Really struggling

I am having such an anxious day today.. I got news my sister was put into aged care yesterday, I cannot visit but I tried to find out the situation.. Things with my nephew went badly all of those months ago and it makes me feel very scared to reach out and I am questioning every thing at the moment. After all this is his mother and it must be affecting him a lot even if at times he takes the power over attitude towards her and sometimes says things about her situation in a contemptuous way.. I had a chat to a family friend yesterday who he contacted to let her know since obviously he no longer feels like connecting with me.

I have witnessed the entire trajectory with my sister.. There were countless times I pleaded with her to seek another way, to not put her total care in the hands of others without doing her own research and trying alternatives and the family friend always says to me my sister seems to show no interest in learning more or even connecting with others who struggle with similar issues.. we even have a relative who went through being injured badly by psychiatric meds and managed to do some research on our epigenetic weaknesses and took a better pathway and I offered that help to my sister back in April but she was not interested.

Whenever I visited her in the psychiatric facility she always looked at the other patients as if they were strangers, she was not interested in participating in any art and kept to her self. It makes me so sad to see her so isolated and not able to reach out, but I am sure she has her reasons.

I have to keep remembering that what happens to my sister is out of my hands, that I am not responsible for her choices.. I have shared so much about my ongoing visits to her in my blog especially over the past 4 years since Mum died. At times all I could do was cry and I got frustrated trying to help her when some things I did were not acceptable to her, such as trying countless times to shop for clothes for her that endlessly got rejected. My Mum and my brother got caught up in this futile attempt to help her as well. And seeing her so traumatized and frozen and almost catatonic with fear on the brink of that third course of ECT in April nearly killed me.. She had me running this way and that as in her confused state she thought her i phone was broken and asked me to take it into the Apple store, that day I had a full on panic attack in the toilet and a woman had to help me to breathe.

How do I manage to let go of my sister? At times I do manage it, at others an inner voice tells me I have not done enough but friends do not agree. One by one they have been frozen out too.

I must stay close to higher power today. At least she is not alone at home and vulnerable to her own depression all alone but still there seems to be no nurturing adult that wants to show up inside of my sister to help her.. And I am aware that we are inching closer and closer to the anniversary of my father dying on 8 Jan, therapy is on a break today I could not even eat breakfast so I took myself off to the shops in order to at least be moving after Simon came to walk Jasper.. I ended up shopping for a bit too much food and then cleaning the car out to stop the anxiety, but a lovely highlight was listening to actor Ethan Hawke being interviewed on the book show about his latest novel.

There are no easy answers.. My second cousin reminds me my sister’s soul is on a journey of some kind.. and perhaps I need to accept that but I keep worrying about anything I may have done to make things worse…

I am also worried as the more I focus on this the darker the place I get taken into.. it then becomes hard to even feel happy that others are having a happier time, I get a wave of resentment.. Maybe I just need to become the observer of all of this happening inside of me so I do not get as swept up as I can do inside my head and thoughts and removed from the positive present. I write about it in order to get some of the anxiety out my system and I know if I chatted to my therapist she would be asking me what something lovely is that I can do for me today. So for now I will try to change my focus to that, never the less my heart aches for my sister and her painful situation.

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