I Write The Blogs That Make The Whole World Sing

I wrote this blog a while ago but a visit from my cousin (this blog post is definitely not about them) has prompted me to post it.

I have written this blog once a week for nineteen months religiously or close enough for the girls I date. That line makes me nostalgic for the misogyny of my youth but I will try to keep the regressions to a minimum today. I did have other blogs but I did not attend to them with any regularity but this blog, this blog I have written a post every week for nineteen months, give or take a week here or there.  I am pretty sure I only missed one week but in case I was wrong I did not want to give some anal retentive reader something to be anal retentive about.

In the course of time it has gone from a blog that only about twenty of my "Facebook Friends" a week read to a blog that is now read by an average of sixty different people every week and out of the sixty only about ten of them come to the blog through Facebook.  I wont bore you with a further drill down of the readership of my blog other than to say sometimes I do get as many as one hundred unique visitors a week, my vanity is appeased.

What is the point of the first two paragraphs?  Wasn't I supposed to include a thesis somewhere in the beginning somewhere?  I don't know, I consider it a great leap forward for me that I now proofread my posts before publishing.  A point, maybe not the point, but a point is coming next.  I write this blog for personal catharsis and I hope that my catharsis can help someone going through a similar circumstance.  I have said that before but that is not originally why I started this blog.

I started this blog because my family has a problem with communication.  I would tell one relative my current status and just like the children's game telephone by the time I would hear it back from a different relative it would be distorted, sometimes it made me laugh and sometimes it made me cry.  I am hesitant to bring up the second reason but I have always been honest in this forum on if I start writing in regards to who might be offended this blog would go from a source of relief to a source of stress.

The second reason I started this blog was also because of my family.  My family can be passive aggressive, martyrish, and narcissistic and I don't mean that in a good way.  I will just come out and say it, sometimes my family can be assholes and I don't mean that in a good way either.  There is a lot of anger here and I am a little apprehensive about tapping in for fear of what might come out.

Let us just start with a few facts, hopefully I am sounding like a dickhead, that is what I am going for.  Fact one I am not sorry I did not call you personally to give you an account of the latest happenings, I only have so much energy and making sure some narcissist is satisfied that I told them and not someone else about my health travails or at a minimum told them first or at least the same day is often not possible.  In person and on the phone I have had family accuse me of being a liar.  They just can not accept that I did not have the energy to call them, how is it possible I did not have the energy to call them, it is possible and I would appreciate some empathy and understanding (I come by being an asshole legitimately, I come from a long line of assholes and some days I am surrounded by assholes).  What I get is an attack that my lack of calling and communication is a intentional slight and how could I attack them, how could I do that to them?

It did that because I do not care about, your fears are correct, I do not like and I have never liked you.  My entire illness is a fabrication in order to give me cover while I continue to slight you at every turn.  I hope this admission gives you some peace.  Sidenote: there might be some that would say this blog post is passive aggressive and why didn't I tell people directly?  In response all I can say is if you think this blog post is about you it is.

PS If you want to know how I am doing send me a message or call and stop being a dick.

Not A Passive Aggressive Letter To My Sister

This post is not passive aggressive, other than in the obvious way that I am posting on a blog instead of talking to someone in person.

This is to my sister (not the one in the hospital).  I told her that I was not going to write another blog post about her and at the time I said it I had no intention to do so.  I am going to switch it up here and write an open letter to my sister.

Sister when you were last at my house you brought up a blog post that I had mentioned you in.  It was from quite a while ago and was surprised that it affected you that it was still in forefront of your mind.  When I sat down this morning to write a few things that had been simmering since your arrival and departure into and from the city of salt, I wanted to communicate with you and it seemed obvious that it should be a blog post because it gets through to you.

My first impulse was to dissect every slight and wrong that I felt you had committed and get deep down into the semantics and have a really satisfying fight/argument with you in a public forum so neither of us can place a spin on the results.  I did indeed write two blog posts prior to this one that were angry and full of detail and then all of the sudden I wasn't angry anymore.

Dad is dead and mom and I are not far behind him.

I have to prioritize now and being angry with you is a waste of time for us both.

 I do not know you very well.  I am six years younger than you and was only twelve when you escaped our family.  That is how I think about you going away to college when you were eighteen and I am in no way implying that is how you feel but that is how I felt/feel.

As adults I would not claim to know you, that does not mean I do not love and care about you as my sister but we have not had a relationship as an adult.  From my perspective this is not an attack just a statement of fact.  I will not assign blame as to the who or why that is the case just that it is the case.

