Tag Archives: talk therapy

and now for something totally different

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and now for something totally different
by jennifer kiley ~the secret keeper~

phase two of “about” is to take on my greatest passion, which is “writing.” i was told today by my psychotherpist that i am addicted. get this, what it is i am addicted to. my laptop computer. i cannot stay away from her. it’s a compulsion. i need to write. when you hear the words: “just one more thing, that’s all i have to do, then i will be finished.”

this is me except for the mouse. i have no f@&kg idea
how to use a mouse anymore. it totally frazzles me out.

if a recorder were turned on just prior to dinner or when it’s time to leave for an appointment or time to go up to bed, that sentence would be uttered numerous times and dinner would be cold; i’d be late for my appointment or totally get the time wrong and think i had to leave at a certain time when actually the time i thought i had to leave was the time of the appointment. i did that, yes i did.

going to bed can turn into 3 to 4 hours later. when i am editing, i have a compulsive need to tweek every minutae. what i present has to be perfect but it never is. my eyes always miss something. how many times do i hit edit? also, i compulsively hit draft. i may be partially superstitious but mostly i am afraid my computer will crash at any moment, without warning of course.

my laptop is new and yet has crashed three times where it went totally weird on me. the screen started snowing and there was a loud buzz until windows flashed somethine across the screen for me to read but, of course, no one can read that quickly. so, you’re never exactly sure what just happened.

so, i am suppose to spend less time with my computer. it can’t be done. it sits next to me on the end table and wants to be picked up and turned on. and there is so much that i need to do on her. so many projects. too many projects, my therapist thinks. she wants me to make lists. i hate making lists.

when i worked as an animal care facilitator for 14 years, lists were put out every bloody day with our assignments. most of which were to process the animals for adoption but while doing that we were responsible for aswering the phones. counseling people on every kind of animal care you could think of. we, also, were required to do adoptions, which i mostly enjoyd. then there were the surrenders. i hated that part.

but i loved working with the animals, helping them to adjust to their new environment. some wouldn’t let you near them. those animals were part of my specialty. i’d work with them slowly, building up trust, just enough to let me sit near them. eventually, they would come closer and closer, until one day they would allow me to touch them. pretty soon, they would be in my lap or spending time in the staff lounge taking lunch with me and sleeping on the couch while i wrote my novel or meditated. this would be both cats and dogs. i did have my share of bites and visits to the hospital but i never could blame the animals. they were so fearful, some of them.

now i have my own managerie at home. my s/o and i have a total of 16 animals from quite a variety of species. cats dominate, though. recently we were given a stray cat we thought was about 4 1/2 mos old. when taken to the vets, we were told she was a year old and pregnant. to our surprise, it was less than two weeks later that she gave birth to three lovely little baby kittens. the sad note, though, was much later into the night a fourth was still born.

these wonderful kittens are just turning two months old. all boys but at first we thought one boy and two girls. it’s been a while since i had sexed a kitten just after birth. there names have finally settled on being Parker, Poe and Carter the special one. Carter, we think is going to grow up to be a munchkin cat. he is quite short in the legs. what an old soul is he.

we think a kitty named Sprout, that we had a long time ago, who died after only living for one year, from Leukemia. we were shattered. she was a very loved kitty. the most affectionate sweetie one could ask for. she followed me wherever i went in the apartment we lived in back then. now we have a house and room for all our animals.

when Sprout got ill, it was devastating. the vet gave her a transfusion. it seemed to make her all better but we had to quarantine her and change our clothes to spend time with her. i worshipped her. she was found as a kitten around New Years. we had people over. we all kept hearing a sound come from outside but when we checked we couldn’t find anything. it was pouring out. finally, someone went down into the alley to investigate. when they returned, they were holding this drenched black and white long haired minature kitten. she was found in the large garbage dumpster. someone had thrown her in there. what horrible people can do.

i went into command mode and called out for some towels and canned cat food. once i had the towels, i wrapped her up and tried to dry her. my s/o brought me an open can of food and i held it in front of her face. she was starving. her little face just dove into the smooshy food and she gobbled it up. i just hugged her to my body to give her warmth as she continued to consume the food. i suggested to my s/o that she might need something liquid. i was sure she must be thirsty. i was in love. i just hugged her and hugged her. i didn’t let her go.

i am not sure how long it took us to come up with the name “Sprout” because we usually make lists of names before we find the name that fits or the animal lets us know which is the right one. the year we spent with Sprout went by too fast and yet i can remember moments of time that she would walk on my knees when i was in the bath. the water didn’t bother her at all. she was always with me. she snuggled with my s/o and i in bed. she loved us both and all our other cats adored her. there was never any problem with them accepting her. she was our baby.

