JUST GIVING UP

It is becoming increasingly obvious to my sister and me that our mother is just giving up. Some of the things that she’s saying, and a lot of the things she’s choosing not to do are not conducive to the simple process of getting better. It could be that we’ve all reached a low emotional point and things will soon start to improve, or it could be that even lower depths are yet to be explored. Whatever it is that awaits us will I’m sure unfold in time, but in the meantime I find myself in a kind of bipolar state, swinging from anger to sadness and back (and sometimes simultaneously) and sometimes forgetting to be kind and forgiving as I pass through these extremes, which will no doubt cumulate in a kind of grudging acceptance.

The beloved tells me that maybe I should prepare myself for the possibility that it’s because she’s just decided it’s time for her to go, but if that’s true then it’s just starting to annoy me because it seems there’s no real medical reason for it, it’s almost as if it’s become too much bother, too much effort to simply carry on. Then I get angry with myself, and sad for my mum, and the whole wretched cycle goes around again. I can understand a desire to be gone because the pain is too much to bear or something, but to want to go simply because it requires you to try just seems ridiculous, and I don’t want to look back on these days and think she was ridiculous.

When you give up on yourself, who else is there?

This isn’t what I was brought up to believe. This isn’t what I was told.

When I was a spudlet, we were taught to have a bit of faith, and that things would work out all right in the end if you just had a bit of belief in the fact that they would. Now any religious faith I might have had fell by the wayside years ago, but my mother has persisted with her churchgoing and in ramming her christianity down my throat for so many years now, that I’d never have put her down as someone who would just “give up”. I thought that we were meant to “Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!” I genuinely thought that, as a family, we were all made of sterner stuff.

I really don’t have the patience any more for other people’s self-destruction. From bitter experience, I know that it hurts too much.

Many, many years ago, in another lifetime, I rented a room in a house in which there also lived a serial self-harmer who was constantly trying to end their own life. Over the course of a long period of months, various failed attempts were made at all times of day and night, and it turned into a kind of war of attrition, which was ultimately exhausting for everyone living there. However, in those circumstances, when the stakes are so high, you really feel that you can’t just give up, but, in the end, I suppose I did. Perhaps we both did. Because they finally succeeded in their ambition, which was shortly after I’d realised that living in that environment seemed to be slowly killing me too, and I had just completed the process of moving out of there. I now look back on that time as the moment when something in me stopped too. The shock of that event pulled the rug out from under me, and I now believe that I slammed a door in my mind that I’ve only recently been able to begin to think about prising open.

Friendship let people in, and then you would lose them, and that was just too painful to bear. Better not to let anyone else get too close, better to shut myself away and keep the pain out, push the potential hurt away.

It’s taken me a long time to start to think another way. Luckily, despite everything, the beloved and I managed to find each other in the empty blackness, and she has slowly nurtured and cared for me and dragged me reluctantly out of my personal darkness to emerge blinking into the milky dawn light and persuade me into having some glimmer of hopefulness in my life again. Recently, I have managed to tentatively try and rebuild some of those fragile connections with people who I thought I’d lost long ago, and, whilst I clumsily fumble around, trying very hard to manage something that seems to come to others so very easily, I think I’ve made the first step on that million mile journey.

However, my recent dabblings in that cesspit of self-absorption that I persist in calling FizzBok have now also started to make my depression with it all resurface, and make me doubt the worth of such things all over again. Perhaps I’ve come to realise what is blindingly obvious to everyone else, but which I failed to spot in my social awkwardness and clumsiness: FizzBok friendship isn’t friendship by any normal definition of the word. The endless self-congratulatory references to the mundane: “My favourite this! My hatred of that! Don't you think I’m brilliant? No, I really am! Aren’t I bloody marvellous everyone! My kids! My shopping! (My God!) Me, me, me, me, ME!!!” coupled with a tendency to denigrate anything that doesn’t fall within the individual’s own sphere of interest has really made me want to give up on more than one of them at some time or other. There’s that theme again: “giving up”. Just when things were starting to go so well, too. Is there any way that you can quietly stop someone else’s endless self-obsessed postings from popping up without just “unfriending” them, giving up on them? Mind you, it’s not a place for reasoned debate, is it? It’s not a place where you can just have a quiet word with someone and say “too much”.

You could argue, of course – and you’d have a good point – that endless self-obsessed postings from places like Lesser Blogfordshire are just as unreasonable to endure, and have the added disadvantage that they can go on at some length that is mercifully denied to the FizzBok crowd. My only defence to that is that I just post the link, whether you choose to come and read it is up to you. Sometimes something pops up on FizzBok that so irritates me that it quite ruins my mood, but it’s so short and pithy and utterly there that it’s impossible not to read it in the first place.

Nonetheless, I have at many times also considered giving up on this, these daily missives from my own dark side. Certainly at the moment I’m struggling to find the words and the motivation when my days are so bleak and similar. A daily cycle of work – eat – hospital – sleep (with occasional variations) is not conducive to “creative” (or whatever else you might want to call it) thought, and reaching into those gloomy corners to pull out another nugget (or – more often – pile of poo) to share is becoming increasingly difficult for me to manage. I mean, I was going to write something else this morning, but I even gave up on that.

Maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe we are a family of quitters. That’s quite a thing to realise on a damp Saturday morning, isn’t it?

Cue Kate Bush: “Don’t give up now, for somewhere there’s a place where we belong…”

Oh, I give up.