Tuesday, November 30, 2010

life is hard

You know, I started this blog to talk about surviving brain injury in hopes that others with brain injury could relate. But what I found was that I was so excited that I started to get back to life that I didn't want to be talking about my survival. I wanted to go live my life.

And that's when life started. Life. Life is so difficult and yet can be so wonderful. It's just life.

And right now, life is happening with a HUGE bang. I'm going through so much that I think I might pop. I'd really like to disappear. Not in terms of suicide, but in terms of just wanting to fade away and disappear.

I got married in July to a beautiful butch of a woman. She's now made the decision that she wants to go through the transition of becoming more of a male. This is a loss for me. This is creating grief. This is killing me as the woman I married is now leaving me and replacing herself with another person. Not to mention all the feelings that come along with it for me. MY identity, the fear of losing someone beautiful to someone looking 'odd', the fear of my love chopping her body up to become someone else. The fear of her becoming that 'someone' else taking testosterone and becoming a different personality. There's so much to be fearful for.

If this wasn't hard enough to deal with, I retreated from Facebook feeling as though I'd like to fade away and found that nobody really cared. I hoped that my friends would make an attempt to speak to me because I was having a hard time reaching out. I had a hard time trying to spit out what is on my mind, so I retreated. None of my friends there really noticed that I faded away. I have a small handful (3) of people that have actually contacted me to see if I'm ok. I thought I had friends there. I realize now who and what friends are.

If both of those weren't hard enough, we had a sewage flood in our home this week and I am now without my home for up to four months. They've taken everything we own as they have to clean and test everything to see if it's contaminated. So now we live in an attic with not to many of our niceties.

If this wasn't enough to handle, I was just in the process of doing my gradual return to work and doing quite well. I was on the 5th day in a row. I'd worked my way up to being able to work 5 days in a row and it took 2 months to do it. On my 5th day feeling completely successful, I slipped and fell in St. Paul's hospital when trying to get a client to the HandyDart bus. I re-injured my back and have been lying flat on my back for 5 days.

I found out from my lawyer that this falls under WCB and if I don't get better FAST, ICBC will try to make it seem like I was completely healed before the fall and not help me any further with my claim from the accident 2 years ago that resulted in brain injury and kept me off the job for those 2 years.

So, now I have to 'get better fast' while I'm trying to fight through the grief of losing my wife to a transgendered person while trying to live in an attic in a sewage filled house.

Life.

It's not easy. I don't know how to deal with all of this. It was easier to get through brain injury and learning how to walk, focus and dealing with the pain of it all.

Life doesn't stop. It just doesn't stop. I know I'm not alone. But I'm in a hard place and really don't know how to deal with it all.

How do I just disappear to make it all stop? I don't. I just go through it ... and hope I come out of it stronger.