My exit essay
I wrote this last month, when I signed off services with the folks at Belle Reve. My psychiatrist asked me to write an essay explaining what was going on in my life and what my thoughts and priorities were. What I was thinking.
I think it's going to be my exit essay from a period of blogging, as well. I'm not losing my LJ, but the person who began it so many year ago no longer exists.
It's time for him to say goodbye.
So it's long and rambling and far far too...TOO. But it's crazy, sick Ryan saying goodbye, and Ryan facing life and saying hello.
And as an update, since this is a couple weeks out of date, Cyri's still here. She sleeps here, anyway :)
She's a pretty amazing woman, my sister. I like her a lot. And she likes me, too!
So here we go.
Bye.
There has been so much drama in my life. Melodrama might be more accurate. I've always been so overemotional, so overintense, so caught up in my own insanity. So much the victim. I think more than anything, all of this time I've been the victim of my own ideas. While it's true that my mind puts on concentrated shows of psychedelic psychosis, visions of my brain spinning inside my head and ripping my eyes out, bugs falling from my eyes, my organs liquifying and being vomited out...While it's true my nervous system is hypersensitive and crosswired so a light touch is an attack, and my reactions can be violent....While it's true I've seen visions, heard voices, imagined conspiracies....none of that is any excuse to have bought so deeply into my own drama. And I do wonder why none of the myriad psychiatrists and analysts ever thought to say to me; "Ryan. Stop taking yourself so seriously."
Of course there's much more profit in prescribing a medication, rather than dictating a personal change. No doubt it was easier for me to be able to write things off with "I can't help it."
But over the years I came to think of myself as so fragile. By doing that I've constantly doubted my ability even to "be", let alone to "be whole" or "be independent" or "be normal" or even "be strong."
I spent my life thinking that Pat was the strong one, so caught up in what was wrong with me that I never really noticed what was wrong with him. Immersed in my psychotic reality I never really paid any attention to his very real life. Because he was always there for me, he was always the one picking me up and holding me back and cleaning me up, because I was not sane and not capable and not anywhere near the friend to him he was to me, I never knew what he went through. I'm not blaming myself for it, because I WAS completely crazy, I didn't know what was going on, and I wasn't capable at all....but I do blame the people who were charged with taking care of me. Because how could so many of them have been so wrong for so many years?
Look at me now....I'm my own guardian, I have a job, I have an apartment, I have friends. I've had a few girlfriends, they didn't work out, and look...my world did not end. I just lost my brother....that's two Carroll boys gone now....and while it hurts....oh man, it really hurts and sometimes it's very very hard to get past it, there's nothing happening that's not the same grief anyone goes through when they lose someone they love.
But a few years ago I'd have been suicidal, hallucinating, hospitalized.
And I'm angry about that. It took one doctor just a few hours of talking to me, of reviewing my history, of really really looking at it and seeing the things that had gone on, to say "Well, Ryan, this isn't right...."
Why is he the only one who bothered to take the time to notice the things that weren't right? Why did it take me until I was 24 to find a doctor who would not only listen, but would also THINK?
How different would it have been had this man, or someone like him, come into my life ten years ago? How much would have been taken off of Pats shoulders? How much more THERE for him could I have been? How much more aware of what was going on?
I'm not angry at myself. I'm angry at the people around me for allowing it to go on, for allowing me to believe my own hype, for feeding into my drama, for placing me the invalid and then allowing me to stay there when it was never once necessary. And for putting that burden, not on me, because I was unaware of it, but on so many other people. On people who weren't strong enough to cope with it and with their own situations too.
If I'm this capable now, I would have been this capable then.
This treatment, back then, and I would have seen for myself how completely strange the whole situation was. How WRONG so much of what we believed to be true really was. How much my best friend needed somebody to be there for him, and to help hold HIM up.
Would I have still been sick? Of course....but not helplessly sick and caught up in behaviors.
Would I have had seizures still? Well yes, I always will. I would have always needed to be driven around and picked up off the floor once in a while. But I would have been infinitely more able to handle it myself, as I do now.
Would I have figured things out faster? Undoubtedly.
Would Pat still be alive?
That's the question that's really been on my mind lately. Would Pat still be alive.
I don't know if he would be. Because what led to his death still would have happened. His mother still would have been incomprehensibly evil, still would have committed the completely unspeakably awful crime she committed, and I doubt it would have been any easier for him to cope with. I can't even say for sure that is reaction would have been different.
