Death

So I'm sure everyone has heard about the shooting at the movie theater.  That's put a lot of stuff on my mind lately.

Up until fairly recently, the only thinking I did about death was about how much I wanted to die.  I remember first wanting to die when I was about 9, so it's been a lot of years of that kind of thinking (though I wasn't suicidal for all of that...there is a difference).  Anyway, I didn't get sad when people died.  I met death with 2 emotions: jealousy and anger.  The jealousy is fairly obvious...I wanted to be the one getting to die.  Most of the time I didn't want to kill myself but I begged for some kind of natural causes to take me away.  Which brings us to the anger part.  I hated that good people who want to live are dying all the time, when my useless self was begging for death and couldn't have it.  During one of my very worst times, a friend of mine's 6 year old daughter was dying of cancer.  I felt like such a horrible person for nearly killing myself just a few weeks before she died.  Why couldn't god have given me her cancer and let her live her happy life with her family that loves her?  That is still something I struggle with...I wonder how my life was saved so many times.  Even when I wanted to die and tried to die my life was continually saved.  But that's a topic for another post I guess.

My life has changed in this last year.  Especially in the last 7 months or so.  Now I actually want to live, and I have different feelings about death.  The theater where the shooting took place, and the guy's apartment, were within a 4 mile radius of where I used to live a while back.  Thankfully I don't live there now, but I've talked to friends who know ppl directly involved.  As far as I know I don't know anyone that was hurt or killed.  The closest I know of is a friend's friend's coworker's daughter was shot and at this point may or may not make it.  Another friend was working the late shift at a restaurant just a few blocks away, so she saw and heard a lot of the chaos.  And frankly this stuff is all scaring the shit outta me.  Now that I want to live, the thought that I could be heading out to a movie some night and not make it home is terrifying.  I figured I was living a pretty safe life these days...not drinking, not doing anything crazy, being an overly safe driver, etc. etc.  But going to a movie should fall under safe things to do, but yeah.  This is the first time a shooting or anything like this has really bothered me to be honest.

When Columbine happened I saw the shooters as somewhat heroic.  Not that I would ever do that, but I loved the idea of getting back at the people who hurt me with that sort of magnitude (I was bullied and always an outcast at school).  When September 11th happened, a friend and I danced around laughing and singing "It's the end of the world as we know it."  We at least on some level thought it was the end of the world and found that rather hilarious.  (Kind of horrible to think about now).  Those are just a couple of examples but you get the idea.  Now I have to say I'm feeling kinda scared.  I never understood before why ppl got scared of things after a shooting or terrorist attack or whatever else.  But now that I value my life so much more I'm a little scared of things like this happening.  Ok more than a little I think.  Tonight as I was driving home I saw 4 cop cars gathered in one area with flashing lights on and I got scared.  It's probably nothing big but I was surprised at how nervous it made me.  It doesn't help that I've always felt like karma is going to come back to bite me and as soon as I start to value my life then all those prayers for cancer or some other way to die will finally get granted.  I'm sure that's a very self-centered thought, but it's there.

I thought I had more to say about all this but I guess that's all.  I'm just really overwhelmed right now thinking about death and all the dangers out there.  Now that I've started to value my life I'm realizing how fragile it is and I want to protect it.  I'm afraid of losing it and I'm going to have to process this in a way that I haven't before with other such events.  (Speaking of which, how horrific it is that these days we have multiple shootings and mass death type events to compare this stuff to in our supposedly peaceful country).  This one just hit a little too close to home, even if it was a former home.  I don't want to let fears about it get the best of me.

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All that said...gratitude...I'm grateful that I survived this last week w/out a drink.  It was a great week.  I got to go out of town for a friend's wedding, see lots of great people, etc. etc.  It was also unbelievably intense.  There were a lot of ppl I used to drink with there, lots of pressure, and lots of temptation.  But even with all of that resisting the drink wasn't a big deal.  It was hard, frustrating, and quite the struggle, but I knew I wasn't going to drink.  I just knew, and for that I'm grateful.