The Story So Far...

I've been going back and forth about doing this since making the decision to end my year-long social media exile.

For the record, that decision wasn't my call. The only reason I did was because for the ninth time in the last ten years, my life got knocked back to square one again.

And, as has been the case every other time this has happened, I didn't do anything to deserve it. I didn't screw up, break a rule, be a terrible co-worker or anything else that would cause someone to lose their job. It was all about dollars and cents. Particularly, that my need to earn them wasn't as important as either the need for the company who hired me to save them, or the people in charge of running it to cover their own asses for their own mistakes in the wake of a global pandemic.

The excuses I got the day I was sacked were ones I've heard more times than I can count; There was no other choice. It's not your fault. We wish there was another way. It's purely business, it's nothing personal.

That's really easy to say when you're able to go on making a living in a place that's managed to insulate you from the realities of the outside world for the bulk of your career. I suppose the ability to compartmentalize it in such a way as to not feel the weight of the decision you're making becomes easier as well. Whatever faint glimmer of humanity you may feel in that moment when you see the impact of what screwing over the person you made promises to, who you asked to trust you, and who packed up their whole life and traveled hundreds of miles to be part of what you're trying to maintain must vanish just as fast too, I suppose. 

Safe in the knowledge that the house you've bought, the kids you raised, the retirement you've saved and the life you built didn't get taken away from you. 

Instead, it got taken away from me. Again. 

And how I'm not expected to take that anything other than 100 percent personally defies any measure of logical thought. How I'm expected to not be anything other than angry about it defies that logic even more so.

When I hit the end of 2019, I was at a critical junction in where I wanted to be going into this new decade. Having been made to live the nomadic, monastic way I did through the 2010s, I came to Maine with the belief and assurances made that things would be different here.

That I would be safe here.

That I could finally start to rebuild my life here.

Doing that meant also doing some things I wasn't really thrilled about. The first was finding a therapist who was willing to work with me and for the past ten months, I'd been lucky enough to find one who would.

I'll admit that when I started with her, suspicions were high that it wasn't going to help. Considering my previous attempts at therapy had been with doctors who said that I needed to just accept that life isn't fair, that everything that happened to me in my life was my fault because I'm just a terrible person, or they gave me a stockpile of antidepressants du jour and sent me on my way, I had reason to be skeptical at the very least.

Which is why I was surprised when the gameplan she devised for me didn't involve pills or making me feel any worse about myself than I've already had for I don't know how long. Instead, we were going to do something rather radical that my previous doctors would've likely scoffed at.

We were going to do actual, honest-to-god therapy, and see how that worked.

Specifically, I was undergoing a psychological triple cocktail of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Evidence-based Therapy (EBT), twice a month for an hourlong session. 

Was it easy? No. 

Did I struggle with it? Quite a lot, at times, depending on the subject I was trying to process.

But was it working? Yeah...it was.

It was working right up to the point where I lost the job, and the insurance that came with it. In fact, the day I was sacked, I was supposed to meet with my therapist for another session. That didn't happen, of course.

I was afforded all of ten months of therapy that I both actively sought and desperately needed, and I have no idea when or if I'll ever have the chance to find another doctor who will work with me like that again.

The second thing I needed to do was get out of the toxic cesspool that is social media.

Editorial Note: I can already hear the opposition to that statement from those of you whom I'm still connected to through Facebook, Twitter, etc. That the idea that it's toxic is my problem and not yours. For the record, I'm not disputing that. It is my problem. Unfortunately, it's what you post everyday that feeds that toxicity to the point where it's no longer healthy for me to engage with it.

Now, you may be saying to yourself right now that you don't post what are widely considered toxic things. Your day/week/whatever may consist of posting things like the work you're doing on your house, or the new coworkers you're handing out with, or the night spent with your significant other.

From anyone else's perspective, that façade you've established may seem totally innocuous. Maybe even something to revel in. 

It's not to me.

For me, what social media has become is a constant 24/7/365 reminder that the life I wanted, and what I worked so hard to achieve that I destroyed myself in the process, will likely remain beyond my reach no matter what I do. Instead, I get to watch you all enjoy the lives you wanted, to the point where you take them for granted without seeming to realize the difference between us is nothing more than the combination of your innate privilege and sheer, dumb luck.

You may not like that and if you don't, that's your choice. That doesn't change the fact, however, that had the cosmic scales tilted one way, instead of the other. Had you or your family made a choice me or mine didn't make, or vice versa, between when we came into this world until now, the roles you and I currently inhabit might very well be flipped. 

Now the argument could be made that I still have time. That it's not over yet. But as someone I thought was a friend pointed out to me not too long ago, the best I can hope for is 'a decent rest of my life, just not the one I always imagined.'

Well, if there's one thing I can say unequivocally, it's that despite everything I've been through. All the pain, loss, grief, betrayals, disappointments and setbacks upon setbacks upon setbacks, I never stopped thinking that what I imagined wasn't still attainable if I just put my head down and worked harder.

Except here's the kicker. It's not that I don't care anymore...It's that I just don't care anymore.

I don't care about what's going on in the world. I don't care about whether or not things are going to get better or worse in the next few weeks or months. 

And crucially...I don't really care about people, because I don't have reason to and there's no real value in it anymore.

My whole life has been spent in pursuit of the same three primal things we all want: Love, Acceptance and Happiness. I wanted them more than money. More than a big house or a fancy car or a corner office. I wanted them more than any material possession I could really fancy...and I've fancied quite a few. Yet, they're the three things I've never been able to attain.

It's not for either a lack of trying or a lack of wanting. What I've found is that the people I wanted them from, the people I loved, accepted and wanted to make happy, either did not, could not or would not accept it. Why? Because regardless of how much I cared, I also lacked the necessary privilege they expected or wanted in order to find me worthy of reciprocation. 

I get that. I really do. Looking at it from that perspective, why would I want the affections of someone who doesn't have the means to make my life better? Who can't match my own sense of entitlement or what I think I deserve when there's so many other people out there who probably can? 

