The Dagless File

[Dagless]

I have to move forward from here. I have to see what it is I want from my life and have the strength to get it. All my life I have spent my time dreaming of things, my head in the clouds. You can lose a life time doing that.

 

The second part of that speech I've got memorized goes like this:

 

"Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But you got to be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you aren’t where you want to be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that isn’t you! You're better than that!"

 

Do I know what I am worth? Do I know what it is I want? These are the things I need to find out, but whatever they are, they are out there for me if I want them badly enough, if I am willing to take the hits.

 

Now if you excuse me I have a guitar I need to learn to play.....

 

“You got a dream... You got to protect it. People can't do something themselves, they want to tell you that you can't do it. If you want something', go get it. Period.”

 

“The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

 

 

..............FILE CLOSED..............

[Dagless]

Okay so I’m trying to move on and do something with my life, which is good but Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that, having patients with it all is proving the trickiest thing for me. One thing that is really dawning on me is how I don’t really fit in anywhere and how difficult I find it to connect with people, I don’t know it’s just weird. I’ve never been much of a social creature, I mean I’ve been out and gone clubbing and whatever with mates in the past but to be honest I never really found it much fun.

What the strange thing is it has started to leek in to my time at work, I’m finding that I just want people to leave me alone. I just want to turn up, do what I have to do and go home. It has started to become a real effort to get up I the mornings and get myself there for another day of soul sapping. To be honest when I think about it I don’t think it has anything to do with my social skills, I think I’m actually just very unhappy there. I really do have to move on from that place as quickly as possible, I just find myself becoming stale. I almost feel invisible at times like I have become a part of the furniture but it’s a move I have to make with a lot of thought and consideration, there is no point in taking any sideways steps with this one. So, until then, patients……I must learn patients.

[Dagless]

Felt like crap today. My mind has been everywhere, I just haven't felt comfortable talking to people, although I've been trying to. I've just wanted to sit in a corner on my own. I've felt fragile almost on the verge of tears most the day, can't seem to focus. People talk to me and I don't seem to hear them, I wonder if they can tell that I'm not really there.

 

All this time I've been fighting to stay afloat and now it feels like I am slowly drowning. I miss Lisa so much, this place just feels so lonely, empty, two dimensional without her..........

[Dagless]

There is a guy at work, a guy who is miserable most of the time and goes around like a bear with a sore head. I have to work with him and I use to be able to take his down beat attitude and his moaning about other co-workers but I admit I don't have the patients like I use to. Its lead me to question my change of attitude towards him. Am I less tolerant that I use to be? Is it partly my fault that he is getting worse because I have I stopped reaching out to him? Or am I just simply wiser to people like him now, people who blame others for the way they are and refuse to take responsibility for their actions and now I simply don't have time for those kinds of games.

 

Treat others how you would like to be treated, you reap what you sow and if you make your bed then you have to lie in it. Cause and effect, that’s what it all comes down to in the end.

[Dagless]

A friend at work was talk about his girlfriend who has gone on holiday without him and how much he missed her. I went on holiday with my brother a couple of years ago, it was something I'd agreed to and wished I hadn't. Being away from Lisa for that week was just horrible. I phoned and texted her all the time, I just wanted to get back to being with her. When I was with her I just felt so.....right, I always felt kind of disconnected some how when we were apart. I promised her I'd never go away like that again.

 

Sometimes that's how I feel, like I'm on that holiday waiting to be in a place where we are together......except there is nowhere to go, no place to be.

[Dagless]

It's funny, when I look back at my time at school all I wanted to do was fit in. In fact I think it was the last thing that I felt like I actually did do. I was too cool to be a geek, to geeky to be with the cool guys and certainly not tough enough to fit in with the tough guys.

 

They say the hardest thing to be in society is yourself because woe be tide that we shouldn't "fit in". It's taken me a long time for me realise that it is okay to be who you are and not to necessarily believe the "truth" that they sell you as being "the norm". In my experience that is no absolute normal, it’s just something that was invented to make us feel ashamed at our individuality.

 

I found this but I have no idea who wrote it

 

You do not have to be cool.

You do not have to be slender.

