Tag: depression

How does one schedule the ending of a life?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I posted about a little while ago, my dog is not well.  He was diagnosed with cancer a little over a month ago, and has a tumor that has been rapidly growing since then.  I got a second opinion to see if this were something that could be operated on, but the combination of the growth of the tumor, his age, and his heart, it was a no-brainer that he was not a good surgery candidate, and that this was a situation to simply just try to keep him comfortable for however long he has left.

It’s been about a month, and the fact that I’m writing this at all should be enough to know just how well things have gone.  The tumor has been growing and is protruding visibly.  Chase’s appetite has been gradually decreasing, to which to me is the #1 thing to know when it’s time to start reflecting on mortality, and his physical behavior has decreasing.  His hips have occasionally given out on him, requiring me to pick him up and put him in the grass to relieve himself, if he isn’t unloading where he settles in the first place.

One of the things I told myself when I realized that the clock was counting down was that I did not want to keep my dog alive for the sake of myself.  Once his quality of life was starting to really not be so great would be the point where I would do him the courtesy of letting him bow out gracefully and with his dignity, and not when he was frail, immobile and already starving to death.  This is a mistake I’ve made in the past, and it is something that I did not want to repeat, because it’s not fair to our pets to do such selfish things.

It’s been a lot of reflecting over the last few days, but this is where I think I am with my journey with Chase now.  His appetite is dwindling, his activity is becoming more sedentary, and as noted, his legs are starting to fail him.  In spite of his documented heart issues, his heart is not failing him, but the rest of his body is really starting to.  He’s attentive and his mind is still clearly with us, and this would be a whole lot simpler to do if it weren’t, but that’s just the cruelty of life sometimes.

The thing is, in all the pets I’ve ever had or been a part of their lives, death has always been kind of a in-the-moment thing.  They’ve never dropped dead in front of me, but typically things have occurred that made it very clear that the time was now, to say goodbye.  No real time to think about it, just act, and do them the solid of not letting them suffer.

I’ve never been in a scenario where I’ve had the time to contemplate and make the decision, much less call the vet to schedule, the literal ending of a life, and it feels completely bonkers that this is something that people actually do all around the world.  But here we are.

It sucks because it feels like there’s a degree of convenience, of washing my hands of the responsibility and care needed, and I’m constantly talking to myself to remind myself that it’s for his sake that we’re doing this.  Put a merciful end to the suffering of cancer spreading and taking parts of his body offline.  Suppressing a once-healthy appetite.  Making him unable to sprint circles around me while I held the leash with amusement at his energy and vitality.  I’d be lying if I said that there wouldn’t be some relief of the absolving of some duties, but it’s never worth the ceasing of a life, but the flip side to that, is that I’d be forcing a dog to stay alive for my sake and not his, and that’s precisely what I’m trying to avoid.

All the same, I’ve made up my mind, and I have to stick with it.  Short of the cure to cancer being released into the air and the discovery of the fountain of youth, applicable to dogs as well, there’s not much that’s going to turn this back, nor should there be.  My boy has lived a lengthy life, been an unforgettable companion through a substantial chunk of my own life, and it’s time to let him go and sprint as many circles around the afterlife as he wants, before he abruptly stops to drop the biggest poop a dog of his size has any business dropping.

2 Under 2: Days like today I’m over parenting (#075)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I should be happy and excited right now.  I have received some very good personal news.  But I’m not.  I can’t be, because parenting two under two is soul sucking draining and there’s no room in my life for anything me, because I’m dealing with two crying kids all fucking day every fucking day and I have no idea when it will ever get any easier. 

#2 sucks at sleeping and doesn’t nap or stay asleep which already drains me daily, but has now devolved to where it encroaches into my one-on-one time with #1, because she’s insisting on waking up earlier than ever, despite not getting any more nap time or night sleep, so I am literally handcuffed to her from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed.  And to think she had one really perfect day earlier in the week where she slept until 8, had two perfect naps, and didn’t fight me Mortal Kombat when it came time to sleep.  

