The Kindest Cut

i hate this curse of tenderness
so hit me hard and break the spell
that keeps me weak and so unreal
no matter how it feels

- Ultra Vivid Scene, The Kindest Cut


The kindest cut is quick and sharp. If you want to leave, leave. Take your cat and forgo the deposit. One of the most hurtful and unnecessary things a person can do to another is to allow them to think, act, live and feel they have a significant other who has their back when in reality they do not.

- titaniumhunter



Death is Only the Beginning by Morrtis on DeviantArt

---

the following began as a response to a thread asking something along the lines of how people get over things like a death, or when that death is a suicide, something like that. well, i started responding...and two hours and a few dozen paragraphs or so later, i realized that by using my story to answer the OP's question, i was really ignoring the question, taking over the thread while diminishing the OP, and just telling my story, for better or for worse, whatever the reason may be.

so, for better or worse, this is more of my story, the very same one i've been telling through these blog posts. i might elaborate in places unnecessarily, or skim over areas in which you wish i'd expound...but fret not, for i'll probably tell all the pieces of my story, or at least the pieces that are to be told, multiple times, from multiple angles, before i cease to publish new entries. so as long as i'm writing, and as long as you're reading, this story ain't done yet. hope you're comfortable.

---

my life turned upside-down roughly 6 years ago; i lost my kids, job, car, and house, then turned myself into jail for my sentence, then almost a year later went back to jail on a violation. been out since, probation done. now in the process of trying to get my record cleared to make getting work easier.

fast forward to last year, the year from hell (part deux). within the first 6 months i:
• lost one of my closest friends over an accusation he made, and still won't say to my face (in fact he won't talk to me at all), along with two others due to the same incident - one being collateral damage
• lost another friend suddenly to a heart attack; he was only 40, good health, no prior indications anything was wrong, didn't smoke, wasn't overweight, was active...
• got in a relationship that was short-lived, but incredibly volatile; started off GREAT, broke up twice, ended extremely sour with no hope of reconciliation and repairing the friendship we started with
• as part of that last, got accused - TWICE! - of cheating, with his friend, in his room...the first time with him there in the room
• lost my job and went on unemployment
• was struggling to balance a failing relationship, trying to find a new job (not easy with a record), driving all over the place to visit my dad (or drop off/pick up my mom while i ran errands/etc), who was increasingly in hospitals or hospice care during the seven months between his diagnosis and death, being strong for my mom so she wouldn't completely crumble mentally or emotionally while caring for him (as she has major depression and severe OCD, and the accompanying hyper-active anxieties), and trying to maintain my own sanity/health
• got introduced to meth by my boyfriend, and later (during our second split) got actually high for the first time, not just stay-awake-longer-and-drink-more (like coke for me, ugh), resulting in my present addiction

and i did it all without benefit of social circles or a support network of friends, as what little time i wasn't spending with my dad or doing things for my mom, i was spending with my boyfriend, so i wasn't going out, or spending time with my friends, or any of that. the only people i ever socialized with anymore were my boyfriend's friends; my close friend that i lost at the beginning of the year is sadly/ironically the person i needed most so i could lean on him for strength and support (he's also my previous ex; we became better friends after we split, well until...).

in the subsequent months i came to learn that what i had thought were problems between my boyfriend and i because of personality differences, or because he had started smoking heroin again (i lost a close friend to a heroin OD, after years of being clean, just a year before that), or because he was just "that far gone" now from the meth combined with his severe weed addiction, were actually because he had been cheating on me for at least the last month and a half of our 3 1/2 months together. the night my dad died, he came and spent a couple hours with me - or at least it felt like that long, because i was already swimming half a handle deep in vodka by the time he got off work. the one thing i needed at that moment, that night, was to not be there at home, to be anywhere but under the same roof where less than half a day earlier i had watched my father take his final sip of life; i mean literally watched.

