Welp...

Well, here I am again, however many years later. How is it that I always seem to come back to this thing whenever the metaphorical sh*t hits the fan? I guess it's like my own personal (and free) therapy...

I've had this blog for years and have written about a hundred different things. It was always where I went to vent, to get things off my chest, to ground myself. Again... free therapy!

For months now, I kept telling myself that I want to write in order to help deal with my current situation, but kept failing to sit down to do so. But today I woke up, had some breakfast, watched HTGAWM (ridiculous TV is my guilty pleasure), read, and finally thought enough is enough. Please write, Cathy. Your soul needs it.

So here I am and here we go. What's been going on that I've had the overwhelming desire to write for a few months, you may ask?

Well...On January 19, 2016, I met a boy. And August 12, 2016, he died.

It's been almost 6 months to the day, and my heart still drops whenever I say those words. He died. Not in a figurative "he's dead to me!!" while feverishly deleting all traces of him from my life kind of way. No, like...for real died. Like I've sat next to his grave crying and talking to him, while staring at the picture his family put on his gravesite died.

To say that these past almost 6 months have been a whirlwind is the understatement of the year. Grief is hard. It's bumpy. It's overwhelming. It catches you off guard. You go from being "ok" to shaking through sobs in the matter of five minutes.

(Un)fortuntely, this is not the first time I've experienced the sudden loss of someone in my age group. (More on that "un"fortunately word later...)

Five years ago, on August 13, 2011, I lost my high school best friend in an accident. Her passing was undoubtedly, pretty safe to say, the most difficult thing I have ever gone through. I had a flight to Chicago scheduled for August 18 to go visit her, and instead, I drove to her wake that day. Her passing was a nightmare. I had never lost anyone that I was that close to, that was my age, or to anything other than a health reason. Her death was everything that shouldn't happen. A young, beautiful, healthy woman was gone in the blink of an eye because of a tragic accident.

I struggled through all of those emotions and eventually made my way out. But then fast forward five years, almost to the day, I lose someone else. My handsome, smart, witty boyfriend was gone. I was shocked. I cried out on the phone with his dad. I was confused. And then his father said the words that I can still hear in my head...

"Cathy, he died from an overdose. He struggled with this for a long time."

Those words were like a blow to my chest. Why? BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW. Because I never saw him do anything, take anything, swallow anything. Because he came to my house almost every weekend with not even an overnight bag (seriously, how unfair is it that men can fit their life into pants pockets and not need to carry purses like us?). Because I'd go to his home and see nothing, anywhere. Because while I did know something was "wrong", because I was ignorant but not blind, I had no idea it was that.

The phone call with his father lasted under five minutes and I was suddenly not only processing the fact that he was gone, but also processing the why. It was terrible. It still is. We all know that grief has stages. Disbelief, anger, guilt, etc. I learned about those stages five years prior with my friend. But dealing with the grief of an overdose is an entirely different beast. I think a lot of guilt associated with losing someone is the guilt of things unsaid. Of not visiting them more frequently. Of forgetting to say I love you in what ends up being your final conversation. But this guilt isn't that. This guilt is literally, why didn't I see it? I could have helped him. I could have gotten him help. I could have called someone. Basically...I could have saved his life and I didn't and I was a terrible girlfriend for not having done so.

Of course that's all bullsh*t and I know it. It is not my fault that this happened. I can't even feel guilt for being an enabler, because you can't enable behavior that you weren't aware of or participated in. But it doesn't really change those waves of guilt that wash over me every now and then.

And then there's the anger. Mmmmaaannnn... the anger is so very real. So real that back in January I felt anger towards him as if he was still here, had said something stupid, and not apologized. That anger you feel when your man is just clueless and does something and has no idea why you're upset, but you're just counting down the minutes until you speak to him to get it all off of your chest. That's what I felt. I was so angry that he had never told me what was going on. That he lied to me every single day. I try not to think of it that way but of course, that's simply what it is. He lied to me daily to keep the truth from me. But last month, that thought just snowballed and I started to wonder what else was a lie. Was EVERYTHING a lie? Every word, every action. Or just the words/actions that were meant to hide his disease?

There is SO much I want to write about in regards to my last 6 months, but I'm going to leave this here for now. I sort of want to publish all of these posts in an entirely different blog, but I need to set it up. For now, I'm happy to have at least started to get all of these feelings down on virtual paper.  My hope is to not only use this as a tool to help myself heal from this, but maybe even help someone else. I've Google'd the crap out of overdoses, drugs, etc since this all happened, in an attempt to get more understanding of the disease, and find support systems. Every little blogpost, article, and statistic has helped in some way, even if just for a few minutes. Maybe I can do the same for someone else.