Up by My Bootstraps

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.