Tag: loss

‘Freedom day’

Four face masks with cartoon animals on them
Four masks from Sugar and Sloth

Tomorrow is ‘Freedom Day’ when the final lockdown restrictions are lifted. What freedom people are currently lacking is unclear, but some things I’ve seen are – having to wear a mask, having to check in at shops and restaurants, and not being able to meet as many people as they like. Apparently, this is oppression, and we can’t keep wearing masks forever because it’s not normal.

After the first date for ‘Freedom Day’ was delayed, anti-lockdown and anti-mask (or pro-death) protesters marched through London demanding everything be opened up again. They walked past open pubs, open cafes and restaurants with indoor dining and into an open shopping centre, which then had to close because of the disruption they caused (I bet Alanis Morissette didn’t see that one coming).

Cases are rising rapidly despite vaccines. Younger people are contracting the virus; there’s another mutation that has been allowed to spread rapidly, and again, we’re told that more people will die.

Freedom for disabled and chronically ill people looks quite different. The Office for National Statistics says that 2.2 million clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) people were advised to shield. This meant not leaving the house at all unless absolutely necessary. Many relied on government food boxes or support from local charities and mutual aid groups that sprang up during lockdown.

People who are CEV, especially those who are immunocompromised, are getting told to shield again. Some people haven’t been out since the start of 2020, and the vaccine may not even work for immunocompromised people or those taking immunosuppressants. Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been this message that it only affects the elderly and vulnerable. Aside from this not being true, these people are not disposable because they’re older or disabled, but they’ve been thrown under a bus and allowed to die to give other people their ‘freedom’.

The other used phrase (apart from wake up sheeple which makes me want to stab someone in the eye) is if you’re scared, stay at home and let people who want to live go out. People who are shielding don’t want to have to stay in or avoid contact with their partners. They don’t want to go a year without seeing anyone or not getting the medical or social support they need, and they shouldn’t have to stay in forever because others are too selfish to wear a mask or make any other minor sacrifices.

July is disability pride month, and once again, disabled people are being left to die or excluded from society, this time to please the people who are tired of the pandemic. We have to learn to live with the virus, let the bodies pile up on the street and pretend to care with gesture politics like clapping, because making sure people can go to the football and trade deals with India are more important than saving lives.

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Bee for bee 🐝

In my last post, I talked about Juliette and what a caring, fun, creative, loving, colourful person she was. When she died, I said I’d get a bee tattoo, not a worker bee. I wasn’t looking to copy her, but a bumblebee to remind me of her and our friendship, which started from matching underwear, a reminder of the memes and pictures of bees with fuzzy butts we used to share. On Monday, I got my tattoo of my own fuzzy butt bumble bee with a purple watercolour background to match Juliette’s hair. I know she’d approve of this.

A bumblebee tattoo on my wrist with a purple watercolour-style background.

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Suicide is pants

Long time no blog.

This post is about suicide, though there is no mention of methods.

A bee on pink flowers at the station on the day of Juliette’s funeral

I’ve been wanting to write this for 6 months, but it was too hard. A potentially creepy comment about owning the same underwear on a drunken toilet selfie did not get me blocked, but instead was the start of our friendship. We met through an internet mental health ‘Community’, and there were many eye rolls about such places and some of the people in them (though we were aware that we were far from perfect ourselves).

I soon found that Juliette had a wicked sense of humour, she was attractive and creative and had various different hair colours in the time I knew her. She loved animals and owned four gorgeous rats. She had an accidental memorial leg of tattoos for people in life who’d died. Despite her intolerance to bullshit (and lactose), she was loyal and supportive to those she cared about. Hummus memes were frequently shared and still pop up on my Facebook notifications. Some of the jokes we shared were truly terrible.

Living in Manchester, she got a worker bee tattoo with ‘Don’t look back in anger’ going around it after the Manchester bombing, and bees became her ‘Thing’ online. A gif of a cat dressed up as a bee (creatively dubbed beecat) falling slowly off a sofa became our way of conveying frustration/ crap day/ crap mental health, and often summed up how we felt. Her mandala cat tattoo was also dubbed beecat.

We had a group chat with three of us in it, which was 90% complaining about life, mental health and the internet and the rest was probably random memes and beecat gifs.

I knew Juliette had attempted suicide previously, but part of you doesn’t want to accept that it could happen, and when it did, I didn’t want it to be real. It felt like someone had punched me in the chest; a feeling that’s come and gone for the last 6 months. I cried for hours and have cried for many more since.

Her funeral especially broke me. When many of the people who cared about her had mental health issues and were scattered around not only the country but also the world, only a few of us were able to go, but a request for people to change their profile pictures to bees spread and on the day of her funeral, my social media was full of different types of bees. I’ve never been to a funeral full of people wearing cat ears before, but as soon as we arrived, we knew it was the right place.

People talk about grief and stages as if it’s linear and as if it doesn’t come out of nowhere and punch you in the stomach; it’s not that simple or straightforward. Oasis makes me cry, pictures of furry bumblebee butts hanging out of flowers make me smile, and part of me still expects her to be online.

Sometimes I’ll make a really inappropriate joke, and I know she’d have laughed and we’d both joke that we were the worst. I thought the 6-month anniversary of her death yesterday would be hard, but instead I was caught out on Friday crying for several hours (the ugly, snotty, puffy face version).

Tomorrow I’m going for a consultation for a bee tattoo, so I’ll always have a reminder of our friendship.

I miss you

Beecat loves you x

Helplines aren’t a replacement for proper mental health care, but if you’re in distress and need someone to talk to, you can contact the Samaritans or, if you’re under 35 Papyrus. Text support is available from Shout.

If you’ve been bereaved by suicide SOBS can give you support and advice

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Release

A countdown for the number of days I’ve been self harm free

I was trying to explain to someone recently the conflicting feelings that come into my head around self-harm. I want to self-harm, but really, I don’t. I keep thinking how much better it was to have an outlet for the way I feel, but really, I know that it wouldn’t help, it didn’t help, not really, not properly. But that doesn’t stop my mind jumping to it when I’m stressed, anxious or overwhelmed.

I haven’t self-harmed in 391 days, but I self-harmed from the age of 17 to 32 and intermittently before that. It’s not that I want to self-harm, it’s just that I want to breathe and not feel like I’m suffocating. I want to stop feeling like I’m dragging a weight around with me or wading through custard, and when it’s been something I’ve done for so long, it’s an immediate thought, an ingrained reaction that my mind jumps to when I feel bad.

I’m not naive, I know that just because I haven’t self-harmed in a long time, it doesn’t mean I won’t ever do it again. I can’t say for sure that I know I’ll never self-harm again, and even now, it’s not that I never do anything unhealthy/ potentially harmful or things that could be seen as negative ways of managing things, they’re just less destructive and don’t involve me ending up in A&E. The longer time goes on the bigger the stakes, once I was past 6 months I’d beat my previous longest time, then it was 7 months, 9 months and finally a year.

Sometimes people ask what they can do to help or make things easier, but I don’t always want them to do anything other than listen or try to see things from my position. I know some people are more practical than others, and their reaction is to look for a solution, but sometimes the solution is just to please listen to me and hear what I’m saying when I say how overwhelmed and stressed I feel. That I miss people I was close to, how alone I feel, how the light at the end of the tunnel feels very dim and distant right now, that’s what can be done to help.

Sometimes I just want someone to take me down to the car park and let me cry

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