“Soul Tired”…

Yet again it’s been while since I’ve posted here. I’ve little energy for anything recently. How new. After having a chat with myself over the job thing, I have relaxed a little. Only thing is, it doesn’t matter how much I tell myself “I’m ok, I’m doing good”, that annoying background anxiety just won’t stop gnawing away at me. I despise it. It’s debilitating when it rises to the surface. I practise CBT on myself most days. “Be nice to yourself.” I’m told. “Tell yourself nice things.” is another. So I do. I try to anyway. I guess it’s no different than what I’m trying to do with my Princeling. I’ve been making an extra effort to make him feel good about himself. College didn’t work out so he could do with a confidence boost.

It’s Precious’ birthday this week. It also happens to be the same day My Lady went into hospital last year. Another anniversary, but this will be the first one year anniversary… One year… ??? … One… Whole… Year…

My heart bleeds for Precious right now. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like for her. Her birthday forever tainted with Mum’s hospitalisation. The mind boggles. I hope she likes the gifts I got her. More than anything, I hope she can have a good enough time to take her mind off it for a while. In her position, I’d want to either sleep the day away and ignore it, or party hard to ignore it. I am not Precious though, and much like My Lady and I, Precious and I are very different. We always were.

I had another batch of papers to sign recently, regarding the investigation into My Lady’s death. It’s so hard to go through. When I’m reading it, I can literally feel a weight pressing down on me. My heart speeds up and I get a burst of adrenalin as my mind is taken back to those two weeks in ICU. I just want the whole process to be over with. I know what happened to My Lady, but was it negligence? Whether it is or not, the fact remains that a drug she was given, for a condition she didn’t have… Killed her. There is simply no getting around that. It’s horrific.

I’ve been struggling with sleep again this last week or so. It takes me days of early nights to catch up on one late night. Friday’s have now become very late. Friday before last I intended to have a power nap and found myself being woken up by my Princeling at 11pm. This Friday, I was going to do the same but set a few alarms on my phone. I dozed for 45 minutes but never actually slept. It was nice to just quieten my mind for a bit, but that ‘bit’ lasted about 5 minutes. The rest of the time I was lying there on the sofa trying not to overthink my life. Still, my body felt rested. Sometimes I find it hard to tell the difference between actually being tired and being so depressed, all I crave is to sleep my life away.

At work this week, I have chilled out somewhat. I had to. I was going to go pop if I kept it up. The product we have been working on is more complex than recently, so a degree of concentration was required, for once. Naturally this makes time fly which always lightens my mood. Low rent job it may be, but there is still satisfaction in being surprised when break/home time comes, turn around and being even more surprised at how much work I’ve done. It seems I put one of the permanent staff to shame all week. Hopefully they will not cause trouble over it. Seems ridiculous but it’s true when I say it would only take one word in the right ear for me to get the boot. Some are fired just because the middle management didn’t like them on a personal level. I don’t see how that works as they don’t make any effort to get to know the temps. There are one or two exceptions to this but it really is like that there. Some are so petty, it’s sickening. Some guy comes along and threatens their pathetic little low rent bubble even though I’m in no danger of usurping them from their job and they know it. I’ve seen it many times. Stuck in their own little EastEnders style soap opera bubble, squawking all day about Corrie, Enders or some other utter shite. It makes my skin crawl.

So, as I said, Friday came at last. After my non nap, I brewed a pot of coffee and said screw it, lets go… After the last Friday UN meeting we were all looking forward to it so much. A lot of us have been struggling with our mental health in some way or another and Friday nights together have been the highlight of the week for most of us.

So after at least nine months of Subs Club being completely argument free, it came. On the one hand a couple of new Subs Club members were being dicks in the live chats. Even being rude to existing members. On the other hand, I had posted a link to an article about Biden assigning a Transgender lady into the White House. He said they were a crazy person and no good for the job. Trouble is, he referred to her as “It”. I obviously pulled him up on it, but he was unrepentant and even tried to justify his position in the same sentence as a (kind of) apology. Refusing to even entertain the thought of educating himself, he stuck to his guns. At that point, I hid the comments and unfriended him. I don’t want that crap on my Facebook wall.

After the tiffs in the live chat Robb asked one of us to sort out a moderator to keep tabs on peoples behaviour in the live streams. He asked us directly, mental. So we voted and sent the names to Robb and we await to see how he wants to play it. We are guessing he will make our selections moderators on his account. How trusting is that? There’s no other way of one of us officially moderating it without access to Robbs account. We discussed this at length in the couple of hours leading up to the pregame subs stream.

It was electric happy hour this time, and Robb and JMac put on the best set I’ve seen in months. Last weeks was amazing to but this one really got me going. Having had a few beers along with the rest of them, the UN meeting on Zoom was basically a drunken laughing attack all night. Last week I hit the pillow at half three and this week it was 2:45.

So, it seems it’s taking me days just to write one post. So be it. If that’s how I work then fine. I have no idea why I worry about the “audience” as I’m not writing this for anyone else. No offence dear reader, but this is not for you, it’s for me. I can’t even believe I’m still doing it. Nearly 44 thousand words in 2020… I’ve not written that many in the last ten years I’d guess! I haven’t looked back at the earlier posts much recently. When I do I get the strangest feelings on top of reliving the feelings I was having back then. I still get the desire to be in my garden on a scorching hot day, tending the garden, all the while, music playing on my garden system. Barbeques almost every day with my Princeling, and hours of guitar practise. I was getting paid, I had a job to go back to that I loved, and although due to lockdown, I couldn’t actually see my people, there was that perverse pleasure and feeling of safety I used to have. It’s surreal now, as I had never felt more unsafe. The very worst thing from my nightmares had come true. That means anything can and will happen. It’s just a case of when.

So it’s Precious’ birthday tomorrow… I wish I could be with her to just give her a hug if nothing else. That’s not going to happen and once we hit tomorrow, it will be constantly on my mind. Two weeks and then the anniversary of My Lady’s passing. Those whole two weeks though. I have them burned into my soul. Every last horrifying second of it. The two families I bonded with in the waiting room while we were all going through genuine trauma. The hug of joy from an old lady who’s husband of fifty years had just pulled through. The day before, they were sure he would not make it through the night. I spent around 3/4 of my time there sharing the waiting room with another family. Friends in trauma. Then, after several hugs of hope and relief, the mother came through the main doors of the ICU ward as I was going in, and just threw her arms around me and said “He’s going to die!”. Over the next two days, one by one, his family came to see him one more time. Each and every one of them gave me a hug and thanked me for the support I had shown their mother/grandmother. Every one of them.

Anyway, as you see, it’s all there. I still have the notepad entries on my phone stating what drug and what quantity was being administered. Every day…

Well, enough of such pleasant reminiscences…

It’s about time I finished this post…