But what I do know is that had I not been held a helpless incoherent quasi invalid with no awareness of what was going on around me, I would have been available for him to talk to, and I would have had the ability to understand what had happened and to..just possibly..help him through it.
The level of drama would have been so much less.
The level of intensity would have been so much less.
How much less driven to protect me, at all costs, would he have been?
How much less likely would he have been to commit the crime he committed, and ultimately couldnt live with?
Maybe it would have happened anyway.
Maybe some of this drama was just destined to be.
There are bad people...and there are good people who do bad things because of those bad people, and then can't live with themselves.
There are people who love their friends so much they will die to protect them.
It's possible that that's just who Pat is...was.
It's also possible that the doctors who treated me...both the psychiatrists who misdiagnosed, mismanaged, mismedicated and mistreated me, and the specialists who treated me for years for a disease I DID NOT EVEN HAVE, are responsible for some or all of what happened.
There's no way to know.
But so much emotion, so much pain, so much drama.....didn't have to happen.
So much that we were so intensely worrying about wasn't even real.
Of course some of it was....but what would have changed had we known what we needed to know to pull what was real out of what wasn't?
Fact: My best friend, Patrick Braegan, had a mother who abused all of her children. She withheld food and water, locked them in closets, locked them in their rooms, burned them with cigarettes, shut them in freezers, took their coats in February in Massachusetts and made them walk to school without them, went months without speaking to them and when she did speak to them she ridiculed and humiliated them, and verbally wished them dead more times than anyone could count. This same woman hated nearly everyone she knew and did everything in her power to hurt everyone she possibly could.
I knew she was a bitch, but of course I never knew the extent of it. She worked for Path Lab. And when I was 8 years old, already overmedicated and half crazy and had run away from home to a hippie compound rife with drug use and free love, when I was 8 years old and had been returned to my family and my doctor suggested I be tested for HIV because of the drugs and the sex, my best friends mother, who hated me because I was her sons friend and she hated him, because she hated everyone, because my mother loved her children so she hated her, my best friends mother falsified my test results. She falsified the repeat test results and any tests I had thereafter THAT WERE PROCESSED THERE. I was assumed to be HIV+ from the time I was 8 years old until I was 23...when ironically enough even though it was discovered, I was not actually told.... Which of course explains why, when I was tested again after a car accident in south Florida I tested negative. And why I'm testing negative now.
I nearly died when I was 15 from AZT toxicity. I've nearly died twice more when taking HIV meds.
I've lived my life afraid to touch people, afraid to be touched.
Because of a woman who hated. How many other people has she done this to?
When he found out what his mother had done to me, my best friend...much less stable than I inherently was, although of course nobody knew that.....was unable to cope and he tried to kill his mother. This was a man who abhorred violence in all of it's forms, who would not even kill a bug. And because he was unable to live with what he'd done, he tried to kill himself...
Horrible enough but he mistimed it and I was in the car with him. What he got
then, was not anything like concern for his own wellbeing, with what could have
happened that would drive him to this. Instead he got a lot of recriminations about what he'd done to ME with his act.
How wrong is that?
And how much different could this all have been if the people who should have
caught these things had caught them?
How was a woman able to falsify repeated lab results?
How was it that nobody caught this?
How was it that no doctors realized that there was something amis as years and years went by and my blood showed now hiv related changes? My health showed no effects at all?
How was it that until a year ago no doctors wondered at my inconsistent test results?
Why is it that seven different psychiatric institutes and five different doctors misdiagnosed me so many times?
How is it that my case managers and my staff people didn't figure out that something wasn't right?
Why is it....that nobody, not my doctors, my family, my friends, myself..supervisors, managers, case workers....discovered these mistakes?
How many lives would be different had all of these people thought for themselves? Had they not just read what the person before them had written and decided it sounded ok to them? Had they only listened? How many lives would still be?
Zack might have never left college. He might have been able to finish. He might have not almost frozen to death that February night. He might have never started drinking. He might have put himself first. He might still be alive.
Of course he might not. Because nothing to do with me killed him, unless it's just because he put off getting care for too long because he wanted to tell me things other people should have told me years before. But his illness was his own and nothing to do with me caused it. It's entirely possible that his life would have ended how and when it did regardless. But how much more full and rich and rewarding would his life have been in the meantime?
