I am doing better. I am eating again and I sleep. The physical pain is gone. I am, however, deeply depressed. I see that this depression is a result of circumstances exacerbated by the withdrawals. I am mourning the loss of my brother and also the end of a friendship.
Someone I met in the blogosphere, someone I came to love very much hurt me deeply. It’s hard to understand and I feel a sort of shame to have developed such profound feelings for someone I’ve never met in person, but there it was— love. And joy. Someone who got me like many of my friends of the flesh never got me. I have other blogosphere friends like this too. But now that I’ve been hurt I fear trusting these people “out there” that seem so real, that seem so open, that seem so honest, that seem so empathic, that seem so compassionate because they understand. The rug was pulled out from my safe little internet world. My place of comfort where I met people who knew.
No one in my “real” life (I do now think this blogosphere too is real) has ever hurt me like this. I have loyal life long friends. What scares me is how much do we out here know one another. Is it easier to misjudge safety security and love?
I have to say, though wounded and cautious, this has not stopped me from continuing and developing friendships I had already started but there is a pain in my chest and a hesitancy.
I’m sorry I am absent now. But losing a brother to cancer then a trusted friend with whom I had much more contact with than my brother there at the end has left me bereft. I don’t feel like writing. I am not finding new and interesting unoriginal material for my blog either.
The other thing that is funny about this blogosphere world is that I feel responsible to you, my readers. I feel a need to keep this blog up and running. All in all it’s a good thing. Writing and sharing information that may help people has become the productive part of my life—something that gives it meaning—and so comes the feelings of responsibility. This in essence is my job. Someday, of course, I hope to be able to work with people in person again, but for now you are my work. I do my share of letter writing here and there and other small forms of advocacy, but my blog is where I get the most pleasure.
For those of you with full lives “out there” beyond the blogosphere it may be hard to understand how if basically housebound the internet can become a more real world than the one around you. And when you’ve been abused as a child and then by the hands of psychiatry there are really so few people who know. It’s a seductive enticing and wonderful thing to find people in this virtual world. The nature of the friendships are hard to explain unless you’ve had them.
Anyway—that is why I’m absent. It’s not simply the withdrawals. But it is the journey I’ve chosen to take which is sharing myself on the net that led to this juncture. One becomes vulnerable—but we choose to put ourselves out here and so this is a risk we take. I will not stop and I will continue to develop and make friends, but I will be more careful. In the end this was instructive.
Two major losses in just a little over a months time is kicking my ass. Right at this moment I am thinking of my brother. The person I shared blood with at this moment trumps. God I loved him. He was my hero. My mentor. My friend.
I know the pain will pass in time and I will never again be naive to the complexity of the internet.
I am closing comments on this post. I do not wish to discuss it. I simply want my readers to know what I’m going through right now. I’m mourning. My brother and my friend. Life is so unsure and right now I’m just downright delicate and the particular delicacy may indeed be the withdrawals.