You do not have to be quick.

You do not have to be smooth.

You do not have to be silent.

You do not have to be loud.

You do not have to be separate.

You do not have to be edgy.

You do not have to hold on.

You do not have to agree.

You do not have to cover up.

You do not have to "be remembered"

You do not have to be better.

You do not have to grasp.

You do not have to prepare.

You do not have to look away.

You do not have to have the answer.

You do not have to be cool.

You do what you are or you become what you do.

 

There is no right or wrong way to be yourself in this world because there is only one of you in this whole expanse. You feel how you feel, you think how you think and you love how you love and don't go changing who you are just because you think you should.

[Dagless]

Someone asked me about closure a few days ago and it's been something that has been on my mind for awhile.

The fact is I don't really know what caused Lisa's death and that is something that keeps throwing up questions. In the hospital they told me that they where looking at Adult Sudden Death Syndrome because they could pin point it at anything else but I never told them about her battle with bulimia.

 

Months later I read a small article in the paper about the inquest in to Lisa's death and it said heart attack but how can that be it the doctors had tested for that and scanned her heart and rule that out. Could that article of got that wrong? Was that just an easier way of putting it?

 

I read this earlier this month

 

link removed

 

"People with bulimia literally can just die for no apparent reason." it says in part of it. I can help but wonder if this is what happened to my Lisa. Anxiety, bullying and bulimia, the same things where going on in Lisa's life and they are both around the same age.

 

The truth is in an inquest report and it is out there and I think I may have to read it or ask someone some question to get to the truth. I don't think I will have closure until I do.

 

I will have to go to my family with this but how do I do this without it seeming as though I am digging up the past, instead of trying to lay it to rest?……

[Dagless]

Lisa's death was not as a result of a heart attack. The media often use the term heart attack instead of saying cardiac arrest which explains the newspaper article. A heart attack can be diagnosed through blood tests, which is why the doctors could rule that out. Lisa's heart was not damaged or enlarged in anyway. Her death was recorded as natural causes but it was adult sudden death syndrome, which is what I was told in the first place but I after what I had read I had to be sure.

 

Whether or not her sudden death was a result of her on/off battle with bulimia I guess I will never know but the fact that there was no evidence to support this make me feel that it was not.

 

Maybe now I have a little peace of mind on this, I can finally stop questioning it within myself and stop churning the events over in my mind in the hope that I would find answers there.

[Dagless]

It has been a year and a half since Lisa died. I feel different in myself, within my mind than I have ever done over the months that have past. I feel......at ease. I had to ask those questions about Lisa's death so I could get to some truth at what happened, even it the truth was awful I needed to know. I just couldn't live without knowing. I would have been constantly questioning myself, my mind, my memories, the things I knew or at least the things I thought I knew.

 

Now that I have found what I needed to know my mind seems to have settled. As though the storm has finally past and the clouds have cleared.

 

I feel as if I've been in hibernation for over a year, in my own cave as it were. I feel thin these days (I've continued to lose weight very slowly since I lost that two stone in the first month and am now the lightest I have ever been in my adult life) and it does not make me feel good.

 

Maybe after all this time of taking care of myself mentally, it's time to take care of myself physically.

[Dagless]

It has been a year and a half since Lisa died. I feel different in myself, within my mind than I have ever done over the months that have past. I feel......at ease. I had to ask those questions about Lisa's death so I could get to some truth at what happened, even it the truth was awful I needed to know. I just couldn't live without knowing. I would have been constantly questioning myself, my mind, my memories, the things I knew or at least the things I thought I knew.

 

Now that I have found what I needed to know my mind seems to have settled. As though the storm has finally past and the clouds have cleared.

 

I feel as if I've been in hibernation for over a year, in my own cave as it were. I feel thin these days (I've continued to lose weight very slowly since I lost that two stone in the first month and am now the lightest I have ever been in my adult life) and it does not make me feel good.

 

Maybe after all this time of taking care of myself mentally, it's time to take care of myself physically.

[Dagless]

It is not a condition of old age that you start to lose things from your life. There is not a point where life stops giving things to you and starts taking them away instead. As we start to have different departments close down at my store and those people who work for them pack up their things and move on, I can help but notice how quickly things can change.

