Warning: Long post ahead, suicide mentioned in post
To anyone who takes the time to read all of this, thank you. If not, it’s okay. It feels nice to type everything out even if it isn’t read or responded to.
I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but 2023 has been the hardest year for me and for so many reasons. I’m normally a very laid-back, quiet person and it takes a lot to get to me; but this year has been one bad incident after another and I’m struggling to stay positive.
It started with going on a cruise In late January, which overall was fun but I had a lot of conflict with my older sister. We’re normally really close and she comes to stay at my house often, we go out and shop, and usually do gardening together. During the cruise she changed, and went from treating me as a friend to becoming the “bully older sister” she used to be when we were kids (I’m 30, she’s 33) so we struggled to get along while stuck in a room together for 5 days. This caused her and I to have somewhat of a rift between us, we still talk but I can tell things aren’t the same. On the way back home, she’s really sick and claims she has COVID but refuses to wear a mask around anyone and coughs without covering her mouth (we were in a car together for 8 hours); of course we all caught COVID, and I end up losing a week’s worth of pay because I had used up my PTO on the trip (my company doesn’t offer sick days).
After the cruise I get back to work and things get back to normal until I had an incident at work in the beginning of March. I’m a School-Based Behavioral Health Liaison, it’s a bachelors-level behavioral health position where I provide psychoeducation to students and teachers regarding mental health topics to use in the classroom and I have individual consultations with students as needed (when students have breakdowns in class or ask to talk to me). Normally when I meet one-on-one with students, I send home paperwork for consent from parents unless there is a specific reason or I don’t plan to meet with them more than once. I had a student ask the principal to speak with me as she was experiencing a panic attack. When I talked with her, she told me that her mother physically abuses her and that she’s afraid of her mother. With being a mandated reporter, I reported it to DCS. When the mother found out that DCS opened a case, she came to the school and demanded to speak with the person who made the report. The school principal called me into the office with the mother sitting there, which immediately gave me away as the person who made the report. Long story short, the girl’s mother is threatening to sue me and my company for talking with her daughter without her consent; although I could not get consent as the reason for talking to her daughter was that she was allegedly being abused by her mother.
Then on April 12th, I get a call from my dad that my brother committed suicide. This was the worst of everything that’s happened, as he was only a month older than me (he was my stepbrother but we grew up together since we were 4) and we were really close growing up. He drank heavily the night before and ended his life in front of his two oldest daughters, so it was extremely tragic. It happened at my younger brother’s house, and he held him as he took his final breath. My younger brother is only 25. My family and I are struggling to deal with the loss and the way it happened, I feel like I can’t keep my emotions in check and I’m a mental health services provider (master’s level intern working on my MSW). My brother that passed had separated from his wife a year earlier and moved to Georgia from Florida. She was physically abusive to my brother when they were together, she’s currently on drugs and not providing for their kids. She told the kids that everything that happened to them was his fault and that he didn’t love them. His oldest daughter was so angry with him for moving to Georgia that they got into a fight the night he died, and she told him to kill himself. I can’t blame her as she’s only 15, but I can’t help but have so much anger at his now ex-wife for making his kids believe that he was a bad person when he was just trying to establish a normal life for himself.
The day my brother died, I was scheduled to have a meet & greet with the FBI for a Special Agent position. I had to reschedule for obvious reasons, so it was rescheduled for May 17th. On May 17th, I wake up 4 hours early to get ready. The location was 2 hours from my house, and I wanted to have enough time to make it there early. I leave 45 minutes ahead of schedule, but when I get 30 minutes away from the building I get stuck in traffic due to a wreck. I get through traffic only to make it to the meet and greet 2 minutes late, so they don’t let me in and count me as a no-show although I was standing outside. Since I had previously rescheduled, they terminated my application. I had been working on getting this position since September of '22, so about 8 months total. I drove home 2 hours in silence because I couldn’t believe what happened.
I’m now working on my internship at my current job, but just found out that when I received a $10k raise by getting a new position, I lost half of my benefits. This isn’t really a big deal, it just feels like another thing to add to the list. I’ve lost my brother, I missed out on probably the biggest job opportunity of my life, my relationship with my sister is worse, I’m grieving, I’m constantly worried about my younger brother as well as my family, and I feel like I’m at a dead-end job.
On the upside: I’m alive, I have a job, I exercise daily, I’m not terminally ill, and I have people that care about me.
