My life is thrilling. Got up at 8.30pm. Dressed, then cleaned a chainsaw, checked it for oil, then cleaned the toilet with the same brush, before cleaning the brush and finally my hands.
Haven’t eaten yet. Haven’t bothered with my medication, either. Ate far too much yesterday evening as a free prize for playing a bizarre guessing game in a fish and chip shop on the way home.
I’m wondering if I should eat tonight or wait until my meagre breakfast in the morning. I’m starting to err on the side of the former.
What the actual fucking fuckity fuck on a fucking stick does it take for the police to take seriously the evidence I’ve submitted to them about the dragon abusing me and our son??????
A year of staring at the details and the result? Absolutely fuck all.
Emotional numbness is where we experience mild to severe feelings of detachment – so it’s hard for us to access normal feelings any more. This includes both negative and positive emotions as you can’t decide to shut just one feeling off. Common causes of emotional numbness include different stresses or traumas … from receiving bad news … to being in an accident … to recovering from the death of someone close … to a relationship breakup … to feeling deeply humiliated or ashamed. So how do you overcome emotional numbness and live with emotional integrity again?
1. The first thing to do is to choose to respect and allow all emotions – no matter what they are. Also, try and grasp the fact that suppressing your emotions will likely lead to heartache and problems later on (as they’ll possibly resurface at inappropriate times.)
2. Try and understand that feelings and actions are two very different, and unrelated, things. That is, you can still feel angry without becoming violent – so don’t assume your feelings will affect your actions, too.
3. Try to figure out the message behind intense emotions. Are you angry because you’ve been hurt, used or abused? Are you sad because deep down you feel that you’ll never find true love - as you can’t believe that anyone will love you for yourself?
4. Take that risk – and find the courage to ask someone for help. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know that there are those who genuinely love you like – like a true and caring friend. The important thing is not to try and isolate yourself, and to make the extra effort to prioritise self-care. You need other people to help you work through this.
5. Seek professional help if the symptoms persist. There are excellent counsellors and therapists out there who have the training and skills to help you to get free – so you can live a more fulfilling and normal, healthy life.
6. Be patient within yourself. It’s likely to take time – as you will need to learn to trust, and take some barriers down, so you can be yourself again (and that is often hard to do when you’ve experience hurt and pain).
I’ve read this a few times and I find it incredibly laughable.
1. Way too late for me to undo decades of damage.
2. I can appear to function normally, calmly, sometimes enthusiastically, at least as far as an individual is concerned. I learned how to do that from about the age of 8 (yes, eight years old), when I learned that no one even remotely gives a shit. Nothing has really changed.
3. Been there, done that. So what? Changes nothing.
4. The risks, however minor, have always ended in idiotic failure of one sort or another.
5. Professional help? The NHS is utterly useless in this regard, and years of privately funded counselling only led me towards realising nothing will ever get any better.
6. Time. How many more decades is this going to take? All of them won’t be enough.
Seriously, this is a very big joke. A very hollow joke.
The only thing I really have to look forward to each day is that I’m another day closer to my unavoidable death. That’s at least a form of progress which no one can deny me.
I attended a bit of a post-pub drinking session late last night and, although I categorically refused to join in, the remaining attendees played a “Never have I ever…” drinking game. It made me realise just how damn sheltered my pathetic existence has been, how much I’ve got absolutely no idea about… and how much I will never know.
So, what’s the point of continuing to perpetuate the misery and emptiness?
New Year’s Day 2022. I’d been coming down with something a couple of days ago, only starting as a bit of a sore throat.
Yesterday, things felt a bit worse and, although a LFT came back clearly negative, I braved going out.
Today, from about 2am: awful. No real temperature or change in sense of smell or taste, but I’m fatigued, aching to the extent even my eye muscles hurt, a dull but uniform headache, and a bit of a runny nose. I don’t feel like eating or drinking, either. A very restless night.
Thought I’d book a visit for a PCR test today, not that this set of familiar yet long since seen symptoms feels like COVID-19. Nearest is an 85 mile round trip, and there’s no way I’m up for that, only to learn it’s a heavy cold the likes of which I’ve not had for several years. I might get one closer, tomorrow, if I book early and am able to withstand the lesser drive.
Doesn’t help that my back is understandably giving me a reminder of how painful that can get if I don’t move about.
I’ve got some co-codamol which might help everything except for the back; that, when it flares up, is in a league of its own.
Part of me wants to get up, to hydrate, to take my medication, and the pain relief. Most of me wants to find a comfortable position, lie here, drift off, and cease to be. At least that hasn’t changed.
Update 2022-01-03: Around 2.30am on the 2nd I booked a PCR test much more local to me. Early this morning it came back as positive, just as the symptoms are rapidly diminishing. Got to look forward to a week of self isolation.
Would have been useful if I hadn’t had the vaccine jabs.
I just had to interact with the estranged wife, and wanted to “test the water”, so to speak, to see if her views about me having friends since moving out had changed… if I was to ever move back in.
So I told her (simplifying the details), one works with buses and is ex-army, one is a journalist, one is a chef, another a retired butcher, one with dyspraxia and anxiety, another a care worker, etc…
She asks if I’d met them all at the pub? Yes.
“I’m not having any drinking parties” was the start of her automatic condemnation of all, soon followed by “I have an academic background!”. I hadn’t even thought about parties (not difficult since I’ve never really attended one), and I made it clear that if there was to be any drinking it would be as part of a social occasion or event; a birthday or similar.
How fucking snobbish can you get? She’s not changed one iota, still just like a dalek, hating anything that isn’t like her, isn’t ideologically pure enough to be acceptable in her world.
I used to have to effectively beg weeks in advance to go out - dates, times, locations, duration, purpose all explained in advance - only to be hounded prior to her predetermined home time to check I’d be back, with wild accusations and threats to call the police in phone calls and text messages.
No wonder when I was with her - even with weeks or more of prior notification and explanation - inviting anyone over was so painful I rapidly ended up not bothering to go through the grief.
Her friends? No problem, drop of a hat stuff, holidays staying with us, big dinner parties (including getting me to buy all the wine and such), day trips, holidays abroad with them (at least pre-pandemic), etc. Such blatant hypocrisy. But at least there was peace while she was away, and she wouldn’t flip out at me when her friends were around.
Fortunately she doesn’t know which pub; she’d only harass the staff about my activities there like a member of the Stasi bleeding their informants dry of information in order to invent the wildest conspiracy theories.
A few days ago it struck me; Blinding Lights should be presented as a lament, sung by someone dying, alone, lonely, perhaps in a hospital, maybe with their abusive “beloved”, on their deathbed. If I survive long enough after my next suicide attempt, I’ll at least hum it only because I don’t want to remember the words.
I can even picture the arrangement in my head, both video and audio, which is far too real, too traumatic. I can only hint at Pink Floyd’s The Wall for a clue, and there’s one song there which absolutely kills me.
The silent cries of a desperately lonely man in a selfish and ruthlessly unkind world.
I'm a friendless 52 year old man, trapped in an unhappy, loveless, and abusive marriage. If it wasn't for our son, I'd be long gone.
The silent cries of a desperately lonely man in a selfish and ruthlessly unkind world.