We all want to be with people, platonically or otherwise, who help us move forward, not backward. For reasons I don't think I will ever truly understand, I've had to go back to Start and begin again every year or so since I was barely six years-old.

When you're finally faced with the hard math of that equation, understanding that no matter how much you go back over the numbers, the solution absolutely will not change, there's really nothing more that you can do but accept that that's the scope of your existence, so best use the time you have left worrying about something else.

And that's what my plan is. 

Once I figure out where I'm going next and selling off everything I can't afford to bring with me, which is the only reason why I reactivated Facebook, I'll be dropping back under the radar and most likely not coming up again. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to find a quiet place somewhere that I can stay for longer than a year or two, and my days will be spent trying to live as quietly as I know how.

I'll admit, if there was a genuine perk to being offline for the last ten months, it was once the withdrawals of having to post something or see who else is posting something every 1-2 minutes wore off, that I could be infinitely more productive with my days. Seriously...if you're as exhausted and not getting anything out of being plugged in all the time, you should really try it.

I could go to the gym, cook food, play games, start writing again and get outside and travel to places without that constant toxic reminder in my head of making sure I documented it on social media with the sole exception of Instagram, because it's still good for photography, which I've also been trying to do more of.

In closing, I offer the following: If you want or need to get a hold of me, I still have the same phone number I've always had and I wouldn't mind a chance for an actual conversation, rather than talking over chats or texts. Call me old-fashioned if you want, but you don't appreciate being able to actually talk to people until you have no one to talk to. And as a lot of you who may read this are of similar ages to me, you remember when we used phones as phones, rather than something to spend hours playing Candy Crush on. 

Otherwise, I'll be around.

Either until I see you, or until the next life. Tally Ho.

Done Decade

This was supposed to be the decade where everything finally changed for the better.

Where everything I'd dreamed of, worked for, been told wouldn't happen would finally come to fruition.

After previous decades of being knocked down, beat up, written off and having to grind through the stark, cold reality of just how cruel and unfair life can be, no matter what I tried to do to change it, this was when it would finally reach a point where it became fair for me.

Well...everything did change for me in ways I could've even comprehended at this point in 2009. But at I sit here in on the doorstep of 2020, it's impossible for me to ignore the inescapable truth that it sure as hell wasn't for the better.

Rolling into 2010, I was less than six months from finally completing my dream of getting my college education - something I'd already had to put off for more than a decade to that point thanks to all the shit I had to navigate through in the late 90's. While it may not seem like much, the magnitude of reaching the finish line was in no way lost on me, either.

It meant that not only could I start to chase the other dreams I had as far as becoming a journalist and being part of a world I'd always wanted to experience. I saw it as finally having the means to take care of myself, my wife and the children she'd put off having so I could see my goal all the way through.

I'd absorbed so much knowledge and had worked my ass off while also carrying three jobs to help keep the bills paid, that by the time I hit graduation, I don't think I'd ever felt more learned, more confident and for the first time in I don't know how long...more optimistic of what the rest of the decade would bring.

Then came 2011, the Breakdown...and the complete implosion of my entire world.

There's truth in the cliche that nothing in the world that can fully prepare you for the moment you become a parent. Secondary to that, there's absolutely nothing that can prepare you for the second your mind breaks.

In less than 36 hours, I went from being a brand new father, with dozens of people having spent months patting me on the back and telling me "You're going to be a great dad!" to an utterly lost, despondent wreck that no one wanted anything to do with...because that's what happens after the sudden onset of severe Mental Illness.

All that sycophantic support seemingly vanished in a nanosecond. My position as my son's father was taken from me within a week of his being born. Before 2011 was over, the only long-term relationship I'd ever had, spanning sixteen years, was also done. Having lived through my mother's two divorces when I was a kid, I'd always told myself that history wasn't going to repeat itself with me. That I wasn't going to be like my father or first stepfather. That I was going to do it right.

Except I'd spent that entire relationship being completely (and I concede, willfully so) oblivious that the person I'd made those promises to turned out to be unbelievably toxic to me on multiple levels. It wasn't until we were clear of each other that I began to finally see the extent of what I'd been ignoring and the full impact it had on me.

Editorial Note: For the record, that doesn't exonerate my own issues or mistakes I made while we were still married. Was I a perfect husband? No I wasn't. But this I know and I stand by it until the day I die. I did the best I could with everything I had. I took those promises I made seriously and never broke them. The same cannot be said on the other side of the equation.

The shock of spending half your life with someone and suddenly finding yourself alone again is both profound and completely terrifying, to say the least. The only thing I could do, as much as there were times I very much didn't want to, was to pick myself and try to find a way to move forward again. By 2012, I'd made some progress in my career, but had also been broadsided by the reality check that everything I'd been trying to outlive and overcome from my childhood was going to still keep me from where I ultimately wanted to go.

A golden opportunity that could've at last put me on an upward trajectory was taken away at the last possible second for no other reason than base and unabashed discrimination, and there was nothing I could do to change it. The jobs I'd grinded away at both during and after college, paying my dues and making no end of sacrifices for in exchange for similar opportunities ended up undercutting me as well. Those chances going to people who possessed more ambition but a fraction of my work ethic, while I was left totally high and dry.

If there was a bright spot in that part of my life, though, it came when I wasn't expecting it. For the first time in I don't know how long, I'd come across someone who despite being so out of my league in so many respects, was someone I found utterly captivating and interesting. And for reasons I struggled greatly with, she seemed interested in me

I won't lie...I was equal parts hopelessly smitten and scared beyond belief. The last thing I wanted was to find a way to fuck up this chance to maybe be with someone who'd gone from being a friend I cared about into someone I genuinely loved.

Well, fuck it up, I did. More than I could've possibly imagined and the fallout utterly shattered my heart. Now she's nothing more than a Ghost - an intrusive thought that I don't think will ever stop haunting me.

At that point, I was so lost that I didn't know if there was anyone or anything that was going to keep me from just sinking into the abyss of Depression, guilt, shame, self-loathing and outright despair I felt myself being pulled into. Most nights I went to bed not wanting to wake up, provided I managed to sleep at all, while my days were spent trying like hell to not give into the relentless voice in my head that spent all hours trying to convince me that death was the only way out.

