Moved on to Metastasized

I have moved on, it only took three mental breakdowns, 5 months, and a whole lot of lost time from my friends. As well as the worst news I could receive. My father's rectal cancer has returned; all of a sudden my squabble with Paige and Matt seem insignificant.

I'm completely devastated, I feel very similar to the worst of my psychosis except I have a real current reason to be sad. Last time we were so hopeful when we went to the office in Mayo to see the doctor, we were so surprised when the doctors' informed us it really couldn't get much worse. Stage IV-Type 0. It was a miracle that it hadn't metastasized. It's been five years, five years of my father being in remission, five years since I was forced to help him heal; to spend every waking minute with him while he's in pain. Apparently the surgery didn't catch all of it. The found it metastasized in what they currently believe to be his peritoneum, the layer of tissue around the abdomen.

Now all I can think about is the worst. I'm only now just starting a new relationship online with a single mother I met, but now instead of making sure Katie isn't just another Kimmy, I also have to worry that my dad could be dying. I'm not sure how to give her the time we deserve.

I'm scared and I'm not sure what to do. This weekend I get to go see Celtic Women in concert, a group I've always want to see live. Yet, all I want to do right now is curl up in my apartment and forget the world exists, but I know that won't help.

I suppose all I can do is to keep breathing and moving forward.

 

~Nathan

To Moving On...

I wonder, why is that you affect me in such a way?

It's been five months since I met you and without trying or meaning to that you changed my world. My feelings for you aren't love; I didn't get to know you that well enough for that. And yet the sound of your voice puts my heart in my throat; as well as instilling a feeling of adoration and want. That are then immediately followed by feelings of embarrassment, anger and a profound sadness. Whether you are there or not. I want so hard to be happy for you and your relationship, but I can no longer pretend that I'm not interested in people. Keeping that secret isn't fair to me or to others.

I need to live and learn to love myself so I will no longer look into the mirror and feel disgust, both for the things that I did when I was young and for the person that I've allowed myself to become. But it's time for me to move on. I need to be better than my abusers and move past the horrors of my youth. I need to love myself, for myself, so I can help the next generations to learn from my mistakes.

They say that to learn to breathe you must first breathe out. That the first lesson to truly relax is to accept that which you stress over and then let it go. Even if you can only do it for a few minutes; in time it will get better. For the past few months, I have allowed my anxieties, paranoia, and depression control my life. The psychosis from my past has controlled my future, and my hopes for the future have drowned my present.

For years I've tried to hide from my memories, and I have gotten pretty damn good at it. Though at times my memories started to poke through to my conscious mind and I was forced to go to Sanctuaries. Be they at my friends or to church. But this year when I finally bounced off the ground, when my memories started to return I had no sanctuary to go to. I no longer felt safe at my friends, as they had betrayed me; I no longer felt at home in the church. I couldn't even feel the presence of the LORD, while I was there.

For a long time I had blamed other for my problems. Though they may not be blameless for my current issues, they are not the cause of the root issue; my problems are my own. I have survived to this point, but I have refused to live; as I was unable to love myself. I disposed the person I was as a child and I hated the person I had become.

As this chapter of my life comes to a close, I look to the present and wonder. What can I do at this moment to improve myself? I need to take care of myself better; I have to begin to care for my health. To not just use it as an excuse for others to pity me for it. I need to care my things, so I can have control of my finances and my life. Yet, I won't make a promise to do these things, for I have tried that before. And when I broke those promises to myself, even if to no fault of my own, my psychosis got worse. Even if the promise wasn't keepable.

As I think about the past, I can now see both the good and the bad. I see that which I could not see before. Love from others, as well as my own disrespect. Even though I was hurt when others disrespected me. I had wanted so much of others, but I had refused to return those same wants.

It's time for me to breathe out, let it go, and move on.

 

~Nathan

Sleep

So I'm diabetic, I have been official for around 10 years and I probably have been for all of my life. And when my mental health begins to deteriorate I used to allow my blood sugars to elevate. It was a quick fix to calm my raging thoughts.

It no longer works and to make matters worse as I now start to reign my sugars in and my health improves it making my mental health worse. My nightmares have returned.
Most of them are old thoughts mixed with very weird vivid dreams of me blaming myself for my past, for things I had no control over. I know logically that this is only my subconscious trying to categorize the past few months into something useful and then to discard the rest, which may finally put the last few months of my torment to rest. But now I can't sleep unless I'm exhausted, either in body or in mind, so I don't dream. And my body still can't take exhausting amounts of work.
On good news though at least old thoughts are starting to fade and don't hurt as much. Silver lining I guess.

