Losing the will to live

I have been experiencing such intense emotions over the past two days I could not even log on to write or read on the computer yesterday and I just had a major melt down after seeing a friend at the market who made all kinds of promises about how when she came back to Canberra for two months we would spend lots of time catching up. I saw her once and then called three times and she promised to call me the next week and never did but it was not just that when I saw her it was like she was not even in her body and she seemed so vague as to whether she had got my messages and then said I am sorry but it was all just so so deeply heartbreaking and the thing that disturbed me most was my first reaction was deep anger and then just disbelief and then guilt because she obviously is not well so wasn’t it just very selfish to concentrate on my own disappointment. I got her a glass of water which she needed and then sat with her a while but towards the end I felt so disappointed in her I just walked away and burst into gut wrenching sobs at the fruit and vegetable store. I know something really deep down in my soul was triggered by all of this,… firstly it was like in my family that I did not exist, she did not see me and then it was like all those time with my so called ‘best friend’ in childhood who would fail to turn up when she said we would get together. I would be waiting about all excited and she just would not show up.

I noticed when I got home I felt like I wanted to die, the pain was just so intense. In fact writing this is helping me and I don’t feel as flooded any more but I really had very intense suicidal thoughts on the back of it. The sad thing that I also think triggered me is that she is the exact same age as my sister who died and the life seemed to have gone out of her. She was telling me her family were trying to convince her to go antidepressants. I think they must have succeeded, she was so dead in her face it broke my heart to see it.

I still have terrible pain all around my heart after writing this. She was the one friend who always go in touch before she went away to be with her family. She seemed to be erased when I saw her, I just cannot explain it. The empty hollowed out feeling I was left with really made me feel life is barren and so soulless and I would be far better off dead. Reading this back now after writing it I do believe I probably carried these feelings as an adolescent and began medicating them with alcohol at 14 and other drugs from 17 years on, something my nephew and I were talking about last night. The feeling of wanting to die is passing now. I am not sure if as an empath I absorbed some of her feelings just sitting with her for those 10 minutes or so. Or if this was my past pain at being neglected, unseen, disappointed, forgotten or ignored.

In any case it does help to write about it. My therapist told me recently she believes my friend is neither reliable or consistent, just like my Mum. Interesting that his is all coming up with Mercury retrograde in a lunar ruled sign, Cancer and slowing to station over the next four days. My friend is a Sun sign Cancer.

I also had a long conversation with my nephew last night and he has been hitting so much of his childhood pain and trauma but he also told me how much of his childhood he has ‘lost’ which is a key sign of trauma anyway. . He has been doing a lot of reading since coming off his meds for Bi Polar and he said he had two days in bed over the past week but only because past pain was coming up. I encouraged him to witness it and feel it and know that in time it would pass, what he lived through was so dark, my sister had psychotic episodes when she hurt the boys with some of her hallucinations, to the point her ex husband sent her back to us with a one way ticket when my nephew was only 3 or 4. He was sharing how hard it is to be unparented. and I could only validate him, his father also left he and his younger brother alone when he started an affair with a woman who never accepted his children… It made me realise how much pain those of us who are emotionally neglected or betrayed carry and its not always possible to ‘just get over it’ if you never had the holding and comfort it does leave real wounds and may attract us to wounded people. Its something we were speaking about last night as my nephew also beats himself up internally.

I will try to keep as connected to my nephew as I can. He cannot afford therapy and that troubles me as I know when memories start to emerge we need a safe place to share and unpack them. I am prepared to be there for him to a degree that I can also take care of myself even though his own sharing sparks my own wounds too, maybe its another reason things felt so so dark today.

After posting this I read the following by Thich Nhat Hanh and wow it resonated.

Suppose someone has made you suffer alot. You may beieve that you are the only one that suffers and that the other person is thoughtless or vindictive and thats why they made you suffer. But if you have the time and patience to look deeply, you will recognise the suffering in the other person. Because that person does not know how to handle their own suffering, they remain the first and biggest victim of their suffering. You are only victim number two.