Let Luce

Here it comes. Christmas.  This is the first time in twelve years I've been without my son on Christmas. I've never had to share him. I've never had him taken away from me. I'm trying not to focus on the losses. I'm trying not to focus on the anger. I'm focusing on me. I want to be the elusive 'good surprise'.  The hits I've taken through the years are minor compared to ones I've taken this year. Sometimes I feel like leftovers. What does that mean?  It's always about the unanswered questions. Leftovers. The details left out. The details left behind. The questions about Christmas morning this year. Will Bobby have the gifts wrapped and placed neatly on the chair for when Jude comes down the steps in the morning? Is Jude going to let tears fall down his face in the dark before he falls asleep like I do?  Christmas is a dark time for me this year. Dark like the path I was running with no place to go. It's easy to get lost in the darkness. I...

 I wanted to Trauma Dump so I can stop talking about it. I thought it would stop being a part of me. I thought it would stop being a part of my writing. But that will never be.  That will never be.  'But to say never say never you done said never twice...it's the questions, it's the questions boy...' (Common Sense)  'Sew, buttons on your underpants.'  My Mom always used to say that. I would sigh and say, 'So....'  She would finish my sentence with, 'buttons on your underpants.' I still catch myself repeating her quips and phrases after all these years.  Semantics.  What a 'mother huncher'!  That's another little phrase I picked up from my buddy's Dad. He would say 'mother huncher' instead of y'know....the big cuss word.  He also called Giant Eagle, 'The Dirty Bird'. Ew.  But that's what we are left with when people leave our lives in one way or another. Things they've said, things they'v...

  Trauma Dump (continued) Everything changed, but change itself.  Nothing ever changed and I woke up one day and everything was different.    25. My relationship with Eric fell apart. He started to drink too much. I guess he was alone too often. He made a permanent decision. He hung himself in his basement with an orange electrical cord. The only thing left in his house were empty bottle of Canadian Club a single bottle of Heinz ketchup in the fridge, and the stench of stubborn sadness.  26. My son. I thought. My son, my sun. And I started to tick again. Was that a bomb? Or a clock?   27. Bobby got diagnosed with cancer. I found out a month before the treatments began. His actual diagnosis was whispered behind my back long before that. My invisible brother (by blood only) insisted he would be supportive. He would hire someone to take care of Bobby. Bobby - hired me. Turns out sometimes, you have to actually be present, to be present....

           Trauma Dump.            Let's do this.   They say anger is only the initial reaction. The first most obvious feeling. Underneath that anger is hurt, pain, sadness. All the secondary emotions that lie dormant. The secondary emotions wear their cloak of anger to avoid being addressed. It's just too difficult sometimes. A lot of the time.  So let's see where all my anger was/is coming from. Maybe it will help me to figure out just how much pain I am in.     1. My junior year of high school my mother got pneumonia and spent the next nine months in ICU. I got my drivers license and was able to go to school, work at a grocery store, and visit her at Mercy Hospital throughout those months. Silver linings. 2. The summer going into my Senior year of high school my Mom got well enough to come home from the hospital. We had a live in nurse to take care of her. 3. A month later my Mom h...

It's best for me to write out my traumas as a timeline. Time has always been somewhat elusive to me. I have missed time, I've made up time, I've been late, I've been early. I can't say I've ever truly been ON time.  How is one supposed to be on time? Seriously.  I wear a watch all the time and I still don't understand time.  What I do understand are timelines. General times that have happened and passed and still stick around in the present. Time for trauma. Time for timelines. Time for times like these. Time.  A fickle, funny word, isn't it?   By definition time is:  t he indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. Bizarre, am I right?  So, I've decided to do a tragic, trauma, timeline of sorts. It'll help us speed past some of the snapshots that inevitably take me back in time. I'll get there eventually. I'll get somewhere eventually. I hope.  My Paradox Philos...

  Well... I know what I'm doing here. I'm listening to a broken record.  Me. But, really, what am I doing here?  Besides riding the Ferris Wheel of the blame game and throwing stones from my piles of broken glass.  I sometimes sound like I'm ringing the alarm for an awful upbringing, in a seedy neighborhood with wretched trolls posing as family.  Sometimes that's what it felt like...and 'feelings are valid'.  (Learned that in therapy).  But what role did I play?   It goes back to Radical Acceptance. Owning your shit. Owning the part you played.  (Learned that in therapy).   How the hell did I really get here? It's quite the list, I'm going to be honest.  As a professional secret keeper I have a long list of secrets.  Luckily, that's what I'm good at:  lists and secrets .  If I keep slinging mud and name calling whilst not 'radically accepting' the role I've played in this game called life, I'll never get to the g...