and it came to me then, that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time
as i stared at my shoes in the ICU that reeked of piss and 409
and i rationed my breaths as i said to myself that i'd already taken too much today
as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me
away from me
amongst the vending machines and year old magazines, in a place where we only say goodbye
it stung like a violent wind that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds
and i knew that you were a truth i would rather lose, than to have never lain beside at all
and i looked around, at all the eyes on the ground, as the TV entertained itself
'cause there's no comfort in the waiting room
just nervous pacers bracing for bad news
and then the nurse comes round, and everyone lifts their head
but i'm thinking of what Sarah said
that love is watching someone die
so who's gonna watch you die?
so who's gonna watch you die?[/spoiler]

but the boyfriend didn't want me over ("you need to be here") and i was far too drunk to even stumble down the block to the closest intersection, let alone any other friends' places, so stuck at home i was. i may never know, and i really hope i never know actually, but i strongly suspect the boyfriend didn't want me over because it would interfere with his plans with side chick, as i generally planned my weeks around his days off so we could actually do things together, and spent the night those nights; when my dad died, it wasn't one of my "normal nights."

forget everything else, forget the infidelity, forget my friend that abandoned me, forget everything except the fact that my boyfriend, the person i loved, and trusted, and needed and depended on, and, however unfairly to him in even a perfect world, had come to lean and rely on over those preceding weeks, from whom i was drawing my strength as i was giving all mine to my mom, could not give me that one thing i most needed that night, and that was to not. be. there. he stole from me the very thing that, even now looking back, i still fully believe would have made all the difference in the world, not with us (or at least i highly doubt it would have made a difference there) but with my ability to cope on my own, without using dope to shut off my emotions just to get through the day, and the night, and the next day.

and looking back before then, knowing what i know now...all that time, that energy that i wasted on him, my focus and my attention, that could have been spent instead with my dad in his final weeks...it's anger that gets me now, roiling, boiling-over anger, where even just a few months ago it still barely rose to a simmer.

this is how i know that i actually have begun to process, and to deal, because since my dad's death just before the beginning of summer i have just sort of existed. i've cried, sure, but other than only once or twice briefly out of pure grief over my dad, it was for the most part because of exactly that night, when my boyfriend that i needed in that moment more than ever walked away, just abandoned me to my situation, whatever his reasoning actually was. i was grieving both my dad and my relationship at the same time, as it was 11 days after my dad passed that my relationship had come to an end finally. only i wasn't really grieving, but rather examining intellectually and filing thoughts and details and facts away in a mental filing cabinet. as if i was reading an encyclopedia, or a textbook.

my use didn't change because of my dad, and in fact other than the immediate couple of days afterward it actually would have gotten to be less had it not been for the other source of emotional volatility at the time. but unfortunately, in my world nothing hard ever comes easy - yes, that sentence does make sense if you're me - so i don't get to deal with things one at a time or even two at a time, like normal people do.

for the longest time, for months, i just simply...survived. less than a week after the breakup my twice-a-week average use became daily, snap-of-a-finger just like that, in large part because it was the only way i knew to keep my emotions from completely overrunning me altogether, and also (in retrospect) because in a way, by using, i could blame it on needing to not hurt over my now-ex so i could get through the day, and that meant i didn't have to deal with my emotions with regard to losing my dad. i didn't have to process, or do anything other than the most practical and reality-affecting things such as matter-of-factly take the payments for my dad's cremation to the mortuary and get a receipt for my mom, or sorting through his things to donate, sell, toss, or keep, or rearranging the furniture in his room and dismantling his bed so i could have a bedroom after 3 years of sleeping on the couch...

...and through all of it, i wore a mask of stoicism and acceptance, under the guise that we had known this was coming, we had had 7 months to prepare and to brace for it after all, so it wasn't unexpected, and perhaps i had even "pre-grieved" in a way. my lack of sadness was justified, and also i still needed to be strong, more than ever now, for my mom; her depression took a major dive after his death, not so much from losing her husband of what would have been 38 years last September, but because caring for him those past months had given her a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, and now she didn't know what to do. she had nothing. her life, her existence, was empty, without something, him, to focus her attentions on. so in a lot of ways, i didn't get to process and grieve. though i also subconsciously didn't want to.

that reared its head more recently; i spent about a month and a half taking low-plateau doses of DXM and just detaching from reality a bit more nights than not, because "not feeling" just wasn't cutting it anymore. meth's ability to turn off my emotional side, thus allowing my rational side the freedom to actually think, and sort, and logically process, and figure out from there, all things i never really was able to do before meth, was something i had learned shortly after getting high that first time.

once i noticed that - while high, it wasn't so much that i didn't have the emotions...i just didn't feel them; no, not that i didn't feel, i just didn't care - that's when i started using to de-stress from time with the boyfriend, or a particularly rough day at the hospital, and it became more and more necessary. not with my family, but with my boyfriend. what started as de-stressing became reactionary management as i went along through the encounter, then a necessary preparation just to be able to have the strength to face him.

