We all fall down

So yeah, today started OK, the constant pain that has been my personal hell for the last 3 weeks is gone. First gout then an infected tooth that I had to have pulled. I got started on building a D&D character with my little brother, then we went and helped a family move, mostly loading up a truck. Got back, and looked through the mail, there was a letter for me from the girls. I still haven't talked to them since Erilyn had her appendix removed, so it was kind of a shock. Inside were their school pictures, Erilyn looking enough like her mother to worry me Carol and Brenna looking like they hadn't had any effort whatsoever put into their appearance for picture day. Needless to say, I'm grumpy about that, and then there was a letter inside.

From the girls...

From Brenna, "I love you Dad"

From Carol "I love you wile (really) moth (much) Dad"

From Erilyn "Dad I hope that I get to see you again, love your May"

The last one hammers home how empty I am without them and even now, half an hour later I can't control the tears. I need my girls, I can't live without them, and don't want to. I love them more than I can put into words and miss them more than I ever want to admit to myself.

"We all expected you to fail"

I'm sure that's not what my sister meant when she said it... Or rather not in exactly those terms. Let me go back a few months, I'd just lost everything including the girls a place to live, I'd been trying to kill myself unsuccessfully, and in a very dark place that I really haven't climbed out of, or improved much. So my sister got me a bus ticket to stay with her in Phoenix, and help her with her move to Eureka, hey it's better than sleeping in a park in central PA. So when I get there, and I'm talking to her, she says everyone who tries to do the single parent thing eventually loses it and gets completely overwhelmed, and that she, and everyone else who knows anything about my situation is amazed that it took me as long to crack under the pressure as it did.

What I heard, and still do, is "We all expected you to fail, and we're surprised it took you as long as it did to do so." I put a lot of pressure on myself to be honest. I see other people seemingly breeze through life, or at least the parts I struggle with, I look at many of the situations and problems I have and can clearly see the right solution. I don't always act on that information, but I generally know when I am and am not doing the things that will move me forward.

I can see how the decisions I made brought me to this point, I could see it as it happened. How can I forgive myself for a poor decision I made when I knew it was a poor decision. And when I look at how high the cost is, how can I not look at my sister's statement and not see it as "we all knew you were gonna fuck up in a major way eventually."

I've always been my own harshest critic, it's why I stopped going to church ten years ago. I made some decisions, didn't want to stop what I was doing, couldn't forgive myself for them, and refused to be a hypocrite by continuing to go as though I was doing everything right. At the moment, I want to crawl into a bottle and forget my life, because I see nothing in it worth dwelling on.