Okay, so I whine on here a lot about my problems, illnesses, etc. This has apparently attracted the ire of individuals and they have voiced their discomfort at my constant whining. Here’s the deal: entries made on this domain are basically diary entries. Yes, they are open to the public. Yes, people can comment. Still, it is basically my way of writing down my frustrations on a day-to-day basis. I am encouraged to do this by people who get to hear about more of my life than I talk about on here.

If you look back at the 2001 entries, which were on a diary website, you will see that when I haven’t expressed my frustrations, I’ve gone more off-the-deep-end. Even when I posted multiple times a day, I was still dangerous to myself. I still ended up in the hospital. When I stopped posting frequently in 2006, I got more and more depressed and nearly ended up in the hospital again. I have learned to rant to get rid of the anger.

I am angry, I will admit that. I am sad, too. I am also very content and sometimes almost happy. I’m not happy or content about the things that upset me. I am happy that I get to continue living. I am content with my life in general. Even though I get pissed at my parents and friends and doctors and anyone else I ever talk to, I still love them. I am going to be whiny, angry, sad, etc. It’s part of what’s going on in my life. If you’ve read this blog since February of 2009, you might see the increasing negativity in some of the entries. If you look at that month’s entries, you will see that that was the time that I got the blood work back that said I’d tested positive for Lupus and Sjögren’s. I was a bit positive after that, because I thought that maybe one of the folks was right about false positives, but when I started showing signs of Sjögren’s in the summer of last year, I started giving up. I started shutting down. I started grieving.

There can be five stages of grief. These reactions might not occur in a specific order, and can (at times) occur together. Not everyone experiences all of these emotions:

• Denial, disbelief, numbness
• Anger, blaming others
• Bargaining (for instance “If I am cured of this cancer, I will never smoke again.”)
• Depressed mood, sadness, and crying
• Acceptance, coming to terms

People who are grieving may have crying spells, some trouble sleeping, and lack of productivity at work.

…
Grief may be triggered by the death of a loved one. People also can experience grief if they have an illness for which there is no cure, or a chronic condition that affects their quality of life.

I have been grieving for the girl I thought I would be, the girl I once was. I’ve been grieving because I found myself in a situation that I had never prepared for. All throughout my life, I had prepared for the idea of being mentally ill as an adult. I dealt with that. Being physically ill and ending up with the disease that led to the death of my grandmother was something that I wasn’t ready for. And I can’t rant to my parents because they’re going through their problems and if I talk about this with them, then I remind them of what my grandmother went through and the pain on their faces is too much. I can’t talk to my remaining grandmother because she worries so much that I almost faced a firestorm from my mom when she found out that I’d given my grandmother her phone number in the hospital. I can’t talk to my aunts about this. I can’t talk to my friends from church or school about it. I have 1 outlet…the internet. So you get to experience the whiny, depressing, annoying posts. You get to deal with my not dealing. I might have done better if I hadn’t missed almost a year of therapy while taking care of my mom. Who knows?

Of course, if you think I’m only a whimpering little fool or anything, then you miss the happier things. You miss the joking I do. You miss the sarcasm. You miss a lot. If you just focus on me in my worst moments, then you only get the worst parts of me. If you look at the whole picture. If you look beneath the anger, then you begin to see who I really am.