much money we have or don't have, no matter how much we have or haven't gone through, as evidenced by Elvis and Robin Williams and all the others, those thoughts creep in. Sometimes they stick. Sometimes they can't be patched. Sometimes the patch fails and the roof caves in, and you can't find your way out of it. And maybe you don't want to.

Even then...especially then... judgment has no place in stopping it from happening again to someone else. Nor does it help those people you may know who lost a loved one that way and can't bear to hear those opinions and fucked up jokes and condemnations.

Love. Kindness. Empathy. Know them and use them. Or simply shut up.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2018/04/shades-of-parkland-use-your-words.html

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/2018/04/half-baked.html

Cognitive Script https://cognitivescript.blogspot.com/2018/04/broken-hearted-mama-uyw.html

The Bergham Chronicles https://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

The Blogging 911 http://theblogging911.com/blog

Climaxed https://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com

12personalities12 https://mytarotdotblog.wordpress.com/

My Brand of Crazy https://sarahsbrandcrazy.blogspot.com/

Coffee and Healing

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are: Bitter ~ Rejuvenate ~ Winter ~ Sleep ~ Quiet ~ Dark

They were submitted by: http://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

Just to let everyone know, this isn't 100% autobiographical. I've never officially come out to family, and I haven't dated a woman seriously in a long time. My mental health issues are not nearly to this level either, but it's not hard to channel these feelings and put myself in place of this narrator. 

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Even with sweetener and cream, the coffee leaves a bitter taste on her tongue that makes her feel both alive and comforted in a way that nothing else can accomplish. Just the smell of her favorite brews wafting through the house relax her anxiety better than any pill has ever managed to do, better than all the years of therapy, all the hospital stays. Sometimes she thinks there must be something to that whole aromatherapy business--give her a hot mug of coffee even on the worst of days, and at least for a little while she transcends all the muck and stress and turmoil her brain puts her through. Her frazzled nerves are stilled, and she feels almost completely rejuvenated, whole. With a mug in hand, she’s not broken but slightly bent, still good to go if a little worse for wear.

This winter has been especially dark, darker than the unwanted swirl of grounds often left at the bottom of her mug. She’s been withdrawn, quiet. She hasn’t had good sleep in a couple months now worried about the future, about how she will get along in this new political climate. She’s lost touch with family after coming out, said goodbye to friends who, for reasons she will never understand, decided to back hatred this election. She watched in horror as person after person she thought she knew backed a candidate that expressed a desire to destroy her freedom to exist. It was too much, and her depression raised its ugly head after years of her being able to beat it back with medication and self-care. Those friends she didn’t feel she had to cut out of her life completely, she lost touch with because of her mental health issues, the she started alienating herself from a lot of her acquaintances and social media sites. She just couldn’t take the hatred anymore. If she didn’t take out time for herself, it was going to destroy her, and she had worked too long to beat back those demons to give up so easily.

So now she sits alone in her reading nook in front of the needs-to-be-cleaned bay window not really reading, not really doing anything but staring into space and drinking coffee. On good days, she showers and does a little yoga, gets the basics of the house clean, snuggles the cat and cooks meals for the week. On bad days, she just sits and worries about the next 4 years and the aftermath of them, how far the country will be set back when racism and xenophobia and homophobia are more acceptable than minding your own fucking business. On her worst days, she panics and screams and cries and smashes dirty dishes and cries some more and wallows in her emotions.

She knows she needs to do more, to get out there, and get back to life (whatever life is…), and she will. She has done it before, and she’ll do it again. But as inauguration day approaches faster and faster, she just doesn’t have it in her to fight right now. She’s too exhausted, too raw, and no matter how often she tries to see the good in the world, she circles right back to how backwards things seem to be moving, so she hides in her cocoon, her “bubble” as so many people would snarkily call it, and tries to exist in this new world where every bit of forward momentum she has felt in the last 8 years slowly crumbles around her.

Maybe tomorrow she will feel more like herself or maybe the next day. Whatever day it is, she refuses to let hate win in the long-term. She might be sitting here alone drinking her coffee this morning fighting nothing more than the tears that threatening to roll, but she won’t sit idly by while the country she loves is torn to shreds forever.

Soon, she thinks, and snuggles back into her throw watching the truck across the street park next to the huge Trump sign in his yard. Maybe she should start with destroying that shit.

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Here are the rest of the participants. Check them out and enjoy!

