Can You Really Forget The Past?

I did something really weird today. It took until now for me to get reminded what today was. I was going along having a pretty good day. I hung out with one of my best buds, I laughed over stupid memes and bad jokes with folks. I got to have a great dinner with great people. I even had some awesome animal moments with the Katface and my snakes.

I was feeling a little anxious, but I couldn't put my finger on why. Everything seemed pretty great...

Then Facebook Memories reminded me of this post: http://chronicwerewolf.blogspot.com/2015/06/dearly-departed.html

It's the anniversary of my mother's suicide....shit.

I actually forgot for a moment there. I lived my damn life and had a good time. I have been a bit numb lately, but that wasn't connected to anything. Just something that happens after a manic spiral, and I get really tired easily. Been sleeping a lot, though not restfully. It feels like chasing a dragon I can never catch...

But that is just a day in the life for me. My feelings are not connected to my mother.

And I refuse to feel bad about it.

So I forgot. I don't have to honor her. She wasn't an honorable person, and she never added anything good to this world. She doesn't NEED to be remembered all the time. I don't have to torture myself with horrible memories of how she failed me as a mother. I'm owning my shit,  the same shit she threw in my face like refuse. I am loved, in ways she couldn't even fathom. I am strong, and I use the darkness she and many others beat into my soul as healing and hope for others. I don't give up. I have suicidal thoughts, even recently, and I wrestled those demon voices down. I will not be devoured by my internal hydra. I will keep cutting the heads off until there are no more voices left to destroy me.

I am glad I was distracted enough by love so I didn't dwell on hate. I'll do something special for myself later to remind myself I am worth it. I won't let the darkness take me down. Not today. Especially not today.

Stay in the ground where you belong bitch.

I'm over you.

Grieving, Cancer and Geek Father Figures

"When one has not had a good father, one must create one." - Nietzsche

I came from a broken home. And when I say it was broken, I mean the universe took the biggest hammer it could find and slammed it, over and over, into my life. The hammer hasn't really let up either, I just learned to endure it better. I'm sure Thor is getting tired of his hammer going missing.

So for me growing up, I had to make my own heroes. While girls around me drooled over the newest boy band, I was listening to Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, and David Bowie. I was reading books and comics by Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and  Stephen King. I was finding people in the entertainment industry to look up to. They would likely never meet me, but that wasn't the point. When you hear a song that sounds like a familiar place in time, it can change your life. One song, could bring a whole world of magic into your life. That's what good music does. And good is what you make of it, not what other people tell you is good.

When someone I looked up to, even in the smallest way dies, it hurts. It hurts really deep. Today they announced Allen Rickman's death. Another one bites the dust thanks to Cancer. I am getting really tired of the sound of that word. Cancer sounds like a worse curse word than Fuck at this point. I've lost so many to cancer myself, and have friends struggling with it. Watching them fight is hard, and it makes me feel so many tumultuous things. It's a terrible illness. Just chews people up and spits them all over the cosmos. The bright ones still shine long after they are gone, reminding us that we choose how to go out when the curtain calls. Bowie worked right up until the end. That was not a man planning death. That was a man squeezing the last drops out of life.

I've lost people in my own life to Cancer, and know plenty more who are fighting it. Seeing so many of our heroes in the music, film, and the horror industry die is just hard to carry. I've gone numb today because of it. But the numbness made it so I could write this post right now. I haven't been able to write anything coherent in a while.

My father left me before I was born, and from then on I had a string of men come and go. My mother's luck with men seemed rather shitty. If they weren't abusive fucks to her, they were to me. One guy even adopted me when I was 6, only to drop me like a hot rock when my sister was born. So I didn't really have a father. I looked out into the world and people like Robin Williams filled the void. Never completely, but enough that I could endure my life and not completely hate men. I grew being beaten, humiliated, degraded and raped by men. So to me, my heroes were the closest feeling to family I have ever known. And I know how sad that sounds.

Some people have what they call "Geek Husbands". People they admire and have a little lusting for.  I will admit if a man is attractive to me, but I tend towards being attracted to women. That's just how I work. I think I have more Geek Wives than husbands. But I have a pantheon of Geek fathers/uncles. Men who showed me how to embrace my gender fluidity. People like Bowie who taught me through song to "Embrace the Strange." I needed that guidance. I sure as hell wasn't going to get it from the men that lived in my mothers drug house.