  SubStack is a delightful little application I found quite some time ago. It is a platform for writers, thinkers, existentialists, sports fans, but mainly writers. It is a grown-up Medium. If anyone remembers the Medium platform. I quite enjoy the posts on SubStack and started a blog on there a while ago but didn't feel totally comfortable writing out my thoughts. I am going to share the two little posts I wrote on there as well as a post I found on there today from another author. Please enjoy.  The Moment We Notice Ourselves Changing  It is only You!!! From The Philosophy of Us SubStack December 12   There is a moment, usually small and almost invisible, when we realize we're not quite the same as before. Nothing dramatic. No grand revelation. Just a subtle shift, like the light moving across a room.    Maybe we pause before responding. Maybe an old worry feels lighter than it used to. Maybe something that one hurt no longer has the same sh...

Listless .  It's a funny word because it can mean 'without having a list' OR it could mean 'lacking energy or enthusiasm'.  You'll never catch me being either of those two definitions. I will always have a list and I will always have energy. Even the combination of group therapy and constant reading up on my cognitive behavioral skills and dialectical skills has not left me listless . What gets me going in the wrong direction is what I call PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Some others call it mental illness, even more generic is the ever popular Bi-Polar diagnosis. Even worse than that is the blame on hormones or PMS or PMDD.  No matter what you call it, it's counteractive to my situation.  The constant rumination of previous things that have happened that were traumatic or stressful running through someone's mind like the Ferris Wheel.  I felt shame and guilt for doing that to my immediate family members. I felt shame and guilt for a lot of thing...

 I wish I could say this all started with Cancer.  That doesn't sound right, does it?  There's going to be a lot of things that I say in this post that are not going to sound right.  It's not about being right. Here's your trigger warning.  I talk a lot of shit in this post.  My 'brother' (by blood only) and his stupid, selfish, spoiled wife had trained him to forget about me. I was less than according to their behavior. I have always been treated as less than by these two dum dum lollis.  The real reason why she doesn't come down to visit isn't because her neck hurts or because she can't handle the long two hour drive.  It's because of me.   It's because I don't like to eat shit out of a stinky boot.  I will do it.... but only for people that deserve it.... and only for so long.  My brother and his wife told me a long time ago, 'I'm an alcoholic asshole and that's all I'll ever be.'  So that's what I b...

My favorite family members are on the Irish side of my family tree. They have always quietly been in the background as my guardians and guidance. I can hear them with ease, with a whisper, with authority, with a laugh. Many times they have been the only ones I can hear.  While I live in this sober living circle, this mental health specialty facility, I make time for things I wouldn't normally do. I love to read and write but didn't have the focus to do so in the other place. I am allergic to mushrooms. Highly allergic .  They grow in the dark, in fecal matter, and they taste exactly so. I've tried every kind of mushroom out there. I try everything at least once. The Portobello Mushroom, they claimed, tasted like steak.   No . Buzzer sound. The Portobello mushroom tasted like feces and dirt, just like every other mushroom I have ever tried. The real reason I am allergic to mushrooms is because they are a fungus.  I've read a lot about trees and plants as I...

Youth is meant for dancing out loud.  What I mean by that is: dance like no one is watching when you're young. Don't get me wrong, you can dance like no one is watching when you're older as well, but you're going to know people are watching. When you're young it's easier to be carefree about dancing out loud. I love to get lost in the music. I close my eyes and my feet just start to move.  When I was young I won tickets to see Incubus in concert at The Igloo. Say what you want about The Igloo, some people hated it and were glad to see it go. I have too many good memories there.  When I was growing up my best friend's Mom worked for Mario Lemieux. We got to go to hockey games all the time. Hockey games are only fun when you see them in person. As I got older and the NHL came out of there strike, we acquired Sidney Crosby. I stood in line to get student tickets for twenty dollars. At the time I was a student at Point Park University. Student ticket...

 Not sure what I'm writing this post about yet. I just kinda go until I figure it out. I'm reading several books while I'm in the seventh circle of hell.  Do they still teach that in school?  Dante? Dante's Inferno?  To be honest, I had trouble reading that whole thing, I got a lot of my information from Cliff's Notes. Nobody knows Cliff anymore. He has names now like: Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. I really like several applications but I have not dipped a toe in the AI pool. I don't even use the talk to text or ask Siri or ask Alexa. I still like hard copies of things. Printed out versions. It's easier on my eyes and once it's printed, it cannot be changed.  That's part of the reason I became a papergirl. I don't want the newspapers to go away. How will we know what really happened? I still have several prints of newspapers, carefully stashed away in my old room.  What do you like to collect? What is important to you? Computers, fashion, ...

