Eleven months and one day

Eleven months and one day ago, I embarked on a four day bender that was the end of the most loving partnership of my life.

Eleven months and one day ago my world dissolved.

I thought last night was a full year, but I was wrong. Nevertheless, I curbed my drinking last night so I could say I made the milestone somewhat sober.

I’m wrecked.

So today is day three of my eleven-month-anniversary bender. So much has shifted and changed, and my grasp on the world is different.

I have held life with a light touch these last sixteen years, since my failed suicide attempt at fourteen. I am lucky to have made thirty. I don’t know if I will make thirty-one. I have plenty of reasons to live. Children. People I love and who seem to like me well enough. But still I hold on lightly, ready to let go. Because I am unwell, and because I have given up on a future.

I am doing all the things I’m supposed to do. Medicating. Eating. Working. The drinking isn’t good, but it’s not all the time. Still the blackness beckons. Still I don’t want to keep going. Still I want to give in to the insistent voice in my head that just doesn’t want to hang on a moment longer. I pull myself through moment to moment.

Eleven months and one day ago I lost all hope. Truth is, it’s not really come back. I’m going through the motions. Even the love I bear toward several very special individuals is not a protection, not a really strong motivation to not-die. A new job that I’m happy with doesn’t matter. The destruction I could leave in my wake isn’t a dissuasion. Nothing matters.

The Taylor Centre have given up on me. I can’t afford a private psych. I can’t really afford to go to my GP and I don’t think she can help. I am adrift alone, with occasional interjections from loved ones.

I have held on for eleven months and one day. I’ll probably continue to hang on a while longer. But don’t hold me dear. I am too likely to make an untimely exit and leave you all.

Love isn’t enough. Hope isn’t there. Faith burned off a long long time ago. The future is incertain, the past is agony. In eleven months and one day, I have learned mostly that I am fragile and broken and there isn’t anything that will fix me. I fight to stay connected to the world, but the fight isn’t going well. 

I have my rules for going. I must write farewells. I must call the Taylor Centre. I don’t even know if I can follow my own rules any more. I feel rash and impulsive. What does it matter? The people I love know I love them. There’s nothing I can say to be a balm to the wound I would cause. The Taylor Centre are utterly hopeless and I have no faith in them. The only people that have ever come through for me are my ex and my mother. I’m not going to call on him – it’s not fair on him to be in any way involved in this. I’m not going to call on mum – she’s too far away to help. I don’t want anyone to feel like they could have done more.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage rage against the dying of the light

I have done my raging. I have found peace and resignation. It has been fought, and won, and fought, and won, but every battle has bled me a little more, until I am white with exhaustion. 

Once more into the fray – into the last good fight I’ll ever know

Bled white and exhausted, but still I fight.