In Reference to Memory

I think of you often. Happy Birthday my Prince.


I wish I could know you.

Luv ya bud.
K

If I remember correctly it has been exactly one year since I last posted. I wanted to come to post to say Happy Birthday bud. I hope you are doing ok. I hope you are healthy well and Happy.

I wish we were brave enough to talk.

I wish so many things.

If you still have my address use the bloody thing. Write me a letter I will write one back if you want me to.

Be safe boy.

Luv you
K

I have been away from LJ for a while, but I had a lot of shit to fix in my head and life, and I couldn't do it constantly reading the way I was and am, but it was important enough to stop by and say Happy Birthday C.

I know you have vanished again, I should have expected it, but whatever, your life is yours and I hope that you are enjoying it. However, I feel that you got angry at me because I couldn't write as you wanted me to, but I could only write in so many ways that I woke up, went to work, came home and went to bed. I know, my life is a sad, sorry state.

It also is a bit bothersome that this is the only portal you have into me and my life. I gave you my phone number, you know my address, etc, but you chose not to employ them, but once. I know we are more than words through a page, I would conquer my fear if you did. I think we are both worth that. I am writing this now because I know it is very unlikely you will ever see it. Don't get angry at me bud, but thoughts are thoughts. I love you still and you are a part of me, but we are a hard thing to maintain.

Love ya bud, be well, god please be well.

K

Happy Birthday Randy. Sorry I haven't responded to your comments, but I have been trying to stay away from the computer for a while, but I didn't want to forget to tell ya HBD!!

11:24hrs. Ok, I just slid that pill down my gullet.



sigh...here we go.

So two days ago I finally gave in and went to the doctor about all this shit. Do you know how hard it is to admit that you can't handle the shit going on in your own head? It is fucking horribly torturous. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but having to put your weapons on safe, clear the breeches and remove your magazine, run that white flag up the staff and stand there like a dolt in full view with your hands visible waiting for whomever comes to take control of your life is pretty fucking terrifying, especially when you have been waging this war with yourself for ...just about your whole life.

I have surrendered twice before. The late 90s and early 2000s were a most terrible time period and I can honestly say, I nearly didn't make it to 2001. I have been waging non-stop war with my own brain for the past 17 years telling myself that I WILL NOT allow myself to get to a point where I have to medicate myself (again) to get through the rebellion my own brain has embarked upon. I have failed. As-so-far I have successfully fought every winter and other errant times when depression and anxiety decide they don't like the standard life I lead, but due to recent circumstances with work, money issues, losing two jobs I liked and the fact that they both hit at exactly the same time, I couldn't win this fight.

The doctor and I spoke and we did the standard diagnosis etc and now I have a brand new medication that will apparently give me a hand, settle the brain a bit and help me to recover my balance. I hope it will...but...

I didn't start it yesterday because I had a commitment last night that I needed to attend, lodge practice meeting, for which I had to take a Lorazapam before going as I had an anxiety attack about an hour before I left in anticipation. I was worried if side affects started that it would make it so I had to break that commitment which would have just added to my...problem, so I am to start today. Yet, I am sat here, it is 10:36 hours and I still haven't taken it. I have tried thrice, but couldn't bring myself to do it, as it would be a physical representation of that defeat I admitted to by going to the doctor....or is it that wall again? Who the fuck knows. One of the side affects has been told me is that it might HEIGHTEN my anxiety for a while, WTF?? Can I handle that? I am afraid of the side affects, but I know I can't continue as I am. Uggg.

According to the online user ratings I have about a 63% chance that this medication will do what it is said to do and work wonders. I hope that is the case. I also have a high chance of getting bad nausea about 15 minutes after taking it most days, which I might not be able to take, I already deal with that, why would I settle for it still being around with the medications? I am however at this time, ready to try voodoo if that might help.

OK, I have the kettle boiling and a bowl of cereal waiting. I have read taking it with food is not necessary, but it might help mitigate the nausea if I do, so I will.

Just the need to take this medication itself is causing me a near anxious episode FFS.

The water is boiling.........here I go.

Tuesday, 16 May 2017

I am about a week late for Mental Health Awareness Week, but I hope we all can still speak openly and candidly about it. I see a lot of headlines out there that it's good to talk about mental health and people saying it's good to talk about it, but you never see people actually doing it and so very many people suffer in silence, so here we go, “Mister Worf, lower the shields”. I know I am going to regret this.

Now for the Brutal Honesty. Hard to write this, but it's part of the therapy.

Listening to music helps.