it makes me so sad and angry that she died so young. the night she died, we called the vet and wanted to know what we should do. it was 2am. he told us he couldn’t do anything. so, i sat on the floor in our extra room where we had to quarantine her and my s/o sat beside me. i just hugged her to my chest and rocked her and told her that everything would be alright. she was dying and i couldn’t do anything to save her. both of us just reassured her that she would be alright. she would be met by our other kitties like tigger the first. she wouldn’t be alone. she slowly dropped into sleep and her breathing slowed down until it finally stopped. she was gone.

just writing about Sprout now makes me cry. after she died, i couldn’t stop crying. i was so distraught when she died. she was that special to us both. she was the most loving kitten that we’ve ever know until Carter. we feel like Sprout has walked into Carter. he has her geniune loving spirit. what a darling he is. so very special, like we’ve known him forever.

i forgot what i was going to be writing about when i wrote about Sprout. her presence is so strong. what i was going to tell you was that i am creating an “about” page and on it i am going to add some suggestions from some famous writers giving quick quotes on writing. i will post that on “about” and this i will post on a memorial page for Sprout and an introduction with photos of Carter.

we like to say his name with a French accent:”Cartere.” on the second syllable hold it long and go up with your voice. i want to make a music video of Carter with some footage i took of him last week but my s/o is the expert on editing. i’m only just learning. if it doesn’t make it to the release of this post, it will be added later. thanks for reading and listening. jennifer ~the secret keeper~

writing that letter to my mother

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writing that letter to my mother
by jennifer kiley
WARNING: there may be some triggering material in this post.

i told my therapist about reading a letter on someone’s blog where they expressed how abusive their mother was to them. They, also, created a mother’s day card. at the time, i did not realize how i responded to it. i did write a comment on this person’s post but i didn’t realize exactly how much their letter and card had triggered me. my therapist asked me if i ever thought about writing a letter to my mother. She thought it would help me emotionally and mentally to express to my mother just what she did to me and how it had affected me then and what it has been doing to me my entire life. the moment she said those words, the thoughts and feelings went through my mind of a great chill and fear. conjuring up that woman and facing the past with her in my mind feels to my insides like more than i could handle.

i see my therapist twice a week, so tomorrow i am sure she will bring up the idea of that letter as one of the topics we talk about. it probably is something that i should really consider doing. it is really difficult for me to face my childhood. last time i tried to do that was in a trauma group. at that time i had a different therapist, one who i loved so much and who i lost about 1 1/2 yrs ago.

my therapist today was a co-leader in the trauma group. she told me that when i would read what i had written as part of our assignments back then, there was absolutely no emotion attached to my presentation, when we read out loud in front of everyone in the group. i was so shut down emotionally, that the words felt like they belonged to someone else.

in therapy, we have been taking it really slowly, getting in touch with my feelings. i have buried them quite deep inside of me. but if i am going to heal the damage i need to face the abuse openly and honestly. which is more than i feel i am ever going to be able to do. but, obviously, i wouldn’t be in therapy all this time if i didn’t know and want to do this work. i want to be healed. i want the nightmares to stop. it would be grand if i could live a life where i didn’t shut down everytime i got too close to being who i really am and to express my feelings without fear always preceeding them. being real is extremely important to me. that is why i wake up every day knowing i must do whatever i need to, in order that this day will have meaning. i will live my life with purpose and hope to find more pieces of the puzzle to make sense out of my being alive.

there will be enjoyment in the mix of learning and growing. and i will do what i love. that is creating and loving my chosen family which includes my partnr and our animals. getting to watch good to great films. reading enlightening words in books and online material from multiple sources. watching television. listening to music. creating blog posts. participating in the whole social media experience. and just feeling and being happy. getting beyond the down side of bipolar. never forgetting the variety that comes with being part of the living world. enjoying art in all its forms. enjoying life in all its forms.

monet “giverny“

A few days later i wrote the followng:

my next session, i told my therapist that i started writing a post on writing a letter to my mother, just to express my feelings about the idea of doing that. she told me she thought that was good but she didn’t want me to talk about my blog posts. she felt that i was avoiding therapy. instead she wanted me to talk about death and suicide and my childhood abuse. she felt it was time. well, i will tell you that she really freaked me out. i told her i still have that post on the preliminary of writing the letter to my mother but it is in draft form. someone wrote to me about this and expressed to me that healing is not a race. i totally agree with her. i know that i am good at avoidance but there are reasons. facing certains things can cause bad things to happen in my mind if i push forward too quickly. even the idea that she (my dead mother) will never read it still makes it scary.

