The Black Dog Revisited

It would have been my Dad's 75th birthday last Sunday. I didn't think that I would get that emotional, but it really hit me hard. I found an old letter (one of two he ever wrote me) from him when I was in my first year of university. As a man with a grade 4 education, he didn't write the most eloquent prose, but it was certainly heartfelt. The letter oscillated between telling me that I was his whole world and describing what the pets were doing at that moment. It was intensely personal for him to put his thoughts and feelings down on paper. As I read his tight cursive, I just started bawling.  I had completely forgotten that such a letter even existed and I felt cheated. I felt cheated out of the time we never had to let each other in. I felt cheated because of the many locks my Dad put on his heart so that I couldn't get in. I felt anger at my Mom for poisoning me against him for so many years. At the end of the letter, he was careful to point out that he wanted it to be 'just between the two of us.' He seemed nervous that my Mom would find out he had written it and... well... something bad, something bullied, something bewildering would happen. He was gone a long time before he ever died, and remote a long time before that. But when I sat down and read that letter on Sunday, I felt like the promise of a relationship had been taken from me. I felt the loss of a father that had never actually bloomed.

So yeah, I spent most of the weekend crying. I haven't felt a ton better this week. It occurs to me that the journey out of PTSD might be via a major depressive episode. Today was rough. I am supposed to be at Dr. Supervisor's lab dinner for the end of the year celebration thing. I simply cannot make it. I had to take public transportation to therapy today (travel time = 1.5 hours each way) and I cried the whole way there. Yup, just out there, unable to stop crying despite being trapped on transit in public. Just quietly crying the whole way -- like I was in New York or something. I've never been so glad that I don't have to go to classes or cope with homework and assignments in my whole life.

I know that this is my blog and very few people read it -- and even less of my personal connections (by design) even know about it. So I can feel free to write what I want about surviving this whole dumb process. Grad school has turned into this horrible marathon of personal loss and trauma, and I just don't know how the fuck I'm ever going to get through it. I don't even know if I WANT to finish it at this point. I'm just trying to remember that moods are like the weather. And even though Canada is enveloped in its perennial sucky spring winter revisited -- both mood and weather will pass. Just like the weather, there is always a new mood coming. I have to stick it out. But I am in the Suck right now.

Like the name implies: The Suck totally sucks.