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.