I really did mean all of that I said about needing to keep writing. However, I’ve been very adamant about keeping myself too busy to sit down and take the time to write at the computer.  If I have been at the computer, I’ve only been on to goof off and try to escape for a bit.  I’m trying to work back into a schedule now, though.  School is coming up soon, and I’ve got to get some sort of structure back into my life.  I guess I’ll just catch the blog up with where I am now.

After the last  post, I did go to the Survivors of Suicide group meeting.  All I knew is that would be hard and it would help.  It was very informal, and basically everyone in the group just took a turn updating on themselves.  The date was exactly a month after my brother died, and so painful.  My grief was the freshest, and I was the youngest person there. Everyone in the room had been in my same state just months or years earlier.  They all understood exactly what I was going through, and there was no awkwardness or expectations on me.  The outpouring of love in the room was heartbreaking.  If only these men had tapped into the strength and love in the room.

My brother told me, not a week before he died, that I was his best friend.  My heart just filled with love; I believed so firmly that was a sign that we were rebuilding that old trust again. Sadly, this is the second time I’ve had to make my peace with never speaking to him again, without so much as a good-bye from him before he deserted everyone.  So in some ways, I’ve already done this once. But the sword has two edges, because I feel like he’d still be around if I had only done something, been better to him, not thought, Oh great, more drama! while I tried to help him through his newest issues.  In fact, I’ve finally realized why I tend to blame myself for whatever happens around me.  I take control over the situation by taking the blame on myself.  If I did something wrong, I can do something to undo the situation, or at the very least, mitigate it somehow. As I’ve been reading more and more, I’m realizing that I wasn’t in the position to change his mind, even had I known it.

Blaming myself isn’t going to give me any control over this situation.  But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.  Oh, my brain knows better, but my heart has been too devastated to listen to reason.  I couldn’t have fixed it, and I’m also finally realizing I can’t will him back to life.  Seriously, this was a major theme of my thoughts. I’d go to bed, try to will time backward and the last two months into a horrible dream, and spend all my dreams trying to rewrite it.  I’ve finally moved past that bit of irrationality.

And generally, I’m having more and more good days. Every two weeks, I have a time set aside to just deal with this at the group meeting, and that helps.  While I ache that my brother can’t be here for it, life is sweet again.  My thoughts return again and again with a need to understand and make sense of it all, but it’s not the dominant thought anymore.  When the kids are playing with me, I’m not sad that they look like he did as a child, or trying to figure out how to keep them from some tragic decision 20 years hence.  I’m beginning to see more to life than death again.

This blog title has been in my “drafts” folder for a month now, so I guess I’ll just write on it and get it out of the way.  I was working on it that Wednesday morning, four weeks ago today, when I took a short break from writing to clear my head.  Every time I’ve logged into WordPress since then, it’s been sitting there, mocking me, but I refused to delete it.  The text is all gone, just the title left, but heck, let’s get the next of Stephen Covey’s habits out of the way.  Honestly, I’m not very captivated by the topic at the moment, but it does have real usefulness.

“Put first things first” is pretty self-explanatory.  Do what’s important, and don’t allow that to get pushed down your priority list.  To illustrate how people should prioritize, there’s a nifty grid with four quadrants.  Activities are categorized in terms of importance and urgency.  Quadrant 1 is Urgent and Important. Crisis falls squarely in this category, but so do deadlines or other normal busybusy times.   Important but Not Urgent lies in Quad 2.  Health, relationships, mental well-being all fall under this category.  Quadrant 3 is the realm of the Unimportant, but Urgent.  Things that scream to be done now, but really aren’t all that important, take up a lot of time.  And of course, Quadrant 4 is those things that fall under the headings Unimportant and Not Urgent.  Frivolity, time wasters, et cetera fall into this category.

Alright, now that I’m done with all that Irritating Uppercasing, I should personalize it instead of simply summarizing the chapter.

My June and early July were nearly constantly in Quadrant 1. It was horrible, but obviously, that was situational.  Churning and burning and doing what needs to get done now under pressure has its joys, in the right situation.  Still, it’s an exhausting place to stay for long periods of time.  The prevention for that is to spend more time in Quadrant 2. Sometimes mental or physical health is neglected because it’s not urgent.  Usually it’s not a deathly situation when that Quadrant 2 issue moves to Quadrant 1, but as my past month has illustrated, it easily can become so.  Quadrants 3 and 4 are really often just wastes of time, so I’ll just say that taking the time to identify what is unimportant really is the biggest step. What is important to one person is frivolous to the next.  If an activity’s only accomplishment is that minutes have passed, then that time would have been better spent in doing something more important.