two nights ago i had the worse nightmare and my dead mother and younger brother, who has been in a psych hospital since november 2011 for his bipolar/schizophrenia. he has stopped taking his medication and is in bad shape. he is the brother that has threatened to kill me if he ever saw me again. (and i am actively trying to find out how he is doing so that i might try to hekp him.) they were both in the nightmare. i was there prisoner, stranded at this awful house with no means to escape or at least that is what it felt like. is the thought of writing the letter making my dreams turn into nightmares or are my nightmarse trying to tell me something? how one’s past and one’s demented family can skew your mind from being sure of one’s sanity.

what the hell is sanity? does it mean you are not mentally ill? or does it mean you are able to function in this world with as little paranoia as possible. i know i am not insane but i have a hell of a lot of psych diagnoses that prevent me from living a relatively calm and uneventful life. does everyday have to have some form of torture in it to make one feel alive? when i say torture, i believe i mean feel anguish or suicidal or depressed or so manic that you get into a rage too easily at nothing that important. would you call feeling this way, being tortured? my mother tortured me. is that why i am tortured now. my father had the most perverted collection of friends that he allowed his sicko friends to set me up in order to sexually abuse me. he even forced me to be with them against my protestations. did my mother know? she said certain things that led me to believe she had some sort of cognition of their irreputable behavior. there is so much more that occurred in my childhood that i will at the moment reserve for therapy sessions. i don’t feel i have anything to hide. i was not the abuser, they were. i was just the abandoned child whose vulnerabilty was recognized as an easy target for any evil pedophile, inside and outside of our family.

there were no child abuse hotlines to call. the police would be too dangerous to talk to. one of my abusers threatened to kill me and my family if i told anyone, including the police. i felt isolated and alone in this living nightmare. i had and have a vivid imagination plus i am quite good at dissociation. going to fantasy places is second nature to my mind. maybe that is why when i read a fantasy book i slip so easily into the world that the writer has created. the land in the book becomes more real then the world that actually surrounds me. it’s also more inviting. i don’t believe you can die as if you were one of the characters in the story. you’re more like harry potter with his invisibility cloak.

there are questions that are asked of people who are gay or bipolar or both: if you had the choice to not be gay and/or bipolar what would you chose?

I would chose to be both. but since i have no choice i would say that the goddess predetermined my answer by making it so, without any request by me or asking my conscious permission. now comes the explanation why i would not reverse the process on either of these characteristics or manifestations of who or what i am. i love being attracted to women but it does not preclude having an attraction – non-sexual – for certain men, who often more than not turn out to be gay themselves or just extremely androgynous. being with a woman is more appealing. but it is not just any woman. as that would be true for any straight woman, it’s not just any man.

as to the specifics of bipolar and why i would not want that to be taken away: i embrace the energy and the creative side that often accompanies bipolar. the hypomanic state makes you feel alive with an unlimited amount of energetic resources that enable you to go on forever when you are working on a creative project. it, actually, allows you to work on a multiplicity of projects that fill you with immense satisfaction. it hieghtens all of your senses. your thinking, when focused, gives you an abundance of ideas that feel magical. and your muse is so generous with her participation in livening your imagination. it is better than having almost any kind of drug high that i can think of that i have tried in the past. it is a state of euphoria like no other. trust me, i have tried almost every kind of illegal drug. i must admit that hallucinating on acid or mushrooms were exceptional but the acid always had that drawback of bringing on a sense of paranoia. that really sucked.

admittedly, with bipolar, there are many deterents that suck also. the great depression that takes you down into the depths of the seven circles of hell. suicidal thinking is always one of the descending factors of bipolar. the actual trying is so close one can reach out and touch it: the knife that will open up your veins or the pills that will lull you into a deep and endless sleep where that melancholia of all consuming emotional pain can be silenced as you slip away into a deathlike euphoria of peace. but you don’t stay in that state forever.

vincent van gogh -”starry night” – lived his art & his suicide with manic depression

slipping back into the manic or hypomaic state there awaits you a rage that overtakes you without permission and is released like a cobra striking at it’s victim. the anger, frustration and irritability that slip in and out without a moments notice, then are gone. all of this is a balancing act with triggers that if you are lucky you may learn to recognize before the mood changes.

the unpredictability of the preditability of the mood changes: you know you need to be on a schedule of eating and sleeping regularly. if you take medication, you need to have that regulated also. you try to meditate or destress regularly. exercise is great if you are physically able. doing regularly scheduled psychotherapy sessions. talk therapy is quite helpful in working on the important issues of your life, past, present and future. in my case, my past has such a traumatic and dramatic affect on my life now that i need to unearth all the shit that i was forced to live through. sometimes i feel like most of my life has been like living in a constant trauma.

