Together in Union

On Saturday morning my mom will be getting remarried to the man she left my father for, the man who called me "faggot", and the man who is solely responsible for the breakup of my family.

Basically it's too tawdry to go into great detail, as it would only serve to cook up feelings of resentment against people who have enough as it is. The story here is that my mom ordered me to attend. She told me that I would walk her down the aisle. And I tried my absolute hardest to be there. Truth is, I just can't.

It would take too long to explain completely what happens when my mom does something moving forward with this guy, and there's no scientific reality to why it affects me so much. Only a series of events have drawn clear that this is something I need to shy away from. When they got together in early 2008, I quickly ended 3 years of sobriety. When they went back to Maine for a week so my mom could finish the divorce proceedings, I drank so much that I blacked out and lost my car, never to be seen from again. The list goes on, but the sad truth is that I can't handle the fact that my mom was more interested in her own love life than in preserving the little family I had to begin with.

She's a sweet woman, but she raised me and the vast majority of my values and ethics were created by her. And 3 years ago she betrayed almost all of them. So in the wake of that I've been forced to figure out whether or not she is just a flawed human being, or if my trying to be a good man is a moot point. Which it may well be if people are all inherently evil and self-serving. I don't know.

I do know that on Saturday morning I'll be working hard at a job that I love, despite the fact that I'm crippled. And my mother may never speak to me again. But I took a page from her book, and saw that this time, more than ever before, I needed to take care of myself first.

A little less conversation

I've been in customer service now for a decade and a half, and as is typically the case, I don't have much to show for it. I don't know about other people, but there came a point in my life where I identified that I enjoyed doing it, and wanted to improve how I did it. This is such a huge turning point I couldn't overstate it if I tried.

Once there's something/someone you want, you go to work trying to figure out what alterations you can make in yourself to enhance your chances of success. Some of us, myself included, are a little more limited than others in the range of viable focus. My brain has two settings. The first is a depressed/void setting that makes me speak little and listen lots. Everything I say has been carefully crafted in my mind, and my ability to focus and retain, let's say: school work, becomes unfathomable. I spend the majority of my days in my mind and hate social interaction.

The other setting is, fittingly enough, the polar opposite. I'm gregarious, sociable, when I speak it's almost stream of consciousness. It's like sitting on a sofa inside your head watching your body life your life for you. It's surreal, and it enhances my customer service, my interaction with people, my ability to love and be loved, while simultaneously making it virtually impossible to focus my mind on anything for even a short period of time.

For a few years I switched back and forth between the two, knowing that the depressed/focused setting would certainly yield a better quality of life for me in the long run, including an education, and a wealth of knowledge. But the expectation of those around you to behave a certain way proved more potent a factor that I could have ever imagined. I forced myself to live in the moment, making the best of today and not worrying about tomorrow. Trying to have fun and let those around me revel in the positivity. But most importantly, as I remained in customer service, the happy/gregarious setting was far more often than not an instrument to create success. With my natural intelligence, I needed only utilize a small fraction of focus to learn and complete operational tasks as a manager, and then spent the vast majority of my time with the customer, sharing this gift with them.

The downside is that after ten years of going back and forth, I've found that there is no middle ground, at least for me. And as of the last two years, the depressed/focused setting has all but been dismantled. You can teach yourself to handle depression by training your mind not to wallow in it, but if your depression is simply a manifestation of a legitemate personal tragedy, you're likely to succumb to the sadness, as it is only pragmatic to do so. I just can't in my mind imagine a time/scenario where I could come to grips with being crippled, being in obscene pain, having thrown my life away numerous times, and just learning to live with it.

The only good thing that's truly come out of the last few years is my own view of myself, and the expectations set upon me. There are none, and with all the pressure from schooling and management and growing up, the alleviation of expectation is a game-changer in so many ways it's surreal. Every day I go to bed not having caused any pain or destruction to myself or anyone else, is a great success. And, for some people not totally supportive, it defies conventional expectation of me. Sadly, in the end, I think the only way I could be truly happy as I am today is to have the perspective I do, a constant and permanent reminder of my failures, and incentive to get better. I don't think I would have learned that lesson on my own. God held my hand through all of it.

Dreams/Goals

If I could go back in time and tell myself at 18 anything, anything at all, it would be that short term goals drive your future, but long term goals and dreams hold you back. It isn't until you get to a certain age, or for some never, that you realize that to achieve something you need to have every step planned out like a chess game. If getting a degree is checkmate, you need to have prepared for as many possible scenarios as you can, and do your best to anticipate anything that might come your way. And remind yourself that goals can easily be brushed aside when the opportunity of something easier presents itself.

So much of my failures stem from living in a surreal dream state, longing for a life I'm not willing to work for, and just hoping that it'll somehow land in my lap. Life couldn't be any further from that mentality. Life and success are meticulous in a way that you can't fathom until you've done it. If you knew the amount of work that would go into a goal, you would most likely opt out of it. It's like running a race. You don't look at your watch every ten seconds, because it would drag on forever and you would start giving yourself options of quitting. Put your head down and move with purpose.

