The most heartbreaking loss of a lifetime

How do we cope with the most heartbreaking loss of a lifetime? The most terrible mistake? Something born of an illness so deep and so terrible and unknown to us until it was too late?

At 45 I made a rash decision that altered the whole course of my life. It was the beginning of a time that, after a lifetime of suffering with depression, anxiety and PTSD from longterm sexual abuse I would be diagnosed as bipolar. But the diagnosis came too late, the damage had been done, my life had been shattered, there was no making things right again.

And the thing is there was such a fog of unknowingness due to mental illness that I didn’t even realize, for years, what terrible damage I had done, to myself, and to others. The others survived and went on with their lives but my own life was shattered and I cannot get it back.

I have tried, oh my word how I have tried. When I bought this house, in 2010, with some money left to me after my mother died in 2009, I thought perhaps that I could turn a corner and build a new life, and I tried, and things looked good for awhile, but I was still not well — I didn’t realize how unwell I was — and then there was the fire in 2014 — and mired in so much loss I was not able to regain my footing.

Endless ongoing years of therapy to this day and going forward help me cope. I am off medication and really, at this point, medication wouldn’t make a difference. You can’t medicate away bad choices, you have to live with them. But what if the loss is so great your broken heart will never heal? What then?

And the astonishing thing, to me, in this moment, as I write this, is that it took going off medication, which I did the beginning of this year, to fully wake up enough to realize how deep and profound the loss was. That is the thing about medication. It can be life-saving, and I will tell you right now that if I had to go back on medication at some point I would. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it saved my life. I also know that for many years I was overmedicated and that wasn’t a good thing either. What is happening now, I realize, is that off medication I am waking up to the truth of my life and the sense of loss cuts so deep I am not sure how I will get past it.

In this post I cannot be more specific about what the bad choice was because it involves other people. I am open and honest on my blog, always, wherein it only affects me but I fiercely guard the privacy of those I love. Suffice it to say that this blog post is a question of sorts, something I am asking myself now. How do we ever get past the bad choices we made in the throes of mental illness? How do we cope with these things and move on? And what if the choice was so monumentally bad that it means that we will be lost and alone for the rest our lives? What if we can’t handle the piercing loneliness and at the same time have no choice? What if the consequences of our actions mean that we will never know any kind of security for the rest of our lives and, unable to cope with the knowledge of that we find it hard to move forward at all? What then?

This is what I am trying to figure out. Because in the worst of the throes of the fear that I feel I know that surely I have to go on, that I have to move forward, that there is no turning back, that what was done was done, and that my ability, I will even go so far as to say my willingness, to try to go on affects the people that I love. I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to do this just for me but if I don’t find a way to move forward in a constructive fashion it will affect my children. I won’t have that. I can and will do what I have to do for them.

But just now I don’t know how, and tonight my heart hurts.

Perhaps the rest of this 365 Day Experiment needs to be about facing the choices we have made, and making the best of the life that we have left to us. If I can find happiness in my life, given all of this, I will surely have achieved something. Tonight I don’t know how I will achieve this but I know it has to be possible. If I didn’t believe that I could not go on. And I will go on because I have no other choice. But tonight, no, tonight, in this blog post, I am simply drawing a line in the sand. On one side of the line is devastating loss, too hard to bear, unbearable, no way to go on. On the other side of the line is me going on anyway, moving forward, healing, figuring it out. I don’t know how to do this at all but tonight I have stepped over the line and that is enough.