 

Nathan Damm

Resentment

For a long I've had feelings of anger and resentment towards my parents. And now I have these same feelings for Matt, Paige, my friends and GOD himself. And now as I write this, I wonder if it's only resentment towards myself.

 People always used to tell me "Nathan, life isn't fair. You don't always get what you put in…" No shit. I've always known that; it's one of the many reasons why for so long that I didn't do anything. It never seemed to matter what I did.

 If I thought I was good at something, I would quickly find someone better; they would belittle me for being incorrect at my able. If I put in more effort I would always get one of three things: no one would be impressed if it mattered at all, the effort wouldn't be enough, or the worst they are surprised as if I'd never done anything of that caliber before. And then I'd have to start at the beginning again, soon after I'd be shown someone better. Now this isn't a bad thing normally, but I was a depressed pre-teen trying to find someone he wanted to do. In the end I just decided in wasn't worth the effort to try, of course then it was my fault when it failed, somehow.

 Sometimes I wonder how I made it to High School, never mind how I kept a remote amount of sanity I had when I graduated. But that's where todays issue starts, my senior year of high school. In my 18^th year of life my parents had already began to end their marriage. They hadn't told my brother or me yet, but I had known something was amiss. I have never been book smart, don't get me wrong I'm intelligent; but I pick up things much easier on intuition that on what I'm told. And I've seen families go through divorces before. But that's a story for another time, if a really important story.

 They officially told us after I graduated from high school and as normal they tried to explain how it wasn't our fault. However, they also told me they only stayed together, because they didn't want it to interrupt my studies and graduation. Trust me, it being a barely kept secret had interrupted my studies and I barely graduated. Now that being said I did quickly except the divorce wasn't my fault, but the very idea that the reason the two people who I've loved the longest in the world only had stayed together when they didn't want or needed to was a blow to my heart and my already damaged psyche.

 I had hoped that when I went to college that I would be able to move on; that I could leave the pain behind me and go on and start to live my life for real. I had lost many friends, because I never learned what to do with my feelings; unfortunately I hadn't needed to learn to make new ones either. I never really had my brother; we've only started to become close recently in RL. Haleigh, the girl I love was lost to me and Becca who loved me; I had let go, because I never felt any more than friendship for. My family was now lost to me and I really didn't understand why and I had no one help me to try to understand. I figured at that point I had already lost everything I had loved and there wasn't anything left to loose.

 And then I got sick; I lost my health and my future all at once. After my splenectomy I tried to return to college, but my drive was gone. Once again I had put my all in and got less than nothing in return. I had accepted that somehow I had done something to deserve to be alone, to be poor and to be haunted by my past. My mistakes came in daydreams; I would relive my life experiences and try to change them only to have to remember that I was still stuck in a dead end job at home, unwilling to take the chance to change. Of course the worse part was my good memories; they would come while I slept. They would always be so life-like, to the point I was having full audible conversations. At first they would all be there. Haleigh, Jess, the guys and their significant others and we would just sit around by fire and talk. Every time I would have this dream I would wake up in tears, my longing so great.

 About a year after my illness, I got to see Haleigh one last time. And as we sat next to each other on the bleachers and talked I felt such a great sense of peace. There are not words for what I felt. But I wasn't able to apologize; in the end we just said goodbye. She was the first girl I loved, I loved her then and I there's a part of me that loves her now. I truly believe there will always be that 21 year old part of me that loves that 19 year old image of her.

I accept my own resentment of myself, the resentment that I never told her how sorry I was. I didn't know how to express my feelings for her, to explain how I wanted more than friendship. I had hoped that maybe those notes would give me enough time to get up my courage to tell her or to prove my worth to her (and to me as well) or something. But in the end, all they did was scare her. I slipped and started to doubt myself and I ended up blaming her. And I lost it all.

    There aren't words to express my sorrow.
 
All I can do is ask for forgiveness,

 Nathan

Anger and Aggression

I'm starting to feel like I'm in middle school again, afraid of my own shadow. I realize it sounds a little odd, but please try to understand that my shadow has always been the manifestation of my aggression.

When I was young I was bullied on, I have a picture from elementary school where I'm literally over a head taller than everyone else in my class. And I kept growing, I never got to get used to my height, I never learned coordination. Back in the 90s when you were big and bullied the teachers told you to bully them in return. So I did.