I had to get my previous post out of the way so I can start talking about the fun stuff and the fundamentals. I have been in every kind of therapy since my late twenties. I started at a place called Pyramid. It helped to address the first issues I faced as a youngster. Pre-Motherhood. Pyramid is where I learned my skills that I still utilize everyday. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or DBT .  That's what works for me.  The word ' dialectic ' means to balance AND compare two things that are different or maybe even contradictory. One of the skills they teach in DBT is radical acceptance . I don't want to negate anything I said yesterday about my son and situation I am in. I had to use radical acceptance to get over some of my anger I felt for the misdiagnosis and constant controlling nature of the home I lived in. Regardless of what happened in the past, I did not react properly for many days leading up to Bobby not feeling safe.  Radical Acceptance is another...

   Circles and Squiggles. A drawing.    I'm trying so hard to learn through the freezing cold weather and the hot, hot, heat in my head. I have what they call a 'hair-trigger temper'. For many, many years Bobby and my brother (only by blood) have tried to have me diagnosed and medicated for something that was not a disease. What I harbored inside my tiny body was not some unbalanced, definable illness they would find in the DSM-5.  What I hoarded in my tiny body was infinite rage, dangerously close to hate. It was pride, the unstoppable feeling that I was right, the unquestionable belief that what I was fighting for was right. My pride. But what was I fighting for? The past. Things I couldn't change. Whispers behind my back when they thought I couldn't hear them. No.  Now I had to fight for my son. And that's why I'm here.  That's why I'm stuck.  To get out of the muck.  Forgiveness is something that can be elusive. So mysterious and unsolvab...

 Why am I telling all of this?    It feels like I'm screaming out loud. I love that song by Ed Sheeran, it reminds me of my best friend.  There are several reasons why I'm doing this. Allow me to list them below and perhaps it will be easier for yinz* to follow along. All along.       Why I am telling all of this. A list.  1. It would be way too long to put into a minor post on The Facebook or Twitter.  2. I love to write and have tons of writing I've never edited nor shared.  3. It's part of my REST strategy. 4. It's a strategy.  5. To teach others what I've learned. 6. To be funny at some point.  7. To be dramatical* at some point.  8. To share the inner workings of a life that is complex.  9. To finish something.  10. To pass the time in this facility.  11. To have something self-published I can actually use should I ever want to not self-publish. 12. To become a better editor. 13. To get people who ...

  My brother by blood, but certainly not by any other means had once again invited my Father and my Son up to The Lake Erie.  They would stay in his confusing and cluttered house with his cold wife and caged dogs. They did everything so differently up there I never wanted to go anyway. Except this time.  This time, I did want to go. I wanted to stay in a hotel room the way my brother would stay when he came down to visit Pittsburgh once or twice a year.  He ' grew up ' in the  1990's. He graduated high school in 1994. I was twelve.  The ninties were the most violent decade to be a Pittsburgh Public School student. They had just begun to bus kids from different neighborhoods into different schools.  The intention was to offer anyone and everyone the equally, crappy education at a school of their choosing.    Instead, it mixed kids from across rivers and rivals.    It caused chaos and catastrophe throughout the i...

 PITTSBURGH -    It was once a city filled with smog and steel mills but has become a romantic, cozy, beautiful urban entity. It entices and entertains with the Cultural District and Civic Light Opera shows. It has everything from 'Hamilton' to 'Hello Dolly!' performing throughout the year.  The Strip District has always been my hot spot. Let me tell you about when I was young. Let me take you back like the dream sequence in 'Wayne's World'...     At night the clubs opened up and there were a plethora of them. Several of them literally floated along the river on one big dock. A restaurant called Cruisers had tables with umbrellas overlooking the dark and dangerous looking waters of the Allegheny. The river wasn't something to look at back in those days. The depth was unknown, what was in it was not alive, and it had a very distinct smell. If you fell in or went into the river a single shower would not take the smell away. You would have to use bleach and...

  'It's why we battle, it's why we travel It's why the mascot thinks that I'm an asshole We made the team without putting on a uniform. Smart went nuts and rode a unicorn through the storm .' Smart Went Crazy - Atmosphere    It's always easier for me to start at the end and work backwards. I cannot express to you enough how many times I have started over. I was always rushing through things trying to get to an ending I had never procured.  I am like Phoebe from Friends, 'I don't even have a pla-'. When they asked her what her plans were for the future that was her answer. 'I don't even have a pla-'. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, living day to day. One day at a time is what they tell you in all the self-help groups and group therapy. One day at a time. Well, you can't take it any other way so that's a pretty stupid saying in my humble opinion. That was part of the problem and how I ended up here. I w...