Happy Birthday....Not

by Laura

Today is the body's birthday. We are feeling very alone. We live alone and choose to be alone, but then we feel isolated in having to deal with all the stress in our life. The last five years have been extremely difficult.

Our father got sick in the spring of 2010. We had to help take care of him until he passed at the end of September 2014. We did not live with him, but we spent considerable time and physical, mental, and emotional energy helping to take care of him. Now that he is gone, we feel a tremendous sense of loss.

Factor in the chain of events set off by this.  Brother number 2 is self-supporting but has been sheltered from many things in life. Now he has to get re-situated. It seems like it's taking forever to clean out the house; then it has to be sold, and B2 has to find an apartment.  B2 is clueless in a number of ways regarding how to function independently, so we and B1 are left having to guide him on a step-by-step basis, *in addition* to dealing with the estate and such.

We/MDs are feeling very resentful. We didn't sign up for this. There's a reason we never married or had outside kids. We have enough to deal with by ourselves: Having to work when we hate working; dealing with system issues; dealing with therapy; dealing with depression and anxiety and CPTSD; dealing with mundane day-to-day things.

Enough already.

Happy birthday? NOT.
__________

About reaching out to others:

I hate socializing with a passion, but I'm not the only one. I'm just the most vocal. I should have a t-shirt that says "I think; therefore I b*tch."

Part of the issue is that I can't stand superficiality, and I can't stand small talk. The greeting "How are you?" from acquaintances feels like fingernails on a blackboard. I'm tempted to say, "I'm on the rag, I feel gassy beyond belief, and I have to fight to keep from wanting to off myself. Sorry you asked?"

I don't want connections. I f*cking hate that word. I'm not a circuit board or a plumbing system. I want our relationships with people to mean something. I want us to be able to be who we are, *all* of who we are and what we are.  Not living a segmented existence, drifting from our multi friends to our menopausal friends to our work friends to our relatives to....a whole bunch of different groups of people, all of whom only can welcome a small part of who we are. It feels like it's destroying us.

We live in a singleton world.  And we don't often find singletons who "get it." We can probably count on one hand the singletons that we can trust enough to communicate with them about what we're going through. Even our circle of multi friends was shrinking until we found another forum.  [This social shift has nothing to do with us personally, as much as it has to do with the natural life cycle of communities.--Allegra]

I ramble. I ramble to calm myself and the others down; I ramble to step away from the constant pain. I need to give us a voice in a world where people just don't seem to hear us.