Funny.  My life has become so busy that I’ve had little time to be all introspective and stuff.

Which means there has been significantly less content on this here world o’ mine.

Which means… you all must terribly miss me.  *wink*

I was just thinking…  it’s interesting to recall those very precious moments I once held so dear.  It’s interesting to reflect and think about what my values were then, and what I wanted more than anything- what I longed for.

It’s amazing how easily those priorities change.

It’s dumbfounding how easily I was able to create what I really wanted, and in the process of creating what I desired, I didn’t even notice it happening.  It’s like, *poof* there ya go darlin’, and oh, by the way, in case you didn’t see it coming, we (the universe) gave you all of this months ago, you’ve just been too busy to see us leave the room.

It makes perfect sense: focus on what you want from this life, because then you will get more of it.  For some of us, this process is a lot magic and a little luck.  For others, it’s a lot logic and a little emotion.  For everyone, it’s truth, even if you refuse to see it as such.  What you focus on is what you get more of.  Focus on feeling bad, and your neurotransmitters begin to reabsorb those happy chemicals before you have the time to feel good.  Which makes you feel bad some more.  Which makes your neurotransmitters forget how to feel good.

Feeling bad is both psychologically and chemically cyclic.  We don’t understand exactly how it works, but we know that feeling depressed and being able to absorb serotonin properly is very much a chicken or egg ordeal.  They walk together, hand in hand, and in turn it would make proper sense that if you proceeded to feel good,  your brain might start working right chemically as a result.

Additional research has proven that using mechanical forms of altering the chemical mechanism works, too, to raise the mood.  Hence, SSRIs.

So, I’m here to tell you that focusing on what you want is not just a temporary deal, it’s a lifestyle.  You’re going to stray from it.  You’re going to forget, and you might end up going through a super stressful, super high anxiety, not-getting-what-you-want kind of phase every once in a while.

I’m feeling the urge to revisit this positive attitude, though.  I’m seeing it work, albeit WITH EXTRAORDINARY effort on my part… but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Trust me.  This shit pays off.

I need to vent, and I invite your responses that may be as brutal and blunt to me as I will be in the following blog. I need your feedback. Please, give me something that will help me understand and empathize.

I think suicide is one of the most selfish things a person can do.

It’s the lazy way out, and it only leaves behind hurt and suffering of those who need you.

Just because you don’t feel like you’re needed doesn’t mean you’re not. To not see this is to FAIL to take responsibility for yourself and your life.

I get that there is such a thing as an emotional hurt or pain so deep that one would rather die than to bear it. I understand that. I also believe that no one is too weak to tolerate it and get through– and work on using that huge energy towards something that would really make things better.

I’m a fighter. I know I’m not the same as a lot of other people. Does that hold me to standards other than what someone who is weak is held to? Does the amount of your responsibilities make you more or less accountable for taking your own life?

Ugh. It makes me angry. Furious. I want to lash out at the person who would just as easily take their own life. I want to stomp and scream and walk away.

Those are my own emotions. I own them.

Still, somehow, I know that in the field I want to go into, I will have to learn to deal with it.

Well, I got through this week.  For this, I am impressed with myself.

I found myself cranky, irritated, and within my head, I was downright mean to people.

Biting my lip in a time of extreme stress is exhausting.

You have to bite your lip, though, because feeling bad is relative.  And when one person feels like they just had a hellacious week, what they experienced may not seem like such a bad experience to the next person.  And vice versa.

Anyway, I suppose the point is that I did it.  I’m done with my classes.  I have this weekend off from the kids, and I will write my two papers.  Hopefully I get them completely done in the next few days.

Tonight I’m not really sure I know what to do with myself.  Part of me wants to escape while the other part knows I can’t celebrate entirely until I complete these papers.  The house is somewhat of a disaster… though I did just do a bunch to clean it up.  It was quite unnerving to have my entire family come over to drop off a bunch of my great grandpa’s furniture… I was fifteen minutes later than I said I’d be, and they had unloaded all of the furniture into the driveway… the same driveway that I had spilled some dog poop on while bringing the trash can to the curb for trash day.  I walked inside to put the dogs out back to discover that the dogs had somehow maneuvered their way into the trash can and had strewn coffee grounds everywhere.  Fabulous.  Then I recall that I cannot let the family see the last couch they gave me, as the dogs have destroyed THAT, too.   Just throw it all into the garage, folks…

Thankfully, my uncle & his buddy will come back tomorrow to move the rest of the furniture.  I think they’ll take away that couch the dogs have destroyed, too.  I’ll put my Pappa’s furniture in the basement, keep the old, destroyed couch cushions on the floor so the dogs have something to sleep on, and cover the new couches with sheets and pillows so the dogs stay off of them.  That way if I ever want to sit on them, I can just pull the sheets off.  Yesh…

I re-potted the plans I “inherited,” one of which I gave my Pappa Luke for his birthday.  It’s a beautiful dracanea… and the other is a pothos; I’m not sure where that one came from.

