Feelings of worthlessness (Redux)

[Poppygail]

*Disclaimer- this is a post I placed on another site in late ‘16, Early ‘17. I had been going through some of my earlier posts when I came upon this one and found it as appropriate now as I did then. I hope you glean something from it as well.

As I was sitting alone early this morning, absent mindedly watching TV, my mind began to wander and eventually settled into thinking about the many and varied feelings that come with DLB. Eventually the topic of feelings of worthlessness came to the forefront. Mainly how it became more difficult to push those feelings away as you lost more and more of your abilities. You start to feel as though you can do nothing well (or at all), that you are in everyone's way, and, ultimately, worthless. I thought about this for awhile, mainly from my own diminishing point of view. Soon I was thinking back over my parent's journeys through dementia. They each came to feelings of worthlessness. But to me, that was never true. I valued every day I was privileged to spend with them. Was it easy, no. Did I get aggravated and not really understand what they were going through, yes. Did I ever for one minute believe they had no value, absolutely not. They continued to give something that couldn't be measured or quantified. They gave me a parent's comfort. Even in the darkest days I could feel the warmth of their care.

This is something I will never feel again. I still have the comfort of my wife's and children's love and I treasure each, but it is different from a parent's care. Just as a spouse's love is different from a child's love and comfort. Each is precious but neither can be replaced with the other when gone.

Although my parent's last years and months were horrible and I was actually relieved for them when they passed (although I had a great feeling of guilt over the feelings of relief) I never thought their worth diminished. I was able to be with each right up til they drew their last breath, holding their hands, giving and receiving comfort, leaving nothing behind.

I guess what I'm trying to say in this long, rambling post is fight to maintain your feelings of worth as long as there is a rational thought in your brain. Even if you are in a non responsive state, you mean a great deal to those around you. And that can never be replaced.

Be well,

Randy

[jeffcobb Ambassador]

Randy; This is hard for me to write right now. Hard day and haven't had my meds in a while. However I wanted to add that one of the more fundamental keys or tenets of system trouble-shooting is being able to differentiate a symptom from a cause. For example, if you have one, you say you have a cold, not a sniffle or coughing. Why? The sniffle and coughing are symptoms CAUSED by the cold. Until you can make that distinction on any problem worth solving, you will be forever trying to treat a symptom and not a cause and therefore doomed to fail. True there are times all you can do is treat symptoms but until you can treat the cause, the symptoms will be with you forever. Well you know.

As you may have gathered from some of my other recent stuff, I have a sense that time for communicating is drawing short with me. As a result, I really gotta focus what energies I do have, when I have them, on what will do the most good for the least cost or effort. I can fool with communication methods or software to help me remember things or canes to help me walk or smartphones to help me remember (and not get lost!). The problem is that will only help those symptoms for that day. I only have the "oomph" left in me for one more big....something. I just gotta make sure that single something will do the most good.

After much thought, I realized that almost every single symptom can be made better by doing one single thing: strengthen the mind/will/soul. You need an inner strength, maybe more than you ever imagined but I think only with this strength will you be able to keep getting the better of things going wrong in your health/life. By the same token, I am convinced that without that strength, most things you try to do in order to maintain some semblance of sanity in your life are doomed to fail, and doomed to fail worse as time goes on.

No I don't have it all figured out, no pill to take, no religion to learn. But I do feel that at times, I feel strong inside and can weather the worst dementia throws at me. That feeling is very real. I have also seen when I don't feel that strength that not only can I not get the better of my dementia, it gets the better of me.

I have no idea how and what triggers/causes/generated that strength on those occasions or why it wasn't there in the others....but also, since it happened more than once, it is a repeatable process (Yahoo #1) and as such, should be able to be dynamically triggered (Yahoo #2). I think if I can figure this one out, keep that strength going and strong when I need it, I feel I will stand a much better chance of surviving the coming years.