screw your snide social media shit (NSFW or kids)

Let me just say this thing and then I’m done ’cause this isn’t about me.

The man has been dead for less than 24 hours and you wanna come on here and reduce his entire fucking character, life, and especially death to some fucking dismissive, sneering label? FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING CUNT.

Yeah, “junkies” die a lot. You know who else dies a lot?

White men between the ages of 45 and 54.

People who live at the subsistence level for a long time or keep bouncing in and out of it.

People who experience long-term, chronic stress and/or resource insecurity.

Gulf War veterans.

People with anxiety and depression and ADHD and the damage from 30 years of untreated PTSD they’ve been carrying around, and with that array of comorbidities, good luck getting a medication that is more effective than a fucking green M&M from the goddamned VA. You’re fucked.

Oh, and you want to smoke weed ’cause it helps and it doesn’t give you brain zaps when you skip smoking it, unlike the meds we prescribe? Oh, too bad, you have to pee in a cup, and now you can’t even have the green M&Ms, but here’s your 10% disability for tinnitus. Thanks for your service. Sorry about your life.

(Oh, by the way, there’s no such thing as Gulf War syndrome, say the doctors right on cue, every six or so years when you go to the VA to have another anomalous cyst cut out of your knee.)

We are taught to fucking suck it up and drive on in the army. Eat sand and misery for breakfast and don’t be a pussy. Get back up and fight. You’re fine if you still have a goddamned bootlace, some matches, and a packet of non-dairy creamer in your pocket. Does it hurt? Walk it off, sunshine.

And we do. And we get good at it. And we pride ourselves on our ability to do it, and we’re proud of our squad, and our squad is proud of us. That kind of bullheaded tunnel vision wins wars.

But God, it makes for shitty civilians on the other side. It makes for people who bottle it up until they lash out in the wrong direction, a lot of times at themselves (and there’s a nice little cycle for you). It makes for people who will get up and walk on broken fucking legs, who would never dream of copping out and killing themselves, but somehow those mortality rates are still something else, aren’t they?

How about those unemployment and homelessness rates? How about that risk-taking behavior and self-medication? Psych profession is really only now beginning to kind of glimpse the relationships and understand subintentioned death and think about why vets die in ridiculous numbers from car wrecks. They’re just starting to see impulsivity and risk-taking behavior as facets of suicidality. But you want navel-gazing and introspection and the ability to construct a compelling narrative that ticks all the right boxes and none of the wrong ones so they can win the lottery and get a prescription and some treatment that *might* have a shot at helping?

You want this from vets whose true north was and remains that packet of fucking non-dairy creamer in their pocket while their boots are full of blood? Yeah? FUCK YOU.

No, he wasn’t Mr. Fucking Rogers before the army. He could be moody and mope. Course, he was 20 fucking years old – that’s not terribly remarkable by itself. But yes, there are still personal choices we’re responsible for no matter how we got here. I’m not saying there’s even a direct, uncomplicated through-line here where you can point to cause and effect. I’m not saying anything as simplistic as “the army did this to him” AT ALL.

But I AM saying LIFE did this to him, and if you think you understood him without understanding him as a veteran, you’re stupid. And if you dismiss him as a junkie without understanding the very long and circuitous route he took to end up dead when he was barely into his 50s, then you’re just an asshole. If you think self-medication is a cause and not a symptom, you’re a dumb fuck.

I think his mother has a weird sort of hope that there’ll be some understanding in the form of some undiagnosed illness. I’m not feeling very confident in that. But even if all they end up with is “heart attack,” I’m here to tell you it was broken into a thousand pieces already, held together with a bootlace and packet of non-dairy creamer. He held it together for a really long time.

