Grief

Science progresses funeral by funeral.
-- One variation of a sentiment I've heard more than once

I've had multiple health sites and over the years I've made multiple unsatisfactory stabs at talking about grief and the need to grieve, even once before on THIS site.

For whatever damn reason, people seem to consistently expect me to make them FEEL good EMOTIONALLY. And they get insanely, ridiculously upset and demanding if I say anything that doesn't cater to their precious feelings as my highest priority. This generally conflicts with my tendency to be "too truthful to be good."

As noted previously on this site, I am getting healthier physically when that's not supposed to be possible in large part because I was molested and raped as a little girl and subsequently spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy between my teens and twenties with two different men of the cloth.

I'm not even religious. I did not find these therapists through church or anything like that but I spent a lot of time saying very uncomfortable things to people most people would think would be the last person you would say something ugly and sexually explicit to.

Therapy was an exercise in learning to "trust my eyes over my ears" and be aware of just how much BULLSHIT most people speak and most other people unquestioningly go along with. And it's caused me to see too much and say too much for the emotional comfort of other people.

A metaphor I came up with is that it's like they have an invisible demon chewing on them and when I point it out, they can suddenly see what they never saw before and they experience it as if I CONJURED a demon rather than simply casually said "Well, I'm not surprised you hurt, given the demon gnawing on your leg."

And they aim their ire at me rather than at whatever agonizing, horrifying problem they have. They act like I CAUSED their problem even though that's literally insane.

But they were oblivious until I said something about it, so I imagine some people genuinely FEEL like I "did" something to them, and I am somewhat often surprised that they didn't already know this about themselves.

Over the years I have had too many experiences that metaphorically went something like:

Me: Congrats on your pregnancy. When is the baby due?
Her and her nutso religious friends: "How dare you call her a WHORE! She's a VIRGIN and just FAT and is going away to a fat farm for three months to lose the weight any day now (as soon as she's in labor, no doubt). You horrible, rude, evil woman you!"

And she's clearly nearly nine months pregnant. You can SEE the baby kicking and only an IDIOT would mistake this for "being fat" and either her friends are in on covering shit up or are buying her lying shit under circumstances where I cannot fathom anyone genuinely BELIEVING she's MERELY fat.

So I've gotten a lot less friendly and chatty than I used to be because when stuff like that happens, there's no fixing it, even if I WANTED to and I don't actually want to have anything to do with people who are that delusional and abusive to someone trying to be kind and -- whoopsie! -- knowing too much without meaning to snoop.

I left all the CF lists in part because they were spaces that catered to the emotional needs of people impacted by Cystic Fibrosis, a DEADLY condition classified as a dread disease, and did so in a way that meant the conversations tip-toed around the feelings of the most ignorant, the most incompetent, the people who were the WORST about making their own health WORSE.

The people who dominated the conversation were people who would say things like "I need to LIVE. I can't be wasting what little time I have on making CF the center of my life, so, no, I don't go to extremes about things like cleanliness of my home. I don't have the time and energy to care about such things."

Invariably, these were the same people with the worst medical horror stories and I was CLEAR it would not have been socially acceptable to say "Maybe there's a cause and effect connection between your unclean home and your worse-than-average FOR THE CF COMMUNITY medical history."

I once saw a book about a therapist with the title "Love's Executioner." The back flap explained that the title came from helping one person let go of their ex and it required him to KILL her remaining feelings for this person so she could move on.

If you were -- like MOST humans on planet earth -- raised with either a shame model or a guilt model, especially if you grew up in the Christian church (and some Christian sects are worse than others about the "hellfire and damnation" model of hating on people and blaming them for their own problems), odds are good that anything I say will get run through your mind and interpreted as me saying "You are a bad person and you caused your own problems."

I'm really NOT saying that.

And I do not have enough time to play free therapist to every single person on planet earth who has a health issue and, for example, hears me call them a "lard ass" if they have diabetes and are overweight when I have said nothing of the sort.

IF you have CF, you have a deadly genetic disorder that is killing you. But it's not doing it ALONE and it's not doing it DIRECTLY.

You don't DIE from CF. You die from INFECTION if you have CF.

As noted previously, the woman whose son with CF died at age 17 in part becuase she was a smoker is the reason I left a group called Sharktank. She said she would write "another paper" about CF and name me as the co-author, then abruptly changed her mind.

The group in question supposedly exists to "find a cure" for CF. In reality, it exists to cater to the guilt of a woman whose smoking shortened her son's life so she can find some means to try to "prove" to OTHER PEOPLE she's not guilty of killing him.

No, she hadn't made her peace with his death. No, you couldn't state the obvious that her smoking helped shorten his life.

And that means the kind of information I talk about on this blog was wholly unwelcome on that discussion group because an unstated rule was that she was some kind of "saint" who had made the biggest sacrifice of all and there was no remedy for her emotional pain, so you couldn't say ANYTHING that would in ANY WAY imply she killed him even if you weren't trying to say anything about HER at all.

Most CF lists are not about sharing useful medical information to improve quality of life for people still living with CF, much less extend their lives.

They are mostly about kissing the asses of people with giant piles of emotional baggage who are not dealing with their baggage and expect a lot of sick people who are dying to POLITELY tiptoe around their feelings even though the result is that most CF lists are actively putting a banana peel underneath the foot that isn't already in the grave of everyone still living with CF.

I have no patience for social dynamics of that sort. I don't foresee ever again belonging to any kind of CF discussion group.

You are free to post my work and have conniptions to your heart's content about what an evil psychobitch I am for saying things like "Smoking is a no no" and "Casual sex with a zillion people and no condom is a no no" all you like.

But please don't invite me to your warped party of delusional buttheads. You weren't nice to me when I WANTED you fuckers to be my friends and I'm so done with you assholes, thanks.

Let me suggest that instead of expecting ME to talk with you and diplomatically kiss your asses and serve as a free therapist for you jackasses while you are intentionally abusive to me, you look up some basic info on GRIEVING and deal with your emotional shit your goddamned selves and leave me the hell alone.