When there was nothing else, I looked to the stars. I didn't need a mortal, flawed father. Not as a child. Something otherworldly was needed. To teach me to embrace my strangeness. Growing up, I cared about my Geek Father's more as people than just ideas. They fleshed out and felt like old friends I had never met. They were good to me when the world was not. I'm sure living as a star isn't easy. Especially when you are dying or mentally ill. So seeing my heroes struggle like I do, actually made me connect all the more to them. Robin Williams for a long time was my biggest hero because of his living with bipolar. But when he died, it devastated me. I am still not over it. When they locked me up last year in the mental hospital, I had pictures of Robin Williams in my sketch book my husband brought for me. I had ripped them from a magazine and tucked them among the pages of my book.

You never know who is going to shape your life. And you never know how long they will be with you. Gods die. We dont want them to and we sure as hell can't believe it when it happens, but they do. They die and turn to stardust, leaving their legacy behind.

If I can leave behind even a fraction of that kind of talent and gift to the people I care about, then I've lived a good life. And I look forward to the day I can hang with my Geek Fathers again.

"Dearly" Departed

I've been a really moody bitch all week, and despite myself, I have set parts of my life on fire and salted the earth. It was an extreme reaction from me, and I realized my bipolar is flaring up right now. Despite the meds. Lots of stressors are pulling at me to help with the flares I am having physically and mentally, and when I saw what tomorrow was going to be, my mood the last few days has made perfect sense.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother's suicide. And I am wondering which part of me is deciding this year it's going to hurt. I mean, I always remember the day they found her, not the day they buried her. I sometimes even get the months mixed up. Some years I pretend nothing happened, others I flip out and lock myself away. I'm so messed up I can't even grieve about my mother like a stable person.

But I do grieve. And I always will.

You never get over a suicide. Especially since she was one of my main abusers growing up. Growing up with her taught me you had to scream to be heard, you had to fight to make the pain stop, and you can't trust anyone. Family is a comforting delusion other people get to have. No one will take care of you but yourself. And if I stayed in her house for too long, I'd become an addict and a monster too.

My mother was 41 when she died. She had enough drugs in her to kill an elephant when they found her dead in her hotel room. She did it in a place I had fond memories of before the incident, Niagara Falls. I used to love watching the rushing water. Forces of nature are amazing to me. I recall Houdini went over the Falls in a barrel once. I try to focus on that now.

I have speculated why she did it several times, but I honestly will never get that answer. It's just another mystery, like so many things in my life, that most people don't have to deal with. And the thing that really makes grief about my mother hard is that there are no real good times to fall back on. I have a memory here or there, but I can tell you they would fit on less than 5 fingers if we counted them. Which is a sad, horrible state of affairs. My mother was not a happy person, was untreated for all sorts of mental disorders, and was usually on more drugs than she needed. I'm sure she was probably trying to self medicate, because there was shit wrong inside her body as well as her mind. When they did the autopsy on her, they found growth on her bones. She used to try to scare me and tell me, "One day Kweeny, your body will betray you too. You'll get sick like I am. And your life will be all pain."

She wasn't right often, but when she was...

When I broke my tailbone it felt like my mother's curse had come full circle. Like I couldn't escape a life of pain and madness. And when I went into the hospital this year, it shattered me. I have had a hard time returning to my core self since. I wake up in drug hazes, I go to sleep in drug hazes. I have cold sweats and nightmares. I wake up in horrible pain that makes me grit my teeth every morning. I am a pariah to some, to others, just a moment in time. I still have bipolar swings, and I am not happy with how I am coping.

So I am not okay this year.

A friend suggested I draw, but my pain about my mom might make that actually physically too much for me to bear. My mother never supported my creative pursuits. I told her I wanted to be in a band, she laughed at me and told me I was too ugly. When I drew things for her, she would only point out their flaws and tell me to quit trying...

Sometimes she literally beat the dreams out of me.

But I am going to try finishing my painting I started the other night. Even if the voices are really loud tonight and my pain is really intense. I will see how far I can get before I just cant do it anymore. The painting is emotionally relevant to what I am dealing with right now.