Shit… I can’t believe he’s gone.   I suppose it’ll all sink in on Monday, when I go through the motions of a funeral.  I suppose funerals are good.  I cry and all those normal things… I like funerals better than bridal showers, I guess.

I’ve noticed feeling terribly surreal lately.  Nothing seems real.   Has Landon really been gone for four weeks?  Today is the beginning of the fifth week.  Almost half way through.  I guess being alone here in our home on a Friday night is real enough.  I feel bad that I don’t really have it in me to love on the dogs.  They’re four weeks without a bath… I’m allergic to them… I don’t know if I can convince Emma to get in the bathtub.

I guess tonight I’m a little blue.  Now that I mention it.  Should I work on my papers, or should I relax some?  Should I read a book?  And if so, where?  Down here in the living room or up in my bedroom?  Should I eat something?  That would mean I have to prepare something.  I just want to skip dinner.  I’ve skipped lots of dinners in the last month.  Too bad it’s not showing in my belly yet.  Or maybe it is…

The fucking neighbor dog won’t shut up.  Rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah.  Yeah, it annoys me, too.

Pink Floyd.  Typing on my blog.  Sitting here.  Pretending nothing is real.  Nothing has to be real.  It could all just be my imagination anyway…

The contrast.  It does something… something good.  It makes the good things extraordinary.  Oh yeah, I like the contrast.  Or maybe I like the pain.  Perhaps I’m a masochist.  Yes.  I’ve always been an emotional masochist.  A proverbial cutter, I enjoy emotional pain.  It reminds me I’m alive.  Or some fucked up thing like that.

Well, can you deal with mental illness?

Generally speaking, I say yes. I have this knack for being able to see a red flag that indicates I’m not working with a full deck and can immediately hit the off switch on my emotions. In most cases, I’m golden. Emotionally un-volatile. People tell me things. Things that no one should tell me. I handle it very well, and can remain objective and non-judgmental about it.

Except for one thing…

I have a really difficult time with suicidal people. It’s because I feel so emotionally connected with it. I’ve never once in my entire life– in and out of depression– NEVER felt the urge to kill myself. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraid of it not because I don’t want to die (though, I’m sure somewhere in there, that’s part of it), but because I can’t imagine the pain that my beloveds would experience in losing me. Of course I can think rationally about the situation: everyone dies. You’re no more unique in death than you are in birth. It’s an important part of our life cycle, which in many ways has been fiddled with so incessantly (probably because many people are afraid of death) to the point where we have extended our lifespans so dramatically that it’s affecting our ecosystem immeasurably. Hell, maybe it’s not immeasurable at all– we can see the measurable effects of over-population in a plethora of ways. The point is that I don’t necessarily agree with the extent that we’ve extended our life sentence. It’s not really very good to fuck with the cycle of life. Death is imminent, it’s necessary, and it’s REAL.

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The way we are doing things here as a culture is NOT working.

America is broken.

Fanning the fires with the media’s unrelenting coverage, there is copious talk of recession– bordering depression-era– fallout of the financial marketplace.  It’s not just here in the U.S., it’s throughout much of the western empire.  Housing markets are crashing.  The value of our currency is plummeting.   The masses of us who rely upon credit for our lifestyles are quickly discovering that the amounts we borrowed were only theoretical and can no longer be extended.  It’s leaving the working class in a bind.  The frivolous Can’t-Live-Withouts are quickly becoming the fat we trim from our wallets.

We’ve created a monster, and the monster is made up of our worthless dollar bills.

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Warning: this is a sensitive topic.

I feel like I’ve jumped head first into a deep sea of mental illness. This is such a sensitive topic, that I hesitate to address it, but know that for my own sake, I have to write about it. Somehow, in some way, if I can help someone else out with my thoughts, then I feel it necessary to post it. So, I will do my best to be sensitive about what I say. It is not my intention to divulge identities, nor is it my intention to spew forth drama or unnecessary stress… I just want to get some things straight in my head so that I can have a more solid stance on what/how I think and feel about this stressful situation.

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