On Grief And Dreams

[…💔]

I went to therapy and spouted about all the terrible shit that has happened in the last 2 months. not sure it helped… but we did have a discussion about grief.

[😒]

I imagine that you could discuss grief for a day and a night but I don't see it going anywhere, no matter how much I wish that it would. The only people who do not grieve are the dead, who are exactly the cause of the problem.

I remember first beginning to feel sorrow at about the age of 8-10, +/-; it's been a while and my memories are rather vague. It wasn't because of anything that had happened, it was grief for the future. I had felt sorrow earlier and had found no cure for it except to hope that it would lessen with the passage of time. 

You know that my parents were substantially older than those of my friends. They appeared to be about the age of the grandparents of my friends. Somehow at about that time my brain made the connection between growing old and dying (of old age). I became afraid of the grief that I would feel when my parents did die and how could I possibly deal with THAT. It had to be an early symptom of depression; becoming afraid of grievous events IN ADVANCE of their actually happening. The only way I thought of avoiding the pain would be to die first. Presto! And suicidal ideation was born! And I wasn't even in my teens. I had no one to talk to about it and it probably didn't even occur to me that talking about it could even help. After all, talking couldn't solve what I saw as the root of the problem: death. Being able to face death calmly was a sign of courage, courage that I didn't believe I had. You can compare it to being a skier who has a fear of pain, fear of the pain of a broken leg. It's going to affect how well you ski, no matter how much natural ability you have or how much you develop your skills. My first response would not be to practice more, it would be to kill the anxiety and fear which would free me to do what I do without those damn feelings getting in the way. I didn't know it when I was 10 but (and this is an extreme leap in time) heroin is an excellent solution. As I have said before, H is not simply a killer of somatic pain, it's a suffering-killer, a drug that can also deal with psychological pain. Nobody wants to ascribe any positive attributes to potent (and this varies from person to person) opioids or equivalent synthetic substances but, I maintain that they exist and society has come to believe that the desire for pain relief is a moral weakness that one must not give in to.

There is a different approach. If you can't make pain go away you can try to learn to put up with it, at least well enough so that it won't prevent you from doing the stuff that you have to do. Granted the method isn't exactly perfect. 

Or you can intentionally cause pain to yourself. Cutting and bleeding do in fact have two positive effects; three if you count the release of endorphins into your bloodstream. (I experimented with causing endorphin release when I had shingles that nobody could diagnose as shingles. An incredibly painful condition. The part of my body that was affected was my neck and throat, with the exception of the skin over my trachea. Wherever the idea came from, I decided to soak a cotton ball in alcohol and swab an area of my neck with it. And I thought that I had experienced pain BEFORE!! Christ!!But in less than 15sec the pain faded as if I had applied lidocaine to the area. The effect lasted for only about 10-15min, tops, but it had worked! I had proven the efficacy of endorphin.) The first positive somatic effect of slicing oneself, over time, gets you used to the physical pain itself, making the self-mutilation easier; a simple decision, an act of will. 

Its second positive effect is that it can reduce stress, depression and what, for lack of a better name, I call internal psychological pressure. My explanation for this benefit is that if you think of your circulatory system as a system of plumbing, the negative feelings of depression and stress are analogous to blockages in the piping, ratcheting up the pressure in the system, pressure which if left untended will lead to bursting pipes which, in this extended metaphor, represent a mental meltdown, or nervous breakdown if one prefers, and should that be allowed to happen, through ignorance or negligence, there's no predicting what adverse effects and of what severity, will ensue. So, to lower the pressure, you bleed liquid from the system. Blood is the liquid and as it flows your internal emotional pressure drops along with the blood. There is also the fact that you are choosing to do this, you are taking action, which means that you are taking back control of the plumbing of the machine, re-establishing self-control, at least temporarily. Being in control is in itself calming since you free yourself from being a slave of your emotions. Of course this is not a permanent cure but it is a powerful technique for interfering with an acutely overdriven limbic system, recovering control of your feelings instead of being controlled by them. To toss in a pop culture reference, the Vulcans got it right.

Something I almost forgot to mention. The reason why I haven't gotten a pet is because that which lives is born to die and I don't need anymore grief. Be it a human or be it a cat, if you love it there is no difference in the quality of the sorrow that I feel upon their death. And with fuzzy buddies there is an additional issue. Given my history with cats, all of my feline friends lived to be at least 20 years old. Cats become just as attached to you as you do to them and, at my age, the odds are good that a cat would outlive me. I don't want to create that situation either. If I didn't live alone that might change the equation but it is really quite unlikely.

There was a time in my life, for the life of me I can't pin down when, so let's just say that it was in my youth, before I came down with chronic depression. In that time my mood was satisfyingly stable. I wasn't depressed but neither was I glad. I occupied a grey middle zone between the two. Maybe I was already on an SSRI but that doesn't ring any bells. I can say that whatever the reason, that "no man's land" of the emotions is precisely what an effective SSRI achieves. Has any MD or shrink ever explained the expected effects of an SSRI on the emotions? I'm not going to run through them here in case it's all old news to you. We've texted about it but I can't recall whether Al was on an antidepressant or an antipsychotic so you may well be familiar with both.

Looking back at it all I suppose it is in the end pretty silly. Being afraid of the death of my parents or of a fuzzy friend years or even decades before the fact. Grieving for the future, for events that cannot be altered or avoided. If that is not insanity then I don't know what is.

(These balloons were knitted together and this is the final result. Take note that there's no mention of "the elephant in the room," although Jane is actually woven all through the piece without being mentioned by name. She is my parents, a cat, a sibling, a long dead friend you never knew. And now she's waiting on the river's bank waiting for Charon's boat to dock, a boat that no one but the Boatman knows the schedule of.🌹)

🖤 And what of we who are left here, marooned, alive in body as Time frays, strand by strand, that weak tether keeping sighing souls tied to the side of a dark worm drilled plank, the sliver that was not long past a vessel.…

Enough!! Wet I'm forever reminded of but it's the cold that bites the flesh while Old Nick's hound gnaws hearts with a piercing grinding sound. Hear I aught else? Nay!

Then let it end. Give all over to the lunatic few who survive of the crew! Ahargh! Be gone; I spit on you!!

The damp is close.…feet so silent they may well be hacked away…mist…breeze…

Grey air that trolls exhale…in…out…Yes, I'm well worn out enough, ground down to powder over too many years. "Keep your chin up!" holler the toffs. "Fuck you and the butthole you crawled out of!"

I do believe that now the only thing that is keeping me from hiding beneath the quilts and covers, putting out the light and chasing e'er elusive sleep, is the knowledge that tomorrow is yet another day.…🖤