It's an understatement to say the last two years have been challenging. Quite frankly, I don't know how I'm surviving it at all. 2019 had its own series of challenges, and yet as the saying goes, "fall down seven times, get up eight." And then 2020 proved that 2019 was merely child's play.
The austerities & precautions & isolation I've endured because of the pandemic (plus avoiding people who are very clearly deluded and recklessly stupid), grief over mom's death, which has unearthed yet another layer of grief over dad's death, my own health crisis due to the vaccine, and last but not least, MENOPAUSE to round out things for good measure.
If need be, I can continue on this current path for a while more, but not sure how much more, as the isolation IS taking its toll on my emotional health.
And when I say "isolation,"really, it's just me limiting exposure to friends & family who seem hell bent on either/or catching COVID or transmitting it, all the while claiming they're taking precautions, despite the fact they very clearly are NOT taking precautions: i.e. my sister attending super spreader events without wearing a mask; my aunt & uncle taking a cruise, then later a trip to Ireland; and a friend taking a cruise (and sharing a cabin with a stranger), then later taking a trip to Peru, a country where they don't have vaccines readily available like here in the USA; or my niece who has ONE KIDNEY deciding she's going to Florida for spring break. But whatever, fuck it, right? I can't live other people's lives, and they're just making choices I wouldn't. Yet, I resent being put in the position to "give face" like a give a shit if/when they test positive for this pernicious virus.
Anyway. Yeah. There's a lot of seething resentment on my end. Not even jealousy. Just resentful that friends and family cannot be trusted to be careful, and then I'm cast as being antisocial because I refuse to put myself in a position where I might catch this virus.
A byproduct of the isolation is feeling forsaken by friends and family. And the existential crisis of being aware that mom's gone, and mom was the glue that kept everyone in her orbit, and by extension, my orbit too.
I'm feeling abandoned, and it's also dredging up to the surface every friend or family member that's disgusted, disappointed, and dropped me. And in the end, I guess I should appreciate they're not actively in my life anymore, as they all, in the end, only used me for their own personal gain.
I think of my friend H., who I thought we were great friends going back to high school, and who not that long ago (maybe it IS that long ago--5 years +/-?) I made her a sweater I never saw her wear. Or M., who I haven't seen since my first wedding in 1991 and who consistently flaked out on every time we planned to meet in NYC (who, I might add, tried to shake me down for one of the 3 precious N95s I found in my dry wall repair supplies at the start of the pandemic). I think of my best childhood friend J., who just disappeared into the ether it seems. Countless cousins of mine, I've tried to contact, and well it's not important to them--I'm especially sad about mom's cousin B., who I always thought I was close to, who decided when dad died she wasn't going to "come back east for sad stuff anymore," and the last time she did come back east for a little get together at mom's I declined as I was still pretty chapped about it.
I think of now former friends/co-irker or Sharlett, who, in the end didn't value me, and was a parasite who took what she could could from me, and when I dared to be bold enough to speak out about how she was treating me, she couldn't handle the confrontation and dumped me. And well, Brenda? She was a parasite as well, and clearly we have philosophically opposite ideas of what friendships are, and she at least owned up to the fact she was jealous of me (which accomplished nothing for me personally!) and who truly surprised me with her lack of empathy and surprised me with her capacity for careless cruelty.
I think of another person who I thought was a friend, T., who, the very day I was processing the fact that ten years worth of work was for naught and that I wouldn't be able to have a kid of my own, her response when she finally ran out of give-a-fuck was to say, "The world is overpopulated enough as it is."
Then there are the friends who I've lost because of politics.
And lastly, there's my sister, who I reconciled with in 2017, but the more I think on that, the more I realize that, too, was a means to an end for her. And rather than put any energy or focus into fostering our relationship, she's found Jesus (again), and would rather have yet another church organization exploit her Type A go-getter personality. Pretty much strangers are more important than I am.
I shouldn't waste more time on this stuff, which I view as abandonments or losses, or something else which I have yet to identify. But there's something there that I just can't seem to let go.
A good practice I've been doing these days is when I start thinking about each of these people, I quickly revert to CBT training and remind myself not to believe these distortions and that for every one of these people who have hurt me or dumped me, I have just as many (if not, more) people who want to be in my life.
I wish I weren't so highly sensitive. I wish that the abundance of friends was enough to wash away all the hurt feelings, and wash away the tears that I still cry about it all.
And if all the tears are driven by menopause, I guess it'll be another 5-10 years until that well dries up. I just don't want to waste one more moment than is necessary crying tears for people that just don't matter anymore.
Does any of this make sense? There's just so much overlap right now with my abandonment issues, grief (death IS the final abandonment), and menopause. It's really a devil's cocktail, and pretty difficult to navigate.
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