They aren’t always external, and they most certainly aren’t always a recognisable thing, reasons. Often times you can see through the fog and point directly at a thing and say “THAT!”, that is what has thrown me off balance and is causing me all sorts of shit right now; shit being thoughts that you had convinced yourself defeated years ago, feelings alien and frightening, incomprehensible physical reactions that make you feel everything but right, or fine. Often times, though, you can point at everything and it will someway be having an affect, and other times, you can point all you want and you are shooting craps hoping you’ll win. Sometimes throwing the dice is all you can do because anything else is just beyond your current mental, physical and spiritual fortitude for the causes are within. You are simply incapable of anything more than a token gesture towards normality and wellness. Sometimes, even, wearing that mask you wear that makes people think you’re OK becomes more of a weight than telling the truth, which itself creates all sorts of awkward, never mind the shame; people look at you differently, that hurts.

Rumination, dwelling and the mental circuit of trying to discover exactly what is going on just adds to the pressure and muddles the good effort to solve that which you strive to solve. People ask, “well, what exactly is it that has you in this state?”. This just adds to the heat that threatens to boil over the pot because, THAT is exactly the dæmon that eludes every mental effort and process. The knowledge that you don’t know is frightening. You question everything. Its maddening and infuriating that your own mind is the causation of everything that isn’t right at this time. You are cognisant of the fact that something is wrong. You know your shit ain’t right. You understand that normal is not a word to dwell upon at this point in time. When simply committing to a daily routine as basic as hygiene, sustenance and practicality is like walking through the most wicked of snow storms, draining, exhausting with complete lack of vision and warmth, life gets pretty fucking tough, and concentrating on anything other than what is weighing you down or even directly in front of your face is damn near impossible, and actually having the ability to rationalise nearly anything at the time might as well be myth or dreams of wealth. It’s like everything is on mute and you’re trying to see life through a scrambled TV screen. The tertiary effects that stems from this madness are myriad and just add their own weight upon those already drowning you in self-disgust and fear. Your state affects the state of other things, like friendships, family relations and, in today’s climate, most threateningly, your employment. (I have the most understanding and tolerant supervisors in the world, Thank God for them).

The most difficult and torturous question you dread is when someone asks you, “How are you?”

When you awaken and rise, struggle through the daily hell of spending an hour convincing yourself that you’re fine, that you’re not having a heart attack or stroke, (Yes, I know it sounds stupid, silly and ridiculous, but the struggle is real), then chipping away at the physical results of like wildly shaking hands, chest pains, migraines, feeling as if it is 55° in your flat, that feeling you are going to either pass out, throw-up or both, then trying your best to groom yourself for human presentation, trying to adjust your perception so that living isn’t in third person, or through a lens like you’re watching a movie, and actually walking through that fog ridden gelatin-like wall that is your ever present nemesis that dampens every single effort at anything you make, you walk out your door and fight your way to work surprised you didn’t die on the way because you don’t remember a second of the drive. Sometimes you can’t even make yourself get that far...and you hate yourself even more. You only imagine what your co-workers think of you. If you win that battle and succeed in getting to work you’re exhausted by the time you arrive, you encounter dozens of people, workplace politics, a job you never wanted and were forced into (You constantly wonder “am I grieving for what I have lost?” Gods Chedoke I miss you), sick and dying children, viruses and sickness’ surrounding you, your fear that the state you’re in will cause you to err or make mistakes that can very well kill a child (I never signed up for this), and your ever-present feeling of utter pure disappointment in self and existence…. you might begin to understand the total war people wage against themselves when their mental health is broken. The brain does fucked up things YO!! And when you can’t get to the bottom of it, you disappoint yourself knowing you have overcome this monster time and time again through life and yet, here it is again, larger and more fierce than ever raging with ugliness and vicious ability to completely erase all your past efforts, tearing away any semblance of balance you have achieved, and stood upon you an incomprehensible weight you’re powerless to thwart or move; you surrender. This beast sustains the whirlpool which encompasses your world sucking the everything from your everything ever getting deeper and deeper, faster and faster, and every single effort and thing of goodness gets ripped away and taken from you. You are destitute, trying to cope knocking back Gravol®, Benadryl® and lorazepam when needed to calm those physical reactions you abhor, it gives you a minimum semblance of functionality...most of the time, good sedative, nice sedative.