Being so desperate to get away from all the reminders of everything and everyone I'd lost, I took the wholly unexpected lifeline that was thrown to me from central Washington and spent the middle of the decade in the geographic middle of nowhere. At the time, being surrounded by nothing but high desert for hundreds of square miles and living in a town so small it was hard to find on most maps, I figured it was as good a place as I'd ever find to go through whatever detox I needed.

For the first year or so, the isolation helped. By 2016, though, with the company who hired me seemingly on the verge of collapse, I decided that 25 years spent in the Pacific Northwest was more than enough. It was time for me to go to the one place I felt I could hopefully rebuild my life and could reconnect me with the person I'd been once upon a time.

It was time to go Home. Except when I got back to New England, it became clear pretty quick that it wasn't the same home I'd left.

The family I wanted to reconnect with had become so dysfunctional, petty, selfish and sociopathic that I wanted nothing more to do with them and the feeling was all too mutual. It was another stroke of luck, though, that I managed to get onto the staff at the Boston Herald for a temp-to-hire position, provided I worked my ass off to show them I was worth sticking around.

Oh...I was also going to have to live out of my car for close to a year while they made their minds up on that.

As much as I thought having to exist in an 8x8 prison cell as a teenager surrounded by a couple hundred men who could've killed me without a thought was bad enough, even that didn't prepare me for being homeless. I thought I knew heat or cold, then tried to sleep every night curled up in the back of my jeep, enveloped in a cocoon of blankets and a sleeping bag or sweating buckets every night, using an old milk jug for a makeshift urinal and subsisting on fast food, cheap snacks, YMCA showers and gallons of Starbucks chai and hot cocoa in exchange for free Wi-Fi access.

It was only after I went back to Portland to watch my foster dad be buried that the Herald told me I'd been wasting my time, and I once again had no idea what the hell I was going to do. It was on a whim that I contacted some old friends who'd relocated from Portland to Cleveland and asked if I could spend Christmas with them that I found a way out.

Not only did they let me come out, but they also didn't want me to leave again after the holidays were over. I did go back to New England and tried to make the best of the situation again, but I don't think I lasted a full week before I made that 11-hour, 900-mile drive again back to Ohio. I spent much of 2017 and 2018 living in the corner of their basement, sleeping on a futon and trying to make the best of a truly shitty job that I ultimately quit after I realized my boss was an utter pillock and it wasn't going to get any better while he was still there.

But I was safe and despite the occasional hiccup, we all got along. Days were spent playing games and making the best of otherwise dreary Walmart grocery runs. Nights were usually spent talking about stuff that often resulted in me laughing, which wasn't something I was all that accustomed to anymore.

And for the first time in I don't know how long, I was able to connect with someone on a relatively affectionate level again. His name was Shadow and he was an incredibly derpy in the way all great cats are, but after spending years completely alone and having shunned pretty much all social contact with humans at that point, his decision to come keep me company was a level of emotional rehab I didn't realize I needed at the time.

The only reason why I'm not still there is because about six months ago, I got a call from one of the almost 1,000 jobs I'd applied to between 2014 and 2019, asking me if I wanted to come back to New England and work in media again. So I packed up all my stuff one more time, took another 11-hour drive all the way to central Maine...and here I be with a roof over my head again, food in my cupboards, bills that are paid and a proper bed to sleep in.

Granted, I could've expanded on this a lot more than I did, but it's close enough to a Russian novel as it is. That said, even writing out this semi-abbreviated recap hit so many emotional pegs that in no way can I ignore what I'm feeling now that I've got it out...

I don't know how the hell I managed to survive this decade. I honestly don't.

Going through both the Breakdown and then the divorce in less than six months was more than enough to make me feel like I was done. Piling on top of that the emotional sledgehammer blows of having a career, potential relationships, friendships all disintegrate in the ensuing wake, of having to bounce around from one spot to another in the hopes of finding any measure of stability...and all without anywhere near the reservoirs of self-confidence or self-worth I had when the decade started...?

By all accounts, I shouldn't have made it to 2015, to say nothing of 2020.

I suppose I should see that as a victory on some level...but I have to admit that it's hard to do so. Instead, it's a struggle not to look at it just a seemingly endless streak of failure, disappointment, rejection, heartache, loss, madness, self-loathing and pain.

The person writing this is a much different me than I was when this decade started. Maybe, had my luck been different and even one of those things not happened, I might not have changed so much. Also, had I been able to get into therapy sooner, rather than six months before the decade ended, I would've been able to handle it all better.

But that, like everything else I wanted for myself in the 2010s, didn't happen and I find it hard not to put the majority of the blame for all of it on my back.

After all, they were my decisions, my choices, my actions, inaction, reactions, feelings, wants, desires, interests, expectations, hopes, ambitions and most importantly, my mistakes and my failures that got me to this point...and they cost me everything and pretty much everyone I cared about.

Where I go from here, I have no idea anymore. All I know is that with everything I went through in the past ten years, if I want to avoid repeating anything close to it again then I have to be willing to overhaul nearly every aspect of my life...and I'm going to have to do it alone for a while.

Before the year is out, I'm shutting down and/or turning off all my social media connections. The reason for this is threefold:

1.) Social media has become so emotionally toxic for me that it's no longer healthy to be part of it as all it does is enhance the negative feelings of envy, bitterness, guilt, shame and anger that I've been struggling with this whole time.
2.) My ability to honestly express myself when I'm trying to work through those bouts of negativity, or even those rare moments where I'm feeling as close to good as I can these days, has been countered with the seemingly constant blanket response of "Shut up. No one wants to hear it and no one cares anymore, so just go away."
3.) One of my biggest problems for the majority of my life has been the need for external validation from other people in order for me to feel any measure of self-esteem or self-worth, and in that respect, social media is no different than giving someone who's trying to kick addiction a free heroin shot every hour on the hour.