And what about Pat?
My mom, who left the family after having been far too inundated with crisis she couldnt handle?
My dad, who sold the house in the heights, sold the house at the cape, and spent the last ten years crammed into a two bedroom apartment with four kids and himself?
My dad who's once wicked and sharp sense of humor first declined and then disappeared...who became a man who never smiles, rarely speaks, and counts the days to his death.
Jay, who's life is nothing but sadness and depression?
And what about Justyn? Justyn was already on the fast track to his own destruction before I was born, but had I not been in the forefront of everyones mind maybe....just maybe....Justyn, who needed so much more help than it turns out I did, could have gotten the attention he needed, when he needed it.
Maybe he wouldn't have given up when he did.
What if it's possible that he, too, could still be alive?
So many lives ruined, so many lives ended...and for what? Because other people did things they shouldnt have, didnt do things they should have, didnt listen, didnt' pay attention, didnt didnt didnt...
Five years ago I would have blamed myself.
I'm not doing that.
But what I am doing is resting. I've learned all of this in a relatively short time. Zack's dying act was to come here and to give me a literal suitcase full of paperwork, medical files, court documents, confidential files he should not have had. He was sick when he got on the plane to come here, he was sick when he got to my house, but he felt that for me to finally be told about the deception that was my life was more important than he was. By the time he finally went home and got to his doctor it was too late for him. I wish he hadn't done that, because to me there's no information that's worth a life. But it was what he did, what he chose to do, and I'd give anything for him to have decided otherwise. But he didn't, and that was his decision. He let it go until it was too late.
It's not too late for me.
I used to think I'd had a hard life. Now I realize that I've been living SO LOVED by people that they were readily willing to sacrifice their peace, their sanity, their lives, to protect and defend me.
People were willing to give up their families, their homes, their friends, their educations.
How can I ever complain?
And how can I ever pay them back?
Of course I can't do either.
What I can do is make sure that nothing they sacrificed is wasted.
It will not be wasted.
So, I'm resting.I dont want drama. I don't want emotionalism. I sent Crit away last week because she came all of this way to see me, she didn't call, she didn't say anything, she just showed up and she wanted to talk about Zack.
I made her leave.
I don't want to feed into anymore drama. I'm going to LIVE. I was given this life by people who were so dedicated and so comitted to making sure I did not merely exist but instead had a life of quality and safety and love that they were willing to give up their own lives to make it happen.
Consider it done. Everything I do now, from this moment on, is in honor of this gift that was given to me.
The past...the lies, the deceptions, the mistakes, the bad doctors, the violence, the suicides, the depression.....over.
Done.
It happened and it cant be undone.
So now we go forward.
My sister Cyri, who while she was in school just hated me because she could never bring her friends home because I was there and completely crazy, because their parents didnt want them around me, my sister Cyri who even though I was ruining her life, fought with everything she had to keep me out of the state hospital, who sat up with me hundreds of nights, wrestled hundreds of sharps out of my hands, was bitten, hit, stabbed, head butted, shoved, vomited on, and verbally abused......who gave up her life as a teenager to take care of her sick, crazy brother....is landing tonight in New Orleans. My friend Dominic is picking her up. She's coming here to stay with me for a while.
What's especially liberating for me here in this is that she's not coming because there's anything wrong. Not with her, and not with me. She's not coming because she needs care. She's not coming because I do. She's not coming because anything is wrong with our Dad, or with Dev or Jay.....
She's coming, she says, because she misses me.
She's really coming, I say, because she's been dying ot see New Orleans, and why not come when your brother will let you crash for free at his place?
I'm gonna hang with my sister. We're probably going to end up talking about things I don't really want to talk about, but not unless it just happens. We're going to get to know each other from a whole new perspective. Her not having to worry about my doing anything nuts, and me not looking at her through the massive hallucinations I've always seen her through. In a way we're going to meet each other for the first time.
There's a possibility that other members of my family will be journeying down here to see me this summer. We'll see how that goes.
But there will be no drama. There will be no bullshit. I want to get to know my family. I want to recover and I want them to recover. And because we're a family we need to do it together.
And then, when we've had the chance to rest and recover and adjust to all of the things we've discovered have been going wrong over the years, when we've digested the reality of it all, then...and only then..we're going to decide what to do about it.
