One day, you will sit alone and look through old photos that seem like they were taken just yesterday but really, those moments are so far away. They’ve become memories, and a life that you once lived… Treasure good and happy, joy and thrill filled moments…indulge in those moments – whether experienced with those you care for or experienced alone – while you’re taking the photos and living the experience. Make them count. When they become just a memory, never look back at them with regret, because in those moments you were alive. You were living – not just existing. And being alive and not just existing is what life is really all about about. It is always “the good old days,” in one way or another… Never forget that.
“You’re gonna miss this
You’re gonna want this back
You’re gonna wish these days hadn’t gone by so fast
These are some good times
So take a good look around
You may not know it now
But you’re gonna miss this
You’re gonna’ miss this
Yeah
You’re gonna’ miss this…”
To those of you who have commented on different posts, dm’d, texted, or even called and I haven’t been able to speak to you with everything going on, I’m sorry and I truly appreciate your kindness and your concern for my mom, for my son, for my family, and for me. It means so much – even if I can’t respond right away I see you and feel you there. Love y’all…so very much. It breaks my heart open to be able to receive, and thus continue to give, love…and have hope. ❤️
It might be one thirty in the morning but it is still Sunday, so Reverend Sister Christy is going to preach. We having church.
Today’s topic is: Don’t give up a good apple in your life just because you see a blemish and mistake it for a worm.
Misery may love company. But you know what miserable people really want? To be heard even in their silence. To be cared about even when they’re misunderstood. To be thought of even though they may not want to be seen. Even if they can’t or don’t want to express themselves or respond…they need to know they still matter, not tossed to the side because they or their struggles make you uncomfortable.
Why? Because disconnection is not humanly reasonable even if a human being doesn’t have the ability to express themselves – and all people are not going to express themselves in ways you can understand when they DO express themselves. We are meant to be a collective, supporting each other, even if it’s just with a comforting smile and soft eyes, or a simple, “Hey there, I was thinking about you and I’m here if you need me.”
People don’t necessarily always want or know how to express themselves. They may not necessarily want that. But what everyone wants and needs, whether they express it or not, is to have the option.
So get down off your high horse, Herod Agrippas of the world, and sit down and LET PEOPLE BE EXPRESSIVE in whatever ways they can be even if you can’t understand those expressions – and as long as they’re not abusing you in any way, if you don’t have anything nice to say or don’t know what to say? Just say so.
Stop punishing people just because you have your own issues and double standards, Herod Agrippas of the world. Get rid of those double standards, and if you have your own issues? Work on them rather than personifying them.
I won’t even say “as long as they’re not hurting you,” because you know what? SOMETIMES THE TRUTH HURTS. Abuse is different. But just because someone’s behavior or choices bothers you, or you don’t agree with them, doesn’t make them invalid or constitute a behaviors they should be punished for by someone with their own flaws and faults. NONE of us are perfect – and for all who would argue that the biblical God was, he himself was not perfect and he KNEW that after he screwed up “man” (see https://lifehopeandtruth.com/god/who-is-god/genesis-6/).
Here’s the thing: You aren’t living someone else’s experience. THEY ARE. So be kind in the ways you can be, even if it is to explain to them that you can’t be of help to them. Be thoughtful. Add some good to the world by shutting up and just offering to listen, even if they don’t want to talk. TRUST ME – that matters. It counts. It’s worth the effort in the long term, even if it angers them or seemingly stresses them, if you truly care for them.
No. Don’t give up a good apple in your life just because you see a blemish and mistake it for a worm.
I can’t, and that’s ok to know and to accept and to feel and to express. That’s what this post is about. I know I haven’t really updated here and none of you will know what is going on in full but basically my mom has been living with me and… Well…
There comes a point where you have to accept what you can not do and stop letting people keep trying to convince you that you can do in their “motivational” ways. Sure, they’re trying to help.
But when I say I CAN NOT DO THIS BY MYSELF I need people to understand something: i am doing this BY MYSELF and it’s not working – and it’s not about not wanting to. It’s not about not believing in myself. It’s not about the inconvenience. It’s not even about my own mental health (though it should be). It’s about LITERALLY not being able to care for someone with these needs BY MYSELF, and raise my son and care properly for him. I’m not sorry that that will always come first. I AM legally responsible for him, he’s a minor. And he can’t help me with this. And…she’s not really even my mother. Never has been, by blood or otherwise.
It’s about debilitating migraines. It’s about health issues I had long before this ever started.
It’s about I PHYSICALLY am not strong enough to help someone who refuses to help me help them – lifting dead weight every five minutes to go to the bathroom? Nope. Can’t handle it. Especially with a migraine. Getting her in the tub? Impossible. So we improvise with bowls of water and a tub chair OUTSIDE the tub. Getting her to eat? Also impossible. Which doesn’t help with her strength issues. Getting her to get out of the bed and sit up without arguing and telling me how disappointed and ashamed of me my dad would be that I am trying to make her do something she doesn’t want to do – on his birthday yesterday, when she knew how upset I was – because she KNOWS what she’s doing and she just wants to hurt me.