Does that mean I'm going to drop off the world entirely? No, it doesn't. If you need to get a hold of me, I'll be around. I just won't be online anymore, so you're going to have to work a little harder to find me.

My biological father always liked to remind me, If you ever get yourself in trouble, it's on you and you alone to get your ass out of it. Considering he didn't live to see 2020 either and died a broke, bitter and lonely old man exactly a year ago, it's not lost on me that if I don't do something about this now, I'm going to likely end up the exact same way.

I swore to myself when I was barely 10 years-old that I would never be like my dad. The problem with that is doing so came at the expense of me not figuring out who I am.

I'm at the unignorable point now where I have far more days behind me than ahead, so it's way past time I get that straightened out.

See you on the other side. Tally Ho.

Sweat, Showers and Self-Care

A point of em-PHA-sis up front, if you'll pardon me a moment...

Despite being a photographer for more than 35 years, I really don't like getting my picture taken and as a consequence of that, I despise 'selfies.'

As a rule, I don't take them. In fact, in the almost ten years I've had a phone capable of it, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've allowed myself to and not felt like an utter pillock.

The reason for this isn't because I'm being egotistical or contrarian for the the sake of being contrary. It's because the older I've gotten, the more shy I've become and after a childhood and early adulthood where I was psychologically and emotionally conditioned to both want to be invisible and to leave as minimal a trace of my existence as I pass through this world, the idea of suddenly wanting all eyes on me is about as antithetical to who I've become as you can get.

Editorial Note: One of the lessons I learned in all my years as a journalist was 'Cover the news, never be the news.' Same applies for photography. I've found there's a whole lot more amazing things in the world to capture through the lens of my camera than me blocking the view.

Which naturally begs the question...Okay...why is there a 'selfie' sitting here now?

The answer to that involves setting the ol' Wayback Machine to about about two-and-a-half years ago.

At the time, and I'm not being hyperbolic by any stretch in putting it this way, but I was in as bad a situation as a person could find themselves in. After relocating cross-country and trying to get my life moving in a forward direction again, I found myself having to exist solely out of the back of a Jeep I'd picked up after my beloved Honda Civic died in an accident.

I had a job, but it wasn't permanent, although I was told it could be if I worked my butt off and things went my way for a change. But in that environment of uncertainty, I couldn't commit to anything like an apartment until it was made certain. So, while having to exist in that sort of employment limbo, I had to quickly take stock of my situation and figure out what I needed to get by.

Clothes, bedding and food wasn't a problem, luckily. I made enough money that I could get a meal everyday (even if I had to get it from a restaurant or grocery store deli) and brought all my other essentials with me when I moved.

What I didn't have though, was access to a shower.

If there's one thing I think a person feels the most self-conscious about when they're homeless, it's the idea of how to get clean in a hygienic sense, if for no other reason than it helps you feel a little more human afterward. Or at least, it was for me. Even though I could change my clothes every day, it wouldn't matter if I walked into the office or anywhere else for that matter, smelling like I'd had a sabbatical in the bottom of a dumpster.

Fortunately, just down the road from me was a YMCA, and although I could've easily found a way to sneak past the front desk and get to the showers in the locker room, that's not how I wanted to do it. Instead, I figured the best thing I could do was use the opportunity as means to finally get motivated enough to maybe get my carcass in as much shape as a newly-christened 40-year old could get.

So that's what I did every morning, probably more than I should've at first considering how truly out of shape I was, but the payoff I gave myself at the end of each workout was the idea that I'd earned that shower. I know that may seem like a trivial thing in hindsight, but you'd be surprised how much that can drive someone to do something they'd made excuses for or took for granted a thousand times before now.

Fast forward back to now, and even though I don't have to worry about where or when my next shower is going to come (for now, at least) the byproduct of those first ten months of having to live that way which I couldn't have anticipated at the time was how much I'd make going to the gym a pillar of the self-care regiment I've taken on since then.

It wasn't like I hadn't tried exercising when I was younger, nor did I think it wasn't something I needed. Growing up, I was always a scrawny, wisp of a kid to the point that as a teen, I found out some of my friends thought I was being starved by my dad. When I met the woman who became my wife, however, it didn't take long for my body to change into something considerably less healthy.

In hindsight, I can't and won't solely place the blame on her for that. At the time, I was content to let myself go thanks to my already noted lack of motivation and also my yet undiagnosed Depression telling me that I didn't need to be in any form of shape anyway. Say what you want about self-loathing, but it can be just as much a driver of apathy as self-worth can drive someone to pursue a goal in the first place.

That said, it didn't help my cause that I was with someone who'd struggled with genetic-based obesity and didn't have much interest in doing something to limit its effects. The insecurities that accompanied that situation also fueled an idea in her that if I somehow got in shape (and thereby somehow became attractive to other women) that I'd ditch her at the drop of a hat. And it wasn't until I was on my own again that I could take stock of my situation and see the toll my not seeing the toxicity of the situation had taken on my body.

I'd love to tell you it was an easier route that led me to where I am now, but I don't gain anything by lying either.

Now, the most common assumptions or preconceived notions that most people tend to make about someone like me trying to get healthy again are usually the following three:

1.) I'm still stuck in some desperate midlife crisis
2.) I need to prove some macho-Alpha Male BS to the world 
3.) I'm trying to pick up women

Well, I hate to break it to you, but no...wrong on all counts. How do I know? Because my motivations are waaaay more self-centered and basic than that.

1.) I do it because it gives me an outlet to channel and process everything my Depression, PTSD and anxiety throws at me every day.
2.) It helps slow the effects of the CMT I was born with a little while longer.
3.) My clothes fit better and I can see parts of me I haven't seen in a long time.

And probably the simplest reason...I just feel better.

Not just physically or emotionally, but I somehow feel a little more human, which is hard to really explain other than when you're so used to operating each day as robotically as possible, feeling you still have a heart pounding in your chest is strangely reassuring at times.