Please note, decompressing and recreation are important, by the way.  Some people wouldn’t count fun as important.  They’re making a terrible mistake.  It’s very easy to see when life is bleak just how laughter and joy make us whole people.

The most vital thing I take from this is learning to identify what is important, and to always remember that urgency is a separate issue.  Triaging time according to urgency ends up shortchanging many truly crucial issues.  Far too many people let their own personal situations slide while they take care of “what needs doing.”  I’m very guilty of that, myself.  I’ve been trying to remember that I’m never going to have time for my health, my career, or other personal goals if I keep waiting for some “me time” wrapped up in a pretty box with a bow.  Time is going to continue to move even if I don’t use it to exercise, tell people I love them, follow my dreams, or take care of myself.

In related news, I’m going to my first ever support group tomorrow, for Survivors of Suicide.  I’m pretty nervous, but also anxious to do something proactive for myself.  Wish me luck!

Returning to blogging is difficult for me, but I strongly feel it’s very necessary.  I’ve rewritten my first paragraph about four times already, because I don’t know where to start again. I’m determined to get through this, though, so I’m just going to stick with whatever I type this go round.  Today is actually the first day in nearly a month that I’ve felt like myself.  I’m sad and weird and life is slightly surreal, but the underlying me-ness is assertive today.  That’s weird, because yesterday was absolutely horrible, for no real reason except that it was.

Most of the people who read this blog probably know by now that my brother didn’t just die, he committed suicide.  Specifically, he hanged himself.  It hurts very badly to type that out. Originally, I wasn’t going to even bring that up on here, but it’s all I’ve thought about in the past weeks, and I really don’t have to worry about protecting his privacy anymore, do I?  Much of my talk on the 7 Habits sprung directly from conversations the two of us had been having about becoming more productive, effective people, and dealing with others.

I haven’t known what to do with myself, so I’ve done one of the things I do best — research.  It turns out that suicide is one of the most traumatic of all griefs to weather.  Murder doesn’t even trump it, because with suicide, the survivor deals with all the emotions of a murder plus knowing that the very person they are mourning was the murderer.  Complicated emotions are hard to deal with, and every single thought I’ve had is common.  The most important decision I can make is to allow myself to feel them, and not torture myself for feeling or showing pain.  If I can’t talk to my usual friends, I need to find somewhere to talk.

I’ve read estimates of 2-8 years before I pull myself together.  I’ve read lots of “don’t make any big life decisions for a year” speeches.  These statements produce an angry That’s unacceptable!!! from my brain.  But I have to admit, that when I think about my plans to return to school, and think of taking the math placement tests I’ve got sitting in my inbox, that same brain screams at me that I’ve got more important things to be thinking on.  Of course, figuring this mess out isn’t going to happen, but nurturing myself and taking the time to grieve and mourn and get my head on straight is better spent now than years down the road breaking down because I sucked it up and didn’t embarrass myself.

My thoughts on blogging have changed drastically in the past few weeks.  Actually, since last week was the first week I wasn’t dealing with funeral arrangements, family, or a kid in the hospital, I should say that last week I thought long and hard about my worries about this blog and decided I just didn’t care as much about privacy or about what my readers thought about my posts, at least for a while.  Ladyglutter.com will be filled with my struggle, and I have no idea how long that might last.   While I won’t be laying my soul completely bare here, I have some major healing to do.  I’m usually very private with my struggles, but this has become so life-altering that I am really forced to be open about what’s going on, anyway. If a small part of that is working it out on the web, at least this way I haven’t totally abandoned something that I really enjoy.  Even if blogging is hard and I ramble something fierce, this way I’ll keep doing it.

As for my tiny audience, I love you guys, but right now, my foremost concern is myself. I have to get to where I can think straight.  I’ve already seen that there some people are not able to deal with my dwelling on intense personal pain.  If you stop reading, I won’t be judgemental. I can deal with it, writing is cathartic to me, even  if no one reads what I write.  I also might attract some voyeurs.  If that happens, I can only hope that the things I type will help someone else out there who is either struggling, or knows someone else who is.