We really have to.
But me...I already know what my priority is.
I'm going to live.
I think it's going to be my exit essay from a period of blogging, as well. I'm not losing my LJ, but the person who began it so many year ago no longer exists.
It's time for him to say goodbye.
So it's long and rambling and far far too...TOO. But it's crazy, sick Ryan saying goodbye, and Ryan facing life and saying hello.
And as an update, since this is a couple weeks out of date, Cyri's still here. She sleeps here, anyway :)
She's a pretty amazing woman, my sister. I like her a lot. And she likes me, too!
So here we go.
Bye.
There has been so much drama in my life. Melodrama might be more accurate. I've always been so overemotional, so overintense, so caught up in my own insanity. So much the victim. I think more than anything, all of this time I've been the victim of my own ideas. While it's true that my mind puts on concentrated shows of psychedelic psychosis, visions of my brain spinning inside my head and ripping my eyes out, bugs falling from my eyes, my organs liquifying and being vomited out...While it's true my nervous system is hypersensitive and crosswired so a light touch is an attack, and my reactions can be violent....While it's true I've seen visions, heard voices, imagined conspiracies....none of that is any excuse to have bought so deeply into my own drama. And I do wonder why none of the myriad psychiatrists and analysts ever thought to say to me; "Ryan. Stop taking yourself so seriously."
Of course there's much more profit in prescribing a medication, rather than dictating a personal change. No doubt it was easier for me to be able to write things off with "I can't help it."
But over the years I came to think of myself as so fragile. By doing that I've constantly doubted my ability even to "be", let alone to "be whole" or "be independent" or "be normal" or even "be strong."
I spent my life thinking that Pat was the strong one, so caught up in what was wrong with me that I never really noticed what was wrong with him. Immersed in my psychotic reality I never really paid any attention to his very real life. Because he was always there for me, he was always the one picking me up and holding me back and cleaning me up, because I was not sane and not capable and not anywhere near the friend to him he was to me, I never knew what he went through. I'm not blaming myself for it, because I WAS completely crazy, I didn't know what was going on, and I wasn't capable at all....but I do blame the people who were charged with taking care of me. Because how could so many of them have been so wrong for so many years?
Look at me now....I'm my own guardian, I have a job, I have an apartment, I have friends. I've had a few girlfriends, they didn't work out, and look...my world did not end. I just lost my brother....that's two Carroll boys gone now....and while it hurts....oh man, it really hurts and sometimes it's very very hard to get past it, there's nothing happening that's not the same grief anyone goes through when they lose someone they love.
But a few years ago I'd have been suicidal, hallucinating, hospitalized.
And I'm angry about that. It took one doctor just a few hours of talking to me, of reviewing my history, of really really looking at it and seeing the things that had gone on, to say "Well, Ryan, this isn't right...."
Why is he the only one who bothered to take the time to notice the things that weren't right? Why did it take me until I was 24 to find a doctor who would not only listen, but would also THINK?
How different would it have been had this man, or someone like him, come into my life ten years ago? How much would have been taken off of Pats shoulders? How much more THERE for him could I have been? How much more aware of what was going on?
I'm not angry at myself. I'm angry at the people around me for allowing it to go on, for allowing me to believe my own hype, for feeding into my drama, for placing me the invalid and then allowing me to stay there when it was never once necessary. And for putting that burden, not on me, because I was unaware of it, but on so many other people. On people who weren't strong enough to cope with it and with their own situations too.
If I'm this capable now, I would have been this capable then.
This treatment, back then, and I would have seen for myself how completely strange the whole situation was. How WRONG so much of what we believed to be true really was. How much my best friend needed somebody to be there for him, and to help hold HIM up.
Would I have still been sick? Of course....but not helplessly sick and caught up in behaviors.
Would I have had seizures still? Well yes, I always will. I would have always needed to be driven around and picked up off the floor once in a while. But I would have been infinitely more able to handle it myself, as I do now.
Would I have figured things out faster? Undoubtedly.
Would Pat still be alive?
That's the question that's really been on my mind lately. Would Pat still be alive.
I don't know if he would be. Because what led to his death still would have happened. His mother still would have been incomprehensibly evil, still would have committed the completely unspeakably awful crime she committed, and I doubt it would have been any easier for him to cope with. I can't even say for sure that is reaction would have been different.