The problem was, when I was bullied no one really seemed to care. At least no one seemed to care about me, but when I bullied them back, and then my classmates would fawn over them. They would make sure the asses were alright, to make sure the Ogre hadn't hurt them. Then I would get dirty looks for days. And in the end I would just be bullied again and no one would care.

Soon my size and strength began to be a curse and I began to fear my anger and aggression. I began to force my anger down so that I couldn't touch it. Soon I couldn't draw it out at safely. I would become pent up and frustrated and then I would snap under the smallest of pretexts. I would lose potential friends and more, because I couldn’t express myself in constructive ways. I couldn't draw out my anger constructively while lifting nor could I push my aggression in competition. And I never really learned how.

And that leads me to now. Now I'm 30. When I lift my anger comes out naturally and I can feel my muscles tear from the extra strain. And I'm afraid to get together with my friends and compete in noncontact sports because my Shadow, that which is the manifestation of my aggression, may rear is its head and roar. And then I'll have no control of myself at all.

Respectably,

 

Nathan.

Hopes, Dreams and Catfishes

So the girls I had been talking to online was another Catfish. Now logically I've known for a week or two that something was wrong, but emotionally I needed the crutch. I wanted it to be true so much. I wanted someone to look forward to seeing me, to be wanted. I liked caring about someone's safety and not having to worry if they would get the wrong impression and I'd somehow loose a friend. 

Still it was nice to talk to a real person. Even if all the information I was given beforehand was fake, I like to believe that what we chatted about on yahoo was real. Of course, this also makes the blow worse as well, doesn't it? Unlike the others, I had actually grown feelings for this woman. Feelings of friendship and companionship mix with caring and at the end a hope for the future. 

Once again my hopes for a future are destroyed by someone who cares only for themselves. And my dreams of a family of my own have been made nightmares, seemingly of my own ineptitude. Right now I feel horrible, as all I can think of is the relationship that caused my last emotional spiral. I feel horrible because I want their relationship to fail and not because I want to attempt another relationship with the girl, but so that my old friend who tore out my heart will feel the pain that I do now. I've repeatedly told myself it the past 12 hours that I want this so I can pursue a meaningful friendship with the girl. But that's because I fear if I do pursue it now, some of my old friends will try to use that slowly budding friendship as an excuse to force me to become friends with him again. 

Once you combine these two issues with my financial woes caused partially from my emotional/mental breakdown at the beginning of the year, along with my mom's horrible attempts to help me coup, it just feels like I'm being pushed away again.  

As to my Mom's attempts to help, she calls almost every day. Which I like, I like knowing someone cares, but she keeps throwing my mistakes in my face I don't know if she's attempting to make a joke or if it's a reminder. But either way, at the end of the day I've generally already used up most of my mental fortitude against it. I tear down myself throughout the day as it is, just to rebuild myself. So that eventually I can feel whole again, while still being myself. But having her remind me of my money issues, while I work my second job at home, while my bills sit on my table in front me needing to be paid, when I already can't pay my rent, I don't know what to do. I don't want her to stop calling.  

But I'll keep working on it. I'll keep pushing myself as I can. I let my fears of my past allow me to stagnate for too long. I'll do what I can to use my anger and my will power in useful manners. I'll clean up my lifestyle and then who knows. I never would have guessed this, not now… 

Respectably, 

Nathan 

Friendiversary

Happy Friendiversary Paige,

Thank you for being there for me in the past month.

Your advice and presence has helped me move past the uglier truths of my life that I have had to fully realize.

I wish I could tell you to follow your own advice. To look on to your own future. Regardless of whether you choose to take the job that is offered to you, never allow someone to take that chance to grow from you. I remember how much you were looking forward to learning something new.

I suppose if it comes to it that would include me as well. Don't allow me or my words to end your future either. I don't know if they are just my love for you as a friend and a great person or if I think them out of jealousy of wanting to be with you more. I can no longer tell, but I don't want to be unseen and unheard ever again.

We're all important.

To my friend, who as all my female friends I sometimes refer to as Darling,

Nathan Damm

Matt

Matt, I can't take this anymore. Your narcissism is just to much, all I wanted was an apology. You didn't see the point. I wish I could go back and act when I first noticed. The people out there who don't even know me anymore give me more feeling than you have in years.
Goodbye my friend.
I forgive you,

Nathan Michael Damm