Christmas Eve 2017
I’m having an emotionally bad time.
Dealing with foreclosure and finally being kicked out of my home, where I’d lived for 54 years, knowing the final eviction is January 25, has caused a level of depression and stress beyond what I’ve experienced. It’s very hard to get beyond the emotional pain.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m very grateful to my friend Ken for taking me in and giving me a place to live, and my friend Ryan for coming with me on this journey in my life, but for anyone who has been through depression, who fights it on a daily basis, they know the pain my friends who haven’t got severe debilitating depression will never know. The pain isn’t physical, but it can be. It can manifest itself in physical ailments, it can cause mental deterioration, it can create all sorts of issues.
Depression is a shapeshifter. I can sit right in front of you, smiling and laughing, and wishing I were dead. The most innocuous thing can trigger depression, or a moment of depression.
This year I am coping with the fact that I have failed to keep up the pretenses of society. I couldn’t keep going, struggling to live day after day, meeting my obligations and living up to what society expected of me.
It isn’t that I cared what others thought of me, because I don’t. It’s what I think of myself, and I have failed myself. Like so many who were in over their heads in the housing market, and so many who risked everything for their family, I gambled on everything in order to first fight the losing battle of caring for my mother when her mind snapped and her world came crashing down. Dementia, delirium, delusion, senility, Alzheimer’s, all ripped her apart, and I cared for her until she died. By that point my financial status was in ruin because while I was fighting the losing battle on one front the economy attacked from another and created the perfect storm of the housing bubble bursting. As I struggled with that, losing my mother and watching my career as a realtor crumble, my own health, impaired by the strain of caring for my mother, failed and I begin the first of a series of heart problems resulting in a weak heart that is held together by plastic from the aortic aneurysm, and 8 stents to prop up the arteries so blood continues to flow through my veins.
With the foreclosure finally through it all feels very surreal. The past three weeks, since I left my house and moved to Virginia Beach, all seem like a movie to me. It’s all been as if I’m sitting outside myself watching the movie of my life as it plays on a big screen before me.
I’m literally a shell being manipulated by outside forces with no idea how I’m getting through each day and no direction for a future.
I would like to get back into real estate in Virginia. I would like to write another novel and self publish it. My health flip flops from moment to moment. I was turned down for disability in New Jersey because I could still work part time. Yes, that is true, but for several years I worked part time and couldn’t support myself, and didn’t qualify for social services because I wasn’t an alcoholic or addict. So I got by relying on the kindness of friends and family.
My world is torn apart on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t have to be a disaster of earth shattering proportions to tear everything down. A flat tire makes me wish I were dead. It practically incapacitates me if I have even the mildest confrontation with my near and dear.
Depression has caused more damage than anyone can imagine. It is destructive and debilitating and yet I go on. I go on because I haven’t died. That’s the best I am capable of doing at the moment, and I know there are many others out there who are feeling the same way. It is to them that I say Happy Holidays! I say hold on. I say we can overcome this, and all the petty outside interference in our lives. Everything is temporary, and if we can get through the short term, the long term will fall into place.
Tiny Tim, the Dickens character not the 60s folk singer, said “God bless us, everyone.” The universe, Goddess, God, whatever you believe in, even if you only believe in yourself, will get you through the temporary as long as you hold on.
Yes, I’m depressed. Yes, much of the time I do wish I had died during one of my four heart attacks, but I didn’t, and for as many suicidal thoughts as I have on a daily basis, I persevere. I keep going because I haven’t died. When the Goddess or Gods or universe decides it wants me, then I will go.
So each day I get up because I didn’t die in my sleep the night before. As long as I don’t die I’ll be here.
Happy Hols!