No matter what effort you put forth your mind and body rebel. Your thoughts betray you depression encompasses you, the sun is gone and nothing but bitter disappointment and self loathing remain as you want nothing more than...not to be. You thank your divinity that your logic, ethics and beliefs hold your emotions in check and your journey into your past selves through your past writing help to mitigate those dangerous thoughts, the Seirēn of mental health, presenting themselves to you. Your small victory is motivation, however so small it is, though you still feel that you are nothing but a disappointment, a burden to everyone, yourself inclusive; you try your best to not see their face as they look at you…you feel even more shitty when they tell you you’re not…(you withdraw even further; your dark corner is never deep enough to hide you). You have many masks though, and sometimes even convince yourself, for a time, that they are you.

You know that as long as you realise and understand that you have tools to work with to help yourself, that you are not totally far-gone. There is a light in the East, a small speck of something that helps you help yourself, if not stand upright, to at least be able to say to yourself, “I need help”. This is OK, it will cause tears and all sorts of misfuction within your pride, your sense of independence and your ability to rationalise your own defensive methods, but you know what you need, and that is defense in itself. Once you say those words to yourself, even though it is still dark, dreary and that omnipresent wall that holds you fast from everything you try to do is still there, at least you know the road will be less rocky and you will trip less, even though you can’t see where you’re going except ever onward towards that small speck of light you see. You hope whilst you stumble forward that your reality will stay sturdy beneath you long enough for you to exorcise these dæmons again. You will emerge, embarrassed, shamed and afraid because it will be a new reality, but it WILL be reality and you will have succeeded where so many have failed. You just hope to God that those around you don’t treat you like glass, because that makes you look inwards again…are you still broken? ....a vicious circle. You still see those dæmons and monsters beyond your defenses, but you recognise them and their lours and you proactively drive yourself to be steadfast and abide in your newfound light. You hope the journey was worth it, because illogically the aforementioned ‘not being’ you so sorely avoided, for 3.14 seconds, you secretly yearned for. But, at the end of it all, if you can concentrate long enough to write a editorial like this, things are perhaps brighter than one perceives; that is one of the tricks your mind plays, it convinces you things are worse than they really are.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
- Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes writing with brutal honesty helps provide that light.

There you have it, disambiguation.

I need a tea, and a nap, and will try hard as hell to resist the compulsion to delete this.

Mental health, talk about people, it's the only way we can break that stigma.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” Mr. Marcus Aurelius


easier said than done my old friend.

I thought I was ok, after having several days off, i went nearly all day yesterday without an anxiety attack, I thought i was good to go back to work....but no.

I got up this morning with this sense of impending doom, my body was shaky, i was llight headed and I felt as if I wasn't real. I took a Lorazapam to try and settle myself down and it just didn't work. I changed my tea to decafe to not make it worse and it didn't help. i couldn't even hold the cup my hands were shaking so badly. even writing this is a terrible excersise in control. I have to defeat this enemy lest it overcome me.

It was if there was a physical wall standing before me keeping me from doing what my rational mind knew I had to do....by 05:15 I still hadn't done anything I need to do for work, like shower, lunch and etc so I was already beyond the point of getting there on time...which just made me more mad at myself and the hatred poured forth. I only have 3 Lorazapam left and that too is causing anxiety......fucking hell, how did I become this monster? Though I have had anxiety for several years now it was well under control. I lost all that control mid-Novemberish? December? fucking hell, I don't know.

I need to speak with my doctor today. I am going to lose my job if this continues.

god damn it I hate myself.

It has been exactly one year today that Zen (Karl) decided to withdraw his friendship from me. The time has really flown. Our last communication was via email on 24 April 2016. He and I had been friends since 1995; what a shame.

What happened?

My words are going to be everywhere here guys, so please tolerate my everywhereness as I am just venting as it comes out, no organisation here.

Last year at this time we had had plans to do what is called our "Proving" of our 3rd Degree together in both my Lodge here in Hamilton, and his Lodge in Peterborough. It would be him, me and his friend Spencer. We left the plans to the respective Masters of our Lodges to plan and make happen after we floated the idea to them. The first mistake was that they communicated via facebook instead of some formal avenue, but that is hindsight. My WM tried thrice to get things rolling, Zen did as well, and I did too. But for some reason other than a short one sentence the Peterborough Lodge just wasn't communicating so a fortnight before the Proving was supposed to have happened, and having not heard anything from the Peterborough Lodge my WM decided to create a game-plan and pitched it in the joint Fb chat we had going. He proposed that we three would present our work to the Lodge and then I would give my obligation.