As much as I've known I needed to undergo some type of therapy for a long time now, the one thing I didn't anticipate when I started was both how much I needed to have another outlet like this, and how easy it would be to incorporate it into my life once I let myself get into it. Having been on vacation for part of last week, my first stop after getting home the night before was the gym, because I had to get back to work and I had a lot of stuff built up from that time away I needed to filter out of my system.

Having used a million coping mechanisms over the years to deal with all the crap in my head, my one big regret is that I didn't commit to this sooner, but I can't do anything about that now. All I can do now is use it to get what I need out of it every day...

...and if that means I don't look quite so bad in a mirror, I guess that's gravy.

The Value of Feelings

Since getting back from my vacation a few days ago, I've had this nagging question pinballing around my head, in no small part because of my Depression's tendency to lock onto something and obsess about it to no end.

How much are emotions and all the corresponding feelings connected to them actually worth?

I suppose that because I live in America, a country utterly controlled by what's become a highly distorted form of Capitalism, I guess they fall under the purview of yet another commodity who's worth is dictated by the almighty and unimpeachable market. Which means, by that economic pretzel logic, there's no real flat rate, no equilibrium between where one person's feelings rank in value by comparison to another.

As in all things we like to slap a price tag on, which is just about everything, it all depends on relative and sometimes arbitrary factors like who's feelings we're talking about, that person's status, reputation, position, presentation, etc.,

For example: We tend to be more interested in the feelings and emotions of those in position of celebrity, financial or social superiority, potential physical attractiveness and perceived potential compatibility more than we do pretty much anyone else. If a person ticks one of those specialized boxes, then it's almost an immediate response to shift our attitudes and behaviors towards the value we see in how they feel about us.

What that means for the rest, I guess, is that no matter how strong their feelings or the motivations driving them are, the unpleasant reality is that they're not worth much more than the proverbial plugged nickel.

When I first sat down with my current therapist a few weeks ago, she asked me to put down a list of everything I was hoping to get out of the work we're hopefully going to be doing over the foreseeable I-don't-know-how-long. My response was to divide my list into pros and cons, based on what I felt like I need to change most about myself.

While a pro might have been something like Find motivation to be creative again, a con was more along the lines of Learn to stop caring about or getting emotionally attached to people.

Now the obvious critique of the latter, and my therapist called me out on it too, is 1.) human beings aren't programmed to not care about one another, as that's why emotions exist in the first place, and 2.) there's nothing productive or positive about not letting ourselves care about those around us.

Maybe so, but good luck convincing my mind of that because for most of my life and especially for the better part of the last ten years, it's been nigh-on-impossible not to feel like pretty much everything I feel has no value whatsoever.

I wish I could say that's solely the byproduct of my Depression both before and after the Breakdown, but that would totally ignore the unshakable perception that everything I feel, with the sole exceptions of my anger and my guilt/regret/shame, don't seem to be worth anything to the people I've let myself stay attached to in one degree or another.

After one episode of having those feelings go unrequited after another, going all the way back from my early childhood and on through to all the pain and anguish I had to endure with Ghost, I honestly can't think of a more rational realization to come to than what I feel and how I express those emotions isn't worth anything to whomever I direct them at either.

If that seems a little harsh, try having to live with the idea that no matter how much you grow to care about someone, it's likely never going to be seen as valuable as someone else who may end up very well making them feel worthless down the line too.

God knows I've seen it almost as many times as I've been told that my feelings aren't wanted or worth enough to be considered of value. Which leads me to ultimately wonder why I'm bothering to still hold on to them?

I mean, I can try proving to you that I'm worth your investment of affection or love or that my feelings are valid and have a higher measure of value than you may think until I'm blue in the damn face, but if you either can't or won't recognize that...then I can only conclude they really aren't worth much of anything, are they?

And that makes it all the harder to find any sense of self-worth if the people you care the most about in the world can't seem to value how you feel as anything more than what you'd find on a local dollar store shelf.

Dispassionate

It doesn't feel like it's been years since I had the energy or interest to immerse myself in the things I was once so passionate about.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a drive out to a part of the Maine coast that I'd never been to, and is my usual wont, my camera was in the seat next to me. And it was about an hour or so into the drive that I realized I hadn't pulled it out of the sling bag I bought for it and taken pictures of any sort in close to two years.

It's been just as long since I felt truly motivated and interested enough to sit down and try writing a piece of fiction.

It's been even longer since I felt anywhere near what I did when I started my pursuit of the career I'd wanted since I was old enough to know it was what I wanted to do with my life.

There were so many things I used be so passionate about when I was younger. So many things that I was interested in and cared enough about that I remember spending time I should've been doing other things being wholly fixated on my passions instead. It's the narrative we tell ourselves when we're young and idealistic — cultivating and building the treasure map that we think will lead us to the place we all want to end up at by the time we have to finally grow up.

We're going to have that career, write that book, travel to those exotic destinations, marry that person and live that life we want so badly for ourselves, because otherwise...what the hell else is the point of living in the first place?

Earlier today, I saw the news that someone I used to work with and someone I considered a friend back in the day got a true dream job that essentially sets him on that course for life. On the one hand, it's impossible for me not to be anything but happy for him. When we met, we were both struggling to find our feet in an environment where our bosses took neither of our passions for the work we both did and wanted to do seriously.

Success didn't come overnight for him, either. He had to do what a lot of people in our line of work do, which is embrace the mercenary life and bounce around the country between whatever jobs we can find. There were personal setbacks and situations he had to overcome as well, and there were a few times when the frustration became almost too much.

But because he managed to find people who saw value in his passion and the lengths he'd go to hold onto it, opportunities opened up that paved the way for the success that he genuinely worked his ass off to attain, culminating in the news he got this morning.

It's hard not to be happy for someone who's had to fight to earn something like that. On the other hand though, it's also impossible not to be anything but absolutely livid about the fact that such things never seemed to be even a consideration for me, no matter how strong my passions to reach the same heights were or what I was willing to do to see them realized.