frankly, i was, and still am really, glad that i had meth to get me through those times. previously, whenever i needed to destress or gather courage/strength, it was booze as my DOC. and if i got upset about anything, for any reason, my emotions would completely take over, amplified tenfold and tenfold again even by the booze, which tricked me by simultaneously keeping my intellectual brain switched on if i wanted, while secretly turning off my ability to reason through and process and logic. in those days, if i was upset about anything, i was impossible to deal with, sometimes even for myself.

unfortunately meth swung so far to the other extreme, and it was an effect on which i relied so i wouldn't have to feel anything whatsoever but could just be numb if i wanted. so too often, the people that mattered - read, my boyfriend - thought i didn't give a shit at all, no matter how or when i tried to explain otherwise. i was just making excuses, or justifying things, in their eyes. sometimes both.

of course i see now that it wouldn't have mattered. if it wasn't meth, the alcohol would have been the excuse for him to tear into me and break me down. and if not that then the cigarettes that he would have berated me for smoking. or for not having when he wanted one and was out. it would have been that i was spending too much time with him. or not enough. i see now that nothing i did, or didn't do, would ever be good enough for him, because i didn't matter to him. and now that i understand this, i see how the same idea extends to others; i just never paid the same attention to them and their condescension, because they weren't the one i loved. not to say that they're unimportant, but they weren't important to me, in that way, at that time. they still aren't.

in the end though, as painful and as horrible as it was, and as miserable as it made me...i wouldn't change a thing, save the night of my father's passing. my narcissistic ex was, quite frankly, a pain i had to endure to finally realize my worth. the addiction he introduced to my life has had far more benefit than it has caused issue. and all of it together is what ultimately brought me here, to Drugs-Forum, where i have met some of the most amazing people one could ever hope to meet. in a life that seems like one horrible blow after another (stories for other times), this has been a bright spot that was so sorely needed i didn't even realize that i had been sitting in the dark.

i still am dealing with the emotions relating to my dad not being here anymore. he and i quarrelled, sometimes rather vehemently, butting heads so violently one might have expected it to be literal, like two rams fighting for supremacy, locking horns on a mountain side until one was unconscious. but in those final weeks, as i tried hard to be a buffer for my mom as her frustrations induced the same sort of reactions, often unnecessarily, my dad and i had developed a closeness, a rapport that should have been there all along but wasn't. i will never forget seeing the tears in my mom's eyes as he wouldn't even look at her as we discussed his final wishes, the way he preferred to deal with me because of the way they fought all the time then. perhaps he simply didn't want to cause her any more distress, or to see the look on her face as she asked the questions no one wants to ask and fewer want to think about answering.

i look back and i can't help but wonder where he and i had gone off the rails in our relationship, when and why and how we became so toxic to one another, to where even deciding what to eat for dinner was a strained exercise in civility. i can't help but wonder if we had had a better relationship, if the one between him and my mom might have been better at the end. or if, like with my ex, any of that would have mattered in the end.

---

it's kind of funny; as i sit here writing these words, i find myself wiping teardrops off the desk in front of me, as they fall from my eyelids in a way they are rarely allowed. even in private i don't cry often, whether out of a refusal to confront my grief and sadness and loss or a refusal to even admit vulnerability to myself, to let it show and just let the emotion out instead of keeping it bottled up on a dusty shelf, in the back of the closet i call my mind.

i miss him terribly, every day for these past ten-plus months. his ashes sit on a shelf in my bedroom, waiting for the day my mom and i can finally go to Canada, to the city where he was born, and scatter his ashes in accordance with his desires. i must admit that's not a trip i look forward to taking, as much as i've missed my own birthplace and have wanted to go back for the past 30 years now. (i couldn't even go when my grandfather died shortly after my daughter was born, simply due to a lack of a passport.)

and with that, dear reader, i'm afraid i will have to end this post here, as the faucets of my eyes are finding their valves stuck in the open position, and it is difficult to both mop and type at the same time. however don't think it a bad thing - this catharsis has been long necessary, and i am glad that i have a willing audience, even if it's just a nameless server in a rack somewhere in some unknown country, to which to tell my story.

isn't it funny how sometimes a perfect stranger can make for a better listener than someone who is close to you, supposedly knows you and cares about you?