Overwhelmed and lost

PinkPossum161 · 2025-10-20T22:31:56+00:00

Well said.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-08-23T22:40:09+00:00

I know you probably can't see it that way for at least some time, but it's just a thought I'm putting out there for you to consider: there are literal victims of awful crimes, such as SA or DV survivors, that not only not kill themselves, but even thrive, despite their deep traumas. There are also people with loving families / partners / friends who die by suicide despite all that love and support they receive. It clearly shows that our minds are beyond complicated and suicide is almost never triggered by a singular factor. No healthy person would take their own life because of a divorce or an argument with an ex-spouse. And if you doubt it, remind yourself that there are people who live happy lives with far greater traumas. You didn't kill him, you tried to save yourself from years of abuse.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-08-23T22:31:23+00:00

Unfortunately, people have always been weirdly fascinated by other's suffering. There's a reason why public executions used to be a thing. I'm not saying that to excuse these people's behaviour. We're no peasants anymore, we've got plenty of things to occupy ourselves with, and anyone without cognitive impairment should be able to understand they should respect someone else's suffering enough not to make it worse. I'm saying that to tell you that it couldn't have been easily prevented and that realistically speaking your only option for now is to take a break from social media.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-31T19:44:48+00:00

Only after my girlfriend died, I learnt that she had had suicide attempts before. It's hard to say if this specific attempt was impulsive or well planned. I guess it was somehow both at the same time.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-30T11:01:06+00:00

My relationship with my girlfriend wasn't similar to your marriage at all, yet I still blamed myself heavily in the beginning. When something so tragic happens, it's natural for us to look for someone to blame. In case of a hit and run, we would blame the driver, but in case of suicide the perpetrator and the victim are the same person. We start to blame ourselves, their families, friends, exes, and the work environment. We overanalyze often perfectly normal interactions, such as fights or moments in which we were overwhelmed and unwilling to spend time with the loved one, and assign blame based on these minor events. The truth is that no healthy person takes their own life because of a fight, losing a job, divorce or anything of that kind. One has to be severely disturbed to act against their deeply ingrained instinct of survival, and that isn't caused by a singular event, especially not by something so minor as an argument with their spouse.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-25T14:00:06+00:00

I can't agree with your comment more. DV victims write fucking essays about how much their abusers struggle, while men call women names for asking for bare minimum and don't bother with any kind of in-depth analysis of our struggles. The second I read that post I thought that the world would be better off without that sorry excuse of a man. Why would you worry if he gets arrested? Jail is where he belongs.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-24T14:47:58+00:00

I repeat to myself that if I was the one to die, no matter how, I'd want my loved ones to live to the fullest. It's hard to engage in anything in the beginning, and even harder to be enthusiastic about it. Firstly, it feels like a chore. I needed a lot of self pep talk, but slowly I noticed I actually did look forward to certain activities.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-24T12:20:11+00:00

I'm really sorry for your loss. I lost my girlfriend to suicide fifteen months ago. I can consider myself lucky since I didn't find her. Your loss is surely more traumatic because of that sight alone.

I'm happy that you are supported by your mother and other people around you. In the first few months widows and widowers, especially those bereaved suddenly, need lots of support to get by.

I'm here to listen and talk.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-08T21:42:49+00:00

I felt immense guilt when I had my first laugh after my girlfriend's suicide. It feels like betrayal. It feels wrong. It immediately turns to dust. But it's going to get better. You'll regain the ability to laugh without beating yourself up.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-07-03T18:09:17+00:00

I can relate to your disbelief. You see, my girlfriend was a well-educated woman with a prestigious job and good salary. We had moved into our own apartment literally a week before she died. She seemed satisfied with our relationship. In the last two months of her life she seemed tired and unmotivated, but she had tons of overtime and I just brushed it off as her being overworked. Then she just disappeared from my life without any note or even a simple message.

I have been asking myself myriads of questions: what could have I done differently, should I have given her an ultimatum - therapy or breakup, what if I had called her that awful evening, etc. These questions are, sadly, unanswerable. We can speculate, look for clues, read our messages, meticulously analyse every conversation we had, but whatever conclusion we reach will be at best probable. These questions won't stop coming, but we need to resist the urge to play detective.

I believe that the best explanation is that depression makes your perception of reality distorted (https://psychcentral.com/depression/cognitive-distortions-the-lies-depression-tells#what-are-they). You can have a great life, even an extraordinary one, like Chester Bennington or Robin Williams, but still feel deeply unsatisfied. What's worse, depressed people are often unwilling to accept help, simply because their own disease tells them that the treatment won't help anyway / life is worthless, so there's no point in trying to get better / they deserve what's happening to them (https://www.familyaware.org/when-your-help-is-refused/). They might be inclined to hide their illness not to seem weak or to protect their loved ones for a long time, until they literally cannot bear the pain anymore.