 

Some of these people I have seen week in, week out for almost four years and I hardly know anything about them and then one day they are just gone. Moved on. And although they will probably not give me a second thought I can't help but feel sad at the thought that I may never see them again.

 

We are losing and gaining things all the time in our lives. Some so quickly or so gradual that we don't even notice but I guess that's life.

 

This is something I wish I had the courage to say to someone today:

 

"I'm sorry I never got the chance to see what lies beneath that tough exterior of yours but I have no doubt you have someone you love and trust enough to show that side of you to. I can't help but envy him"

[Dagless]

Our physical bodies are the product of evolution, it was not designed and it is not perfect. All living things have the same simple rule: Be able to survive in your environment and as a result all living creatures are a product of their environment. The way we interact with our environment, through sight, touch, taste, smell, are all things that we evolved with for one simple purpose: To survive.

 

It is important to know that our minds have also had to go through the same process. Much of what we believe to be our minds are survival processes, reflex actions and much like their physical counter parts they exist to protect us from harm, emotional harm. It may sound strange put I consider these parts of the mind as part of the physical self. The brain is a marvellous learning device. It is constantly gathering information in order for us to be able to survive in our environment better by compiling it as experience from past events. But this has a flaw. If we are hurt then we fear becoming hurt again, both physically and emotionally. So motivated by fear we build inner barriers and defence mechanisms to protect us from that pain and the path in which the pain came in. I am guilty of this too, it is part of being human. It is how we have evolved.

 

The past is not a blueprint for the future, it is only a guide. We are not slaves to our past, there is nothing that we can not leave behind if we are willing to let it go.

[Dagless]

Moving on. Why on earth do I feel selfish about this? Someone you love dies and you just move on, get on with your life? Doesn't feel right somehow but what are the alternatives? Emotional limbo, forever wishing for a life you will never have, with someone who you will never be with.

 

If we can just move on what does that mean for those whos lives we leave behind? That we forget them, that they don't matter? No they matter, she mattered.........more than anything.......

 

So I have to look within myself at the barriers I am building and why I have ground my life to a halt. I'm afraid to let her go, let go at what we had.......but what we had doesn't exist anymore.......I'm holding on to nothing but an idea, a dream that will never come true.....but I fear letting go anyway because at least it is something to hold on too.......and now I can see how crazy that sounds.

 

Lisa is gone and with her all our dreams, all our precious dreams. Her life was precious and although sometimes I don't feel like it is, mine is too.......that is why I choose to live, that is why I will choose to move on and no other reason.

[Dagless]

Something happened today which as left me a little confused. I was helping a girl at work drag some fixtures in from outside. When we had finished she said "Thanks Dag" and then she hugged me. It was a friendly little hug that only lasted a couple of seconds but it took me totally by surprise and I froze to the spot, like a rabbit in headlights.

 

I didn't know what to do and then I had all these conflicting emotions. It felt nice but it hurt to feel that. So I went and shed a little tear in the corner as my brain tried to compute what the hell I was feeling.

 

All this from a little hug of gratitude......my heart is a mess.....

[Dagless]

I posted in my old thread today because yesterday I noticed for the first time how may people have viewed it over the last 19 months. It stunned me. I wanted people to know that I was doing well after all this time, that it does get better.

 

I was talking to someone on Saturday about Lisa and my feeling and stuff and it didn't feel over emotional, I didn't feel like crying. I felt free from all that and it felt......good. It felt good to talk like that.

 

I still love her and that never goes away and I hope people understand that. It's not something you have to hold on to.....it becomes part of you.

[Dagless]

Years ago, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I remember being in a supermarket and there was this guy. I couldn't tell you what he looked like or what he was wearing because all my attention was focused on the contents of his shopping basket. He was there, looking at the cheap shoes and in his basket was five turkey dinners for one and five of those small cans (they're like half cans) of Cola or Fanta or Dr. Pepper.