Baking In A Tornado http://www.bakinginatornado.com/2017/01/grey-hairs-and-antacids-use-your-words.html

Dinosaur Superhero Mommy http://dinoheromommy.com/2017/01/13/uyw/

Spatulas on Parade http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2017/01/chicken-cordon-blu-and-uyw.html

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html

Sparkly Poetic Weirdo http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/

On the Border http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2017/01/chicken-cordon-blu-and-uyw.html

Confessions of a part time working mom http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2017/01/use-your-words-face-off.html

Climaxed http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com

The Bergham Chronicles http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

I Loved

Before I post this, I just want to say this is fiction. I have never dealt with this personally and hope that I havent done any injustice to the topic by writing about it. I like to explore characters and potential reactions to life's problems like grief and loss and love... And I honestly hope I never have to know what it feels like to be in this narrator's shoes because I'm not sure I would handle it so well personally.

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“At least we aren’t that bad off yet, right? Fighting each other in the mud for a scrap of water. What kind of life is that?” I had asked her during the first parts of Mad Max: Fury Road. We were home that night, neither of us being too keen on going to the cinema anymore with people on cell phones the whole time, loud ass, disruptive kids, and the recent rash of theater shootings.

“Are we really all that different though? Aren’t we all fighting for scraps while the rich keep the power and the money?”

This was another reason we didn’t like going to the theater, these conversations.

“Well… we have water and no one makes us shave our heads.”

“Shaved heads notwithstanding, does everyone have water?”

“Not everyone, no.”

“But isn’t there enough money in the world to make sure they do?”

“I’d have to do the math on that, but most likely.”

“And isn’t there some random rich white person that decides on occasion to do some charity and bring medicine or food or water instead of everyone pulling together and actually resolving the issues that cause it? Sort of like raining down water from a gushing pipe every now and then?

“I mean…I don’t think those people are necessarily as evil as this guy, Sadie.”

“Some famous guy somewhere said something about the biggest evil being inaction.”

And with that her point had been proven for the most part, I guess. We enjoyed the rest of the movie, but the conversation was done. That’s the kind of thing I remember about her most, the thing I might miss the most except smelling her in bed beside me, feeling her heat, being able to put my cold toes against her calves and start a wrestling match in bed. I miss those moments beside her in bed the absolute most, but I also miss that quick intelligence, the snapshot conversations that didn’t take a debate or hours worth of back and forth. She dropped in and made her point, and that was that. It was like that idea was waiting inside her perfect little brain just for the right moment to show itself.

I’ve dated since Sadie.

Let me rephrase that. I’ve been out with other women since Sadie, but ultimately I end up comparing them to her or her to them, and it never works out. And even if I like someone, she inevitably asks me how I deal with it—having been with someone who committed suicide.

Is there an answer to that question, though? Truthfully, I haven’t dealt with it. Truthfully, every time I sit down to dinner with some other woman, I feel like a lying cheat. I hate myself for it. My heart still belongs to a woman that never wanted to be in this world in the first place, and all I can do is lay awake at night and think of all the things I should have said or done or not done even while knowing there was nothing that would have changed it. Rationally, I *know* it wasn’t the first time she tried to end things and that it was a constant battle for her. I *know* that it was going to happen sooner or later because even when she got the help she needed, it was only a temporary fix. But, the part of me that doesn’t give a shit for rationalization, the part of me with all the feels…that part of me is always and forever going to search for something I maybe could have done differently that might have made all the difference.

I love her. Even now after 2 years in this world without her, I think I love just as much as the first time I ever told her. Or maybe just as much as the 12th time I told her. I did kind of rush into things, but the first time I met her I just kind of knew that I would fall head over heels in love with her. I don’t scorn her memory for leaving me with all this baggage, and I don’t think she took the coward’s way out of things the way her family seems to… What I do think is that I was lucky enough to spend 6 long years with her through the hard times and the best times, through the tears and the depression and through the days when we laughed so hard together that my face ached the next day. It hurts to be without her. It hurts more than I ever thought anything could hurt me, but she was honest with me from the start, so how can I fault her? She told me on our 3rd date that one day she would probably commit suicide one day, and if I was going to date her, she needed me to understand it would never be forever. It was a serious conversation, but I already had a serious crush, and I thought naively that maybe it wasn’t as bad as she made it out to be. That’s when I told her that life isn’t worth living without taking risks, and that I needed to know what falling in love with her felt like despite those risks.

She kissed me for the first time that night and cried softly into my neck afterwards.

So how do I deal with it?

I don’t.

I don’t think there’s a way to deal with losing the love of your life. Sure, life goes on and all that. I don’t cry every day anymore, so there’s improvement to be had, but there will never be a time when her memory fades, that I don’t fall asleep at night wishing she was here, and I’m okay with that. I took the risk with her and saw it through, and for at least awhile I knew how it felt to love someone more than I loved myself.

