Coming Clean...

 

My closest friends know some of the struggle I went through this spring.

Only Eva and Mark have any sense of how bad it was. You can't hide things as well from people you live with. 

Why did I hide my distress and despair from most everyone else? That's not like me. 

I grew up with a bipolar mom. I'm not blaming her for this...actually I think I'm crediting her....but the truth at any given moment was often hard to decipher. It was hard not to believe deliberately so, at times.

As a teen, I had a Trumpian idea of truth. I cast myself in the best possible light, not realizing people could easily see through my mask. The truth of anything was how I felt about it at the time. That lasted longer than it should have...almost, not quite, until I met Eva when I was 26.

By that point I'd realized I'd alienated everyone who ever cared for me. On a very deep level I didn't believe myself worthy of care at all, and the Newtonian reactions to my own actions only reinforced the notion. I began digging myself out of that hole. How? The same way I dig myself out of any hole. I make a ladder out of words and climb it. 

The writing was damn near compulsive in 1998. Much of it was done in a quiet room at Kitchener Public Library...I had nowhere to write in either of the two pretty awful  places I last lived before moving in with my now-wife on our third date. In the year before that happened, I filled a thick journal with a pink/purple cover I christened "Past, Present, Fuschia". 

Some of my best writing is in there. Nobody will ever read it. Yes, there are some things too personal for even me to share. I basically rebuilt myself into the baseline of the person I wanted to become, then charted out possible future paths. Even back then, every potential path had obstacles in it I had no idea how to overcome. Even back then I felt like it was far too late to try. So I decided to lean hard into that baseline person -- the being at my center, my core -- and see what kind of much needed  growth might result.

The first step was putting authenticity into everything I did, and to do that I began to consciously model my stepfather, John. Although he was and presumably still is a deeply private man, you could be sure his public and private faces rarely diverged. Compare and contrast my mom, whose feelings about anything could pivot instantly and often did. 

I didn't want to live like that. If at any time I can't determine how I feel about something, I'm apt to drop everything until I do. Sharing my feelings? Has always, always been like breathing to me. How else does a guy who grew up deeply sheltered, without friends, learn which feelings are natural and which aren't? I have a lot of supposedly unnatural feelings I am both lionized and demonized for.

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But in this case I just had a lot of feelings, period. Guilt. Shame. Defiance. Grief. At first, quite a lot of anger -- which is always fear in drag. I apologize for not being willing, or able, to share that with you. I feel like I have been living a lie these past few months, and there are few things on this earth I hate more. 

Now that I am emerging from the storm, I need to shake myself dry, and so here comes a flood of words. This is carefully written not to disclose anything covered under multiple NDAs.

The campaign I was in for the better part of seven years poofed on me in February and they generously allowed me to test out for, and get into, a completely different outfit. It was a curveball for me. Part of it was the switch to a Windows machine. I have less experience with Windows than just about anyone I know, and I LOATHE it as an operating system. Since I got my first Mac in 2009, I've barely touched anything else. Not the first time I've backed myself into a corner. The job itself was radically different too: constant, EXTREMELY HIGH STRESS customer contact. Not life-and-death, but any potential interaction could easily involve (a) thousands of dollars; (b) an inconvenience that would be intolerable to anyone, especially my new clientele; and (c),  I thought I was cut out for this.

As I went through the training, my misgivings grew. One day just before work, I had what felt like what I imagine a heart attack feels like, fell and gave myself a concussion. I was forbidden to look at screens for five days...right in the meat of the training.

They tried to condense five days into one, but that only increased my anxiety. I was vomiting with every call. I kept trying to ask them to lay me off so I could go on EI. They kept telling me my only option other than perseverance (and no offer of further training or even shadowing) was quitting...which wouldn't allow me to access employment insurance. 

I went to my doctor as frightened as I have ever been in my life. My voice cracked like I was going through second puberty. I was shaking. I mean, I try my hardest to provide in other ways, but those ways don't pay the mortgage or put food in our mouths, you know? I'm so glad medical EI exists.

Getting a new job: I wanted to start looking immediately. I had a six month deadline. Eva nixed that as harshly as she ever nixes anything and commanded me to take at least a month off and heal. She, too, has been through career wrecks.

That added more fear, honestly. Every day threads from various places would find their way into my line of sight (I swear I didn't go looking for them)  all of them saying the same thing: jobs do not exist. Help, I'm homeless and have applied for almost a thousand jobs and nothing. Over and over again. Demoralizing (and terrifying). 

One more thing to add to the trigger-list. I'm getting more and more adept at simply zeroing my attention to anything I don't want to look at. By that, I do not mean I'm ignorant, any more than a person with their eyes closed is unaware they're watching a horror movie. It was a conscious decision that very quickly became unconscious: don't fixate on the Bad Thing. Let it pass over and through you. Strip your feeling from it, make it a bland fact. There are no jobs available. If it starts drumming in your head anyway -- a real problem for us anxious depressives -- reframe it. It doesn't actually say "There are no jobs available FOR YOU, does it? Have you even tried yet?

I felt a twinge with the first job I applied for. This could well be a lie on their part, but the rejection letter I got from them was worded in such a way as to encourage, not discourage me. They said they'd had over two thousand applicants and that my resume made it further than most; although they weren't interviewing me this time, I got a real feeling the "no" was more of a "not now". 

Eva's been through that. The first time she applied for her current position, she was rejected. The second time, same deal. Third time was the charm, and it was only after she had gained some call center experience. Both the first two times I DISTINCTLY recall telling her that the "no" was a "not yet" and she'd be working there someday, don't give up hope. Those gut twinges are starting to come more often as I become more open to them.

The second job I applied for, the twinge wasn't just a twinge but a psychic yank. Sure enough, after a month of waiting -- enough time for me to question whether it was a yank, a twinge, or just gas -- I got an interview. Unlike any interview I have ever had, this one was NOT in person or on camera. I was hired on my voice alone; I was well into training before anybody had the slightest idea what I looked like...and so far I've been on camera for maybe five minutes total. 

Please don't ask who I'm working for or what I do: while I can legally disclose the company I work for, I am strictly forbidden to disclose its client's names. Instant termination would be the least of my concerns. I can say I have one more week of training before nesting, that I regrettably will not have weekends off any time soon, and that other than the lack of weekends so far I'm very happy with how things are going. Nervous about taking calls, yes, and that's to be expected: I'm one of those people who doesn't feel like he knows anything until he knows everything. They have done everything in their power to stress to the whole class that mistakes are not just expected but in a sense encouraged. I'm optimistic that this company doesn't seem to put any credence into visual apperance: that aligns with my own value.

I'm glad the clouds have begun to lift. The panic around I gotta get money so we can live is pervasive and hard to combat. The guilt and shame around I just had a nervous breakdown doing stuff  easier than my wife does every day has dissipated with pharmaceutical aid. The defiance, heavily inflected with idealism as so much of mine is, had to do with needing a job at all. I'm pining for some sort of UBI so that I can learn how to stand on my own two feet, without a boss or company behind me propping me up until they're ready to pull another rug out from beneath me. We are a species that has existed for 350,000 generations...how many of those had to deal with offices (even work at home offices) and credit scores? NOT MANY.

Mostly, I'm grateful to my new employer, and to Eva and Mark, who once again kept me from spiralling completely out of control.

Now back to your irregularly scheduled Ken.