To make life any easier, #1 has apparently begun entering the terrible two phase where everything warrants crying and tantrums, and we’re talking real tears and snot and screaming and shunning.  And there will be moments in the day where both kids are crying, fussing, screaming, or all of the above to where I just have to stop, stand there still, and contemplate that this is where my life is at, and wondering, what. the. fuck. 

Obviously I’m not the only dad or any parent who’s ever been in this situation, but I would really like to know how other dads have fared or handled this specific scenario of simultaneously raising two under two, in similar aged kids to my own.  I need to know I’m not alone here, because I’m constantly overwhelmed, constantly overworked, often miserable, and at times completely over being a parent and just wanting a fucking break that will never happen because two under two is too much to ask of anyone to alleviate me of and I can’t rely on anyone and I don’t know any two people or don’t trust anyone to do a fraction of shit I do on a daily basis to get me one. 

I know that I’m not alone under these circumstances. I just want to hear it. 

But the disheartening thing is that I don’t know anyone in these circumstances. My friends and our generation itself are all so anti-kids or they have just one kid, or they’re fortunate enough to have family and other free care to lend hands, that it really does feel sometimes that I am alone.  

All I want for Christmas is a single day where I can turn off dad mode and live like a regular human being for a day.  Sleep without an alarm. Past 7 am. Eat when I want to eat and not when #1 eats so she doesn’t get pissed that I’m eating without her. To have a moment where I realize that I can run, write, or workout or watch tv for an hour without getting interrupted. Not be on double duty with two kids by myself for 3-5 hours a day.  Not to have to deal with pets.  To have an evening where I don’t have to sprint upstairs at a moments notice 3-5 times to pacify a kid because they can’t stay asleep.

Just one fucking day.  Happy Kwanzaa 

Oh, and my nanny just called in sick. Today’s going to be awesome.  Happy Hanukkah 

I hope the afterlife is ready to get their asses destroyed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By now, I would wager that just about everyone has someone they can name off the top of their heads as someone whom they think has been the greatest casualty of the coronavirus.  Whether it’s a family member, or family of a friend, or a friend of family, a celebrity, regional personality, or what not, at this point it’s probably not a stretch for people to be able to have been affected to some degree of sadness at the death or someone they cared about.

For me, short of anyone in my family, the news of the passing of actor and martial arts legend, Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba is without question, the one death that stands out above all others in my personal little world, and it upset me tremendously to have learned of the passing of this icon.

At 82 years old, it’s not like he hasn’t lived a full and fruitful life in his own right, but the fact that he passed due to pneumonia associated with coronavirus says to me that he still died in a pointless, unfortunate and completely avoidable manner.  I won’t sugarcoat the disappointment that I felt to learn that he also wasn’t vaccinated, but given his age, I’m hoping he was more of the type to be concerned over a vaccine of such nature to a person of his age, versus someone who was just anti-vax, and flat out refused it, but this is something that I guess we’ll never know.

I don’t even really know where to go with the rest of this post.  I wanted to make sure that even in spite of my complete lack of any time to do any writing, that when I started writing this, I wanted to be clear headed, and relatively available to gather my thoughts and write, because most anyone who knows me probably knows that I’ve always been a die-hard Sonny Chiba fan, and that I saw him as more than a martial artist and an actor, and more like an icon and a personal hero, that started kind of as a joke, but really grew into something genuine and meaningful.

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‘Burned out’ doesn’t even come close to describing how I feel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On any given day, here are the things that I like to accomplish in my free time:

  • Write
  • Run
  • Watch wrestling
  • Watch tv in general
  • Play Fire Emblem Heroes and/or Pokémon Go
  • Do surveys

Coincidentally, that just so happens to be the list of things that I so rarely get to do anymore, on account of the fact that I’m just so endlessly busy, with a plate so perpetually full, that I’ve been feeling on the cusp of anxiety attacks at just how much stuff I feel that I have to do on a regular basis, with practically no help at all.

