Lost my voice again.

Just an advance warning my post may trigger, if you are feeling delicate or are sensitive to subjects that cover abuse then please don't continue reading this. You have been warned!




I had another episode of my voice going again last week, apart from a mildly sore throat my voice is now fully back. This is obviously a good thing bearing in mind last year I lost it for 5 months which mean't some fairly serious time off work. A repeat of that would have been devastating for me in terms of progressing forward with my life, mentally and financially. Financially I would be screwed to the point that my home would be at significant risk.

Obviously this year I am in a better position that I have been in a very long time. I am fully aware of the warning signs when things start to kick off. The difference this year is that the warning signs weren't subtle, they smacked me as hard as possible.  It was full on hardcore and scared me silly.  It didn't help I went walking in the rain and I tried to put some of the blame on that.

So what was it?  Well nothing to do with my daughters, wife or Amy this time.  This was some really really nasty stuff from my past. It came back in full horrific colour en mass. More than that I ended up feeling very violated.  These are memories that have been buried for along time now.  I am not going to say who, what, why, when and how long for as my immediate priority has to be to protect myself.  I am not in any immediate danger or at risk but that isn't the point. The point is that I am dealing with this with very very little support and I am not sure how to fix it. My throat is getting more and more painful typing this.

I have done enough to get my voice back which is the symptom of the problem.  My biggest issue is night time.  I maybe safe and away from danger but I am getting wound up at night around the time I go to bed.  I am struggling to fall asleep and am waking up very tense so I am not getting a decent nights sleep.   I had a brilliant day on Saturday yet that night I had to spend well over an hour talking myself down and relaxing after I had gone to bed.

Assisted Suicide

I have visited this once before but have decided to re write it and see what sort of reaction I get.

Before I go any further I think I need to say a bit more about myself. I am pro life, I believe that everyone has a right to life. I am 100 percent against the death penalty under any circumstances. I firmly believe that suicide leaves more than one victim, specifically someone has to find the person who has committed suicide and deal with the aftermath. I have had personal experience of suicide after attempting myself and dealing with an attempted suicide of another. Amy did not die of the injuries caused by her suicide attempt but of injuries inflicted before she hung herself.   The Catholic church teaches that taking life is wrong. It is also illegal in the UK to assist someone attempting to commit suicide. I have a living will which gives legally binding instructions if I am in a position where I am unable to make my own decisions.

In this context we are not talking about someone hanging themselves, cutting their wrists, taking an overdose or jumping off a building. We are talking about someone taking their own life in a controlled environment with minimal assistance after what I would hope is very extensive assessment. The person being provided with a lethal amount of a drug but taking it with their own free will.

Everyone has a right to life but should people have the right to choose when, where and at what time they die? Honestly no I don’t think a person should have the right to choose when and where they should die. Not in the context of suicide no.  

I have a living will to safe guard myself and to prevent others being put into the position where they have to make choices they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. There is a standard of life where I am not prepared to go below and if this means that I loose my life so be it, what I won’t be doing is committing suicide. I also have no issue with someone who decides to end treatment for a life threatening condition.  

We do have the right to life and this is protected by law, both nationally and internationally. likewise we also have the right to life without pain and suffering, we have a right to a standard of life so why shouldn’t we have the right to end that life when it falls below an acceptable level?  Because it is wrong, there is always hope (that maybe a poor argument but is is true) How does one judge what is an acceptable standard when it comes to illness or injury? To try would run the risk of valuing one life above another, you may even run the risk of turning someone with a certain injury or illness into a second class citizen and putting pressure on them to end their lives. What safe guards are there to prevent vulnerable people being pressured into killing themselves?

When a person decides to end their life they are considering one person only and that is themselves. Wether it be assisted or not, that person is not considering others. You may accuse me of wanting to see people suffer but that is far from the case. I wouldn’t want anyone I cared about to suffer, I would want the medical profession to ease their pain rather than assist that person to die. Isn’t that what they are there for?

Life is precious, we should not start to de value it by allowing assisted suicide.  

Flashbacks

I am going to say something which is going to sound odd on the basis that flashbacks are nasty horrible things that can leave me anything from being mildly upset to a panicking wreck. Some are heart breaking and some are just wrong in so many ways.

There are that I welcome the flashbacks and even fully embrace them.  In particular the ones I am talking about are of my daughters.  They hurt, they break my already broken heart even further, they remind me of what I have lost but I welcome them.

There are very rare times that I welcome the other flashbacks purely when it is over I can get some peace. I get incredibly tense and wound up when I can feel one coming up.  My brain goes at a million miles per hour and it is relentless.  The moment I found Amy is still burn't into my skull but I have had that one so many times now that unless it is really full on I can deal with the aftermath fairly quickly.  There are other memories coming back from the distant past, thing that I would rather not remember.