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I hope the strength of my narrator shines through instead of this being seen as bleak and depressing... thanks for reading and be sure to check out the rest of the link ups and the More than Cheese and Beer blog!!

An InLinkz Link-up

Faded

He looks around the room at the empty spaces on the walls. Spaces where photo frames used to hang. The wallpaper is still in its original, unfaded glory in perfect rectangles peppering walls filled with nail holes while the rest of the paper is in a sad state of worn dinginess. It’s a reminder of everything he’s lost in the last few years. His entire life decorated these walls from the early days with his wife before they were even married to their last anniversary and included every milestone of their kids’ lives.

He should have paid to have the wallpaper replaced instead of bitching about the expense and telling Claire it was a waste of money. It wasn’t until he saw it this way that he could tell how bad it really is. She was here day in and day out, though, seeing it fade, losing its luster, slowly dying the way their relationship must have done. Just like with the wallpaper, he never noticed how bad it had gotten himself—not until it was unsalvageable and wiped clean of every good memory it ever held.

Instead, he is sitting here in a tattered recliner, still in sweats. He’s smoking again. He can’t remember the last time he was sober…or the last time he had a shower. All he can do is stare drunkenly at the walls, at the bright spaces where the best moments of his life should happily be displayed. It has been months since Claire moved out and left the note pinned to the fridgerator with a Shop Local magnet. His wife left him via a Dear John letter like some horrible cliché. That’s what his life has become. A cliché. And, he’s the sad old bastard that hangs himself in the basement on Christmas. That’s the way it goes, right?

He pours himself another snifter full of whiskey and snubs his smoke into the too-full ashtray on the table beside his chair blowing his last puff back into the stale, nicotine-riddled air before leaning back and putting his feet up. The whiskey cup is resting in his hand on his shrinking belly--he hasn’t been eating much. He picks it up, swirls the amber liquid in the glass, and lifts it up in a toast to the wall. To life, it’s so fucking lovely.

The crash of the glass against the wall makes him jump. It isn’t until he hears it breaking that he even realizes he has thrown it. The whiskey drips down the wall pooling and spreading over the shards of glass that have scattered on the wooden floor. He’s barefoot. No way is he going to be able to walk to the kitchen for a new glass without cutting his feet. There’s no one here to see him drinking straight from the bottle anyway, so who fucking cares about the glass, he thinks. WHO. FUCKING. CARES. That should be his new life motto. It’s obvious no one does. He hasn’t even heard from the kids, for fuck’s sake. His own children… Not a word.

He sits up letting the recliner back into the upright position and takes a long swig from the bottle of whiskey and sets it back on the table with a tender love that only a budding alcoholic can muster for the drink that could take his life from sad to tragic in a just a few more weeks. He runs his hands through his thinning hair letting them come down and cover most of his face as he leans over on his knees. The tears are welling up threatening to spill despite how certain he had been that he had absolutely none left in his body anymore.

Surely, there’s a limit to the number of tears a man can shed when his whole diet consists of alcohol and tobacco.

He sighs in the empty, smoky room. His depression hangs like a cloud above him giving the smoky air a weightiness that feels like it could crush him underneath it at any time, and that sigh just adds to it tightening the pressure on his metaphorical heart just a little more, another pebble on the rock pile that’s threatening to squeeze every last ounce of his soul from his body. Every movement feels like he’s underwater. Every breath feels impossible. Yet, here he is lighting another smoke hoping he’ll pass out this time. Maybe the flame will catch the recliner when he drops it in his sleep. Maybe that’s his only way out of this…an inadvertent suicide.

He takes a drag holding in the smoke for a moment before blowing it out forcefully into the air around him. The blank spaces are distorted in the hazy air just like they are in his own brain. Images of his life captured in photographs that he can barely remember, days and images he took for granted. Moments he would give anything to recapture, to hang on the wall with a bit more pride.

He finishes his smoke still staring at the way the wallpaper discolored around those bright spots, those things he should be proud of but were just distant recollections, and puts it out in the ashtray. As his face turns to look again at the wall, the glistening from the still-wet patch of whiskey catches his attention. That’s when he sees it, a small damp rip in the paper there where he threw the glass.

His eyes keep drifting to that spot over and over through another swig from he bottle and another cigarette until finally he pushes himself out of the chair, wobbling and swaying. He doesn’t notice when the shards of glass stab into the soft fleshy parts of his feet and cut into his toes and heels. He leaves bloody prints on the hardwood in no time, but that doesn’t stop him from making his way to the wall. The only thing slowing him down is the way the room spins uncontrollably now that he’s out of the chair. He makes it, though, all the way across the room to the dried whiskey on the wall and picks at the rip peeling away an entire strip of the faded paper.