Zen didn't like the idea of only me giving my obligation as it made me look more important than the other two Brothers present and from a certain perspective he might be right. I brought the subject up with my WM and he said he thought thats what the other two guys would want because the obligation was a very personal thing that aught be shared in their home Lodge,(He wasn't able to tell this to Zen though, because Zen refused to call him). I told him to tell my WM how he felt about that and recommend a change, but instead of speaking with my WM Zen just let it out that the plan was unacceptable and treated the brothers differently and that there was shenanigans afoot (<-- my words, not his), and that he wouldn't do it as proposed. He did not propose an alternative however and the rant was actually very strongly worded (all of this in the group chat we had going).

I asked Zen to call my WM and inquire as to the reasons for the proposed process and tell him that he too wanted to recite his obligation. Zen wouldn't do it however, he wouldn't call my WM to inquire as to what the words in the email really meant, and had he interpreted them correctly. He made an assumption as to what everything meant and ran with it, leaving me in a very awkward position to try and get to the bottom of things. I acted as a middle man betwixt them for three or 4 phone calls and all it would have taken was Zen making one single fucking phone call to speak to the man himself, but he wouldn't fucking do it. What the fuck? why? how hard would it have been to just call and ask "what exactly did you mean here?" That one simple sentence would have corrected everything and made what turned into a fucking mountain of crap into nothing but a "see you next week." I ask Zen three different times to call my WM, he just wouldn't do it. Instead he backed out of the proving saying it was unfair and unequal. I was irritated as all fuck at this point for the way he was behaving...most of it via facebook. I was embarrased to all hell. I can't rightly remember the last time I had felt like that. I was so fucking irritated I just shut my facebook down completely as a result. I tend to do that every other year or so when FB drama get out of hand.

The next day I get an email from Zen of a screen shot of FB messages he tried to send me after I had shut mine down. He thought I had deleted and blocked him. I was incredibly disappointment he even considered that, knowing me for 20 years. He should know what I would do and not do.
He then tells me that my behaviour is what is the saddest thing of all of it, that I would continue to do my Proving after him and Spencer had backed out for being treated unfairly, that I was being a bad friend. My first thought was that he was joking and I was "what the actual fuck?" He wanted me to back out of my Proving because he made an assumption based upon the words of an email without confirming what the words actually meant, or even attempting to communicate with the author to either confirm or understand what was written.

For Zen to back out was zero risk what-so-ever. He would just stay at his Peterborough Lodge and do his proving in his own time. For me however, I would be backing out of a proving in my own Lodge, the one that initiated, passed and raised me to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason. I risk insulting every single brother in that lodge and my city being a small and close-knit masonic community, risked becoming outcast in my entire city, based solely upon Zen's perceived slight, based upon words written in an email he refused to confirm or even communicate with the author of those words. The risk was everything to me and nothing to him, yet he ended a friendship because he expected me to withdraw.

If I actually believed he was being slighted and treated with inequity I would have dropped out immediately. Not a hesitation. But I did not, and still do not feel he was treated badly. Again, all that had to be done was ONE SIMPLE PHONE CALL that for some unknown reason he refused to make; I was practically begging him. I felt humiliated supplicating myself before him like that to be ignored. He jumped to a MASSIVE conclusion and ignored every attempt I made to remedy the situation by stubbornly sticking to that assumption knowing how frustrated I was. Knowing me like he does, does he really think I wouldn't support him if I thought he was being mistreated? His friendship with me, and seeing me trying so hard to level things out should have indicated to him that SOMETHING wasn't as he was seeing it, I guess he didn't trust me enough.

In the end, he and his friend still pulled out. He withdrew his friendship from me thinking I had betrayed him by doing my proving without him. He thinks my Lodge treated him unfairly. I think he treated my Lodge and especially my Worshipful Master of my Lodge unfairly by drawing conclusions without investigation. He did not perform his due diligence and acted upon an assumption with very little concrete evidence. He treated me unfairly by putting me in the middle and trying to force me to make a choice to stand with him when I didn't agree with him that he was being treated unfairly. What kind of friend does that? making all or nothing demands; it was incredibly selfish. I don't think he considered my feelings once throughout the whole situation.

So now I have lost my best friend, but if he treated me this way over something so petty as a misunderstood email...maybe its a good thing I learned this lesson about him now, than suffer it when it was really important sometime in the future. If he wouldn't even give me the benefit of the doubt over this, thank the gods I haven't had depend on him when it really mattered. He was my best friend, now after a year...I am not sure what I feel, but what I do know is that every week that goes by he matters less and less. I am not even sure if the friendship is salvageable anymore.

These are my thoughts and feelings. I am sure Zen feels differently, as is his right. I just hope he is happy in life, even if we aren't friends.