He was not a happy man. In fact, he was deeply troubled, and over the years he went from occasionally veering downhill for a while before veering back up to aiming for the bottom of that hill with increasing speed with something that started to look to me like determination, these past couple of years. I’m not saying it was conscious. I don’t know. But he was never stupid. He knew how fucking probability worked. He knew what it all looked like from the outside, too. And he knew the slightly bitter amusement of being looked down on or sneered at by people who have no fucking business opening their mouths, but even in 2020 it’s still ok to look down on junkies and hookers, right? Shit, even wastoid brain dead party bros whose mental age peaked at 14 hate fucking junkies. It’s fine to hate junkies.

So what do *you* do when you fill out all the right forms and check all the right boxes and do all the things you’re supposed to do as best you can — though your threshold for frustration and stamina for paperwork have taken a thorough beating after a couple of decades of dancing with Veteran’s Affairs, and there’s a little learned helplessness that’s crept in there after a few rounds of promising starts that totally petered out yet again — but the entire fucking system is simply inadequate to help you? What’s your morally superior fucking answer?

Well, if you’re [him], you keep getting back up for formation. You’re late sometimes. It isn’t always graceful, and sometimes you fall down and stay there for a while. Maybe you don’t always make the best choices. Maybe your perspective gets pretty fucking skewed there after a while and your sense of what’s possible narrows a lot. Maybe you can’t see six inches in front of your face there after a while.

But there was a broken bone in there deep, and it never healed, and he kept on fucking walking on it.

If he’d chosen self-medication over *better options* that he rejected because he wanted to “be a junkie,” because he wanted to get high, this would be a different rant. But that’s not what happened, is it? He never received adequate treatment, never. Something was always breaking down in his body, and something was never healing in his mind, and it wasn’t because he ever said “fuck it, I just want to be a fuckup.” He was in so much goddamned pain for so long.

His mother said she sat with him a while before they took him away and she hadn’t seen his face look that peaceful in forever. She also said she was surprised. I wish I was surprised. I’m not. I was starting to think it was gonna take something pretty radical to alter this trajectory lately, even if half the stuff I heard was exaggerated – and I don’t know that it was. I was afraid it was going to involve something like speeding vehicles and impaired judgment and grievous injury.

So I’m just gonna grab onto that, the fact that it didn’t, the fact that he died in bed and his face was peaceful and be grateful for that even while I’m mad as hell that for him, this is how the pain finally stopped.

And if your takeaway point, your wisdom you’re gonna level on us amounts to “junkies die, he was a junkie, therefore he died,” you and your reductive fucking “insight” can go fuck off. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

when every day is Memorial Day

The Unseen Burden of a Veteran’s Grief – Elizabeth Heaney

not dead

So I’m not dead.

I left my job a few months after my last post (I resigned before they could decline to renew my annual contract after two years of working 90 hours a week for a paycheck I couldn’t live on, after admin threw me under the bus at a university I was once proud to call my alma mater) – and with that, I lost my shot at the career I spent 15 years training for. Struggled along with self-employment for a while, work dried up. And then I pretty much lost my shit for a while and stayed in bed for about four months. Along the way I lost my ok credit, had a couple of nasty tax surprises, got and then lost a new job, and then lost my house and my ability to feed or care for my daughter. My sister took her in, and except for my sister, for a while I felt like I’d lost the support of my family, which was the most crushing thing of all.

Couch-surfed for a while, then lived in a tent in the woods for a while, and then ended up living in a house in the middle of nowhere in a sort of rural village. Haven’t been able to pay rent in about a year, but the landlords are my partner’s parents – we stuck it out after all and are still together – so haven’t been evicted.

My daughter graduated, is about to turn 21, and is doing a fine job of adulting in the city. Most of the family stuff has been repaired at least to the point of being genuinely happy to see each other, though it’s nothing like it used to be and I don’t see them too often. Don’t talk to them, either, ’cause I haven’t been able to afford a phone for more than two months over the last two years.

But most of that stuff eventually got better or is sorta headed in that direction almost four years later, except for the biggest loss of all – I lost my sense of drive and purpose and meaning, and I haven’t gotten it back, haven’t managed to construct or discover a new one, and haven’t found a way to live (and not just simply survive) without one.

