MJG017Senior Contributor
Coping with life's difficulties
following on from https://lifeline.saneforums.org/t5/Our-stories/My-Place/m-p/1622791/highlight/true#M243373
@Till23
My way of handling things has usually been to just go into zombie mode. I completely withdraw and just lose motivation to do anything. I did that for a week or say at the start of last year after finding out I had become resistant to the first hormone therapy. I was told i would be on it for 3 years, go off it... monitor the PSA... if it started going up too much, go back on it for a while and repeat. It seemed like a good deal to me at the time if that was all i had to deal with. I only made it to the 2nd PSA test in late December 2023 to get the bad news, so i never got close to the 3 years. Zombie mode hit and it took my months to really start to get my head together again. I think it was May that I found here and joined.
I have heard that a lot of CSA survivors do turn to drugs and alcohol and the damage that it does to their lives. So i think its a lot of credit to you that you didn't go down such a destructive route. But even so it's hard to imagine who difficult it must have been for you, even to just to trust anyone.
I have come up with so many reasons why people can just sort of disappear when someone they know gets cancer. You listed some of the man ones but i came up with quite a few. In the end I decided I didn't care what their reasons were. If they weren't going to be there for me, I didn't want them around. I wasn't going to pretend and people please anymore, thinking I had to people what people wanted, always be the happy, funny person so they would want me around which I had done for most of my life. Realising that had got me nowhere but a handful of people who disappeared as soon as i really needed them after never asking anything from them, i just decided "no more". I think that was probably the main thought that made me look for somewhere to reach out and brought me here. I had decided that if i didn't want these unsupportive people around, then maybe I could find people who would support me. I was also a couple of months into the planning for the cancer support group i was working on which had really got me motivated to get back into life again.
I was lucky I guess when I had my 8 weeks of radiation. I didn't have work and my partner was working from home a lot so she would just drop me off, i'd whizz in to get done and she would come pick me up. The were upgrading one of the 2 machines they had for the first 6 weeks i was there so they were done to one machine. To make up for it they ran until 9pm, so getting sessions later in the day was fairly easy.
It was a bit annoying because when i went it for the planning session and the baseline image they take, they suddenly ask me once i was laying there was it okay if the give me three little tattooed dots so they could align me in the same position for all the sessions. What was I going to say? So i have tattoos now even though i've looked but i cant find them anymore. So it's not very impressive if someone asks to see my tats. The annoying bit is the new machine didn't need the tattoos! But in hindsight, I'm kind of glad i did so I can say i have 3 tattoos but i'm not showing you.
In the past year I have joined cancer support groups, adoptee support groups and MH support groups. And one thing I've heard time and time again from new people joining is the first think I thought... that I thought these feelings were just me and/or it so great to talk to people who understand what it's like. It really is nice to be able to talk to someone and not spend most of the conversation trying to explain what it like. Especially when some of it you don't even know how to really explain. Rather just talk to someone and you both know the other person just gets it.
That's the excuse they generally use. That they're just concerned about me and that it might be too much. The past one i tried, the one that was with the chemo patients, I go to go there and have a tour and a chat. I was very upfront about where I was in my treatments and that it was always going to be ongoing. That I had done all of these support things, including starting the support group and this is what helped me the most and drove me. She seemed very impressed and said she needed to speak to head office and organize the paperwork and i would be able to start in about 3 weeks. I got an email a week later saying she had talked to head office and they decided to put a pause on my application and that i was welcome to come back in 6 months when my treatment was finished. Like I said, I was very clear about where I was treatment was, and they are a cancer treatment centre so they know my situation. It just felt like a don't call us, we'll call you. And it was just an email. That was the last one i tried as I just could keep doing it.
I have found some volunteer opportunities since then. A member of a steering committee at the local hospital for a nationwide register/database of prostate cancer patients and their outcomes over time. Various studies, workshops, and research projects. All of them are due to me being a "consumer" but they all do seem to value my input from a patients point of view on a multitude of areas, so any little thing i can do and find another little positive or two from my situation.
It must be so rewarding volunteering and helping out homeless people and others really struggling financially. It's so great that they have you there to treat them with some dignity and talk to them and understand them. I'm sure it means the world to them to be treated like a person and not feel like they're there being looked down upon or being judged. As someone who had spent most of their lives finding it near impossible to ask for help, I can't imagine how hard it must be to have to ask for something so simple like food. The main solution with homeless people seems to be just get them out of sight in a lot of places. So anything, or anyone that makes them feel like the have some dignity and respect is so important. If my parents both died when i was in my 20s for example. The house would have needed to be sold and the proceeds divided between us. No because then i found it so hard to find a job because of my own issues as soon as they money run out from paying rent and all the other expenses of living somewhere by myself, I could so easily of become homeless myself. It only takes a couple of things to go wrong at the wrong time for anyone. But unfortunately it does seem to be so much harder for people dealing with traumas and just trying to do their best to cope and get through life. Some of us can hide it better than others and some people have more to deal with but it can be so hard and it's nice to get a little understanding and compassion. It goes such a long way when you can find it. Those childhood traumas stick with you! It becomes the way your brain is wired and it's so hard to change. I honestly don't think you ever do get rid of it, you can just learn to find ways to work around it and get some wins against it. But it takes a lot of time, luck and help.
A lot of people are surprise at my social issues, especially here i think because it's all online. I have time to think about responses, edit them, reword them, change them. It takes me a while. In person I don't have that luxury and i think i freeze. While I do admit i've become better at it, all that anxiety, self-doubt, and low self-esteem issues are still there. I think I've always been good at faking it, but in person it's very had to hide and i think it's much more obvious that i'm not that comfortable around people. Although i think a lot of people may see it as other things. Like maybe I don't care, or i'm disinterested, of maybe even arrogance because I keep to myself. If someone starts a conversation with me now, i think i'm a lot better and more comfortable doing that now. But stick me in a room with someone else and I will sit there in awkward silence longer than anyone else. I will never start the conversation. These days it's not even really because I don't know what to say or think i will embarrass myself like i would have in the past. I think now it's just more of those doubts still say "Don't talk to them, they don't want to talk to you. If they did they would have said something by now." I know it's wrong in most cases and most times the person would be very polite and have a conversation, but those doubts are strong and still have a lot of power of the more rational side of my brain.