I love to exaggerate to tell a humorous story, I like to see people smile and feel like I am a positive part of their lives.  I do not exaggerate about my health, in many ways I am still in denial about how the illness has effected me and that being said when I talk about my health no matter how bleak I am sugar coating it for myself.  I do not know the a word that means the opposite of exaggerate but that would be what I do about my health.

We are not close, you do not share your secrets with me and I do not share my secrets with you and neither of us is going to live long enough for that to be the case but what could happen going forward is we set aside our preconceived notions and stop expecting each other to understand the meaning that is implied by the words we say, we do not know each other well enough for that.  Lets treat each other like the strangers we are, I am not angry twelve year old and you are not a awkward eighteen year old theater geek.  That is what we where the last time we were together for any amount of time, that was thirty years ago and I am thinking we both might have changed since then.

My girlfriend is not in a coma but my sister is in a psychiatric hospital

I have talked about my sister being in the hospital before but I have never come out and said it, my sister has a mental illness.  I have been aggressive in my stance that mental illness should be treated like any other illness and that there should be no stigma associated with it.  Funnily enough I have never mentioned that my sister has been not in a generic hospital but a psychiatric hospital.  I have gone into great detail about my illness in hopes of helping others but I would not mention that my sister has a mental illness, that would have helped others, maybe more than my regular ramblings.

When someone has a serious mental illness psychiatrists, especially psychiatrists at in patient hospital, want to treat that mental illness with drugs until the person is able to function "normally" on a day to day level.  They are not real concerned with quality of life.  I have experienced this same phenomenon with my own doctors, they see a serious physical illness and they want to treat the illness to make sure I stay alive for as long as possible and often regardless of my quality of life.

I know that when I bring up quality of life issues with my doctors we can have a conversation.  Some doctors are willing and engaged to converse about quality of life and some are not but they will at least have the conversation.  I do not know if that is the case for people with a mental illness.  Can someone with a mental illness say I would rather be crazy than deal with these side effects, can they say that their quality of life is so diminished that I need to try other therapies for their mental illness?  I have a feeling that those requests may be brushed aside because after all the person is mentally ill and can they really judge what their quality of life is?

My sister demonstrates a pattern among many people with a mental illness, she does not like to take her meds.  This happens with other diseases the most famous example I can think of is Steve Jobs rejecting the medication that was suggested for treatment of his cancer.  That being said it is more common in the realm of mental illness.  My sister has bipolar disorder and in order to treat her bipolar disorder successfully she needs to take some drugs that are heavy duty and have serious and unpleasant side effects and periodically my sister decides not to take those drugs.

I understand all of this on an abstract level but on the concrete level of day to day life I am angry.  All though I preach that mental illness should be treated the same as any other illness but I still think couldn't my sister choose to hold it together at least until my dads' estate was closed or Hell maybe until I die?  Stress takes a toll on my health in real tangible ways and doesn't my sister care about me enough to hold off on being crazy so I could have less stress?  I know these are all bullshit questions and my sister does not choose to be mentally ill but she does make a choice not to take her meds.

What weight should I give to my sister not choosing to take her meds?  When she is on her meds should she be held accountable for choosing to stop them?  Is she herself enough when she is medicated that I should be angry with her?  I do not know the answer to these questions, Hell for all I know these questions are all rhetorical and I am too stupid to realize it.

When my sister was in the psych hospital either last year or the year before I was talking to her on the phone and I was angry and I asked why wont you take your drugs, your choices impact people that care about you and I worry about you.  She told me I did not have to worry about her anymore, that she had relieved me of all responsibility.  Is it bad that sometimes I wish I could just not worry about her?

All I know is that my eyes are heavy, heavy even though I am taking pills to treat narcolepsy.  I am sad, I am worried, and I feel the weight of the situation.  I have not talked about it much in this forum but I have had a decline in my health over the last few weeks or maybe two months or so, it is hard for me to judge.  I can feel the stress take away energy, energy I probably never even had in the first place, energy that is probably just an illusion from my narcolepsy drugs and you know what?  It was a shitty illusion, I did not have much energy even in the illusion of the life I lead.

A friend of my sister and my other sister have handled the situation this time and I know it is out of kindness and concern for my health that I am kept out of the minute by minute play by play of her illness.  Silence gives you a lot of time to worry, I worry about my sister and I wish she was well.

Caregivers

Below is a link to an article written by a wife of a sick man.  I imagine my wife feels some if not all of what she is talking about and I hope everyone that reads this would remember that care taking is harder than being sick.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/caring-for-my-sick-husband-i-am-going-through-untold-suffering/article19163110/