death is a driving force in my life. i seem to be haunted by people, esp. women i love dying suddenly and unexpectedly. i have had seven serious brushes with death myself through car accidents and near drownings. i have the best guardian angels one could ask for to protect me. and i have known and know some of the greatest people in my life. and have lived the most magnificent experiences. so out with the shit and in with the good. now just to stop seeing dead people when i am sleeping, esp. my mother and father. it was okay when my grandmother and grandfather visited me after they died. and my freinds visited me, some that had died but usually the ones who are still alive. those dreams i love the most. also, i have a tendency to have dreams where i am being visited by famous people in the acting profession. it feels quite real and we have the best of times. when i awaken from these dreams i am sometimes in a haze and feel like i am friends with the actors in my dreams. that is how real they do feel. but how real is life anyway. it moves time along quite quickly.

so, do i write that letter to my dead mother, which she will never read. or will she hover in her ghost like consciousness and spy on me to see what it is i will dig up from my memories about her? when i really open up inside, what will i find? if i write the letter then i will have my answer.

Caitlin & Will – Address In The Star
this is for the therapst i lost who taught me tenderness and love.
losing her was so painful. i will love her always and forever.

Therapy? Is It Important?

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Reblogged from Moorestorms:

In simple terms, yes. I believe everyone could benefit from a good friend to talk to, someone they can bounce things off of, someone who can give them advice and direct them in the best place possible. But we can get all those things from friends' we don't have to pay, right? Wrong!

Friends are great to have, but it's really not fair to them or their own mental well-being if we are constantly bogging them down with our troubles.

Read more… 745 more words

Yes, I believe therapy is important & this blog post states it very fluidly. Therapy has saved my life. I highly recommend taking a read of the rest of this post. It is so honest and well thought out. Great Post.

Up Against the Demons

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By Jennifer Kiley

Well, it appears I have come up against the demons. Listening to The Rolling Stones “Sympathy For the Devil”. I have crashed into the wall. Near the ledge. It was a trigger that threatened my sense of my self. Going to that place to find validation when it was just a game to stroke my ego. Instead it crushed my spirit instead. Welcome to the other side of bipolar, the down side. Only last night and even this morning I felt up and rather hypomanic. Paid a visit to my therapist. She was pretty exhausted but reassurd me that she was listening. Ran into someone in the waiting room I hadn’t seen in ages who was in a therapy group with me years before now. I had my ear buds in listening to soothing music to prepare me for my session. I also wear sunglasses so I won’t be disturbed. I hate the waiting room or any waiting room. There is usually too many people and too much noise. Today when I walked in there were two people. It was quiet until this person across the room yelled out my name. I didn’t recognize her. Speaking to anyone in the waiting room really bothers me but I made an exception b/c it was good to see her once I realized who it was. We talked a short bit then someone else came into the waiting room and went right up to her and stood in front of her and totally cut off our conversation and began speaking to her about something way off anything we were into. Well, that ended rudely and abruptly. So, I put my other ear bud back in and turned up my music while I waited for my therapist to come out to get me. She was running late, which is quite unusual. We normally start before the hour. She knows I hate sitting in the waiting room. I was so hyper during our session and she was so tired. There was so much to tell her and I wanted her to talk to me but she didn’t have the energy. She told me she could listen better with her eyes closed. That may be true but I kept feeling that she was falling asleep on me. I don’t really know what we accomplished. It all felt hyper and superficial even though I spoke about my friend who died last year so suddenly and that I told my partner that I’ve felt invsible most of my life except for when I was being abused. But I think even then, when I think about it, I was invisible then too, because the abusers were going to do whatever they wanted to me without respect for how they made me feel. SO, I would say that makes one invisible too.

Amy Winehouse went out all alone too much alcohol and it killed her

I hate this side of the bipolar. When I feel like this nothing really matters no matter how much I try to make things mean something, they just don’t. What was the trigger? Not feeling good enough. With Bipolar you either feel on top of the world and you can do anything and then there is no meaning in anything. And suicide looks really good but I have made too many contracts not to do anything.

Queen – Who Wants To Live Forever

You also start to do things that start getting weird, like watching an hour long video on Deaths in Hollywood about all the famous suicides and murders and tragic deaths of famous people. All afternoon I started watching strange videos on YouTube. One was on Jackson Pollock. He drank himself to a suicidal death. He’s one of my favorite artists. I wanted to watch a video on James Dean but it wouldn’t play. There is a theme, I get morbid when I start falling into a depression. I miss all the people I love who are dead and gone, famous or those who were friends or lovers that died suddenly or disappeared from my life too quickly. I miss my friend who I use to text and talk to about missing someone else I lost suddenly. Isn’t it odd that the person helping me to cope with losing somebody I love and miss so intensely should die themselves shortly there after and when they were only in their 30s. I was going to text her in the middle of the night but I didn’t want to wake her up. Next morning I find out she died sometime in that night.

