lovaliss's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - I take it back. I don't feel brave. Or maybe I don't feel like I want to be brave. I thought I was doing so well until this week when I woke up to the news that a fellow activist, professor, and friend of all my friend's died. A cancer survivor that ends up drowning alone in his own hot tub and no one knows what happened or why. And his brother found him. The same brother who's wife was killed last summer by a truck while she was cycling. It is like a fucked up cruel joke...a hot tub? A fucking hot tub? The stupidest thing ever...so stupid they made a movie called "Hot Tub Time Machine" because that's how dumb hot tub's are. Everyone thinks he's going to die of cancer and then he gets his foot and leg amputated and lives and moves on like it was just a little hurdle, competes in the para-Olympics...and then he drowns quietly, alone in his hot tub that was broken last week when he posted a message on Facebook asking if anyone knew of an electrician--his hot tub wouldn't turn on. I didn't realize how disturbed I was by all of it and how it was setting off as a giant trigger over my own brother drowning until I found myself awake 58 hours later hallucinating and seeing a dancing shadow cowboy (think "Take On Me" music video style when drawings come to life). It started out harmless enough, an all nighter Weds night which I ended up not doing any work or studying in, but instead researching "Sibling Survivors" and "Sibling Grief" and "Sibling loss in adolescents" and "Long term effects in childhood sibling loss" and discovered I was a textbook classic case...and due to the family responses and environment surrounding the loss, an extra special textbook case for the top tier of truly fucked up adult sibling survivors. There are a lot of things I've tried to forgot or have actually repressed about the time after he died, and those articles brought back so many things, made me remember so many details, connect so many correlations with how I am now even more. I thought it was relieving to know, in fact it was to an extent. And I sent a lot of the journal articles to my sister and she called me at 7am in excited disbelief and shock after reading some of them and we were like, "Holy shit, yeah, that's us, they just nailed everything about us and how mom and dad acted after that and how we acted as a result and blah blah blah..." Needless to say I didn't want to go to sleep--I had entered a phase where I didn't feel like I was in total reality, and I kind of liked it. Plus I just had so much to do that I found myself still awake on Thursday night. Already my mind wasn't functioning properly, and so it seemed rational to me at that point that if I had already been awake so long, 36 hours at this point, then if I decided to go to sleep now and then wake up and do my midterm then I risked not waking up since I'd be so tired...so I should just go for it and stay awake and do another all nighter. So I did. Which was a bad idea. And it was around early Friday morning that I started to hallucinate, but I didn't allow myself to sleep--my mind at that point had decided it was fun and that I wanted to stay in it, and that if I went to sleep then all this stuff would come crashing down and it would be real when I woke up. So I should just make sure I didn't have to wake up. Logically I knew it was inevitable I'd have to go to sleep--but I just decided I'd go as long as I could avoiding it. But the more exhausted I got the more it was all already there anyway--only I was so tired I felt emotionally incapable of dealing with all of it. I tried to go to work Friday night, at this point having been awake 58 hours but due to my immediate outburst about a passive aggressive note on the "TO DO" list which led to me weeping and saying "Can I just tell you...I"ve been awake for 58 hours...and I'm SOOOO tired!!! And I'm seeing a little shadow dog out of the corner of my eye...and so I'm sorry I yelled at you about the list..." I was sent home to get some sleep. That's all. I feel unstable ever since. Panic attacks keep sneaking up on me. I feel like I can't be in public. I feel like I don't want to interact with anyone. I feel super depressed and sad over all these old things I had pushed out of my mind until the other night when they came back in vivid detail and feeling. I guess though, I have no choice but to feel them now, repressing them more or again won't do any good. I just have to feel them now since I was unwilling to feel them before. But it's unfortunate that it's right at the end of my senior year, and it makes me feel like I don't care at all about any of it and that just to keep going day to day is exhausting...and I don't care about my projects...which makes me feel guilty because other people are counting on me...but I just can't find the energy to do it all--just getting by is good enough because it's my best at the moment. 3:20 p.m. - 2012-03-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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