This is not the dementia. This is just her being hateful and stubborn, naturally. Does she even have dementia? No. Not according to the doctors. She checks out fine. So this is just an angry, bitter, mean, frail and weak old woman who needs help with physical things 24/7 and is being verbally and emotionally abusive to the only person who can keep her out of the one place she doesn’t want to go – the nursing home.
Can I even get her in a nursing home? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this much – I’m going forward with trying because the few people who have even dealt with her for a half hour at her home or dealt with her at church or even the beauty shop over the past few years have straight up told me that she is faking a lot of this and how she acts when I’m not around.
When my helping you hurts me to a point where I am literally sick all the time? I can’t help you anymore. And I will no longer try. This is my honest, heartbreaking statement: if she wants to do it her way, I will take her to the hospital and leave her there and refuse to care for her. They can’t put her on the street. I don’t know what they’ll do with her but it’s not my concern – I have NO binding, legal obligation to be responsible for her. Why? Because she won’t LET me – and maybe that’s been a blessing in disguise.
She’s already getting bedsores because she won’t move and wants to lay in piss diapers and fights me to change her. It absolutely ridiculous.
I don’t care about how it looks if I do take care of her or if I don’t. It’s not about that. I don’t want accolades for doing it, and I don’t give a damn if people think I’m horrible for not being able to do it. But I can’t do it. I can’t care for someone with these needs BY MYSELF, and raise my son and care properly for him. I’m not sorry that that will always come first. I AM legally responsible for him, he’s a minor. And he can’t help me with this.
It’s always going to be a never ending battle I’m never ever going to win. I have finally accepted that.
Now. To take more meds and pray my head quits and I can fucking breathe for five minutes without feeling nauseous and debilitated.
We have to stop shrinking ourselves so that others feel bigger and better than they really are. We have to stop doing things when we don’t want to do them, giving things we don’t want to give, accepting things we don’t want to take, and apologizing for things that are the essence of who we are when who we are has never done anything but love the person we are apologizing to.
Apologies should come from people who have actually done something wrong…and even from those people, apologies and respect shouldn’t have to be begged for. The best apology anyone can offer is not in words but in changing their behavior without us having to remind them what we need every time we turn around – the best apology is them just respecting what we ask without us having to ask it more than one time.
Is there anything you feel I need to apologize to you for? Is there anything I need to or can do for you that I don’t already do? Is there anything you want from me that I don’t realize you want? What can I do to contribute to your happiness, and to life you up, today (or any day)?
These are the questions people who claim to love us should be asking us. These are the questions I’m asking you to ask yourself every morning. These are the questions I am asking you this morning. Answer them with the nitty gritty, real truth. Your truth. Don’t be a version of yourself to placate me or anyone else.
BE AUTHENTICALLY, UNFORGIVINGLY YOU and accept nothing but what you deserve.
I’m done, too…. Have been for quite some time now. I think it hit me when I worked so hard to repair a friendship and support the person’s new life not realizing or fully accepting that we weren’t really friends at all until I was accused of “stalking” because I added the person’s new boyfriend as a friend on a Facebook “without asking permission.”
Who the hell asks permission to be friends with a friend’s boyfriend if they are truly friends, especially when they are 30+ years older than you and it is extremely clear that you have zero interest in drama and only have an interest in getting to know and support people?
That experience taught me that it is very rarely about you but almost always about some insecurity or issue that someone else has when they do something completely ridiculous like that. I’d done nothing but prove myself forgiving, trustworthy and kind up to that point but that day, in the blink of an eye, I was done.
I was angry, and I was hurt. I’d done nothing but listen to this friend go on about not wanting to disappoint anyone by going on with life and had been encouraging and, I hope, uplifting about it all. I gave a hundred percent to making an effort to support this person’s new life and to encourage them to live it however they saw fit to live it, not worrying about the judgments of others.
I felt insulted and used as a human being. And, ultimately? It had very little if anything to do with me. It had to do with that person’s own lack of trust, whether in me or the boyfriend or whomever. It had to do with their lack of actual concern about me, and that day that lack of concern slapped me in the face out of nowhere.
That day, I didn’t give up on the person, I finally saw my own self worth and let that person go, like I should have done all the other times that person had walked out of my life, instead of trying so hard to make what was not meant to be in my life work in some way.
This post really spoke to me. Sometimes you’re gonna love or care for people at different levels and in different ways that are never going to truly care about you. Sometimes, they’re gonna say they do but their actions are actions that speak more loudly to their lack of care and concern than the other way around.