Amy Winehouse – Back To Black

Life and death are so cruel. Wouldn’t you like to have the proof that there is life after death? I mean a spiritual place like in the film “On Borrowed Time” where at the end of the movie the grandfather and his grandson go to this special place and reunite with the kids grandmother. That’s my ending. When I die I will meet up with my grandparents that I loved so much when they were alive. After they died they would visit me all the time, especially my grandmother. She would visit me almost every night. When I saw the movie “The Sixth Sense”, I use to joke and say “I dream about Dead People.” It is true. I also get haunted by dead people like my parents. I never wanted to see them while they were alive, so obviously I wouldn’t want to have them come to me in my sleep all the time like they are doing now way too often. This is one crazy post but cathartic just the same. I am feeling just a touch lighter. I think some of the depression is coming out of my fear of being creative. Working on my screenplay is before me. When I am doing it, I feel so incredibly good but the panic and fear interfer. When I am not able to write on it I feel like I am failing my self. It is so easy to forget to remember that being creative needs breathing room to grow itself. My muse has been giving me a great deal of help. Sometimes I need to step back and take a short break so that I can come in with a fresh mind and a clearer perspective. I know what I want to do. It is fear that keeps me from doing it. It means getting in touch of my emotions about my characters and my story, There is a particular character that frightens me the most b/c I care about that character the most. They mean so much to me. I want to present them the way they want to be seen. I want them to be real and not just a caricature. Real in the fictional sense of real. Have dimensions. Speak from their perspective. I am sorry about wandering about in my mind but I am trying to release the demons that are holding me down. It feels just like an exorcism. I am afraid that for tonight I need to come to an end. I need to play with my cats who are probably waiting for me on my bed. They want me to take out their whip toy and tease them with it so that they can attack it. Also, they need to take turns. Do I still feel depressed. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. I need to put in my ear buds and turn on my mp3 to start the music pumping into my veins. I use shuffle and repeat most times so the variety that comes through into my ears and enters my souls is quite eclectic. Sometimes it’s just the right serendipitous order and sometimes I need to skip one or two of the random choices. I will read this before I publish it. There is still much work to do to finish it. A last word for tonight is I read Bobby Brown was talking about Whitney Houston’s cause of death. Her death is just to disturbing and painful for me. I read the police report and the autopsy. That was such a bad idea. It made me sick. I cried myself to sleep for weeks after her death and whenever I listened to her music I would cry. Maybe that is what I need to do. I need to listen to Whitney’s voice. Her Voice is very soothing and emotional for me. It might be just what I need to help me release all this pressure inside of me. Let’s be off to bed. My kitties await me.

Whitney feeling a moment of happiness

forever young

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forever young
content and captions created and written by jen kiley

photographs and lyrics not owned by creator of post.

Title: Forever Young
Artist: Alphaville
Visitors: 44322 Forever Young since June 03, 2010.

spaulding gray-walked off a boat into the oblivion-the pain became too much

there was no way of knowing his heart would explode???

casual about death but still gone forever. what is it about pain that claims so many souls???

alain fournier-b. 11.5,1943 - d. 8.14,2000-lymphoma-daughter ariel-impressionistic graphics-real visual phenomenon--died young-born in lyon, france moved to canada-studied computer science-died in vancouver at the age of 56

kurt cobain-i am an artist that uses words and music and the visual to express myself-but i hardly knew him yet was so saddened by his suicide and grieved his loss-my therapist could not even understand my feelings and now my partner does not get it-i think i felt a kinship with him-i knew his kind of pain-wanting and attempting to kill myself several times and in my thoughts all the time-it holds some kind of fascination and comfort to know there is always that way out

michael jackson-no explanation needed-so many masks

it gets better-just wait for it

Monday: 6.30.11 @4:13am

feeling extremely depressed. what is it about? I’m up all day or at least manically busy. s. loses it on me when I am not able to comprehend in my overloaded mind her newly designing web page. we argued. are they really suppose to be good for you??? arguments, that is???

heath ledger who-died-young all heartbroken

heath ledger-why so tortured-what was his hurry that day

heath-i can't quit you

I certainly don’t feel that way at the time. all I want is m. to come back and be my therapist again. I need her centeredness and guidance. it is a circus and fun and emotionally dynamic with d. but I need the calm of m. and the love I feel with her. I feel the friendship with d. but I want the security of the being there got me so that I can count on her. I need her strength.