The single most fatal malady that can utterly destroy a person's passion for just about anything is being told that it doesn't matter how bad you want it or how hard you push yourself to get it, you'll never reach it — usually because someone in an arbitrary position of authority is more interested in chopping your legs out from under you for whatever arbitrary reason they deign to come up with, and they could care less about the damage they're inflicting in the process, either.

I know I'm far from the first person who's had to face that reality, nor will I be the last. The world is full of us. People who were so passionate about so many things, only to be told we're not special enough to have them.

Have that happen enough times and the world starts to lose a lot of its luster. The color fades out of it and it just becomes a seemingly endless drab, gray morass of imposed mediocrity and low expectations that you force yourself to navigate through just to continue existing. Inevitably, it gets to the point where you just don't care anymore, because the energy it takes to find the passion that's been emotionally beaten out of you through the seemingly endless repetition of disappointment, defeat, rejection and outright denial of what you want doesn't come back.

It's why I have a whole stack of notebooks filled with stories I once planned to write, but I can't write them.
It's why I have a head full of things I want to say...but I can't say them anymore.
It's why it feels like I have this black hole where my heart used to be...because I can't care about anyone anymore.
It's why I had a whole life's worth of things I wanted to see and do, but I know I'll likely never see or do any of them.

The passion I used to have for life wanting to live it to the fullest was taken away because I was so determined to get there that I pushed myself until it broke me. And yet, if you asked me back then if I'd go through it all again in the hope that maybe the result will be different and I'll know that life actually can be fair to all of us...?

I know I'd say Bring it on.

Such is what passion can do to a person before their ambition and drive to be great are beaten out of them.

This is Where I Leave You

So I've been thinking a bit about therapy for the last few days. Not so much in the ideas of whether or not I need it, because I do, or what I'm looking to get out of it, which is to feel emotionally stronger and less toxic.

Instead, I've been trying to fully rationalize just why therapy is something I have to do at this point in my life.

The obvious and easily the most glaring reason why is the degree of both childhood and adult trauma I've held onto for most of the past three decades. That is undisputed and I fully accept the fact that that alone qualifies me for needing to talk to a mental health professional.

But I also had a conversation with a friend the other day that provided a point of emphasis for another reason I apparently need therapy, and this one bother me more than a little bit.

That point being that I need it because I want to be accepted and loved by people who, for whatever reason, aren't capable of providing either to a level that allows for a healthy relationship.

Since going into retirement in 2011, I've had times where the idea of ending it for the hypothetical right person has been a very strong consideration. As Ghost so declaratively put it the day she destroyed me, 'It's a good thing there's seven billion people on the planet, because maybe there's someone out there who'll love you...'

Well, the reality is that out of those billions, there's only three people I would've considered coming out of retirement for, and of the two I'm still connected to in any capacity, both have made it plain that I am nothing other than a friend.

Now, the most obvious option is to, of course, go out and meet more people. After all, that's how we've been cultivating new connections and relationships since time immemorial. Even in an age where we've boiled down potential companions and non-platonic opportunities to the swipe one way or another on a phone screen, it still comes down to the idea of putting yourself back out there and being seen.

Except that, for reasons I'll get to presently, is no longer an option.

Ten years ago, I started my final year of university and I remember very clearly that my aim in finishing my education was purely that. I was there to get my degree and make up for over a previous decade of lost time spent getting through a lot of the traumas that put me on the road to needing therapy in the first place.

I was not there, however, to make friends.

The reasoning behind stemmed from the duality of being married at the time to someone who possessed such a degree of insecurity and distrust of her spouse that I'd had to jettison the majority of friends I'd had when we first got together, because she saw them and anyone else in my social circle as potential threats to somehow take me away, thereby depriving her of the trophy she so badly coveted and was determined to hold onto at all costs.

Editorial Note: For the record, if you were to ask my ex-wife about this, she'll deny it vehemently and instead say I took advantage of her profound generosity and saw her as nothing but a simple meal ticket for the sixteen years we were together. Such is what happens when you fully subscribe to the helpless victim stance and refuse to recognize, let alone be accountable for, your own toxic behaviors, but I digress.

The second prong of that duality came from having endured the trauma of my primary education, which was nothing short of brutal. Said brutality came in the form of being relentlessly bullied, trivialized, marginalized, ignored and summarily rejected by the majority of both my peers and teachers who I had to interact with year, after year, after year.

Yes, I had small cluster of friends who I felt comfortable enough with that I could trust them and be more of myself when we were together. But it also didn't stop me from trying to exceed the limits of the bubble I felt trapped in, either.

It's not surprising then, that this applied most to girls whom I felt attracted to and hoped to establish potential relationships with. Being already a massively socially awkward person at the time and having that compounded by physical awkwardness and an extreme lack of both self-esteem and self-confidence, such attempts were never easy. And it wasn't long before I began recognizing patterns that would carry through all the way to now.

Upon meeting and getting to know someone, it quickly became obvious that my purpose was to be an emotional support animal. I've genuinely lost count of how many nights I stayed up late talking with female friends, listening to them cry and tell me how some other guy they were attracted to had treated them like complete shit, then ask me the same damn question...

'Why aren't there any good guys in the world?!'

I had to sit there and watch these people I cared about and harbored genuine feelings for get emotionally pulverized by guys who I'd loved nothing more than to take my own anger and frustrations out on. Or worse, it was a case where I served as the third wheel, having to watch them be seemingly happy with someone else.

All the while, biting my tongue until I practically gnawed through it because I'd learned the hard way that as soon as I spoke up and said anything about how I felt, that person disconnected from me faster than it takes to flip off a light switch because I'd crossed the rubicon from emotional support animal to interested party...and that was not acceptable.

Now I suspect the pressing question at this point is 'Why did any of that matter years later when I was an adult?'

On paper, it shouldn't. But we don't live on paper and when you had to spend the majority of your early existence endlessly trying to prove that you matter, only to have practically every aspect of your world tell you, No, boyo...you REALLY don't, that doesn't come out in the wash. All it does is further solidify the programming you're assimilating every day by people who on the one hand, tell you they love you, but then do all they can to undermine just about everything you need to be able to function like a 'normal' person would or should.