 

And I remember having this horrible fear that I would turn out to be that guy years down the line. And then I remember something Chandler once said, that he had to go out and buy a snake because:

 

"If I'm gonna be an old, lonely man, I'm gonna need a thing, you know, a hook, like that guy on the subway who eats his own face. So I figure I'll be Crazy Man with a Snake, y'know. Crazy Snake Man. And I'll get more snakes, call them my babies, kids will walk past my place, they will run. "Run away from Crazy Snake Man," they'll shout!"

 

I still have that fear. The fear that I'm going to be crazy snake man, eating his turkey ready meals for one every night, slurping it down with my little can of diet Lilt.

 

Is this a fear we all share? Does everyone have this irrational fear that they will go through life never finding anybody and end up going a little crazy?

 

Or is it just me?

[Dagless]

"Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be." ~ Samuel Johnson

 

“I am learning to understand rather than immediately judge or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I have come to understand that life is best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery. I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.” ~ Bruce Lee

[Dagless]

Lisa was an only child. Her father was a violent man who used to beat her from an early age. She told me that her earliest memory was of him punching her as she sat in the back of the car. She was three years old. I saw pictures of her when she was young, she was a small and frail child. He was a six foot plus bodybuild with massive bear like hands.

She told me how she would lie in bed terrified because if she made a noise he would burst in and beat her. Most of her child hood was spent like this….in fear.

 

Her Mother had all the characteristics of a sociopath. She never showed her daughter any love, never so much as hugged her. I never saw how bad she was until she had to deal with her daughter’s death. She didn’t know how to act. There was no natural reaction, it was all alien to her. Being round someone like that was……..unsettling.

Lisa often blamed herself for how her mother treated her, thinking that it must be something she must be doing but the truth is she was just incapable of showing anyone any love. She only ever used people to get what she wanted. Everything she ever did was for own selfish ends.

She wanted to control Lisa, completely and utterly. I have no doubt about that.

 

Lisa had an eating disorder. She would often binge and purge. I will never know how really bad that got but I often wonder if it was a factor in her death.

She also would occasionally cut herself, something I never understood until I started to browse parts of this site. I regret not being more understanding about that.

 

Lisa had a son who was only four when she died, she was pregnant with him when I met her. His father was a gambling addict. He would often steal her things and go missing for months as he gambled all their money away. He only saw his son a couple of times. Lisa said that when she had her son it was like she woke up and she knew that she had to protect him from all that.

 

After everything she had been through it still amazes me that she could have opened her heart to me the way she did, that she didn’t lose her faith in love. She used to call me her rock but she was the strongest person I ever met.

[Dagless]

Strange how the smallest of details can start a chain of events that can take you in a journey of self discovery, of love, life and loss. 3 pence, that's all it took. 3p.

 

In 2003 I went for a job, a graphic design job in Kidderminster. They wanted an example of my work so a sent an A4 print off of some of my stuff with my C.V. and a covering letter, stuck a 1st class stamp on it and sent it off.

After not hearing anything for a week I just assumed that I didn't get the job for whatever reason and thought no more about it.

I was unemployed at the time and I was forced to volunteer for the Citizens Advice Bureau, just typing letters that kind of thing. About a week in to it I got a card from the post office saying I had some post but I had to pay for it because the postage paid by the sender was i nsufficient. So off I went curious to know what it was. It was the letter I had sent for the job. I had missed the postage by 3p and as a result it had been knocking around the postal system for 2 weeks until it finally made its way back to me.

 

I rang the place in Kidderminster to explain what happened and they said that the job had gone but if I came to see them they may be able to work something out. After weeks of them putting it off they finally said that they would take me on. I was thrilled!

 

I left my job at the Citizens Advice Bureau and I started my new job on a 3 week trial period.

 

I couldn't believe it, I was basically the tea boy. They had waved the carrot of my dream job in front of my face while they got a gofer for 3 weeks......free. I lasted 2 days.

 

I was devastated and to make matters worse I couldn't go back to the CAB, someone else was volunteering there. So I volunteered somewhere else and there I met a young, beautiful and heavily pregnant receptionist called Lisa.

 

If it wasn't for that 3 pence I would never have met Lisa, I would have never have become her best friend. I would never have fell in love with her and I would have never have came to eNA for advice on what the hell I should do about it.