I don’t read books. I don’t write. I don’t create anything. I an under-employed/self-employed and make on average about $5 an hour, and it’s better than nothing, but it’s not a career or a living. I started losing the plot for real about eight years ago, and I ultimately completely lost it after a long, hard struggle that looks pretty distant and foolish (and expensive) now. I lost almost everything I’d ever been afraid of losing and had fought and worked so hard to hang into, and it was even worse than I’d feared.

I had some old friends and colleagues — some of whom I hadn’t interacted with in years at that point — reach out and help me get un-homeless, get my power turned on, get my car on the road again, and I genuinely don’t know where I’d be without them. I reconnected with a cousin I grew up with who helped me start a garden and begin to consider that just maybe, even if I can’t “find the plot” again, that maybe there’s a new one I can stumble upon, or meet, or create.

But I haven’t been able to find it again or make a new one yet. I’m uninsured and unmedicated and untreated, and I’m not good.

But I’m not dead, and every day I don’t hang myself in the old barn is a new day, and that’s about what victory looks like these days. Eight months ago I thought about it every night. Now I only think about it about once a week, and I haven’t put my shoes on to go out there and look at the rafters all summer.

There’s nothing else to tell. I’m pretty much just existing and waiting for something different to happen, because my ability to figure things out and fix them, to *make* things happen – an ability that served me very well for almost 40 years – seems to be completely gone. And I feel like that person is gone, too.

So I’m not dead. I don’t particularly feel alive, but I’m not dead. I’m just surviving.

waiting

I’m just waiting for my daughter to grow up so I can diminish until I die. It’s the only real change I can envision. I am just taking up space and resources waiting to die. It’s the only change worth hoping for. That I don’t think my thinking is distorted is probably a sign that it is, but it doesn’t matter – the effect is the same, in that I am just sitting here quietly, with nothing to say and no energy and no vision and no hope, and no sense that it’s worth talking about or writing about. I don’t recognize myself anymore. I haven’t for a long time. Nobody can change anything but me. And I can’t. I have failed spectacularly at trying and I don’t  have anything left. People hint every once in a while that this self-pity is useless, but they’re wrong. It isn’t self-pity. I can’t care enough to feel pity. Every once in a while I’m dimly sorry for that person I used to be, because I seem to recall that she had some potential. But I can’t feel deeply enough to really grieve anymore either. And as for me – I don’t know who I am, but I am pretty sure I have no power to do anything but tread water, and I know I will eventually wear out and just slip below the surface.

pieces

I would shatter, except the pieces are already too small. There’s nothing left to break. The only form left, I guess, is powder. I could just turn into powder, a fine ashy dust maybe. That crunches a little under your feet, and leaks the tiniest drop of blood. How long can a human being live saying “it has to get better eventually”?

nothing much to see here

Things aren’t good. They are a little better than last time I had anything to say here, in that I don’t spend at least 30 minutes a day crying and I am no longer even trying to pay any of my bills except the utility and insurance, but they are not good and I am really not ok. Thing is, I’ve been saying that for over a year now I guess. I don’t remember what it’s like to feel like I have a future. But I am so incredibly fucking tired of hearing my own self whine that I just don’t see the point in talking about it. I’m such a broken record. And that seems like all I can talk about when anybody asks what’s going on or when I sit down to write anything.

Not that I”ve been writing anything. I don’t even know who I am anymore (except this person that doesn’t seem like me has been me for so long now that I guess that’s who I am). I don’t know what I”m doing here. I have completely lost the plot. The VA helped with some but not all of my meds and the wellbutrin lets me fake it, but does nothing for anxiety, so my coping mechanisms are perhaps not the healthiest, but the point is that I can fake it reasonably well. I can get up in the mornings and get through the day and hold it together and work (or at least I thought I could – it’s come to my attention that perhaps I haven’t been faking it as well as thought). But in general I can hold it together all day until I’m alone in the kitchen at night, crying with the water running (that’s where all of the best drama, the most poignant conversations, the most memorable confrontations, and the most epic breakdowns have always happened – in the kitchen. I suspect it’s family tradition, on my mom’s side, the miniature postprandial kitchen breakdown). I get it together enough to get back to work for the second shift, so to speak, and I have such severe sleep deprivation that insomnia is not generally a problem – I fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow, and I think I’m too exhausted to dream. If I do, I don’t remember anything (though I’ve been told I’ve reverted to some sleeping issues that make me at best annoying and sometimes even a little dangerous to sleep *near* – issues that don’t bode well for my mental health if what I’m hearing is accurate). But overall, I am several good, solid steps further away from the precipice than I was in, say, January, by nearly any available metrics. I”m not sure that’s much of a standard, though.

