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.
A big middle finger from the game of life
I remember sitting in the ER after his first overdose and being the person he asked to see first. He couldn’t stop apologizing and sobbing about being worthless and not wanting to live anymore. I can’t remember the exact words I used but something along the lines of him being anything but worthless to me, but also that he was a fucking idiot. When I would bring it up later to try and talk about what he said, he promised he hadn’t tried to kill himself. He said that it was an accident and he just misspoke but I wonder a lot about what level of intention he had set for himself that day.
If my brother had died at any point shortly following that ER visit it would have fucking hurt, but it wouldn’t have shocked or made me question the point of life. But that’s not what happened.
It took a lot of years and a few more overdoses but he eventually kicked his addiction in the face and got clean. Which if you know anything about heroin, you will appreciate how hard that is to fucking do. He was a strong motherfucker when he wanted to be.
He put back on the weight he had lost in addiction, found an on the road laborious job that kept him busy and far away from the friends he did drugs with. He saved up enough money for a down payment on a home and was looking at listings. He was excited for the next stages of his life. Unfortunately, life is cruel and getting clean at that point was too little, too late.
Just before his 29th birthday, he had a massive heart attack in his sleep and died in his upstairs bedroom of our childhood home. He didn’t have any drugs in his system at the time of his death. He had beat previous overdoses but his heart gave out several years later when he finally decided to live.
Ain’t life a fucking bitch.
A family history of mental/physical health problems and addiction? Better add booze
After leaving the paramedics, police cars and broken sobbing parents at my childhood home, I did the only sane and logical thing I could think of doing. I picked up the same bottle of cheap whiskey my brother would drink at any family gathering and party and proceeded to drink it in its entirety (I promptly blacked out but can vaguely recall incoherent frustrations of me wishing he wasn’t such a cheap bastard and could have opted for top shelf poison).
The irony of the below chain of events isn’t wasted on me considering I’m from a family with a history of addiction, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. I should have swerved all forms of alcohol for all the reasons, but I had always liked a glass of wine (or more) on the weekends. It calmed my always buzzing brain and although it increased anxiety the following day(s), that was a small price to pay for a night of peace and quiet from myself.
Alcohol is a tricky substance. It’s legal, socially acceptable, and if you don’t go too hard, a lot of fun. People use it for stress management even though it has the opposite affect. Overstimulated parents (wine moms for example), burnt out working for the weekend workers, and celebrating the living and the dead. It’s fucking everywhere. I started drinking with the intention to shut my brain up (with an obvious secondary side effect of my favourite thing to do: self destruction). I never said I was smart and if you have been reading so far, I don’t think I’ve tried to reflect that either.
Every other weekend drinking slowly morphed into every night drinking. I wasn’t able to fall asleep at night without alcohol because my mind would get stuck on thinking about the black infinite nothingness of what happens after you die (if you believe you get to run through some pearly gates high-fiving all your relatives and loved ones after you die in some sort of cloud paradise, I love that for you, but I don’t find it plausible – so in the darkness I sit).
I started skipping most days of my medication which might have been for the best since you aren’t supposed to drink alcohol on it to begin with. I quit soccer and got lazy with my fitness. We started ordering take out most days because cooking was too much effort. Between the lack of movement and highly processed imitation food I gained a ton of weight and became more miserable each day.
All those bad choices aside, the worst part by far was the realization that outside the small community of people that were gutted like me over the loss of my brother, everyone else’s lives went on, unaffected. Something snapped in me…it felt visceral, violent, and then numb. Then the anxiety attacks started.
RIP to the person I was
I’m going to say “anxiety attacks” so I don’t offend the general mental health world on the official panic attack diagnosis term since I never saw a doctor (kind of avoided those my whole life short of pregnancy). The only thing I know is, that when I experienced one, I thought I was dying.
There would be a tightness and pain in my chest, followed by the feeling of not being able to get enough air. Sometimes there were tears, usually there was tunnel vision, and there was always unbelievable waves of fear of death and sadness of the loss of my brother and never getting to see him again. They would start suddenly and felt like they were lasting forever when after looking at a clock they would have only been a few minutes.
I can’t count how many of these attacks I had the year following my brothers death but my “funny mean bitch” vibe was demolished and replaced by the “unstable sad girl” personality you probably didn’t want to be around. My persona had been important to me, but now it lay dying on the floor right next to my overworked liver – and I couldn’t care less.
The realization I needed help and this was no longer regular grief processing came after months of the above – I had a very intoxicated public breakdown at a friends wedding. It turns out I wasn’t completely numb and could still get embarrassed (after sobering up of course). Which ended up being the kick in the teeth I needed to pause on the sauce long enough to evaluate my situation.
Grief and shitty mental health aside, everything I was actively going through was completely self inflicted. I ran with this brief lapse of feeling feelings and started reaching out to therapy offices.
I was never someone to talk about my feelings but keeping it all in and using dark humour and blatant evening alcoholism to side step my complex feelings about grief wasn’t working. My brother had been one of the most important people in my life and he was gone, but I was still here and the few people that were still important to me desperately needed me to stop fucking up my life.
I found a therapist accepting new patients and so started my begrudging misadventures of therapy.
Until next week.
Sincerely,
Sammy