But what I do know is that had I not been held a helpless incoherent quasi invalid with no awareness of what was going on around me, I would have been available for him to talk to, and I would have had the ability to understand what had happened and to..just possibly..help him through it.
The level of drama would have been so much less.
The level of intensity would have been so much less.
How much less driven to protect me, at all costs, would he have been?
How much less likely would he have been to commit the crime he committed, and ultimately couldnt live with?
Maybe it would have happened anyway.
Maybe some of this drama was just destined to be.
There are bad people...and there are good people who do bad things because of those bad people, and then can't live with themselves.
There are people who love their friends so much they will die to protect them.
It's possible that that's just who Pat is...was.
It's also possible that the doctors who treated me...both the psychiatrists who misdiagnosed, mismanaged, mismedicated and mistreated me, and the specialists who treated me for years for a disease I DID NOT EVEN HAVE, are responsible for some or all of what happened.
There's no way to know.
But so much emotion, so much pain, so much drama.....didn't have to happen.
So much that we were so intensely worrying about wasn't even real.
Of course some of it was....but what would have changed had we known what we needed to know to pull what was real out of what wasn't?
Fact: My best friend, Patrick Braegan, had a mother who abused all of her children. She withheld food and water, locked them in closets, locked them in their rooms, burned them with cigarettes, shut them in freezers, took their coats in February in Massachusetts and made them walk to school without them, went months without speaking to them and when she did speak to them she ridiculed and humiliated them, and verbally wished them dead more times than anyone could count. This same woman hated nearly everyone she knew and did everything in her power to hurt everyone she possibly could.
I knew she was a bitch, but of course I never knew the extent of it. She worked for Path Lab. And when I was 8 years old, already overmedicated and half crazy and had run away from home to a hippie compound rife with drug use and free love, when I was 8 years old and had been returned to my family and my doctor suggested I be tested for HIV because of the drugs and the sex, my best friends mother, who hated me because I was her sons friend and she hated him, because she hated everyone, because my mother loved her children so she hated her, my best friends mother falsified my test results. She falsified the repeat test results and any tests I had thereafter THAT WERE PROCESSED THERE. I was assumed to be HIV+ from the time I was 8 years old until I was 23...when ironically enough even though it was discovered, I was not actually told.... Which of course explains why, when I was tested again after a car accident in south Florida I tested negative. And why I'm testing negative now.
I nearly died when I was 15 from AZT toxicity. I've nearly died twice more when taking HIV meds.
I've lived my life afraid to touch people, afraid to be touched.
Because of a woman who hated. How many other people has she done this to?
When he found out what his mother had done to me, my best friend...much less stable than I inherently was, although of course nobody knew that.....was unable to cope and he tried to kill his mother. This was a man who abhorred violence in all of it's forms, who would not even kill a bug. And because he was unable to live with what he'd done, he tried to kill himself...
Horrible enough but he mistimed it and I was in the car with him. What he got
then, was not anything like concern for his own wellbeing, with what could have
happened that would drive him to this. Instead he got a lot of recriminations about what he'd done to ME with his act.
How wrong is that?
And how much different could this all have been if the people who should have
caught these things had caught them?
How was a woman able to falsify repeated lab results?
How was it that nobody caught this?
How was it that no doctors realized that there was something amis as years and years went by and my blood showed now hiv related changes? My health showed no effects at all?
How was it that until a year ago no doctors wondered at my inconsistent test results?
Why is it that seven different psychiatric institutes and five different doctors misdiagnosed me so many times?
How is it that my case managers and my staff people didn't figure out that something wasn't right?
Why is it....that nobody, not my doctors, my family, my friends, myself..supervisors, managers, case workers....discovered these mistakes?
How many lives would be different had all of these people thought for themselves? Had they not just read what the person before them had written and decided it sounded ok to them? Had they only listened? How many lives would still be?
Zack might have never left college. He might have been able to finish. He might have not almost frozen to death that February night. He might have never started drinking. He might have put himself first. He might still be alive.
Of course he might not. Because nothing to do with me killed him, unless it's just because he put off getting care for too long because he wanted to tell me things other people should have told me years before. But his illness was his own and nothing to do with me caused it. It's entirely possible that his life would have ended how and when it did regardless. But how much more full and rich and rewarding would his life have been in the meantime?
And what about Pat?