The fact that I’m writing now is a miracle in itself, and I mentally would really like to accomplish a whole fuckton of writing that’s been backlogging in my brain as well as on the living document I keep a list of topics and things I’d like to write about but the reality is that as much as I love to write, there’s only a certain amount of it I can do daily before the topics begin to run into each other and I put out a bunch of bullshit that I’m not happy with.

Over the last few weeks, my daily schedule hasn’t really changed so much as it’s just had things added to it, as some of them have finite timelines in which they should be accomplished.  However, it’s these extra things that have nickeled and dimed their way into overfilling my plate on a regular basis, and the’ve all been constantly bleeding into all facets of my time not spent working and/or raising a child, that I’ve hit the point where “burned out” doesn’t come close to describing how I feel so much as I just simply feel like I’m drowning.

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When your brain wants you to be sad, you’ll be sad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I can’t shake it, but I often times find myself feeling sad.  A few weeks ago when I posted about wondering if I needed therapy, it really wasn’t one of those posts where I was trying to be humorous, it was more erring towards legitimate pondering than it was trying to be funny but I understand how it could be misconstrued considering the vast majority of the time on my brog I’m trying to be funny.

The thing is, I have no real reason to be feeling sad, too.  Sure, my paternity leave is over and I’m back to a job I’m often times feeling very lukewarm towards, but the reality is that I have a job, my mom is staying at my house and alleviating mythical wife and I of our biggest concern, which is childcare during the work days, and there’s a small sliver of normalcy starting to come back into our lives.  My child is healthy, often happy, and there are no adequate words to describe the happiness and joy that she brings to me, but whenever I get settled down and have the time and capacity to get into my own head, I can’t help but feel sad from time to time, and I really have no reason to be.

I think I’m generally unsatisfied with certain aspects of my life and it’s silly to think that I feel like a lot of things would improve if I were to win the lottery or find some way to take financial concerns off the table entirely, and whenever I get into my own head, these pessimistic and worrisome thoughts tend to permeate into my head and leave me feeling more blue than I really have any right to be.

I’ve been asking myself lately what I think would make me happy, and the answers that come up are often times further into the realm of impossibility, like being able to take my child out to certain places, because the world is fucking dangerous still because America can’t get their collective head out of their asses and put some fucking masks on for 2-3 months and eradicate coronavirus instead of waiting for a vaccine that large swaths of the country won’t take anyway because they’re anti-vaxxer dumb fucks. 

And then there are more realistic things, like wanting to make things with my hands, but that requires tools, materials, space, to which those require time, money, time and money, to which those are commodities in which I do not have a lot of to expend, because no matter what, my child will always come first.  By no means do I harbor any resentment towards my child for such reality, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but in the fleeting amounts of spare time that I do have, I feel like I want to do things that I just don’t really have the means to indulge in, at least not without a bunch of prerequisites.

In a perfect world, I have a workshop space, where I can create and do and build and explore things.  But in order to have that, I need to have money, to which I’m not struggling to pay bills or have a fairly normal life as it is, but I don’t want to take out loans for things that don’t add any true value outside of personal gratification, so this is where it would be nice to just win a lottery or something, just to jump start a lot of personal projects and to oh, quit my job while in the process.

But back to the point, I occasionally feel irrationally sad, and it doesn’t take a lot to trigger it sometimes.  It’s times like that in which I ponder on if I should seek therapy, which isn’t that easy of a decision for me to make, because my work insurance doesn’t cover any, and I wonder if I have the financial means to go out of pocket on it.  I’m not saying I want medication, quite the contrary, I barely like taking ibuprofen when I have a headache, but I don’t think it would hurt to know why my brain sometimes insists that I be sad, when I really shouldn’t have any reason for it.  My life is pretty good in spite of the dumpster fire ‘Murica is these days, but when the brain wants to be sad, it’s going to be sad.

I wonder if I need therapy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Easy set up aside, I’m not trying to be funny at the moment.  Over the last few days, and dealing with the clown of a handyman who has for the lack of better term, fucked me, I haven’t been dealing with the frustration over it very well, and it’s bleeding out in various capacities.  As detailed, I got my glasses broken from negligence, and there have been other instances where I’ve made some careless errors that were fortunately nothing too bad other than aggravation.