I would also tell myself not to rush anything, but especially not relationships. When you're young you can't help but rush into things, as you've only been an adult for a short period of time, you can't yet comprehend the scope of life and growth, so you compensate by trying to get everything important out of the way early. Sadly, it just doesn't work like that. And that's how people get hurt. Two young people, still in college, with the same heart-on-sleeve mentality pushing each other closer and closer to the brink of eternity. Too much pressure cause ANYTHING in this world to seize up.

Pharmaceuticals

It's only recently come to light that my preference for quality of life is that of someone just about to get their teeth cleaned-in a serene state of bliss and ignorance, more often than not incurred by way of pharmaceuticals.

When I turned twenty, I started taking Prozac, and it lit my world on fire. It would be two and a half years before a doctor would take the time to realize that when you go from depressed to ecstatically happy in a matter of minutes after taking a pill that takes 6 weeks to start working, something is wrong. I know now that I became bi-polar, probably at the age of 19, courtesy of life events and environmental factors that created a perfect storm of chaos in my life and in my head. Prozac ignited a manic episode that lasted 6 full months, and allowed me to be the man I had always dreamed of being, who could charm anyone, be the life of the party, and party constantly without suffering repercussions. And then suddenly, the effects started to wear off. My accelerated metabolism coupled with a burgeoning drinking problem took me out of the mania and launched me into a void that transcended depression. My life began to fall to pieces around me as I struggled to figure out what was happening. After a few short months of struggle, I conceded to doubling my dose of prozac, hoping for the best. As promise, another mania ensued.

This began a two year voyage of increasing doses of anti-depressants simply to fuel my drinking and allow me to be functional. There comes a day for every alcoholic where you have to be honest with yourself and those around you that there is a problem, and it's your drinking. At this point you either get yourself help, or you begin a path of destruction that never ends, and you never stop drinking. I lucky chose the former option, and sobered up entirely at the age of 23. But my psychological state was still distended. I felt verbally and emotionally crippled, and was tired in every way. My first ever visit with a psychiatrist lasted an hour, and she quickly, easily diagnosed me as Bi-Polar, cancelling the prozac and prescribing Seroquel in its stead. But I was done with pills for that moment. I went cold turkey from 80mg of prozac/day to nothing, and had a distinctly bi-polar year. The first six months I was manic in a way I remembered, but was sober and had a girl at home to keep me in check and keep me sober. The next six months I slipped into a depression that had me sleeping 16 hours a day. So, in January 2007 I started seeing a psychiatrist again to figure out how this could be dealt with.

The next few years of my life would be subject to so much carnage and chaos courtesy of doctor's who make you their guinea pig. There goal isn't to cure you or optimize your quality of life, their goal is to offer you a minutiae of increased happiness with every visit, never letting you know just exactly what you need, as that would simply lead you to be better, and not have to come in for appointments. Which, of course, is how a doctor pays there bills.

So a string of doctors tried EVERYTHING. Depakote, Celexa, Lamictal, Lithium, Lexapro, Paxil, Zoloft, Ability, Seroquel, Wellebutrin, Trileptal, Zyprexa, honestly the list just goes on and on. Eventually I stopped the doctors and told them what I needed for right now, and they gave it to me. It left me just stable enough to build a life for myself that couldn't withstand a 1 mph wind. So when a huge gust of life's crap came roaring over the horizon, I fell farther than I ever could have fathomed. I'll come back to that more, but hitting rock bottom again and again actually did me a favor I couldn't have done without, it led me to defy conventional wisdom.

In '09, after the injury, I decided to start playing around with my anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, and just get the doctor to prescribe as many of each as possible. I made changes whenever necessary and for the first time in my life, instead of slipping into a depression with no way to halt it, I was in control. My decision to regulate my prescriptions on my own is without a doubt the one decision that ultimately saved me. And it continues to save me. Not to mention the fact that now, more than ever, every day I wake up happy I know it's because of my own choices and accomplishments.

I'm blogging for the first time now as a way to show people that what goes on in my head is really not that different than anyone else's, there are just certain distortions that prevail in my consciousness than just aren't prevalent in others'. I'll do my best to describe who I am, why I feel and think the way I do, and what led me to do the things I did in the past that had a major impact on everyone around me.

The first thing you have to understand is that my eccentric behavior goes all the way back to the beginning. For instance, at the age of 20, a customer at Starbucks recognized me from kindergarten. She told me of all the kids she's seen in her tenure of public school teaching, I was by far the most memorable.

Things with me just seemed a bit off par from the rest of the class. It's always been an even division of maturity. In some ways my perception of the world and life in general is years(sometimes decades) beyond all of my peers. In contrast, there are a great many things that I am oblivious to, just inept in every way. So it's been a constant battle to fight back from the fringes and try and get to the middle. All I wanted of life when I was a child was to live a life that was memorable, off the beaten path, and intriguing. It certainly happened, but not nearly in the ways I had anticipated. I've seen more darkness and evil than most any could fathom, the kind of horrible things that literally scar your insides for life once you've seen them. At that point there's no going back, you have to adapt to the fact that you are now, and always will be: damaged.