griefdiaries-blog

[griefdiaries-blog]

whoops, you've accidentally perceived me!

trigger warning: suicide

sooo I fucked up and accidentally followed a bunch of people on this, my side blog which is just a diary where i talk about the trauma of my partner killing himself ten years ago. I just word vomit on here a lot and definitely didn't intend to ever follow anybody or have anyone read what I've written here.

I was logged into this account on my phones internet browser, and my fandom blog on the app, aaaand while switching back and forth, accidentally followed a bunch of people on this account. Mortifying. I panicked and blocked everyone but then felt bad about it so, yeah I don't know, here's an explanation, if you do read anything here (which I don't recommend lmao) keep a heavy trigger warning for suicide and survivors guilt.

My bad!

Xoxo Shanna aka pentapoctopus

[griefdiaries-blog]

I'm back! With a word-vomit ramble.

okay, a lot has changed. I wish I had kept up with this a bit more, but honestly I went through a lot of feelings I don't care to remember. My last post ends with me saying I deserve to burn in hell. So. Imagine another decade of that, and you kinda get the gist.

It's been ten years, plus a couple months. The ten year anniversary wasn't what I wanted it to be. I always have this storybook idea of what things might look like, but when it comes to him, it just never turns out that way. I thought his family would be stronger, love each other harder after his death. Turns out, no. No such thing as a beautiful storybook suicide where everyone learns a neat little lesson. It's like that line in AVPM: you think that killing yourself might make people like you but it doesn't. It just makes you dead.

So his mom is a mess, his sister doesn't speak to her, and his father still dead-names him. I co-founded a community org that created social spaces for trans guys. And that kind of fell apart, maybe at least a little because I left. It's hard not to feel responsible. Is that an ego thing, or a guilt thing? If I'm the glue holding something together, is it my responsibility to stay forever? I don't think I'll ever really know the answer to that. The people who need something the most will never just let it go with no hard feelings.

I planned a party. No, that's not true. I talked about planning a party. A big party, catered, where I would invite everyone I could think of, spend all my money, max out my credit cards for a pizza buffet and an open bar. Stupid. I can't even get my shit together enough to host a game night, why the fuck did I think I could host a funeral luncheon, ten years too late?

Oh yeah, I have ADHD now. I suppose I always did. I was just better at hiding it when people assumed I was only a mess because of the PTSD. And when my life was singularly dedicated to righting the incredible guilt I felt. Well, I didn't do that. It's not possible. It reminds me of my job. I'm an accountant now. I tried so hard, for so long, to 'catch up.' But that's the thing, there is no catching up. There will always be more work, more things to... account for, idk. And there will always be more guilt. There will always be no more Jay. There will always be a dead twenty two year old, and it never changes. It can't. The universe will fill the rest of time with a never-ending supply of the fact that he died on a date and time that's been sealed like polyurethane in the past. The past is a casket, nailed shut. You'd better hope like hell that you took a good enough look when you could, because there's no re-opening it. There's no going back.

The urn is fugly as shit, by the way. First of all, absolute bullshit that he's in an urn in the first place. I wish we could have spread his ashes somewhere, that's the whole reason we recommended cremation. If I knew he was gonna sit in a fugly blue resin statue (yes, really) I would have begged for a burial so I could at least sit with him sometimes. Maybe have a picnic on his birthday. But now there's nowhere. The world is nothing but a lush expanse of places where he isn't. Like, I'm supposed to see him in the stars, or in butterflies, or canyons or waterfalls or babies. He's none of those places, I can assure you. I've checked. I'm worried I'll never stop checking.

I just worry, and maybe know deep in my gut, that things will never get better. I have PTSD and ADHD and all the letters and there's no pill I can take that will make any difference. It's like I lost an arm. I can figure out how to best live without an arm, but like, there's no amount of therapy or medicine or positive thinking that will give me my arm back. I just have to accept that life is half-armless now, from here til eternity. And while maybe there are some silver linings, what nobody wants to say out loud to a one-armed person is that two is the universally preferred number, as far as arms go.

There's a girl I see on TikTok sometimes. She fascinates and concerns me, because she's so young to be so visibly tortured. At maybe fifteen she attempted suicide and lost an arm in the process. She's been in an inpatient psych facility ever since, maybe 4 years or so. Her face is always a mess of raw wounds, in various stages of healing like she has been banging and scratching and picking every inch of her face relentlessly for years. It feels shitty to even compare myself to her, but that's how I feel. Less visibly missing an arm, granted. But like when I look in the mirror I can see something is just gone now, something I can't get back. And people are like, just stop hurting yourself then. Just be normal, and then you'll be normal. Duh. But how are you supposed to do that when the pain is what you are? I am the one who gets people in front of trains, whether it's me or it's him, whether it's a push or a pull. And now I have lost my arm, and everybody knows it's my fault but nobody wants to say out loud, because you don't say that kind of thing to a one-armed dickhead who already knows it's their fault. And everybody is just mulling about on the platform, politely trying to pretend they haven't seen me fall back onto the tracks but how am I supposed to pull myself back up when I'm missing a fucking arm?

