Personal Post. 10*03*26 Frustration Rage and Grief (Patreon)

This is a Personal Post. No game content, no industry insights, no (intentional) humor, not even news about my recovery from cancer. Just stuff I used to put on Social Media. But I don't trust those spaces anymore, so I encourage everyone who wants to read my personal thoughts to join this Patreon as at least free members. Of course, joining at even the cheapest paid level is a great way to support me and my writing, if that's something you want to do.

I'll make an Index of these eventually.

So, if you don't need to know about my mood, my recent news, what I ate for dinner last night (shredded chicken burrito with sour cream sauce and thin-sliced potatoes), please feel FREE to skip these. I know for a lot of you, THIS isn't what you are here for, and that's fair.

Here endeth the introduction.

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This is a rough one, folks. Content warning: Grief, pets, funerals, parents, loss. I wrote it, and I wouldn't want to read it.

I don't like showing my negative emotions.

I've discussed this fact with several good therapists (and a few bad ones), some close family, a couple of dear friends. I hate it when I cry, which is inconvenient because I am a huge sap who can be driven to tears at the drop of a hat, as long as the hat is in a movie and is a well-worn and beloved ball cap with big animated eyes that is forgotten by a young boy in a moment of pique, and the hat reaches out desperately as it is dropped, trying to hold on to its boy, but gets dropped in the mud, slowly buried under fall leaves, and we watch a montage of season after season of the hat rotting away, including one shot of the boy desperately looking for his hat but it's too late, like the innocence of childhood the hat is gone and that friend, abandoned, will rot away in the woods forever lost, along, and forgotten.

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Where was I? Right, crying.

I did not cry at either of my parents' funerals. Or any of the three grandparents' funerals I was alive to attend. I did not cry while holding any of the beloved cats whose time had come and who we had to put down. I am crying NOW, thinking about them, and their last breaths in my arms. A couple of them turned their heads into my body, cuddling to me for comfort to their last. It is the hardest, worst duty of a pet owner to see to it their pets don't suffer when there is no hope for improvement, and it sucks. More than one member of my family have been unable to go with those cats they adored to this final duty, and so more than once I have gone alone.

I wish I had cried. They deserved my tears. But I hate crying, and crying in public is worse. So those tears are usually held for a moment when I am alone, or I am overwhelmed.

When I am alone, like now, writing this in the game room as the rest of the household sleeps and I kept out current cats out much to their annoyance, I can let myself cry. But the split second someone, anyone, might see or hear me do it, I feel anger. Yep, anger that anyone knows I am crying. Sometimes I am tired enough that I am okay with my wife witnessing my tears. I love and trust her without reservation, and when I can't hold them back, she has proven she can be trusted with my sobs.

Heck, sometimes when I am alone I watch media that I know will make me cry, just to get some of the bawling over with. I am aware it's a biological and psychological pressure release valve for me, so if I feel that pressure building and I can arrange safe time and space, I can pop on the death of the Iron Giant, or whatever, and let the eye-water fall. Heroic deaths are the safest tear-jerkers for me, because some things that make me cry also make me mad.

And I hate being mad. Especially if anyone is going to see it.

Sense a theme?

The three mental states I most try to suppress and conceal are frustration, rage, and grief. I am aware I cannot avoid them, but I don't like them, don't want them, and don't handle them well. And yeah, I am aware of a lot of the things this says about me.

Frustration and rage have been at all-time highs for the past 7 years. Personal failures, political disasters, literal worldwide pandemics, cancer, poverty, obesity, and, TOP of the list, seeing other people who deserve more than me not only get less, but get shithammered by the universe over and over and over, have left me sometimes quivering with emotions I hate to the degree I am unable to speak.

This ties into other stuff too, of course. Clinical depression, aging, losing beloved friends, even dealing with the public, sometimes. I'm in much worse shape, physically and mentally, than I should be. I know being 55 isn't the same as being 45 (well, okay, I'll be 56 in 25 days, but whatever), and cancer can take a lot out of you, but my current arc of well-being doesn't bode well for me making it to 65. That's not just my opinion, that's the medical diagnosis from numerous of my doctors. Some of that is the fact I am hugely obese, of course, but far from all of it.

I have coping mechanisms, which have kept me alive so far. I have plans of action, and prescriptions, and a support network. But my margin of being able to cope is so much thinner than it used to be. And the frustration, rage, and grief are so much more common.

(Me, in 2000, by the Wizards of the Coast Mana Pool. When this was taken, I thought I'd found a way to make my love of unreal universes pay off with a secure, successful, financially relaxed life. I found out the next year I was massively, frustratingly wrong. I've been struggling to make ends meet every year since. Some years more than others, but I've not been financially secure since Wizards laid me off 25 years ago.)

Whenever I get to the point I can't see a way to ever be stable or secure in the long term, I end up mentally wandering to a place where I only see two options: keep going, or don't. I hate being driven to recognize all the options I see are bad ones, but that's reality. I'm not a huge fan of reality (my career, social life, and hobby are all built around rules for unreal universes, after all). But I know it's where I keep my stuff, so I have to deal with it more often than not.

Keep going, or don't.

So, I throw myself at another effort to find a way to improve things, or at least reduce how much they suck, because I am going to keep going.

Which means dealing with frustration, rage, and grief.

Fini

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Still here? Okay, lemme put my hat out.

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