cbeen a while since i posted. maybe it’s a call for helf.
don’t you hate when childhood comes back to bite you. That’s what has happened and continues to me.
it all started innocently enough. though I grew up in a family with 6 other siblings, i grew up as an isolate. isolates spend too much time alone. with all that alone time, they quickly learn to humor, entertain and even seemingly care for themselves. it seems like that independence might just be a benefit. maybe for some people, but not for others, and not for me
fast forward some forty years. depression hangs like slime mold on an unhealthy tree. isolates like me easily fall back to their childhood patterns and humor, entertain and even seemingly care for themselves. being an army of one, isolates not only don’t ask for help, they don’t know how.
what’s one of the important pieces of recovery from depression? how about the ability and act to ask for help. the childhood patterns of isolates like me struggle with the very actions that can accelerate their healing. even though they’re drowning, they struggle and flail they still don’t call out for help. that takes them that much closer to going under or postpones recovery that much further.
by not asking for help, isolates unknowingly asked for and receive a deferment from their recovery. the isolate childhood mind convinces the adult that i’ve always humor, entertained, and even seemingly cared for myself; why would today be any different? the isolate childhood mind acts like a millstone wrapped around the neck, holding me down and hindering my exit from depression.
sure a depressed person may be able recover from their depression. to accelerate recovery from depression, they must reach out and ask for help. the childhood isolate has entangled its way into every fiber of the body, chocking off the very air needed to truly live life fully again. for that reason, the isolate person stays on life support, waiting, hoping and wishing for a miracle cure. they look for something, anything that can remove the childhood isolate without completely decimating the host body.
maybe the isolate makes their call for help through their silences. time and again the all to common refrain to someone supporting another person who takes their life is, “i didn’t know things were that bad.” the isolates call for help comes off like the classic “helf” comic by gary larson. with the missed signal, help never comes.
where to go from here? the isolate has to find the courage to ask for help. sure, the isolate child will face a challenge to call out for help, but call out they must.
to the supporters of isolates: are you reading signals correctly? perhaps if there is a call for helf, it’s time to prob a little more deeply to truly find out where the isolate really stands instead of circling and leaving the scene. it is these calls for help and read signals for help that will assist the isolate from their depressive struggles.
facing off with the big d 
I’ve missed reading your blog and hoped you were alright. You describe isolation and I understand completely. I grew up much the same way, now I just feel invisible. It is like it is hard to reach out after so long a time and people that should care don’t really seem to. That is why the blogs are important to us. I don’t have a blog but enjoy sharing our true feelings.
oh ava,
thank you much for you kind words and encouragement. they really do mean a lot to me. i’m sure you’d understand that in a strange way, it feels good to be missed. thanks for reading my worlds and more importantly, letting me know that they have meaning to you.
i have been a through a though spot recently seemingly unable to string together more than a few words, a infrequent sentence and a scant paragraph. that slippage foretold my life journey as after the loss of words my emotional life followed, giving back too many of my gains from this summer. i felt sunk. that made it even harder to write.
because of life discoveries, and conversing with a dear friend, the thoughts of this post came forward in my mind and i forced myself to capture them and write them down. i still struggled; while a normal gestation for one of my posts measures in hours and at least shorter than than a couple days. my labor for this post ended up to be more like a week. it felt nice to hear your kind words and made me feel like my labor was worth it.
now for some on your words…
i can really relate to your statement about time, people who should care but they do not seem to. sure, i’m a isolate, but i would hope if my house were on fire that they’d be calling me, banging on my door or breaking windows to make sure i was awake. okay, my humble abode doesn’t have flaming shooting out of it, but my soul surely burns. someone call 911, our what ever the emergency number for your country is (-:.
again, thank you for your encouraging words. i will try to use them to get me and keep my words going again. if ever you miss my words again, feel free to comment on my about page, shoot me an email (address on my about page), or even usurp the comment field of my most recent post. thanks to you, call a call, knock or rock. remind me that time hasn’t ended your desire to read my prose, again. i am hoping and beginning to see a way through my smoke. for you sizable part in that, thank you!
ps. my mind must being doing at least a little better; I see a couple of blog post wound up in these words.