It's Hard to Keeping Fighting When You're Barely Surviving

 Where do I begin? 2024 felt like it flew by but at the same time, felt like it dragged on and wouldn't let me go. I came into the year with momentum, with hope, with grand plans for how things felt like they should go. 

I went back to work, for the first time in a year. 12 months of recovery, 12 months of learning how to live again, 12 months of ups/downs and struggles. I did hundreds of hours of therapy, spent hundreds if not thousands of hours journaling, crafting, listening to podcasts filled with the stories of others who fought the same PTS demons that I did and I felt encouraged through all of it that I could get through it. That if I put the work in, if I did the home work and dug into the hardest memories that I had repressed, that if I opened doors and broke down walls that I would be able to keep consistently climbing out of the hole. But 2024 didn't have the same plans for me. Going back to work wasn't some grand thing to celebrate. After 12 months of no one that I worked with checking in on me, other than the mandatory check-ins from the higher ups. I didn't expect much, but it was about as underwhelming as it could get. I almost felt more isolated, like people didn't know how to talk to me or what to say. The generic hey how are you's continued and more often then not there was just head nods or quiet hellos. 

I kept my momentum moving forward. For the first time in many months I went back to the gym because I felt that I was at a point where it could be healthy for me to work out again. During my year off I had to take a serious look at why I was going to the gym. During the prior years, I used the gym as a means to further punish myself for my self imposed short comings. I was never big enough, or fast enough, or strong enough. Or if I missed a workout I was going to be the reason someone at work got hurt in a fight. I beat myself into submission day after day, week after week, month after month, and could never understand why I couldn't stay healthy. I couldn't understand why I wasn't getting stronger, or faster, or why I could never gain weight or why it was never muscle I would gain. Who knew that training every day through survival mode just meant I would always be stuck in the mud fighting against myself. And as Linkin Park so aptly put, fighting myself I always lose. I turned to a system that I never imagined I would use, going to crossfit. But not traditional crossfit in the sense of going to a box and doing whatever workout they prescribed every day. I went to Linchpin, a system that I found through social media, and gave me the ability to do what I wanted to do within each workout. I can do the heavy session, the scaled session, or whatever I can handle using dumbbells or my own body weight. For the first 6 months or so of the year, I felt good. I was recovering okay, I felt like I was doing it for the right reasons and I was at peace with my commitment levels. 

Getting into the late spring and summer, things started to change. I felt more stress building each day. Work was becoming a chore, I found myself starting to dread going into the office again. The symptoms physically weren't so bad, but mentally I found myself struggling again. I didn't see the bright side much any more. I felt like I was stuck in the mud, fighting harder and harder to move forward. I had issues with finding motivation to do things for me. Like this blog. Like writing in my journal or coloring, or crafting or creating. I avoided doing things like fishing or hiking, even doing things with my girls became hard, which I really got down on myself for, because I already harbour so much guilt about for the time I lost with them during my darkest times. I didn't enjoy much of the summer, as much as I wanted to, it felt like I just needed to get through each day. I started to feel like I did in years past, like I just couldn't find more than just the bare minimum to get through my days. I could look in the mirror each day and while I didn't hate what I saw, I found myself being down more than up. There were days where I really did feel like giving up. Where I just felt like going back down the rabbit hole into the dark because in the dark things weren't good, but I was just numb to it all. Songs would come on and just hit so hard that I would be overwhelmed by the connection to what I felt. The first time I listened to Jelly Roll say I am Not Okay, I sat and bawled my eyes out because it was my life in a song. Then like a jackass I listened to it 3 more times and cried harder each time because it was a brutal reminder that I was not doing well. So I didn't give up, I just keep plodding along, waiting for things to change. Or for something to go my way. I kept showing up to work, expecting that the organization would be there to do what was best for me, which of course didn't happen. I mean, they backfilled my job and left me in the lurch with no plan for where I was going to go or what I was going to do, so that was great. Each time I would reach out it would be the same thing, no one could tell me any kind of a plan until my hours stabilized, or I was permanently designated as off the road. Everyone knew I wasn't going back to the road, it was pretty obvious from my psych, my treatment team in Kelowna and I came to realize it myself that it was never going to happen. 

Fall brought the girls going back to school, my own work through school, and still no feeling of progress. I found myself struggling with old habits, not eating well, not sleeping well at all, more nightmares and disturbances, my attitude was slipping. I was shorter with the girls, shorter with myself, just turning back into a grumpy dick again. The gym felt like a chore more often then not, the self hatred started to rear its head again. I found myself not being okay with myself which should have been one of the first clues that I wasn't doing well. But because I didn't want to admit that I wasn't doing well, I just kept showing up. I kept surviving. I kept just getting to the next day. I didn't enjoy the way life was going, I struggled to find the enjoyment in little moments that I had before. I felt like my progress was starting to slip away, like I was starting to tip toe closer to the edge of the abyss again and if the ground shifted the wrong way I would tumble back down, and didn't have the energy most days to trust that I would be able to grab on to something to stop the fall. At the end of September I was due to go on a wicked road trip, driving an old decommissioned truck and camper down south. I started a couple days early, heading to the arctic ocean to test out the old wheels and things went just fine, so the day arrived, I loaded up and hit the road, catching the sunrise over the Mackenzie River, finding a blizzard at the richardson pass at the continental divide and then nothing but sunshine. And much like 2024 in general, things didn't go as planned. A large bang, a sudden bump and I watched one of the driver side dual wheels head off into the ditch while the second bounced past me on the highway. I guess the positive is I learned how effective a sat phone can be. And that some MRE's that say ready to eat mean ready to eat if you have a functioning stove and boiling water. Thankfully I was only 100 km into the Yukon so it wasn't too long for someone to come and get me. 

