isurvive.org

VAC,
I am glad that you share and journal your journey. It helps me understand the ebb and flow of healing.
Also glad that post was not deleted this time.

I thought that story of your mother in her sun suit was both beautiful and heartbreaking.
Time and memory are such strange things in that they can incite so many feelings on their own.

I won't worry about you, but I do send comforting hugs, if okay. We carry our pain our whole lives and need others to help us bear it.

take care,

ws

Thanks W.S.

I have not been in denial about the betrayal I got from my folks.....I have been shocked at how deep it runs. It is not hatred, but like a rupture of the soul.

I am much better, but as my wife and I have discussed in past, neither of us can fathom harming our children or grandchildren.

When I feel the need, and I mean on a therapeutic/cathartic level, I go to the family cemetery and just stare at the stones. I have wondered what madness compelled them I know nothing about.

some travel, much to think about. Taking some bold steps that are probably 20 years late.


I see people's faces: this world is full of hurting people: fortunately most hurting people don't hurt.

I run from me and from the past, but I am gaining by degrees.


VAC

Hello,

For the first time in several years, I have not offered a word of comfort to those who do not find the holidays welcome due to bad memories and sorrowful present circumstances. For this I apologize.

Suicide increases at times when people are supposed to "feel good" but don't.

I have noticed in the passage of my life, that inevitably there is some sadness or tragedy that seems to try to quench well-being and joy at times of year and life that should be traditionally full of peace and happiness. We experienced the sudden death of a family member on the first birthday of one of our children. The rush was to memorialize the senseless death with the birthday.

That did not happen.


One of the things we have tried to do is to establish our own traditions now, having been surgically relieved of the burden of family ties and expectations.

I am sincerely and deeply sorry for anyone who sits alone and remembers unthinkable things when the whole world seems to be rejoicing. I believe there is a special place of peace for people who mourn. I have had a few friends diagnosed with cancer that actually turned out to be scar tissue. I can live with scar tissue.


If you are alone, or in an unpleasant housing situation, take a couple of bucks and a book, and get a cup of coffee. Sit and watch the people. I imagine their lives, what their facial expressions mean. I have no problem speaking to strangers when I want to and I feel they would like to converse. Many people older than me have no interaction with others and a trip out to the grocery or for a coffee are their only connections to the world around them....

I hope each of you has some one to say Happy New Year to this year and that 2019 will be a year of healthy growth and peaceful healing for each of you.

Hello VAC


Thank you for insightful writing. I have been in a dark place some years, so appreciate your thoughtfulness

May you also have a wonderful healthy 2019 as you express in your last paragraph


Much caring

Fleur,

Thanks....you know occasionally I heed my own advice.

Today was such a day.

I am sorry the last several years have been a dark time for you.

The comfort of the soul.....peace to every storm.

V.

Thank you so much VAC.

I aspire to your dignity and peace.

But so grateful for the love, wisdom and compassion you always show.

You truly demonstrate how and why life is worth living.

Thinking of you too mourning, reconciling all the loss with the living. For every wound a thousand, thousand simple loving moments of solace and joy.

EH

Happy New Year VAC

….thank you, Fleur.

To all in the UK,

Several years ago, America plummeted to number 55 in the nations of the world as far as truth in media....I see the chaos in our own country, and what the news reports about the UK.

You probably know more about what goes on here than most Americans.

My heart and thoughts for all of you are peace and safety in the very difficult decisions and transitions that appear there.

Thanks to all who have labored to make this site possible, a special gift to us all.

V.

Hello,

I am often amazed at the things I remember.

I am often amazed at where I am and wonder where I will be.

It is amazing to arrive at a time in my life I can remember so long ago, well over 60 years. I cherish the good things, the pleasant times.

I had an image from the past yesterday. It is rather cold here, winter for us, just a cool spell for many, and I was driving out of our local post; had to wait a line of traffic....

…...I looked at all the cars coming and going and remarked in my heart they were almost all the same dull colors, and I had to laugh.

I used to drive a convertible in the winter. I was 15. This is a small city.

It was a green two seater. I wore a hat. I smoked little cigars.

