More light : breaking clear of the grip of suicidal ideation

I honestly feel so very blessed to be a part of this WordPress community. The love I have been shown here by people I have never met has saved me more times than I could ever really say and yesterday was one of those days which are luckily far rarer now, when I go into the dark pit of suicidal despair.

I remember the year my older sister died. I had been invited to start a blog by a fellow blogger who shared a poem I wrote on the pain of my past narcissistic relationship on her site. That was back in December 2013 and the following year was a very heavy winter following the death of my oldest sister Judith in the early hours of Easter Sunday 20 April 2014. As a family we had to make the painful decision to take her off life support on Easter Saturday.

Jude is very much on my mind today as I am just starting to read a memoire on manic depression written by Kay Redfield Jamison and she was born the same year as my sis, 1946. Judith was diagnosed with what was called manic depression then (during the 1980s) and is now known as bi polar following her cerebral bleed. Two years later she was abandoned by her husband who absconded and sent her home (from New Zealand – which by a stroke of ancestral synchronicity was the place our descendants immigrated to in 1874) to Mum and Dad with a one way ticket and a small battered brown suitcase with minimal possessions. Shortly after her illness her husband took her overseas and then dumped her in an asylum as he had another woman over there and this woman would not even allow my nephews to sleep in the house she and my brother in law shared, they had to live in the garage.

Just a few short years after I nearly died in a serious MVA I watched as my sister melted down in the aftermath and tried to take her life. I also saw how my Mother tried to keep her pain silent and how in the end whenever in an episode of deep or vocal emotional suffering the care staff would shove some kind of medication down her throat. Fair enough maybe she needed to be calmed some times but my experience was whenever I was present with her in that blind fury animal state her emotions would rise and crest and fall like a dark wave after some time, being absorbed back into the ocean of herself in the light of loving unconditional presence. The pain she carried was immense and in the end, it and the drugs and her emotional abandonment killed her. I had hours where I sat by her beside just holding her hand in the 3 final years we had together. Not one of her children lived close. Mum and my other sister and I were her only visitors but she was adopted by some beautiful ladies from the nearby Anglican church where we eventually had her funeral service in 2014.

I myself was 21 that year (the year that my sister tried to take her life in 1982) and really struggling, forced to go to secretarial college I had abandoned my studies as my Dad was upset I had shifted degrees (and cities) two times in the confusing aftermath of all the trauma. The riot act was read to me. NO MORE UNIVERSITY WHICH WAS A WASTE OF TIME. I would go to a fucking college to type in triplicate for 5 days of the week and learn shorthand. THAT IS WHAT WOMEN WERE GOOD FOR.

Do I seem angry? Yeah I kept it under wraps for the next 11 years in my active addiction to alcohol and drugs. I buried the truth of how I really felt for even longer. Now I can feel the anger. I can feel the burning in my chest. I can feel the fucking squashing off of life and no I didn’t have the ‘guts’ nor financial resources to go against my father at that stage.

Even though I feel angry at my Dad still, I can say he was absolutely doing the best with what he knew (and as a product of his time) but that does not bely the pain or hurt at not feeling heard, or full seen, or supported, or that I had a voice!!! I can forgive him now to a point. But I also know forgiveness is often not enough without the right to full knowledge of the emotional truth and my sense of protest which I am lucky to have finally found a good enough therapist to validate. In the absence of this as an active or recovering addict I always internalised or turned the pain in upon myself.)

For some reason all of this is coming up today after a day a I spent ferrying my older sister to a needed pedicure appointment on Sunday. I look at my living sister now and I see so much of my older sister in the way she holds her mouth. At times she wrings her hands, HER SENSE OF TRUE SELF AND POWER SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN ALMOST TOTALLY STOLEN BY DRUGS AND THE BELIEF SHE IS NOT WELL OR A COMPETENT PERSON. and the hardest thing was that as we sat side by side in those massage chairs at the Asian nail place on Sunday I finally accepted how sick my sister really really is AND THIS PAINFUL TRUTH BREAKS MY HEART APART AND MAKES ME BURN WITH PAIN. Sorry I cant be all detached and stoical about it. I am carrying and trying to express what she cannot, what has been silenced in her for the past 15 or 16 years of medicating on the back of a hysterectomy she under went in 2003 or 2004 and the abandonment by her own husband who left her for a woman 20 or more years younger.

I shared in a recent post written after I got home late on Sunday how after I dropped her back to the ‘hospital” I felt like I was being released from a vice. This is what she said to me just as she was about to get out of the car. “its good you could take me to the pedicurist because if I had to get a taxi I would have to explain where I was going and why!” Yeah I know staff need to keep tabs on the ‘patients’ but it just made me feel like my sister is in prison. The truth is that I am probably exaggerating here and being overly emotional but I just wish for something so far better for my sister. I wish for her to be in a far different place, she is not and I have to accept it, but it did cause me amidst other factors to feel suicidal yesterday.

At least I can share about this today. Its no accident as the Moon moves closer and closer to meet Pluto by transit and oppose the Sun in Cancer over key placements in my sisters chart (born in 1954 people born this year will be triggered by the eclipse tomorrow) that all of this is coming to a head today. I had to tell Scott to back off today too because I am under more pressure to send money to ‘rescue’ him and I HAVE HAD A GUT FULL. I AM NOT THE WORLD’S SAVIOUR. I REALLY DONT CARE IF IT SOUND SELFISH BUT THE ONLY LIFE I WANT TO SAVE OR CAN SAVE IS MY OWN. I can be there though in some way as long as proper boundaeies are in place (if that is even possible?).

This I know for sure even if I make unconscious choices they are still my choices and I have to own them and live with the consequences. I have as an adult to do the painful work to become conscious of the ways I get put to death or make unwise choices out of my damaged or damaging past. This does take some work, to get free of the F.O.G. FEAR OBLIGATION AND UNEARNED GUILT I swallowed day in day out at Catholic School. The only life I can save is my own and when I get pulled in to think I can save someone else’s I get into trouble.

I will never abandon Scott or my sister, but I must with this full moon which is all about setting healthy boundaries make categorical decisions over how much I can give and help others, my priority in this life MUST BE SELF CARE. WITHOUT THIS I WILL BE BACK IN THAT DEEP DARK PLACE OF SUICIDAL DEPRESSION AND BY GOD I HAVE WORKED SO HARD TO BE FREE OF IT. IT REALLY IS TIME TO SAY NO MORE TO THE PATTERNS THAT TEND TO DRAG ME BACK TO THAT LOVELESS JOYLESS PLACE OF FEAR, GUILT AND OVER RESPONSIBILITY.

If you have made it this far with my post, thanks so much. And for everyone who reached out to me over the past 24 hours, thank you so so so much, just to know you were there means so much to me and made me feel so much less alone, in the end we all have to do our own work to deal with emotional stress and suicidal feelings but at the very least just to know that we are not alone does help. Thanks for being there to support me, from the bottom of my heart.