Oddly enough, that broken down truck seemed to be an omen of things to come. I finally was able to start the accommodation process through work, to see if there would be a job available for me somewhere. One meeting later and I was about as beaten down as I could get. I read right between the lines and could see there would be no offer coming. I was also told that I was going to be moving across town whether I wanted to or not, as the branch of the government that owned my house wanted me out since the other branch of the government had built their own houses. I had no say in the matter what so ever, and was given a deadline of weeks to do the move, which could have easily been done months prior when the decisions were being made regarding which houses were occupied and which weren't. But that isn't how the government works, so I had to rapidly prepare to move, which took all the stability that I had fought so hard to find and maintain and stripped it away, leaving me feeling like my life was out of my control, which was not at all pleasant. Survival mode became the only mode again, I found myself unable to sleep with any kind of frequency, my consistency with eating went right out the window. I would go do things with the girls so they would feel like I was okay, but inside I was a wreck. My anxiety was all over the place again, feeling like I did years ago when I had to go to school events or the skating rink. I was mentally preparing myself to go outside. Then the moving company let me know that there was no move because it was too close to freeze up, so I would be in my safe place for a few months longer. Not really a consolation but at least I could be comfortable in my struggles. 

After weeks of no updates, I decided that my mental health was taking enough of a beating so I reached out about some jobs I saw that might be available and instead of an answer I got my wee-wee slapped for sending an email. Just an email, who knew it would be such an issue but god damn, talk about getting boot fucked while being down. There was nothing left to do but try even harder to just survive. I made christmas presents, stitching and sewing away my nights. I still went to the gym, just for the sake of moving. A good night sleep became a pipe dream, my anxiety would spike before bed due to the number of nightmares I was having which would then make it almost impossible to get up in the mornings. Buckets of coffee became necessary, which also then became a crutch because I just drank coffee and wouldn't eat much. Life just became a hamster wheel of surviving, trying to get through the day to the next solely because I had to for the girls. I couldn't do anything other than survive which truly tested me because I spent so many years just surviving and lord knows that living like that again would break me. I started avoiding life again, hiding in my phone, or books, or doing christmas crafts instead of truly engaging with the girls when they were home. The nights the girls weren't around were the worst, doom scrolling, or watching the same couple movies over and over because I needed the constant comfort to quell my anxiety. The little things for me, the hikes, the cooking, the writing, were non-existent as I couldn't focus long enough to enjoy them. School held the same struggles, I had work to do and couldn't really focus on it, which then created more issues because I started being more negative toward myself, creating the perpetual self hatred that I worked so hard to move past. I guess the adage that it's easier to criticize rings true, even when talking about yourself. 

And fuck December. The entire month, if I could skip it all I sure would. So many shitty memories, so many years of pretending to be happy through the holidays and hating myself for not being able to be happy. In spite of everything there were a few moments that made me happy I was still around. Seeing my oldest perform in the christmas concert. Sitting with my youngest and her mom, listening to them sing and giggle together managed to push the darkness back a little bit. I got to have birthday dinner with my girls then watch them get badges at girl guides, seeing their smiles and pride in their hard work. I tried my damnedest to be present for the christmas season which was hard to do at times. My systems were pretty overwhelmed for a lot of it, and I didn't really do much for myself to help ease the hits, mostly because the energy levels were lacking so much that it was too much to ask of myself. 

The new year started with some reflection and the realization that the past year was not at all what I had hoped it would be. The feeling of being stuck, the constant feeling of having to fight to keep going forward but being scared to sit and stop because it feels like stopping will be a final move. Staring into 2025, there will be some big life changes coming but that's a writing for another day. 

This isn't a pity party session. One of the things that I see in relation to healing is that the struggles are often minimized, they aren't talked about as much, or they are seen as a negative topic to avoid. Since the outset of my healing I wanted to make sure that I was being totally honest when talking about what I was dealing with because if I can't be honest then I'm not really telling my story. This shit sucks. It's really fucking hard and it's really fucking scary. 

But as the song goes: 

"It's hard to keep fighting, when you're barely surviving

But we're still alive, we be losing our minds.

We'll never say mayday."

Mayday means it's too late, that there's no hope left to recover and steady out. For as shitty as it has been, for as shitty as I've felt, no matter how close it felt, I haven't said mayday yet.