And I feel like an asshole because I am not a very unwell teenager in a hospital. I'm a 32 year old adult with a bachelor's degree and a Roth IRA and a favorite brand of water filter. And part of me always thought, through the ten years of relentless guilt, that if I got here, I would be okay. Like the heavens would split apart and he would say, wow, you did it. You're a functional adult with good credit, therefore, you have atoned for hurting him! Like, maybe making 60k a year will be good enough to start a scholarship in his name, and.... I dunno, make everything better? Name a kid after him? Plant a tree? Fuck if I know, I haven't found shit yet. There was FTM Detroit, and it was good. But it wasn't forever. Nothing ever is, when I'm the one standing on the tracks.

[griefdiaries-blog]

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, so I’ve been thinking about Jay even more than usual. I found his Valentine’s Day 2013 gift to me, and I can’t look at it without crying. We were so broke that year (and every year, really) that we just made each other playlists with explanations of why each song made the list. It was like one step below a mix tape, but they ended up being really sweet and romantic. Reading through it though, some of the lines just absolutely get to me. 

“You put sooo much happiness in my life, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” 

“I could just look at you forever.” 

“I never have felt this way before, and it’s better than I ever expected. I love you.” 

“You and I are perfect. I never could have imagined finding someone like you, now I really believe in “finding your better half.” I’ve found mine, and it’s you.”

“I love that I can be totally myself and open and honest with you. I even love myself more when I’m with you.”

“Fun fact- I’ve sung this song in the shower for years, and never thought I’d find someone who would make me that giddy. You do.” 

“I wanna get old with you.”

“We make a great team, and I really think we can do anything together. I’ve got your back, always.”

“I wanna be with you forever... If that’s ok with you.”

He loved the absolute crap out of me, and believed in me to the ends of the earth. And I disappointed him, and broke his heart. People keep telling me he wouldn’t want me to be upset but that’s just not true. I took this beautiful, kind, caring boy and I broke his heart. I know him being sick was not my fault, but it’s insulting to Jay’s memory to say he would want me to be happy. He would want me to burn in hell for the way I treated him, and I can’t say I disagree.

[griefdiaries-blog]

One of my happiest memories with Jay was our first Christmas together, even though a lot of what happened was objectively bad. Jay really didn't care for Christmas at all, but he got really excited about my present. He knew I was a huge fan of Harry Potter, so originally he tried to find Slytherin boxers, but couldn't find them anywhere. (And this was before we knew Dan, my best friend and our resident screenprinter). So he managed to track down my Pottermore profile (which I hadn't been on in ages) and found the description and picture of the wand I had been matched to. He found an Etsy artist that made replicas of Pottermore wands and had mine made. He was so geeked about getting me the best present ever that when it came in the mail two weeks before Christmas, he couldn't wait. I opened my present early and obviously loved it, mostly because of how much research and pre-planning had gone into it. We went out to dinner, and came back to find that our dog, Xena, had chewed the crap out of it. It was one of those things that was heartbreaking for about half a second, but as soon as we looked at each other we just cracked up. We joked about that all the time, for months afterwards.

Our first Christmas together was a good one, despite the fact that Xena messed it up in more ways than one. On Christmas Eve, Jay woke up at 6am to get ready for work at 7, and discovered the horror that had been unleashed overnight. See, Xena had been running low on food, and Jay kept forgetting to pick more up on his way home from work. The night before Christmas Eve, she was completely out of food so we ran to Marcus, the liquor store down the street from our apartment. The dry food she normally ate was marked up ridiculously high, so Jay made the fateful decision to get her a can of wet food just to hold her over until he could go buy her normal food anywhere other than a liquor store. This decision would prove to be catastrophic. After Xena ate my wand, we started keeping her in a big plastic cage when we weren't home, or if she was keeping us awake at night. Jay went to take her outside that morning and discovered that the wet food had not agreed with her. She had explosive diarrhea all over the cage, like an ungodly amount of liquid poop. I awoke to hear Jay retching and tearfully comforting Xena, who had a look of absolute trauma on her face and was absolutely covered in her own poop soup. I don't want to say Jay had a weak stomach, and he wasn't easily grossed out in general, but he couldn't even begin to clean that cage without gagging. So he ended up giving Xena a much needed 6am bath while I tackled the cage. I can't even begin to describe the smell. The only description Jay could come up with was "It smells like death. Like literal death." But you know, I think he made it to work almost on time, and we learned a very important lesson: NEVER change your dogs food that drastically unless you want her to explode from the inside out. And for weeks after, he periodically said "Hey, remember that time you woke up at 6am on Christmas eve to clean Xena's shit? You must really love me, huh?"

Well, I do.

Actually, finding this picture reminded me of something. Because Jay gave me the wand early (and because Xena mangled it), he ended up getting me a second present, which you can see in this picture! He got me a Slytherin shirt, but put it in that big box with like six cans of beer and six cans of pink lemonade iced tea to throw me off. Also, that gray cage right behind Jay? Less than 10 hours after this picture was taken, it would be full of poop.