The following re-blogged post was me that day, and every day since in any situation where I feel used or mistreated, and I didn’t even realize it until this moment. I have learned to truly be done without questioning when my heart says it’s time.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this in the last couple of days: At this time in my life it’s not even about ups or downs or moods…it’s about bad days and good days. People say that you can choose to have a good day just by having a positive thought when you wake up, or by praying or meditating when you wake up – all sorts of different things like that, usually involving gratitude for something, even just life itself. I find that extremely difficult some days, and completely untrue on those days, as witnessed by my past couple of posts.
I don’t think that the power of positive thinking is always enough. There is nothing I can EVER do to change things with my mother. I can not cure dementia. I can not change her. I can not change the situation as it is at this time. Same thing with grief – I can not change the fact that my father and my best friend are dead. They are not coming back. In those instances, people will say it’s down to acceptance and that is true. I can get behind that, to some extent, although as most of you know I don’t believe in such a thing as an end to grief…
I was listening to music earlier while I was folding laundry and this song came on called, “Breathe Me,” by Sia. It hit me in my gut like a bad piece of chicken. We can take responsibility all we want to, we can take action all we want to, but sometimes it just hurts. Sometimes we are just lost. Sometimes we are just hurt. Sometimes we are just afraid. Sometimes we are all of those things and more, all at once, and we are completely overwhelmed. That’s where I’ve been.
Yesterday a friend of mine told me, “Now I’m gonna say this and I just want you to listen to me. I don’t want you to use (anything) as a crutch. You’re STRONG. You walk around with a shaved head because you want to! You don’t care what people think…” She went on… So last night I laid in bed, in my pitch black and freezing cold bedroom trying to stave off an impending migraine (unsuccessful, by the way), and I let all she’d said float around in my head. And ultimately, two things stood out to me.
I do have a crutch. It is alcohol. And it is a waste of time – it doesn’t accomplish anything positive, except momentary lapses in the ability to feel things. And, strength is relative. People see different things as examples of strength. The fact this person, who has been through more than I ever imagined when I first met her, completely rebuilt her life and walks around with such an air of confidence even my shaved head is in awe – for this person to say to me, “you are stronger than this. You ARE STRONG,” humbled me in a way that I couldn’t understand. Of course, that led to more thoughts and more considerations and a whole lot of writing in my journal…but I fell asleep knowing that I did not want to drink today.
And I didn’t.
And I don’t know why. I don’t know what changed.
I do know that by lunch time tomorrow I’ll be craving alcohol like the drought ridden fields crave rain…and I don’t know what I’ll do about that. Probably text or call her, or my cousin, or my therapist…maybe go to the feed store and hang out. I don’t know. But I do know this much – if you really want to make a change, you will do it.
I haven’t smoked in over 24 hours, haven’t had a drink in over 24 hours, and the only reason is because I just wanted to see if I could. I didn’t tell anyone until later in the day today, when I was at the feed store. I didn’t keep it to myself because I was afraid I would fail. I kept it to myself because I only wanted it to be about me and what I wanted.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But I do know that I don’t feel the same way I felt a few days ago when I was battling the suicidal ideation and the complete lack of regard for my life, my health, or my Be-ing. I don’t know what changed… I think mostly, it was being seen, and being cared for, and being spoken to in a way that wasn’t at all what I expected.
I always said I would never allow another “Dorie” into my life – or at least that there would never be another her. I think I may have changed my mind…or my heart… You never know who is going to walk into your life, or when.
Therapy used to be the bane of my existence. Now that I have the best therapist on the planet (for me) via BetterHelp, it’s not so bad. The whole thing revolves around my time schedule – which can be pretty chaotic – and finally finding (or being gifted by the universe?) a therapist who GETS ME is priceless.
That said, it doesn’t change my thoughts or feelings. It helps me to express them in a safer environment than any other, but the reality is that my kind of depression doesn’t ever really go away. It’s up and down, it doesn’t flip but it rises and falls. And with my mom? It’s basically a pit of hell.
I think the thing that brings me down the most is watching this all play out and not being able to do a damned thing about it. Dementia is like that. No matter what you do, it’s gonna progress. Maybe slowly, maybe quickly. Maybe meds help. They don’t if you’re fighting with the person to even take them.
Mostly, the whole situation makes me both miss AND respect my dad so much more. Sometimes I am so angry that he is gone. Most of the time time I’m just sad. Sad at a level that isn’t just melancholy or blue, but at a level that is a thunderstorm – dark clouds and pouring rain, raging winds and thunder in my head. Sad at a level that I can barely breathe through these days.
But here I am. That counts for something, I suppose. Even still, I feel so useless to everyone around me. I feel useless to my mom because she won’t LET me be useful to her. I feel useless to everyone else because, well, depression. I just stay in my room, and read. I cry but I don’t know why as it doesn’t really let anything out. I wish that someday I would be able to find the words to describe this experience just in case I make it past it and have an opportunity to help someone else.
I hope you all have a pleasant weekend. I appreciate your correspondences and your kindness more than you know. You help me more than you know.