It was the only British car in town.

I wore clothes I bought at second hand shops.

I was supposed to have left two years before to go to a boarding school far from here. Won't bore you with useless details, but it was my way out. I was shamed out of it by a relative who was clueless. Even I was clueless then.

Stench....it sort of stinks to me. I was running on adrenalin then. I had shingles around that time. I puked blood. I was trapped and knew it and tried to make my world what I wanted it to be.

Honestly, I felt like a freak of nature and from another world. My mind was whirlwind. I had to be in motion all the time; I even moved in my sleep. I almost never stopped. I remained like this until back issues prevented me from much of the drive to always keep moving.

I am ok, but it has broken something in me, perhaps a positive thing.

A mirage, a clear image of fifty years ago....I was so messed up, so arrogant. Suicidal. My mother was afraid I would kill my dad. I more or less spent very little time at home the last two years of highschool. I should not have been there, but there are so many things that should not have been. That sort of perusing can be malignant.

Everything that I wanted to do and be was ruthlessly crushed. I look back even at my 13 year old self and wonder why I did not bolt and run. Of course I look back to me then with the understanding of me now. I seriously lived in a fog most of the time.

I just shut down and went away when the pressure was on me, almost out of body. I still wonder about that quiet place inside of me I used to run. It was not good, but it kept me. I had a professor in college that understood that.

I used to wonder what would happen if I just stopped talking? I did really almost stop.

I am not lamenting the past, but have realized the waste places I was forced to inhabit. It particularly infuriated me for someone to tell me there was nothing I could not do or be. If I began to do something really well, I had to shut it down.

This week has been an interesting one. I am not sick, nor is my wife, but having lived through the Mephisto waltz of my father's legal affairs even years after his death, and the present storm with my in-laws (which we are escaped from), we put all our affairs in legal order. In other words, all things are legally settled after we are gone. Neitheir of our children will be making any decisions about our future effectively, and there will be no wars between them.

It was strange: a relief and sobering simultaneously.

I saw me 50 years ago and remembered all the things I missed. Walking in the woods for hours alone when I was quite young; I did this from the time. It was a solace and pleasure to me. Before I began to smoke, I could smell each scent and even know what animals were about. My grandfather took me to a field and showed me the tracks of a large unkown animal he had followed.

He told me I could not go out alone again because he did not want me to be killed.


I am rambling and I apologize. The T I have worked with for many years, both professionally and personally is very ill. He has contracted various tropical ailments as an ex-pat and has returned here to recuperate.


My advice to my younger self. Move faraway. Rescue your mother (as she would ask me two years later: so very sad). Do what your heart longed for, which was music. Oh my I could sing. I still do, but my voice is not young anymore. I don't sing to show off anymore, but it is a genuine expression of my soul when I do.


My other advice would have been not to pin your hopes on others or to depend upon them for strength: to appreciate what I got, but never to let others crush me.

That part of me that is extravagant and wild, some of which was never meant to have been tamed.

There is a dam in me that is breaking; I used to write poetry copiously. I wrote. I wrote songs. Before this nation fell apart, churches were never locked. It was an easy thing on my way to and from to walk into an empty church building, to stand behind the pulpit and to sing alone. I could see the songs rise into the arches and filter through the sunlight falling in the stained-glass windows.

It was joy, an aria of life. I didn't even sing words most of the time, I just sang.

I would have told the young me to never have planned to do drugs. I knew I would though from the first time I read about LSD in a LIFE Magazine when I was a kid.

I am glad to have lived this long and to have been kept. It would have been so easy for me to have become a bum. I remember the times I was on the verge of going far away on an adventure, and to have held back because I knew there was no return (these were not positive adventures at all), but a head trip for the me that emerged from the shadows, triumphant in my own hedonistic nihilism.


I am going to write again, this I say to my present self. I will do things the next season of my life, this last part, to take back many things that were stolen from me. I am looking for a voice coach now. It will help me.


I would have said to my then self: you are going to make it. Don't do things you will regret later. I would have said to my then self: you are loved and depression is not who you are.


I say the same to all who are here: you are going to make it; depression is not who you are; you are loved.