second verse

And just like clockwork, evening hits and the bottom falls out. I seem to be having a repeat of the confidence-shattering patterns of 2010 where every single night for nearly a year was sheer unadulterated hell. Awesome. This is a great time to change my meds up, assholes, just great.

I try to trust people and I try not to isolate myself but it doesn’t work. I can’t really do it. Nobody is going to have my back but me, not really. We really are all on our own; if we ever aren’t for a little while, it’s a happy accident but not something we can rely on or expect. That’s a simple fact and I have absolutely no evidence to the contrary. So, no, when I feel bad, I will not respond in a level headed way.

overrated, undermedicated

I finally went to the VA myself (because I can’t afford to pay my gas bill never mind my employee insurance, so I have to take what I can get). And while I did get some free allergy medicine, I also got a three-day ride on the Crazy Merry Go Round because my pdoc is apparently asleep or incompetent and wrote orders for my brain cootie meds that didn’t make any sense, leaving me dangerously overmedicated for half the day and dangerously unmedicated for the other half, though with the buildup in my system of this drug over nearly a year, who knows. But the crazy? Boy can I attest to that. Instant Rage, just add bupropion overdose.

There is never a good time, but this is really, really bad timing. I am about to get my gas cut off for the second month in a row, it’s not even the 15th and I’m completely broke (I only get paid once a month), and I’ve dealing with a lot of emotional flashback shit all while trying to be the sane one in a relationship that is dying a very slow death from long periods of benign neglect punctuated by the occasional burst of angsty energy and then drunken weakness. I have nobody to blame but myself because I don’t seem to be attracted to people who don’t have serious fucking baggage. To top it all off, the pdoc won’t write one of my scripts ’til I pee in a cup, the clinic is walk in only, and I *have a fucking job* so I probably wont’ get my script ’til the semester is over and I can spend a whole day sitting in the goddamned VA clinic waiting. Joy. This is a great time to not have anxiety meds.

Minefields

I can’t for the life of me figure out how I keep getting myself into emotional flashback land. These situations do not look or feel the same at the outset, but they invariably take me to the same places. And then hindsight, of course, is keen and clear. I guess that could speak less to the situations having that much in common at the start and more to the fact that I am very, very practiced at unconsciously steering things in that direction. Which is really sad… and I guess that’s why therapy… but honestly, this time I don’t think it was me, I really don’t. I really, really felt good about having avoided the old trap. So it’s been an unpleasant surprise to find myself wrong after all. Actually, unpleasant doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s been devastating. It’s been like getting kicked in the gut.

***

Duran Duran – Before the Rain

tired

My brain is so broken. It has been so long since I’ve functioned properly that I am beginning to be truly convinced that it has always been like this and everything else was an illusion. I keep thinking I can’t survive this but I keep on surviving it. I keep thinking it has to give, things have to change, because they always have before, at least long enough. But this seems to have some distinct character or quality that is different from before, and the time before that, and the time before that… I’m tired of being this person who is such a bummer all the time. I am tired of not having anything positive to say. I am tired of my own company. I am tired of feeling like this. And since I don’t really have any faith it will ever change, I am really pretty much done – with waking up tasting of nightmares, with crying over the kitchen sink, with living.

This cannot be what living is supposed to feel like. How long can this possibly last?

 

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah