i’ll come right out and say this.
this is going to be a hard read for a lot of you that get directed to here, i think. but i want to actually verbalize this all somehow and give some insight into…well. you’ll see, i guess? just know that if you’re stumbling on this off of a random status, you’re going to be diving in the deep end immediately. and shit’s going to get dark.
but in the past, writing has been one of the only reliable “outlets” for me when i’m in those dark places, and in recent months i’ve strayed away from it, whether due to writing for work or being too busy or not wanting to dwell on myself. this may be a one-shot form of verbal vomit therapy, and i’m sure some of you will read this and go, “what the fuck is he doing”? but again; social cues be damned, i want to let all of this shit out one way or another, and if your response to reading it all is, “what a weirdo” or something in that same context, well…good for you, i guess?
one last note. i won’t use actual names here ever. i’ll use stand-ins when i need to, but i don’t expect to have to, much.
having said all that. let’s dig in, here.
i think the most telling way i can describe to you my mental state in the last few months can be summed up with a single anecdote.
last week, about five days back from work, i had decided i wanted to write this entry and document things going on with me. i had the laptop here in the living room with me, but it was dead, and the charger was sitting in my suitcase in the basement.
it took nearly the full week for me to muster the energy to get said charger and start typing this.
i’ve spent nearly the entirety of the remaining week sleeping 12-14 hours a day, going through the motions at local poker games or the bar, and laying on the couch, watching braindead stuff on tv for a few hours before going back to sleep.
i can’t think back of any point in the last 34 years where i’ve felt as just…defeated as i do right now, i think. i spent a solid thirty minutes tonight bawling my fucking eyes out to my girlfriend of six years, admitting to her
- i had contemplated suicide actively in the last month, which is a first for me
- i was so stressed out that i thought i might have dementia (more on that later)
- repeating the words, “i’m tired” or “i’m so tired” probably 50-60 times
in retrospect, i think it’s that third bullet point that worries me the most, post-possible mental breakdown. it was a perfect identifier for how i’ve felt for…well, years at this point.
if you know me (and for most of you that are here, you actually do), you know i’m a pretty high-strung type of guy, the perfectionist/self-loathing type that tends to always be at least 20% miserable with themselves at all times for one reason or another. i’ve been like that since my days in grade school, getting mad at myself for getting a 97% on a math test, shit like that. my self-doubt has crept up on me pretty severely in the last few years without me fully grasping how severe it was. part of that is the industry i’m in, where you’re pretty much freelancing and it’s hard to gauge just how well/poorly you’re doing, because the majority of feedback you get from people who participate in said industry is negative. this isn’t me saying my co-workers are actually negative, it’s more the people that participate in the activity i work for that tend to get outwardly whiny/critical on social media.
but in my head, i just assume that some of those co-workers, particularly the more gruff/antagonistic ones, are just always looking at my work and picking it apart. which, now that i spell it out, is pretty ludicrously crazypants of me. one of those co-workers did actually come over, pick my first piece of the day at a recent event, then proceed to dissect why it was utter shit for a solid ten minutes, while i’m tearing my hair out trying to keep pace with things happening at the event.
i was an absolute fucking wreck the rest of the day.
this is what i mean when i say, i’m tired.
i spend most of my waking hours just assuming the worst.
part of my breakdown today was a he-said/she-said/you-said game of fucking telephone that i thought was going to leave me down the two best friends i have left in this dumpster fire of a town. i was told i didn’t say/did say/said in the wrong order things that i distinctly remember saying, in the correct order, and given that i was sober and only four people were in the room when it happened and the whole point of the he-said/she-said was to try and prevent said friends from being potentially slandered by someone who seemingly got misinformed, somehow it turned into,
“hey, everyone, check out this asshole.”
yeah, i get it, everyone. i’m the asshole.
always have been.
fuck, when i was in third grade, i skipped up to fifth grade math. during the time i had to stay in the third grade math classroom, i had to grade the math quizzes for the teacher. i decided if someone did poorly, i would make the letter big on their paper (i.e. a d turned into a D about 1/3 the size of the paper) because i thought, being perfectionist/self-loathing in my head, that a big oud “YOU SUCK” on the paper would be inspiring.
it just made my teacher and all my classmates really fucking angry at me for a few weeks. (and some of them are gonna read this now, potentially, that’s actually kinda funny, in a macabre sort of way.)
this sort of “you’re here but can you kinda just not be” sort of interactions that i seemingly have with 99% of the waking universe gets tiring.
the self-doubt is incredibly tiring. waking up every day and thinking, “hey, you’ve got about 55% of your life left before you croak and you could cure every communicable disease known to man and you’re still pond scum cosmically, buddy” is awful.
the girlfriend has walked in on me watching videos about the heat death of universe, the lifespan of the universe, and if the universe resets itself in the last week, all with me just grunting and saying, “sure” when she asked if i was okay.
that’s something that’s always kinda pissed me off about the stigma of not being quite right in the head, though.
friends, random internet passer-by, whathaveyou.
it’s fucking okay to hurt.
it’s okay to cry, to be sad, to want to fucking die, sometimes.
there’s not a single fucking person on this planet that goes through every day smiling.
and shaming people for being willing to share with the world that they aren’t okay is fucking bullshit. too many people get ostracised for not “being strong/tough/private” with their weaknesses, when for a lot of people, having to hold all of that pain inside just amplifies it.
if you get one thing out of this entire entry, i hope it’s this; if you’re doing poorly, mentally, physically, etc, fucking let it out if you think it’ll help you. don’t hold it inside. i’ve done it for years and the damage it’s done is grave.
and yeah, if you’re reading this, i am an incredibly depressed, cyclothymic (diagnosed in 2002 during a fun one-week stint at a mental institution, for all y’all who didn’t know me when i lived in the south, whee), neurotic mess of a human being at the moment.
and that’s cool.
so long as i can do something to make that not a permanent mark on my record.
because, fuck, man, i can’t do this year in, year out for 45 more years. i feel like i’ve aged 30 years in the last three since i moved here.
trust me, i would love nothing more than to wake up, be happy most days, go in public without it seeming like a chore, interact with people without wondering if it’s going to result in conflict or judgement, and go home, kiss my wife, and go to bed happy most days.
i want all of those fucking things, and i want them so badly.
(and yeah, i want the girlfriend to be the wife. but, i’m not being fair to her to ask her to marry me, then this fucking black beast of depression finally latches on too tight and i actually do get the nerve to fuck it all away, somehow. if i’m going to commit, i have to do it of sound mind and body.
and ya boy is a fat boy right now, so i’m 0-2 there.
sorry, trying to lighten this dumpster fire up.)
i’ve half-assed attempted to get over my fear of mental health places (involuntarily getting tossed in a MH will do that to you), including two visits to a therapist earlier this year. but instead of, well, talking, like i figured would happen, my therapist had me looking up at a light for 20 minutes to try and find spots in the brain that held the most trauma.
yeah that didn’t fly real hot with me.
since then, i’ve again dodged my friends/girlfriend’s requests to attempt going again, all the while my stress/anxiety/depression beginning to strangle me again. i’ve gotten pretty damn good at hiding it when needed; i’m sure some people i’ve worked with/for this year are going to read this and go “what the fuck” but trust me; when i work for someone, i’m representing them in public. i just swallow my sorrows down, bust my ass for 4-7 days, then go home and detox.
but all of this, this blurb of shit, this (possibly offputting and whiny) soliloquy, has a point, i swear.
i have one final event to work in the middle of the month, but otherwise, i’ve already asked to take three months off of work between now and february.
monday, i’m going to shutter my facebook down (not messenger, even i have limits) and return the call of a new therapist that the girlfriend contacted for me on friday, and set up an intensive therapy schedule, that hopefully isn’t going to include an MH visit because of the prior shit i talked about.
but at this point, if that’s what it takes, so be it.
wednesday, i’m going to a concert, which has been one of the only sources of respite for me in recent months. my anxiety kept me from concerts most of my life, and only recently, as i’ve just forced myself to wade through the anxiety soup and embrace the music, have i been able to just completely let myself breathe and be free.
thursday is my six-year anniversary.
then friday, i’m going to hop in my car, drive to my home state, and see my family and my hometown friends for a while and just…breathe. and when i return/work ends, i’m going to stick to therapy, the gym, meditation, and home for a few months, like i should be doing. the girlfriend’s dad just recently got diagnosed with prostate cancer (one of many recent poor diagnoses both of our families have received in the last few weeks, really) and i need to be doing more to support her, but, it’s hard when your demons keep having you break down over and over again.
i don’t know a better way to say it than that. but, breathe. i haven’t been home since christmas of last year, even though twice i’ve been within a few hours of visiting, and just neglected to both times. my step-grandfather was recently diagnosed with alzheimers, my dad’s not in super great health, and i generally suck ass as a family member and need to go be around them for a while.
plus, my best friend is down there, and fuck man, if anyone knows how to set me straight, it’s him. although it’s probably going to cost me a few cases of rolling rock.
i’ve decided, at the behest of the girlfriend, that i’m going to cut drinking and playing poker out of the equation for the duration of those three months, to give myself a better chance to let therapy/time off/self-analysis actually have a chance to work.
i’ll probably use this as an outlet/journal for progress and the ups and downs with this shit, as i go.
but i’d like to make it really, just, crystal clear.
i don’t want any comments, any messages, any shit like that from this, at all. i wanted to share this with you guys because i think by letting everyone have a little insight into where my head is at right now, things will be easier when a few months from now, i try and pop back up and try and become a “normal” person.
or as normal as i’ll ever be able to become, because, fuck, let’s face it; it’s probably never happening.
if i didn’t love you idiots, i wouldn’t share this with you, anyways, i’d just vanish for three months and come back and it’d be probably just as awkward as this love letter to myself is right now.
but yeah. thanks for taking the time to read this, if you did. i’m not expecting many to, mainly because i’m not trying to call a huge amount of attention to it, just a simple post on facebook. i didn’t want to battering ram this into people’s heads, it’s more of a, “hey, XXXXX wrote something, wonder what this is” type of thing. if you cared enough to look, you probably care enough to digest this sort of thing.
maybe semi-isolation isn’t the totally correct answer for this, but i’ve tried lots and lots (and lots) of shit over the years, but i feel…hopeful? there’s something almost exciting about getting a good therapist, finding a way to be content and happy with myself, flaws and flubber and all, learning to let my anxiety and insecurities not control my life, and just, be fucking happy, man.
that’s honestly all i want. and it breaks my heart a bit to think that this shit is so difficult for me. writing this all out has honestly broke me down a bit again, but, twenty-piece puzzles aren’t any fun to put back together, anyways, you need thousands of pieces to jam together for the journey to the finished picture to be worth it, right?
i sure fucking hope it is.
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