But yesterday, since I’ve decided to take it upon myself to fix the fuck ups of my shit handyman, I had an incident where I nicked my ring fingertip with my belt sander; no, it’s nothing severe, but some blood was drawn, and it was in a terribly inconvenient place that made typing competently near impossible until I procured some appropriate fingertip Band Aids, which is how I’m back at the keys writing this right now.  You never realize how much a single finger comes into play with an assortment of daily activities until it’s put on injured reserve.

In all honesty, the meme above, about the try not to cry, but then cry a lot?  That’s kind of how I’ve felt on and off throughout this past week, and I’m feeling very mentally vulnerable right now.  I’m not sure if this is just extremely poor stress management, perhaps this is quarantining cabin fever manifesting in emotional instability?  Maybe it’s the anxiety of knowing I feel like the first three weeks of my paternity leave has vanished in the blink of an eye and now I’m on the downward slope of going back to work sooner rather than later.  My dog is also acting a little strange, which isn’t helping, because I already feel like a shitty enough neglectful owner because baby comes ahead of everything, but at least he’s getting his meals and routine bathroom breaks and not locked in his crate eight hours a day like when I was in the office.

Or maybe it’s all of the above, and it’s an amalgamation of factors leading me to feeling like maybe I need some professional help to help me make sense of why I’m in such a mentally turrible state lately.

And no matter how much I talk to myself about how I really shouldn’t be in this much of a funk, here I am.  I have my health, I have a stable job, in spite of some recent angst about it, I have a beautiful and loving wife who supports everything about me, and I’ve got the most gorgeous and precious kid that I have the utmost luxury to be taking care of every single day right now.  Frankly, even I don’t think I should be feeling so volatile given these facts, but I just can’t shake it right now.

I’m hoping that once I get my property back in order, I’ll feel better about things, as the visual results of having been fucked will be behind me.  But if that doesn’t work, I think I may explore what my options are, and/or see if my insurance can be of any help at all in this.  Who really knows what’s going to happen in the future, but I’ve never been one against the idea of therapy, but I’ve always felt like I just didn’t need it, but if things can’t seem to get better through all of the channels that I’ve been using throughout my life so far, perhaps some professional help might not be a bad idea.

I owe it to my wife, child and rest of my family and friends to be the best I can be, and not be so wrecked by stupid shit.  Maybe a good cry is what I really do need, like in Fight Club.  Would probably be a lot cheaper than therapy!

This is really the state of America in 2020

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No matter how much I never liked to admit to feeling it, now that the faucet’s been turned, it seems like not a day goes by where the words don’t pass through my lips, and it doesn’t make me feel any better verbalizing it now as it did when I first came to the realization that right now, America sucks.

Talking with a friend about the state of the world, I found myself saying things that I’d never said before in regards to how I felt, mostly because I’ve been isolated, and mythical wife and I try not to talk about things too much because they really are that depressing, but what came out of my fingers in text is that I don’t think it’s ever felt so physically possible to feel just how much our country is letting us down, the way America is completely and utterly failing the American people on a daily basis right now.

It really is becoming impossible to keep up with all the ways things are fucked up, at least for me, who likes to jot down notes on a daily basis so I can remember the things happening in history for another day, especially in case I feel inspired to write about them at some point.  But it’s downright sad and pathetic the things that emerge on a daily basis about the state of America in the state of the world currently, and I realize that it becomes a little more difficult every day to not grow more jaded and nihilistic about how things are, which are definitely things I don’t want to be happening when I’m in a period of my life where I’m trying to enjoy and savor the time of new fatherhood and spending time with my baby.

It’s kind of not fair that America is in such chaos and forced to hunker, when all I want to do is show my kid the great big world and can’t, because neither of us want to get the coronavirus that’s fucking everywhere and risk our lives.

Continue reading “This is really the state of America in 2020” →