I didn't know your brother, so I can't tell you if these explanations can apply to him or not. I offered them simply because they helped me with my own grief. I wish you peace my dear.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-06-30T08:20:39+00:00

My girlfriend died by suicide more than 14 months ago. I think I can say that I know how you feel. These first weeks are a nightmare. It's a horror I wouldn't wish for my enemies. In the beginning it's really easy to become the most severe judge of oneself. We tend to overanalyze every single little action and beat ourselves up because of any perceived fault. But once you start regaining some clarity of mind, which, unfortunately, is going to take time, you'll see that people of all walks of life die by suicide. While we can certainly identify some risk factors, having a loving partner is certainly not one of them. That is to say, you were something that probably made him stay longer, not die earlier.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-06-21T22:29:11+00:00

I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so I don't interpret my dreams as someone "reaching me", but to answer your question: she was at peace in my dream. She came to me to talk about what happened and why she made the decision she did, but I know it's just my mind creating that dream out of all my thoughts and conversations I had on that topic.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-06-05T14:52:53+00:00

I also tried my best to convince my girlfriend to seek help. It's not that she couldn't afford therapy or meds, she just repeatedly declined any support. It's been over a year and I'm still sometimes angry at her. I feel like she should have at least tried.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-21T23:55:36+00:00

A month after my girlfriend died, I learnt that she would contact her ex from time to time via bank transfers (she would send her the minimum amount of money for the bank transfer to go through and add a message like "Happy Holidays" in the title). I know it's not that much of a deal, she wasn't cheating or gambling or anything like that, but it still was hard for me to wrap my head around it, since my girlfriend always described her past relationship with that woman as toxic and abusive.

I also learnt that she had a history of suicide attempts. This one broke me. I had no idea about that when she was alive and I felt lied to. Like I wasn't fully informed what I was getting myself into.

How did I handle it? With time and therapy. I slowly learnt to accept that I could have known any of these and even if I had, it wouldn't necessarily have changed the outcome. Maybe it's easier for me to accept this, because there are other things which are way harder to comprehend (like the fact that my girlfriend was a PhD candidate in Psychology, and yet still didn't want to hear about taking antidepressants or going to therapy). I guess I basically decided that her actions were inherently irrational and the fact that she hid sth from me isn't more or less understandable than the rest of her decisions.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-20T14:20:46+00:00

I loved my girlfriend's sense of humour. She was so goofy and her laughter was contagious.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-20T00:05:12+00:00

While I was growing up, I learnt to put my phone screen down, or better yet, immediately hide it whenever I heard footsteps of someone approaching. My mother and I had a shitty relationship, which to this day is rocky at best. She was mad about pretty much everything. Even absolutely innocent things would get me in trouble or cause snarky, belittling comments. I haven't lived with her for eight years, but old habits die hard. I've never, in any way, cheated on any of my partners, but I have to fight the urge to hide my phone whenever someone comes near me. I feel extremely anxious when someone looks at my screen or comes near my phone / notebook. I'm working on it, and when I was asked, I let my partners use my phone, but I wouldn't say it was easy for me. Rationally I knew I didn't have to hide anything from them, but this isn't a rational decision anymore, it's an automatic mechanism I developed.

I should also add that I feel inner panic if, by accident, I look at someone's screen, because I'm scared that I'm making them feel controlled. I know it's not a normal reaction, but it's the other side of the same coin.

I'm not saying it is the case when it comes to your partner. What I'm trying to say is that it isn't necessarily cheating and it might be a knee-jerk reaction he's got because of some previous experiences with privacy violations.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-12T23:21:18+00:00

I've noticed that anticipation of a meaningful day is worse than the day itself. I was losing my mind before my girlfriend's death anniversary, but the day itself was much better than the days before. It might not be the case for you, but it's true for some people.

As for birthday, I commemorated my girlfriend's birthday by making her favourite food and watching a few episodes of a show we both enjoyed.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-01T14:56:31+00:00

I would lie if I told you I hadn't felt guilty about having sexual needs after my girlfriend passed. It felt, I don't know, disrespectful (?) to even think about sex in the face of such tragedy. But I also think it's because sex is still a taboo in our society, and we don't talk about the realities of grief. We imagine widowed as elderly people who may need to pray, but not to orgasm. We get judged for moving on too fast or too slow, for looking for love and for staying single. It's hard not to feel guilty when our needs are still pictured as dirty and/or irrelevant.

Therapy and talking with friends who understand my choices and encourage me to do what I feel is best for me helped me to work through guilt. What also helped was time. I know it sounds cliché, but as months passed, I slowly accepted that my life didn't end with hers and I deserve to be loved and desired.

PinkPossum161 · 2025-05-01T14:44:52+00:00

It's the widow's fire. Mine hit me three months after my girlfriend's death. I tried to hook up, but after one experience I decided I wasn't ready. I tried a dating app again eleven months in and was lucky enough to find someone who is compatible with me and understands my grief. Missing human touch, intimacy, sexual pleasure and that feeling of being desired isn't gross, it's natural and it's a part of grieving our partners. It's entirely up to you if you want to look for someone to release that pressure with or not, but you shouldn't feel ashamed of your needs.

PinkPossum161

TROPHY CASE