The other reason I welcome them is that I know regardless of how bad they may be I know it is my mind trying to heal itself.  I can try my best to fix the damage that I am aware of, the other damage is a different matter.

Angry

After hitting a brick wall at 70mph last Thursday I have managed to sort out the mess that was created using a mixutre of sheer defiance, questioning my actions, distraction and damage minimisation. The annoying thing is that my brain started kicking off over something I know is the right thing to do. This is more than just knowing that I am doing the right thing, the facts back it up. Plus if someone else tried to prevent me from doing what I know works with my daughters we would have an issue.  To put it mildly I would kick off in the biggest and most public way possible.  I plan to take steps to ensure when it would have been my youngest daughters birthday in August I will do whatever I consider necesscary to get through it.  It may have taken a week to get it back under control but I have done.

After dealing with that it hit me again, this time even harder. The sheer amount of things I have been through, had inflicted on me or lived through is horrific. Not just my family or Amy but a huge amount of other stuff that is to graphic for me to talk about on this blog.  Some of it I wouldn't change but there are loads and loads that can't be changed. I am the one left to repair the damage and fixed what is broken.

You will have to forgive me if I remain fairly quiet on here but I am really fucked off with the world and the world isn't helping matters.

The progress continues

Sometimes my body is just weird and very unpredictable.  The urges to self injure are fairly intense at the moment, it feels like my body desires the pain, the release and the emotional nose dive. It almost borders on a need at times.  I know from the past that what I am feeling is the addiction, the need for the release is addictive.

Last night whilst eating a packet of fruit flakes I managed to extract a crown. It wasn't exactly a pleasant experience and felt like I had been punched in the face. My body went into shutdown and I became incredibly tired.  Exhausted was an understatement, not my usual reaction to pain.  It may have been the fact that I hate going to the dentist, the fact that I thought it was going to be expensive to sort out or the fact that it was entirely unintentional that caused the reaction. Who knows?

Moving onto my birthday I am really proud to say that I managed to get to 4pm before my brain kicked off over my family and my mood crashed. I managed to ignore the negative thoughts leading up to my birthday. I treated myself and even bought myself some cake. I even fought off the huge urges to harm myself. This was a definite improvement on last year and a vast improvement on previous years.

Why am I so angry?

You will have to forgive my very angry posts recently, it is very rare for my temper to completely boil over but it has done. There are people out there who have used my daughters, in particular my eldest daughter as a weapon against me. We maybe in 2011 but there are 'people' who think that using my daughters as a weapon against me is perfectly acceptable. These people with their actions have caused a huge amount of distress, their actions are extremely offensive and they don't know the depths of my anger.  I have always said that they were off limits to everyone but this was ignored. I actually don't know what to do, so this time I have allowed my anger to boil over in a public way.  I am far to angry to forgive, until I am satisfied and calm again then forgiving these people would be impossible.

The event that I am talking about happened many months ago.  The reason I am posting now is to remind people that I haven't forgotten what they have done, I won't be forgetting what they have done. Time and lack of action on their part has only served to increase my anger and the damage that has been done.

Dare to cross the line?

meh

Well it is my birthday on Sunday and this year I have bought myself Andrea Corr's new album and Black Swan on DVD. It has been a few years since I have actually bought myself something for my birthday so this marks a significant change for me as normally I don't buy myself anything. I hope that I will eventually get to the point that I can have a proper birthday.

I am feeling insecure at the moment and at times it is increasing my anxiety levels. It is the sort of insecurity that can be cured with a proper hug. I know what is causing this but frustratingly there is nothing I can do about it at the moment. A decent nights sleep should hopefully help.

limits

Today is my first post for a while. I haven't been able to get how I am feeling out in a way that makes any sense. When leaving work today I was feeling a bit miffed and my first thought was now was the time to tear myself apart again.

I very firmly believe that I had to tear myself apart, to take a nose dive into a black hole of emotions and pain to get myself to the place I am in now. I am not going to say it was the right thing to do or an active choice on my part but it had to happen. Even with the massive progress I have made I am still walking a tight rope. I still get urges to injure myself and at times get the urge to really let rip at myself.

My family is precious to me and where I draw the limit. In other words my daughters are strictly off limits, believe it or not but people still use my daughters as a weapon to attack me. It has happened numerous times now. I never forget when a person is stupid enough to use my daughters as a weapon against me.

Another mistake people can and do make is trying to compare the loss of one child against the loss of another child. Loosing a baby is devastating regardless of wether it is a miscarriage, still birth, the baby is premature and lives for a few minutes or the baby dies weeks after birth. You can't compare and to do so would mean regarding one loss as less than another. To do so is insulting. The loss of a child is very very serious!