My mom, who left the family after having been far too inundated with crisis she couldnt handle?
My dad, who sold the house in the heights, sold the house at the cape, and spent the last ten years crammed into a two bedroom apartment with four kids and himself?
My dad who's once wicked and sharp sense of humor first declined and then disappeared...who became a man who never smiles, rarely speaks, and counts the days to his death.
Jay, who's life is nothing but sadness and depression?
And what about Justyn? Justyn was already on the fast track to his own destruction before I was born, but had I not been in the forefront of everyones mind maybe....just maybe....Justyn, who needed so much more help than it turns out I did, could have gotten the attention he needed, when he needed it.
Maybe he wouldn't have given up when he did.
What if it's possible that he, too, could still be alive?
So many lives ruined, so many lives ended...and for what? Because other people did things they shouldnt have, didnt do things they should have, didnt listen, didnt' pay attention, didnt didnt didnt...
Five years ago I would have blamed myself.
I'm not doing that.
But what I am doing is resting. I've learned all of this in a relatively short time. Zack's dying act was to come here and to give me a literal suitcase full of paperwork, medical files, court documents, confidential files he should not have had. He was sick when he got on the plane to come here, he was sick when he got to my house, but he felt that for me to finally be told about the deception that was my life was more important than he was. By the time he finally went home and got to his doctor it was too late for him. I wish he hadn't done that, because to me there's no information that's worth a life. But it was what he did, what he chose to do, and I'd give anything for him to have decided otherwise. But he didn't, and that was his decision. He let it go until it was too late.
It's not too late for me.
I used to think I'd had a hard life. Now I realize that I've been living SO LOVED by people that they were readily willing to sacrifice their peace, their sanity, their lives, to protect and defend me.
People were willing to give up their families, their homes, their friends, their educations.
How can I ever complain?
And how can I ever pay them back?
Of course I can't do either.
What I can do is make sure that nothing they sacrificed is wasted.
It will not be wasted.
So, I'm resting.I dont want drama. I don't want emotionalism. I sent Crit away last week because she came all of this way to see me, she didn't call, she didn't say anything, she just showed up and she wanted to talk about Zack.
I made her leave.
I don't want to feed into anymore drama. I'm going to LIVE. I was given this life by people who were so dedicated and so comitted to making sure I did not merely exist but instead had a life of quality and safety and love that they were willing to give up their own lives to make it happen.
Consider it done. Everything I do now, from this moment on, is in honor of this gift that was given to me.
The past...the lies, the deceptions, the mistakes, the bad doctors, the violence, the suicides, the depression.....over.
Done.
It happened and it cant be undone.
So now we go forward.
My sister Cyri, who while she was in school just hated me because she could never bring her friends home because I was there and completely crazy, because their parents didnt want them around me, my sister Cyri who even though I was ruining her life, fought with everything she had to keep me out of the state hospital, who sat up with me hundreds of nights, wrestled hundreds of sharps out of my hands, was bitten, hit, stabbed, head butted, shoved, vomited on, and verbally abused......who gave up her life as a teenager to take care of her sick, crazy brother....is landing tonight in New Orleans. My friend Dominic is picking her up. She's coming here to stay with me for a while.
What's especially liberating for me here in this is that she's not coming because there's anything wrong. Not with her, and not with me. She's not coming because she needs care. She's not coming because I do. She's not coming because anything is wrong with our Dad, or with Dev or Jay.....
She's coming, she says, because she misses me.
She's really coming, I say, because she's been dying ot see New Orleans, and why not come when your brother will let you crash for free at his place?
I'm gonna hang with my sister. We're probably going to end up talking about things I don't really want to talk about, but not unless it just happens. We're going to get to know each other from a whole new perspective. Her not having to worry about my doing anything nuts, and me not looking at her through the massive hallucinations I've always seen her through. In a way we're going to meet each other for the first time.
There's a possibility that other members of my family will be journeying down here to see me this summer. We'll see how that goes.
But there will be no drama. There will be no bullshit. I want to get to know my family. I want to recover and I want them to recover. And because we're a family we need to do it together.
And then, when we've had the chance to rest and recover and adjust to all of the things we've discovered have been going wrong over the years, when we've digested the reality of it all, then...and only then..we're going to decide what to do about it.
We really have to.
But me...I already know what my priority is.
I'm going to live.