Counting our blessings -- hard, but we all should, not just in November.

[moriah]

Right now, I'm very blessed more than I can say. DUers helped me get the money together to see a real shrink, and while I wasn't able to get in before I had to go inpatient, when I was still in a financial tailspin and reached out to my other online/IRL friends for help.... they helped. $10 given by an ex-coworker, $1000 loaned from a guy who I've always paid back in the past, he knows if nothing else it'll come out of my backpay. He told me the biggest thing he wanted me to do was concentrate on getting well, not by stressing or feeling guilty for having to ask for money, and that if I paid at least *something* every month, he'll consider me current. I'm trying to go for a minimum of $30 a month, with a goal of $93 a month (which would have it paid off at 20% interest in a year).

So I'm blessed by my friends.

I try to remember that when I feel like they would be better off without me.

[libodem]

1. We are so much better off

With you in the world. I'm glad people helped. My best friend got news about 2 weeks ago that a nephew had committed suicide. He was 27, 3/4 of the way through nursing school, and had been overcoming a drug and alcohol problem. He used a bungie cord to hang himself. He'd asked his mom to buy them for him the day before.


It has left his parents devastated, his grandmother, and his 94 year old great grandmother. Plus can you imagine being the guy's girlfriend and calling up to talk to him and getting.g that kind of news.
He must have been hurting. But he has made sure now that his family and friends all know how it feels,

I'm damn glad you are with us.

[moriah]

2. Sadly I also lost a friend to suicide this summer....

.... and nearly lost a friendship to save another prior (testified against him for involuntary commitment, which means he'll never be able to buy that firearm that his background check came back clean for 2 hours after he was served the petition and taken into custody. He told me, and I felt that meant he wanted help even if he fought me on going to the hospital.

The other one never spoke up, shot himself with a gun he already knew. His girlfriend found him.

[libodem]

3. Oh, I am so sorry

I have been very worried over a personal friend who moved away to Michigan. I knew she had bought a gun. She told me her whole extended plan that she had laid out last year. Very detailed. She couldn't afford it. She was a couple hundred short.
She managed to buy one this summer. She is poor as Hell, but signed up for a concealed carry course. She got a certificate of completion but because of the bipolar and all the meds she knew she couldn't get past the background to carry it around. She was actually quite stablized. I think she might have been feeling a little too good, maybe a teensie bit manic, cuz she decided to go back to Florida to be a groom at the racetrack. I haven't heard from her in months now, until today.

I so thought of her when you told your story. I've been so afraid she might have gone out to the woods and gotten under a pile of brush like she talked about. She's back in her subsidized apartment, with a horrible cough, but she is alive.

I'm so relieved it makes tears run down my cheeks.

[moriah]

4. I'm glad she's okay, too.

I used to own a gun, and after I had my first bout of depression severe enough to become more actively suicidal rather than have passive suicidal ideation and I checked myself in, I found a coworker who had many and was well-versed in their use to care for it and try to break it in a little more -- at that point I'd only put about 300 rounds through it at practice, was only able to practice once a month and generally only did 50 rounds each time (I practiced with snap caps with a proper backstop at home to try to catch my flinch, but really needed the alternating snap caps and real ammo to clear up the flinch -- probably should have started with a .22 but could only afford one firearm).

I'd had two other coworkers offer to take it, but both had voiced they'd been suicidal in the past and weren't current firearm owners. No way was I about to let them care for it, even though they were offering to help me, they said. When I moved back home, it got left at my sisters, and she eventually bought it from me.

Also, when I went out of town for a month while I had it, I "boarded" my gun at the pawn shop for $25 -- $100 pawn that I kept and paid back, and the $25 interest. I didn't want anyone to get into my house and steal it. It's a gun-owner's job to keep their gun from criminals, children, and the clueless. While I hate to put friends who have expressed suicidal ideation into the latter categories, it's more like a child -- if I know someone's thought of doing themselves in, I'm not about to give them (especially a male, who are far more prone to use guns) the way to do that if they have thoughts too. Just as I wouldn't leave it for a criminal to steal.

I don't think everyone who's ever been depressed should be barred from owning a gun. But involuntary commitment for suicidal thoughts involving firearms, rightly in my state, is a disqualification to purchase.

[libodem]

5. One thing that was intetesting

Was her report of Florida in general and how much it had changed. There is a big divide between the haves and have nots. Lots of panhandlers coming up next to super fancy cars even along the freeway on ramps. She said NONE of those expensive cars rolled down a window give anyone a dollar.

There were no longer any wooded areas around the track all paved, everything locked up and unfriendly security guards at the gait, no buses, only $40.00 taxi rides, skinny, hungry, black homeless people in in tattered clothing, wandering around looking for spare change.

She met a Haiti girl who was headed by bus to New York in a sleeveless dress and flop flops, she gave her a nice new jean jacket, she was wearing. And some good advice.

She is kind and good. She said she saw the horses in trailers headed toward Florida from her bus window on her way back home. She missed them by two days.