When will it end?

I haven't posted here in a while. In a way, I feel bad. When I created this blog, it was with one main purpose:  truth. Too few people know the truth about child abuse - about how common it is, how devastating it is, and most importantly, how false most of the so-called "knowledge" about abuse that is out there really is.

I started the exercise by writing down my own story, in all it's sordid detail. I did not expect it to affect me as much as it did. I did not expect to end up on the Bathroom floor, one dark night in January, with a razor in my hand and agony in my soul. So I did what I had to do so many time before to survive - I picked myself up, put down the razor, and reached out to a therapist. Slowly, things got better again, and a few months later I was ready and motivated to not only finish my story, but to jump head first into this blog, using every spare moment to turn this into source of information - a source of truth - about abuse.

And then everything fell apart. Wave upon wave of new knowledge of the depravity of my family, followed by memories I hadn't even known I had suppressed. Triggered, almost daily, by simple things people said, by posts on a site that was supposed to provide healing and support, by the mere act of writing on this blog. Dreams of my foster father haunted my sleep, unexpected and unwanted memories of being abused by the one person I had though had tried to protect me tormented my waking hours. Finally, mentally and physically all by destroyed, I dragged myself up and went back on medication.

Now, I am rebuilding my mental and physical health. This involved stepping away from the things that had triggered me - including this blog. It was necessary. Tonight, deciding that I feel much better, I check back into the forum that has given me so much support for the first time in a while, only to realize that we had lost a member. The last time we communicated, he said that he admired me. I never understood why. I knew he was in a very deep depression, but I didn't expect to read about his death. The post doesn't say explicitly, but it's there - in between the lines. It was suicide.

So here I am, trying to keep it together, trying to write something coherent. Trying not to think of my own cousin, lying on that narrow bed in the clinic I had convinced him to book into when he confided in me that he wanted to take his own life. Trying not to think of my own semi-lifeless, 17-year-old body being dragged out of the shower, spilling blood on the bathroom tiles... and my grandmother's face when I woke up - tired, grey and with the lines more accentuated than ever before. My twin, sitting on his bed with that gun that he got god-knows-where... Walking up that mountain after my darling wife's death, planning to jump off a remote cliff... It occurs to me that suicide seems to be a endlessly recurring theme in my life.

When will it ever end?

Why does there have to be so much pain in the world?