As a result, I didn't function that way. Instead, I fully enveloped myself in a bubble of willful isolation, not making any friends or letting myself get to know anyone on anything other than a working or otherwise professional level for close to fifteen years. Any connections outside that purview had to be essentially through my marriage and approved on some degree by my wife.

It doesn't take a Ph.d in psychology to understand that that's not a very healthy way to try interact with people.

By the time I reached my final year of university, it was glaringly obvious to me that I couldn't keep doing that and I owed it to myself on some level to at least try to form some new connections. So I did and what I wasn't prepared for, or in no way could've anticipated, was the amount of energy that was going to take. To this day, I don't think any of the friends I made back then fully understand just how hard it was to let my guard down enough to let them into my world on some level.

It was exhausting and I don't use that term lightly or for the sake of hyperbole.

When you've allowed yourself to operate a certain way for so long, as much as a matter of simple survival as much as it is the perception of knowing your place in the social hierarchy, daring to go against the grain on that can sap the life out of you. Especially when it's become so entrenched in your psyche that it's always there to remind you how trying to evolve into something else is a complete and utter impossibility.

Fast forward to after my marriage disintegrated and I suddenly found myself single as I was entering middle-age with a severe case of dad-bod, my hair falling out, a career I'd barely paid for that was seemingly stuck in reverse as I was trying to get the damn thing off the lot, the financial tonnage of said investment around my neck like an anchor and a head full of Depression and PTSD that decided it was the perfect time to crank it up past eleven. To me, it wasn't hard to rationalize that I was, without question, the single-most unattractive human being in history.

Seriously, I felt like I could make the Elephant Man seem like late-90's Brad freakin' Pitt, by comparison.

And yet, I was still supposed to go out and find someone else to try and be with, so I did. Except I'd quickly discovered that it might be a new century and we were all supposedly woke to the new realities of the world...but nothing had really changed insofar as my ability to go beyond the confines laid out by people I saw a potential future with.

Not only were the lines of demarcation more severely drawn. Now they were guarded by a whole hell of a lot of barbed wire, dragon's teeth and other defenses prepared to take my head off if I made even the slightest move out of my allotted space.

But here's the kicker about emotions and why they exist. They demand to be felt — even when you know it's the absolute worst thing you could let yourself do. So I did and each time, I paid for my idiocy in thinking that it might somehow end differently than it has since I first started letting myself care about people more than I should have.

The friend I mentioned at the start of this said to me that one of the things she hopes I'll get out of therapy is that I'll stop being envious of people I'm attracted to who're in relationships and still want to include me in their lives, because, as she put it, "That sort of behavior can kill friendships."

Maybe it is, but my counter to that is what's more detrimental to a friendship or even just a person as a whole — forcing someone who cares about you on a potentially non-platonic level to have to swallow their feelings because it's considered some sort of inconvenience, or making them be a bystander for your attempts to be happy with someone else, then serve as a sounding board when it inevitably goes sideways?

Having been on the receiving end of both way too many times for one lifetime, I know well enough there's no right answer to that equation. They're both cruel and hurtful actions that we all-too-conveniently compartmentalize behind the edict that just because someone cares about you on that sort of level, they don't deserve to have that affection returned in any way, shape or form. This, of course flies in the face of about two centuries of opposing social norms and conventions that we cling to for dear life, slapping them on everything from internet memes and Hallmark cards to what we tell each other when someone tears our heart out for the seemingly umpteenth time:

Don't worry. There's someone out there for you. You deserve to be loved and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I'm no genius, but I've been around this floating ball of rock long enough to know that you can't have it both ways.

To be fair, I don't go out of my way to make friends with women in order to eventually ask them out. I've had quite a few female friends over the years who I've felt exactly zero romantic feelings for and that doesn't bother me, nor should it. And when I find myself getting attracted to a female friend, it's not because of some quantum shift in my behavior that makes me think that they're somehow obliged to date me.

It's because by that stage, I feel comfortable enough that I feel like I can start to trust them, and more importantly, I feel like I can let my guard down and be myself, warts and all. Simple as that.

It may not be the right thing to do, per current social prerogatives, but I've reached the point where it's simply easier for me to find the quickest and easiest way out of what we now colloquially call the friend zone than it is to continued to be trapped in it because I'm not considered good enough to be anything else but.

I had to come to terms a long time ago that no matter what I do or how much I try to prove I'm just as worthy of it as anyone else, no one will have me. There's absolutely nothing in that acceptance, however, that requires me to like it on any level or continue to operate as yet another someone else's emotional support animal in exchange for being called a friend.

I'm sorry, but if that's what you need, then get a dog. They'll still love you unconditionally even after you go through yet another breakup with someone who didn't care about you as much as I did before you said I wasn't good enough.

Either that or do what I'm doing and go get some therapy, because I can't be the only one who's head is messed up if this is how friendships and relationships work in the 21st century.

Self-Care, Selfishness and Stigmas

It's been a bizarre couple of weeks...which is an odd thing to say because nothing that truly fits that adjective has really happened in that span.

My life returned to the familiar pattern of getting up in the morning, hitting the gym a few times a week, going to work, coming home — rinse and repeat. Two weeks ago, though, I tossed a wrench into what, all things considered, is a seemingly milquetoast existence.

I went and saw a chiropractor in the hope that it might lead to an end of some of the physical dings and dents I've accumulated over the years. The first appointment lasted about an hour. X-rays were taken, questions were asked, cracks and pops were made.

A couple of hours later, I went and saw another doctor. We talked about some stuff. She ran some general tests and we set up another appointment for a few months from now. We also set up another one with a potential therapist with the idea that before the end of the year, a plan will be in place for me to maybe start feeling better on some level.

Now on paper, I know that nothing I've just acknowledged is wrong in any way, shape or form. People go to the doctor all the time. The chiropractor's office was full of people who, by all accounts, seemed no more out of the ordinary than I do.

The difference, though, is I don't know if any of them felt as anxious, self-conscious or out of place as I was feeling within the first five minutes after I walked in the door.