lifehouse – broken heart

virginia woolf-geniuses who kill themselves

natasha-a talent lost needlessly

natasha-richardson-a headache-then gone-rip

is it ever going to be possible to see her again. I am never going to let go of her. Never. Ever.i just want to die if I knew there would never be another time when m. and i will be together in any way that is possible for both of us. I want to love her and feel intimacy but not sexual just closeness. please come back to me m. I need you.

marilyn-death-listed-as-probable-suicide

one word - marilyn

two words - needed attention

five words-marilyn needed to be loved

please ask the goddess for her to enable us to see one another this week or sooner. but in a good way. I haven’t checked to see how many days we have remaining on our barbaric punishment of probation. we never were sexual nor do we intend to be sexual. i know that all i want from you is to be able to love you and experience the devilish behavior we share together and the tenderness we can feel for each other. most of all i need our hugs. they are the best of spending time together.

dominque dunne-murdered by stalker-forever young

tupac shakur-assassinated

jesse james shot in the back by a trusted coward

aaliyah-and who trusts planes

diana should still be with us but she was tormented

carole lombard-wrong mountain-right lover-wrong plane crash

judy garlard-we all know the system killed her

we could do Reiki together too and meditate. it’s just not the same. i just want to make myself bleed. why my mind goes there i don’t completely understand but i want to take a knife and open up my veins to bleed.

kurt cobain in concert unplugged

kurt cobain found several days after suicide

i want the pain to go away. and my psychiatrist doesn’t think i am manic-depressive. i’m all over the place with my emotions. i almost called the suicide hot line. i’ve never done that. i usually write to my therapist or call her on the phone but she has been sick for almost 2 weeks. i’ve only missed 2 sessions but it may be 2 more this week. all i have to go out for is dr. j. for chiropractic adjustments. he’s a poet and we love to talk to each other.

actor gig young murdered woman shot himself

edgar allen poe manic-depressive slow suicide

golden-gate-suicide-bridge

we share a lot in interest from writing to films to current events plus my emotional and psychological state which effects my body which has been feeling a great deal of pain lately. now my psych wants to cut back my clonazepam to 3 pills a day from 4 when my doc told her i need to be on 4. panic and the m/d give me chest pain and clonazepam is the only thing that gives me relief.

christine chubbuck newscaster killed self on air

buddy holly-wrong night-wrong plane

brittany murphy-slowly put to death by whom???

brandon lee the crow-fly high man

brandis died forever young a super-genius on sea quest

writing calms me down. it always seems to do that. i work it out on the page what’s possessing my mind. i’m still depressed but more in some sort of focus. i think i’ll find another song to add to this post.

Remembering Jonathan Brandis

Anna Nicole Smith-suicide while in love after marrying up

Adolf Hitler looks f@#king mean

lord byron-out on the edge and out of control

lady lazarus
by sylvia plath
(excerpt)

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

john lennon ripped away so young

princess diana when she was still young at heart

emily dickinson rumored manic-depressive died young and agoraphobic

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

600 suicide jumps love undefiled

a good read for those who die young from one who did

stephen fry manic-depressive-well may commit suicide

in treatment can help-it does get better

let’s dance in style, lets dance for a while
heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
hoping for the best but expecting the worst
are you going to drop the bomb or not?

a young man's death in which lesbian's are not immune-he was so much wiser than his year of 23-why am i so moved by such tenderness leaving this world so abruptly???love is felt-tears were shed

let us die young or let us live forever
we don’t have the power but we never say never

james dean he crashed too young into death

sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
the music’s for the sad men
can you imagine when this race is won

sylvia's husband was an a$$hole

sylvia plath's journals

sylvia plath-line by line a husband's torment-his torment my a$$ what about his dead wife-ted hughes was a real neglectful s@n-of-a-b!t@h

sylvia in her younger days

sylvia nearing the end

sylvia -giving up the last days

turn our golden faces into the sun
praising our leaders we’re getting in tune

a young twenty year old virginia

jim morrison who died young

janis joplin who died young-i once believed the mob did it-i fell in love with janis when i was a teen and felt if i could just have loved her maybe i could have saved her-magic thinking-i know-but i was forever young then myself

jimi hendrix went off in the divine madness of the purple haze-my younger brother was i think a little in love with him-he modeled his guitar playing style after him-now though he is almost blind and wants to kill me and the mere mention of my name puts him into a blind rage-he's paranoid and a manic depressive-we share the last in common-yet i still miss both my brother and jimi

selena-murdered when just a rose starting to bloom

Amy Winehouse went cold turkey all alone and it killed

the music’s played by the madmen
forever young, i want to be forever young

natasha-a talent lost needlessly

do you really want to live forever, forever and ever
some are like water, some are like the heat