Maybe it’s because he’s this lit, but it feels exceptional. He pulls at the edges of the missing strip on the wall over and over again. Pick, pull, rip, strip… the paper comes off again and again. He works feverishly almost in a trance until he can’t reach anymore of the paper without a stepladder. He’s sobering now. His feet ache. The tips of his fingers are blistered and bloody. But, he feels good. Every strip pulled off the wall seems to have lessened his burden. Either that or he’s finally lost it.

He hobbles back to his chair feeling every sting from the glass still in his feet. He sits down carefully, exhausted and weak, and surveys his work.

The wall is almost fully cleared. There are no longer blank spaces where his life should be, only a blank slate for a new beginning maybe. He crumples the pack of cigarettes and tosses them out of reach, leans the recliner back, and closes his eyes. Just before sleep comes he decides to go downtown and grab some paint when he wakes up.

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I'm so fucking happy that Sunday Confession is going again after a break at the start of the year. Today's prompt was Space, so I threw down a little fiction otherwise all I'd talk about is how I'm an introverted hermit who needs her space as much as a dog needs to lick its own balls. Anyway, check out the rest of the confessions on More Than Cheese and Beer. Thanks for reading. 

That's Some Mighty Fine Lemonade

All of a sudden I found myself unwilling to leave the house for more than absolutely necessary errands. I wanted no part of being social. No thrifting trips. No flea market. No farmer’s markets, record hunting adventures, no phone calls. It’s not completely unusual for me to avoid huge social events since I’m extremely introverted, but I stopped doing the things I loved most. Even the thought of trying to navigate through boxes of old, dusty records looking for hidden treasures of 180g classic rock albums for $2 seemed daunting, exhausting, impossible.

That’s when it became obvious that I had let life get me down.

I’m not saying we’re all individually responsible in some way for the circus acts our brains often put us through. Mental illness is a real problem and it often hits people in uncontrollable ways. You can’t really hold the driver responsible if their car were to run into a restaurant due to a complete malfunction in the system or severed brake lines. But, I know the signs of depression pretty well. It’s not a new thing for me, and given the years I’ve spent in grad school studying counseling, I better know. It’s my lifeblood, my passion. So, when I finally had my epiphany and noticed the things that were going on with me and had been going on for some time, I knew it was true—I let the things I’m going through get to me. I wasn’t paying attention to the signs—something that I have to be able to do to prevent getting burned out in my profession.

I also knew, however, that I was not going to let it continue.

I took to Facebook to vent a little about it with friends. I knew that plenty of people on my friends list had their own battles with depression or other mood disorders and would likely be supportive. The first step in tackling my problem was admitting it, and Facebook was a great place to publicly get started. It was like saying, “hey, I’ve got some shit going on but now I recognize it and saying so publicly means I have to work on it.”

It didn’t really work out that way though.

I was told to go outside, to take walks, and that it was all in my head as if, somehow, I wasn’t already getting outside despite having 4 ducks, 5 dogs, 5 cats, and other animals to take care of not to mention a child and other various responsibilities….as if a breath of fresh air can magically make my money problems, unemployment issues, and everything else just go away never to bother me again. It was a bit disheartening to see how quickly people want to dismiss what you’re going through, make assumptions, and tell you what you *should* be doing instead of just giving you a supportive thumbs up or virtual hug.

I let that get to me, too, and argued and advocated for better understanding of what people go through during a depressive episode. I linked to articles of exactly what NOT to say to a friend going through what I was going through—the exact things these friends were saying, and I let it bother me when people claimed to think I was stronger than that…as if even the strongest people aren’t allowed a moment of need. What I should have immediately done was excise those cancerous moles from my existence before their black centers spread outward over me like a dark shroud of people-dread. What's the point of having friends if they're just going to be dickholes?

I’m feeling better for a myriad of reasons that didn’t involve going on brisk walks every morning, and it’s something I will continue to try to work on until I reach 100%.

When life hands you lemons and you’ve forgotten the recipe for making lemonade, don’t fucking let your friends try to tell you that you have to stuff the lemons in a forgotten drawer and get outside more or to pretend the lemons never existed or that you’re lemons aren’t as sour as everyone else’s. The only thing any real friend should say to you is, “hey, need a hand squeezing those lemons?”

Otherwise, fuck ‘em. 

This has been another awesome Sunday Confession with More than Cheese and Beer. Go check out her own post and the posts of all the other bloggers who joined.