Stigma is a many-faced monster of criticism, especially now in the advent of social media, depending on where you go, who you follow or how you insulate your own particular echo chamber. For me, one of the primary stigmas insulating my own echo chamber for a long time was the idea that self-care and selfishness were the same thing sporting a different hat.

That my being in a position where I put my own needs, issues, problems, interests ahead of anything else is nowhere in the ballpark of self-care. It's pure, unadulterated selfishness, plain and simple.

This wasn't something I came to recently, either. Rather, it was ingrained in me from the time I was a kid. Me putting myself in front of anyone, regardless of the reasons why I felt it was necessary, almost always brought with it the seemingly mandatory guilt trip or other wonderful passive-aggressive behaviors designed solely to make me feel bad about not conforming to someone else's expectations of me.

In our modern, so-called 'woke' culture (a term that utterly infuriates me, because in many ways, our social awareness is causing us to go backwards at lightspeed instead of forward, but that's a discourse for another day) this seems almost unfathomable on some level. And I suppose it's my being older and 'woke' by virtue of all the hard, cruel, unfair and extremely painful experiences I've accumulated to this point, that makes me unable to understand how people who believe themselves so hyperaware of how the world supposedly works, can be so oblivious to the reality of entire generations before them not having the luxury of self-care being seen as anything other than egotistical, narcissistic pandering to the weak-minded and soft-backboned.

In my family, nobody ever dreamed of doing something that resembled what we consider self-care. Are you kidding? To them, self-care was measured by how much alcohol, tobacco or narcotics were required to get through a bad week. It was compartmentalized in the myopic drive to keep your head down at work, never complaining, never feeling like it was too much, and never asking for anyone's help unless it was absolutely necessary.

Otherwise, unless you were on the verge of having Last Rites read, you kept your mouth shut and did what everyone expected you to do, because the second you turned the focus from your obligations to yourself, then you were just being selfish.

That was the stigma I came to understand by the time I was barely in grade school: Weak people need help. Weak people cry. Weak people need to talk about what they're feeling. Weak people break. Strong people just deal with it on their own, because that's how you get tough.

So along with my ABC's and addition/subtraction tables, I learned the not-so-subtle art of compartmentalization. What was happening both with and to me didn't really matter all that much. Not when I had a mother going through a second horribly broken marriage, a stepfather who despised my existence, and an absentee father and wasn't all that interested in being involved in the first place. In that environment, the limits of what could be considered self-care was staying in the relatively safe confines of my room with my toys, books and games and using them as means to escape into areas of my own imagination where I didn't have to think about any of it.

All the things I was feeling at the time, I just crammed them into the back of my head like I shoved stuff under my bed or in the closet as proof that I'd cleaned my room. On the surface, everything seems fine and in order, but all it takes is turning a knob or lifting a bedspread and you realize very quickly that the mess is still there. They just don't want you to see it.

In some ways, the idea that such a coping mechanism seems so alien to people who're younger than me or were blessed with lives where that wasn't required seems just as alien to me. After all, I know better than anyone what my life has been and the impact it's had on both who I became and who I am now. To be fair, the disconnect works both ways, and I guess it's in my serial obsessive nature regarding psychology, behavior and trying to understand why people are who they are, that I struggle with it too.

When I became an adult, I don't think I was any different in thinking I was still young enough that there'd be plenty of time for me to get my life in order so all those compartments would be emptied of all their crap. In hindsight, I did the worst thing I could've done at the time, which is get married, and as much as I hate to admit it, I knew it and it was yet another thing I compartmentalized.

Why? Because the idea of having a family of my own, and thereby a potential support system which I was in desperate need of at the time, was more appealing than trying to continue how to figure it all out on my own. Again, what I wanted wasn't as important as what someone else wanted from me and I did not want to be known as someone who was selfish by putting myself ahead of someone who claimed they loved me enough to want to spend the rest of their life with me.

People tend to think that those moments where someone comes to the realization that putting yourself first isn't wrong can be like some grand epiphany. I wish it were that way, but in my experience, those moments were nowhere in the same ballpark as epiphanic. If anything...they were often quite painful, because they went against everything I'd allowed myself to be programmed on how you're supposed to act.

Even now, in the last two weeks, I've had episodes where my anxiety and Depression have called me out on what I'm doing and trying to do. Now, I get it. That's how those maladies work. I know that all too well because this far from my first rodeo with them. Having lived predominantly on my own for the last eight years, grappling with the logic that making the investments in my well-being will eventually pay off with the dividend of me finally being better has brought its own share of innate stigmas that I keep having to deal with.

But, like I told my friends when I finally left the Pacific Northwest in 2016, I've spent the majority of my life putting myself on the backburner to help others who needed it to one extent or another and it wasn't like they had to twist my arm to get it either. My self-identity has long been linked to what I did for someone else, even if it came at the cost of doing that might be healthier for me, including not doing anything at all. By extension, that also meant if those opportunities ever came around again, I often wouldn't take advantage of them because to do so would be selfish.

And a good person is never selfish. There's vast swathes of Judeo-Christian and 'good ol' American dogma that pounded that rule into us so many times it should've been painted on the psychological pile driver they used.

I don't know if that innate stigma will ever truly go away. I don't know if there's ever not going to be a time where I go into my doctors' office, the gym, a restaurant, movie theater, coffee shop, on a vacation, or when I'm doing anything I find personally gratifying or enriching and not feel like the whole idea of self-care is just a BS-way of trying to justify our own narcissistic selfishness to ourselves.

Editorial Note: The weirdest example of this was when I bought my first set of new bath linens in ten years last week. I mean seriously...I didn't spend a lot of money and it's not like they're somehow frivolous or impractical, so who the hell gets into existential arguments with themselves about towels?!

That bothers me. It really does, because I know at its core, that's not what self-care is. I also know that right now, I need to be doing that more than anything else because, as I've been told more times than I can count at this point, no one else can fix me and I can't fix anyone either.

So if it's up to me to put in the work, then I've more than earned the right to start making that investment any stigmas that come with that, can piss right off.