I'm Scared

I've been posting too many Blogs about my family problems, I think. Four, maybe five in total. But something else came up and I'm getting more worried by the day about my dad.

I feel weak. See, a family friend of ours had a seizure not too long ago. He's one of my dad's best friends. He was getting better, but then he started declining all the sudden and my dad reckons he doesn't have much longer than a week. It's sad, considering his circumstances. But I feel a huge amount of guilt. My fear of seeing seriously ill people was popping up every time my dad asked me if I wanted to visit him. It's incredibly hard for me to see people suffer and I can't do anything about it, because it reminds me about my dad. And now there's no way I can see him now, he can barely talk and can't get out of bed. I feel weak and selfish.

I might sound like I'm making mountains out of molehills as I progress through this, but I can say that none of you can really understand where I'm coming from, unless your dad has had cancer for four years. Seeing people extremely ill is enormously difficult for me. It hurts me to see people suffer and I can do nothing. And it scares me because my dad WILL be like that within the year. My dad does not have more than a year, I'm nearly positive. I can't imagine my dad like that.

It's horrifying. A few months ago, I would have said that I had accepted the fact that my dad will die within the next year, but the worst part is seeing him suffer. Yes, I still agree that the suffering, the slow, gruesome suffering before his imminent death is still the worst. But who am I kidding? There's a difference between knowing your dad will die and accepting it. I always pushed the actual "death" factor to the back of my mind because I was so distraught over his suffering alone. But I feel like, within this past month or two, a light sort of switched on in my brain.

My dad is dying. He will die. This is so hard for me to accept. I feel weak for being scared. I know that's pathetic. But that perfectionist attitude embedded deep within my being refuses to succumb to my emotional and overly-compassionate tendacies. But there's no escaping this, really. I'm bitter that the doctors couldn't have found the cancer just a bit earlier so he could have been cured and I could live a perfectly normal life without the paranoia, without the phobias, without all the fear and confusion and helplessness that comes along with this disturbance in my dad's cell cycle.

I feel pathetic for allowing a mere disease to distort my own being. I am not carefree like the rest of my friends and, as selfish as this is, I just want to live a regular, happy life with the rest of them. I firmly believe that suffering is what shapes a human into what he or she will become, and without suffering we do not have strength, but this is really testing my sanity. I don't know anymore. The only ever-present emotions are fear and helplessness. I don't know if I should hope for my dad's time to decrease to lessen the suffering, I don't know if I should hole myself up in my room and separate myself from him, I don't know if I should resort back to the cutting, I don't know if I should run outside my home and scream my lungs out at the neighborhood, at the world, at God, at cancer, or at my dad.

But I know that I am scared, helpless, and confused. I still hold firm to my belief that I do not have an awful life. That would be selfish. I have my tribulations, but there's always people who have it worse. I am not complaining, do not confuse this. I am simply at a loss for what to do with my life. Likewise, I won't be so foolish to claim that nothing is wrong or that none of these things really bother me. That's worse than complaining. I'm not looking for pity, bear in mind. I guess my reason in posting this is to find some people who can hear me out or tell me they can understand. If anything, I just need people to listen because, as I've said before, I can't really talk about these type of things with my parents. I'm seeing a therapist now, my mom decided to listen so I could start discussing all that paranoia and all the things I discussed here. I guess this could also be a good practice round, because my first session was tough, I didn't know where to start.