I had gotten to a place of being okay again. I was in therapy and finally able to put down the bottle in the evenings. I had fitness, antidepressants and even the worlds shittiest therapy cat on my side. I would still have anxiety attacks from time to time and anything related to my brother made me ugly cry, but I could give life a passing grade.
That’s when I got a call from my dad at work.
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Grief is a funny thing. I acted in ways I never had previously all because my brother died. Maybe that’s why I decided to gamble on the following action and the pros really weren’t worth the cons. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I never once claimed to be smart and the next entry will be solid evidence to back my claim.
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After a very public meltdown and coming to terms with the fact I wasn’t dealing with the death of my sibling in a healthy way, I finally started therapy. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (“CBT”) to be exact. CBT had been suggested to me previously for something seemingly unrelated (and in candid conversation which should have been a waving red flag I may not have been operating as well as I thought I was in the past).
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This one is going to be fucking hard, yo.
This blog/website is about overcoming mental health struggles (and unrelated to this entry finding creative outlets) so the content can, and will get dark.
Trigger Warnings: drug abuse, alcoholism, attempted suicide, self sabotaging, and general fuckupery of life.
As I mentioned before, no kid gets out of childhood unscathed and lets just say without getting into the details, my brother and I were battered and bruised. As the oldest child, it was expected of me to be the example, so short of a brief acting out phase in high school, I was the “good child”. I kept my head down and except for the occasional scuffle, I did all the things I was supposed to. I found the art of great pretending and was able to function well in society and blend in. My brother found heroin.
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I grew up seeing sickly grandparents on handfuls of medication that kept them (barely) living and I knew from a young age that I needed to take better care of myself to avoid turning into them. Doing things that swerved heart disease and type 2 diabetes were high on my list of priorities, but I also never wanted to take any kind of mood-stabilizers that always seemed to have a laundry list of potential side affects (ironically including suicide), or have them change me fundamentally as a person (even though the person I was, kind of sucked).
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They say you are only as old as you feel and as I write this post I have an ice pack securely attached to my right knee following a soccer game – so coincidentally, today I feel old as fuck.
In addition to another year older, this birthday in particular marks my first writing achievement I set out for myself a few months back when I first came out of my most recent depression fog. Life was hard following a few shitty things that happened to the people in my life I love (and I was a very selfish person, so the list of people I even like, never mind love is small), which eventually prompted a leave of absence from work.
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