young elvis-the music just cut too deep-the drugs couldn't heal the pain

some are a melody and some are the beat
sooner or later they all will be gone

dominque dunne-murdered by stalker-forever young

why don’t they stay young
it’s so hard to get old without a cause

corey-haim-when-he-was-young-who could not love this face

corey haim-he thought he was always forgotten but he was not and he will always be forever young

jeff conaway-musical grease-taxi-addiction-overdose

i don’t want to perish like a fading horse
youth is like diamonds in the sun
and diamonds are forever

virginia woolf-genius-tortured by divine madness until her suicide

so many adventures couldn’t happen today
so many songs we forgot to play

Tennessee Williams-a genius with words-gay in a straight world

truman-capote-author-died-young-and-gay

so many dreams are swinging out of the blue
we let them come true

natasha-richardson-a headache-then gone-rip

The Most Beautiful Voice of All Time - I Will Always Love You - Always and Forever

The Most Beautiful Voice of All Time - I Will Always Love You - Always and Forever d. February 11, 2012 at 48

who wants to live forever???
freddie mercury – queen
5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991
freddie died one day after publicly acknowledging he had AIDS
come down the rabbit hole with freddie
have a marvelous time and a divine concert with queen

understanding and overcoming the myths of suicide

Understanding and Overcoming the Myths of Suicide
What Goes On in the Minds of Those Who Attempt Suicide
By Thomas Joiner, PhD
January 19, 2011

Dr Joiner is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor in the department of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Myths about suicide abound in the therapeutic setting. They often inhibit the ability of clinicians (and families) to assess the severity and magnitude of a patient’s suicide risk. This special report discusses some of those myths. In Why People Die by Suicide, I argued that a kind of fearlessness is required to face voluntarily the daunting prospect of one’s death, and that doing so necessarily involves a fight against ancient, ingrained, and powerful self-preservation instincts. In Myths About Suicide, I used the framework developed in the previous book to contend that death by suicide is neither impulsive, cowardly, vengeful, controlling, nor selfish.

Impulsivity myths

The tragic death of a Florida television news reporter in 1974 illustrates the fallacy that suicide is an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment whim, much like casting off peanut shells at the ballpark. In July of that year, the reporter was covering the story of a shooting that had happened the day before. When the reporter called for the news station’s video footage of the scene, the tape jammed. She shrugged and stated, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first—an attempted suicide.” She extracted a gun from beneath her desk and shot herself behind the right ear. She was rushed to a local hospital, but died 14 hours later.

The usual reaction to this tragic tale beyond shock and horror was to dwell on the seemingly impulsive nature of the act and ask, “How could the reporter have known that the tape would jam?” However, the reporter’s behavior leading up to her suicide dispels the idea that she acted impulsively:

• For years, she openly told her family that she felt depressed and suicidal

• Four years before her death, she attempted suicide by overdose and frequently discussed the incident subsequently

• Weeks before she died, the news station granted her request to cover a story on suicide; and during one interview, she asked a police officer for details on self-inflicted gunshot wounds

• One week before, she told a colleague that she had bought a gun and joked with him about killing herself on the air

• On the day of her suicide (or possibly even before), she had put the gun in a bag that she brought to the set daily

• Finally, she had prepared news copy for a fellow reporter to read about her suicide after the fact

The news reporter’s death illustrates that her suicide was premeditated. Death by suicide is extremely fearsome and daunting, and thus requires considerable thought, planning, and resolve. To consider her death impulsive is to assign primacy to that spur-of-the-moment decision as to precisely when to pull out the gun, instead of focusing on the many factors that led up to that planned moment.

In the book An Unquiet Mind, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison discusses her own experience with suicidal behavior and describes how it actually works: “. . . for many months I went to the 8th floor of the stairwell of the UCLA hospital and, repeatedly, only just resisted throwing myself off the ledge. . . .” Contemplating suicide is a signature of serious suicidal behavior. Jamison’s months-long thought process and behaviors counter the notion of spontaneous death by suicide.

The suicide of President Bill Clinton’s childhood friend and White House adviser Vince Foster was of this sort. Despite wildly irresponsible speculation to the contrary, Foster died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Foster snuck a gun out to his car in an oven mitt; he drove to a secluded area of a park, and he shot himself. To imagine that Foster’s death was impulsive is to ignore all of the facts in what was by far the most investigated suicide in history (multiple Congressional inquiries and forensic investigations were conducted). It is also to ignore the character of Vince Foster; he was a well-organized, thoughtful, and deliberate person. No one who knew him would have described him as impulsive.

Foster’s friends and family were stunned by his death; it seemed “out-of-the-blue.” However, death by suicide can both shock loved ones and be planned for weeks, months, or even years. This is because of the human capacity, quite spectacular in some cases, for privacy and secrecy. Except in works of fiction, I have never encountered a death by suicide that was truly impulsive. Many clinicians have mistakenly deemed suicidal deaths impulsive merely because they seemed to be “out-of-the-blue.”