 

The smallest of things can start the cogs and gears of cause and effect into motion and we never know how they will play out until they have had their turn.

 

That's life......excitingly wonderful isn't it?

[Dagless]

It has been no coincidence that my last two posts have been about one thing in particular...the past, both mine and Lisa's. There comes a point I guess where it is no longer a painful thing to do to look back at the things that have been and gone. It becomes nostalgic to look back at what you had......I feel a warmth in those memories now.

 

I guess it's just another part of the process of acceptance and moving on.

 

There it is again, that saying "moving on". I've used it alot in this journal of mine. My mind turns to that now, the undiscovered country, the future.

After almost twenty months of recovery and self discovery I find myself here, a man with no ties to anything and almost nothing to lose. I have a move to make, my move.....a choice.

 

But there is the dilemma, with so much choice what do I choose. Where do I go from here, what the hell do I do with my life now. Time to roll the dice, time to make a choice because the future is behind you before you know it.

[Dagless]

Twice this week I have had dreams with a similar theme. Both had women I have know in the past, in both we were in love and in both we couldn't be together for some reason.

 

The first one starred a someone I worked with recently, I liked her. She had that no non-sense attitude I like but there was nothing behind it. She was just cold. Anyway, in the dream we had feelings for each other but she chose to stay with her boyfriend..........who was a brain in a jar.

 

Don't ask me why he was just a brain in a jar, he just was. What this says about me and my self-esteem I have no idea. Did I mention he was a talking brain in a jar?.......That may be important.

 

The second dream was about a girl I liked at college....lets call her Shelly.

Now I won't lie I had a big thing for Shelly, I fancied her for 2 whole years and never did anything about it. Now in this dream we were in love but we couldn't be together for some reason. I think we were walking down the street and we were having one of those "I can't say how I really feel but I know you feel the same way" conversations. I think she was saying she had just split up with her husband and she didn't know where her head was.

 

Maybe it's just my feelings for Lisa coming out in a different way......wishing for a love that didn't happen maybe.

 

I don't know dreams are strange......what is my brain trying to tell me?

[Dagless]

Ever since I left school I've just fell into things. 15, 16 years of age and they sit you down and ask you to pick a career. I'd never given it much thought....so I fell in to Art College and then I fell in to University. Boy, that was a mistake.....left after a year with nothing but a chunk of debt to show for it. After that I've fell into one job after another.

 

Just what the hell am I doing with my life? I'm 28 years of age and I'm doing a job they could train a chimp to do. Everybody I know is married or has a partner. Everybody's happy these days when the hell did that happen?!

 

I have just been left behind and I feel stuck. Stuck in my job, stuck in my life. I'm going nowhere fast and I have no-one to blame but me.

 

Why the hell did you love me Lisa? Why did you think I was so damn amazing?

[Dagless]

I think I have figured out what those dreams were about.

 

Lisa's dad called me again a few weeks back. It got me thinking about how much I know now about her parents and how they treated her. And if by some strange miracle I was to fall through a wormhole and into a dimension where Lisa didn't die would our relationship be able to work with me knowing what I know now? I guess that's why time always moves forward because we learn and carry that forward. That's life. Sometimes your eyes can only be opened when your bridges are burnt and you can look back and see things for what they really were. The knowledge I have now can not be deployed back then. It has no place there.

 

Those dreams were about trying to recapture the past but realising that things change.....lives change and people move on.

[Dagless]

I have started to notice that my body is slowly starting to change shape. I've been doing some exercises for about five weeks and my arms started to get bigger straight away but now and my stomach is definitely flatter and has some definition (not exactly a six pack but it's not a keg now either, yay!).

[Dagless]

Truth is the basis of all art. I was thinking this last week. Someone must have said that, I couldn't have just came up with it.

 

"The basis of art is true, both in matter and mode."

~ Flannery O'Connor

 

 

There it is, but I don't recall ever hearing it before. I don't know how these things work there way in to my brain but there it is.

 

If the basis of art is truth then art without truth is meaningless. So if you can take something meaningless and give it meaning then that must be art. Is that all an artist is, someone who can show the meaning within the meaningless?