Suicide note myths

Foster did not leave a suicide note, a factor that spurred conspiracy theories on cause of death. To my knowledge, no study has reported a rate of note leaving among suicide decedents to exceed 50%. Moreover, most studies find rates between 0% and 40%4; a reasonable average rate would be approximately 25%.

Why are suicide notes so rare? Some have reasoned that because impulsivity is involved in suicidal behavior, suicidal persons often kill themselves before they have a chance to write a note. There are problems with this viewpoint, however. A major problem is that it draws on the distinct myth that dying on a whim is common. Another problem is the lack of empirical support that compares those who leave notes with those who do not. If it were true that note leavers are much less impulsive than those who do not leave notes, then this distinction should be easy to demonstrate in forensic studies that examine the lives, characteristics, and personalities of decedents. This difference has not been clearly demonstrated.

The relative rarity of suicide notes reveals the state of mind of those about to die by suicide. To say that persons who die by suicide are lonely at the time of their deaths is a massive understatement. Loneliness, combined with alienation, isolation, rejection, and ostracism, is a better approximation. Still, it does not fully capture the suicidal person’s state of mind. In fact, I believe it is impossible to articulate the phenomenon, because it is so beyond ordinary experience. Notes are rare because most decedents feel alienated to the point that communication through a note seems pointless or does not occur to them at all.

Diagnostic myths

Friends and family who have been surprised by a suicide often consider it to be deeply selfish. This is understandable because the bereaved are often convinced that the decedent did not consider the impact of his or her death on those left behind. However, those who die by suicide certainly do consider the impact of their deaths on others; but to them, death is a positive rather than a negative outcome. This is wrong, but nevertheless, it is the view of the person who attempts suicide.

Seasonal myths

Another common myth that even some professionals harbor is that death by suicide peaks around the winter holidays. In fact, far from peaking, the winter holidays represents a low point in suicide rates, possibly because it is a time of togetherness.

My research group hypothesized that seasonality and suicidality are associated at least partly because of seasonal fluctuations in togetherness. Consider a large college campus in this regard. Campuses provide numerous activities for belonging; anyone who doubts this should check out a nearby university’s online master calendar. Universities offer many social, cultural, academic, athletic, and other events—many of them free of charge. Perhaps partly as a function of this high level of belonging inherent in these events, suicide rates of college students are relatively low compared with their same-aged peers not at college.

Opportunities for togetherness are thus high on college campuses, but they are not uniform throughout the calendar year. During a standard academic year (the fall and spring semesters, roughly from September to May), most schools are clearly in session, and chances for social engagement abound through classes, dormitory and apartment life, sports, and so on. However, summer activities continue but they ebb considerably. Therefore, it is conceivable that students’ sense of belonging may be lower during the summer than during active semesters. We found that suicidal ideation was higher in the summer months than during the regular academic year, and we reasoned that this association might be partly explained by fluctuations in opportunities for socializing.

Slow suicide myths

A final collection of myths involves the notion of slow suicide, by which a person engages in unhealthy behaviors despite knowing that these behaviors may ultimately lead to death. Genuine suicidal behavior involves a rather clear intent to die, not to do something else like smoking or taking drugs because they like it. Consider, for example, smoking. By the logic of smoking as slow suicide, we should have witnessed a most remarkable decrease in the suicide rate in the past half century, as smoking rates plummeted; alas, we have not. People know smoking puts them at risk, but they smoke anyway—not because they intend to die—but because they like it. They are willing to take the risks because of how much they enjoy smoking. Addicts continue to use drugs even though they have been told and understand that continued use might kill them; but because they like “doing” drugs, the risks do not matter.

Therapeutic implications

I articulated these perspectives in Why People Die by Suicide1 and Myths About Suicide, which encompass risk assessment, therapeutics, and suicide prevention. In addition to marked warning signs, such as talking about suicide and planning for it, the books discuss clinically severe agitation, insomnia, and nightmares (these latter 3 are themselves not considered acute risk factors in some clinical settings). Noting a patient’s fearlessness of death, perceived burdensomeness, and accelerating alienation may improve risk assessment.

Myths About Suicide concludes with the following excerpt:

We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, nor rash; that it is not caused by breast augmentation, medicines, “slow” methods like smoking or anorexia, or as some psychoanalysts thought, things like masturbation; that it is partly genetic and influenced by mental disorders, themselves often agonizing; and that it is preventable (eg, through means restriction like bridge barriers) and treatable (talk about suicide is not cheap and should occasion treatment referral). And once we get all that in our heads, at last, we need to let it lead our hearts.