I||u5i0n
Active member
...but despite all that, I consider myself pretty successful in the "friends" department. Let's back up a bit so you can catch up - may as well want to grab yourself a cuppa and settle in, because I have a tendency to be long-winded (although (hopefully) entertaining) and, well, you started reading this so you may as well finish it 
I grew up in the middle of the sticks with parents who weren't exactly focused on making sure I had playmates. I learned from a very young age to cope with my loneliness (although I didn't appreciate the solitude at that time). I have since found much consolation in my ability to enjoy my own company.
That doesn't mean that I don't need human contact or that I have a particularly large circle of friends...but I guess I'm in-between circles right now.
So fast forward a few years to the usual high school outcast story - not smart enough to be smart, not doped enough to be cool, and not athletic enough to be a date rapist (that's a joke, folks) I just sort of faded into the background.
When I joined the military I learned pretty quickly that when you are dropped into the middle of a brand new situation, your reputation is entirely up to you. It doesn't matter if you were a ladies man (or a gentleman's woman?) when you were at home in PoDunk, Iowa, because absolutely nobody around you knows the difference. It was quite a few more years before I realized that nobody else really cared, but that comes later.
I never considered myself particularly "able" at finding friends. I was always able to...I don't know...sort of "wedge" myself into a new group, but it never felt particularly comfortable and the people around me didn't seem to appreciate it much. The result was that I more or less kept myself to myself and I really didn't associate with many people. I watched a lot of movies, listened to a lot of music, pretended to learn to play the guitar and hung out in bars and strip clubs. (bars - not clubs)
During all of this I was also suffering from chronic depression. Now, I hadn't intended to dwell on this point, but it occurs to me that this was the first of what was to become many self-actualized improvements to my quality of life. Don't worry - no granola hippy stuff...I'm a different type of hippy. This post is about to get a lot longer. Sorry about that.
My Depression
It's been so long, it really does almost seem like a dream. That should - for most of you - offer hope. But before you dismiss me as another "I'm on your side, guy!" schmuck, hear me out. I'm no psychologist - I speak from experience, not training.
My childhood is probably relevant - you got the "middle of nowhere" thing above, but you didn't hear about the alcoholic father and the mousy mother. When I was about 8 years old I knew he was a jerk, and by the time I was 15 I had convinced my mother to (finally) leave him for good. (It worked out quite well for her - 20 years later and she's still happily married to my stepfather). My father wasn't physically abusive, but there was plenty of the mental kind. He also cheated on my mom which was just...well...let's say I'm keeping the swearing down because I don't know what's tolerated here. He wasn't a nice person and he didn't do nice things.
When I was about 12 was when I first started dealing with depression - and that became a chronic habit for the next 13 years or so. So much so that it was instrumental in my exit from military service.
While I was in the service, things got pretty bad. No, I wasn't in a wartime situation or anything crazy - I was just depressed all the freakin' time and I was a scared, young kid away from home. I was suicidal for a long time, but I didn't think it was too big of a deal. Same ol' same ol', right? I saw the chaplain on a regular basis...didn't have a whole lot of friends, but I kind of eked on by. I was drinking a lot, but it was never about the booze...it was all about getting away from the military for awhile. During this time I started singing Karaoke, which was a bit of fun, but still didn't do much to stem the depression.
Things got so bad one night that I slipped from suicidal into the much more frightening homicidal, and it was all I could do to not be a bad person. I spent the night frozen in fear, staring at my ceiling hoping like hell that I didn't have to go to the bathroom or otherwise move, because if I did...ugliness.
The next morning I called the mental health folks on the post and I got myself some help. Crazy, not stupid They didn't really have much that they could do for me - they prescribed about a half-dozen different medications, all of which worked to none extent and most of which screwed me up for just about everything else. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but I believe that to be a felonious fabrication. I had chronic depression, it was no mystery. Beyond that, they put me in group therapy - anger management, which had nothing to do with my situation and was pretty useless. Yes, that's exactly what you want when you're fairly meek and suicidal - a whole bunch of people around you talking about how they hit their commander with the butt of their rifle for "smiling weird" or the girl that attacked a check-out clerk for overcharging on a pair of shoes.
Because what I actually needed was help, I also started seeing a therapist off-post, non military - a proper therapist, who more or less helped me keep my poop in a group for the last few months that I was in the service.
When I got out the depression didn't go away, of course, so I started seeing a low-income therapist (I was unemployed - fresh outta the service). It was during this time that I had my breakthrough - but my breakthrough had little to do with my therapist. This was the very very VERY first lesson in "being a grown up and dealing with my rotten existence": Therapists can't fix your problems, but they can help give you the tools (or the steadiness of mind) to determine your own particular solution to your own particular problem. There is no "one size fits all" solution - sometimes only medicine can fix it, but sometimes it's in your head.
So here it is - the culmination of this first stage of my growth. Are you ready?
I rode my bicycle to work that day. My psychotic girlfriend lived near my workplace, so I just biked over from there. I was due for a therapy appointment around 1 in the afternoon, so I was planning on just biking over. I'm not particularly athletic - I was just broke and a chain smoker...I was looking for any excuse to get a little healthier and save money. (well, anything short of quitting smoking, of course). So I rode my bike to work, and around noon I left for the 15 minute bike ride to my therapist appointment. Yes, you read that correctly - I'm chronically early. If I'm OCD about anything, it's time (and pens, but that doesn't feature here)
I get out to my bike and my freakin' tire is freakin' flat! You can't imagine how upset I was - it started off swearing, and just progressively got worse as I pushed my freakin' bicycle to the gas station so that I could put air in the tire. I was livid. I was inventing all of these reasons why my tire could be flat - of course, all of the malicious and all of them leading me to think that the people at my workplace were "telling me something"
This was totally and completely typical for my flavour of depression - frustration leading to anger, leading to helplessness, leading to hopelessness. The cycle continues.
But then it doesn't. This is where it was down to luck.
So I'm putting air in my bike tire and it looks like it's holding air. And I look around. And for a brief moment - just a moment - I realize that: It's a beautiful day. Traffic is light. There's no smog in the skies and birds singing in the trees. It was certainly no iconic Norman Rockwell scene. But it was enough. And it started something - and I can even explain why.
Because for once - one single moment, even in the middle of being pissed off - I saw a beautiful day. That's it. That showed me that there was something flat out better than the comfortable bliss of suicidal paralysis. I didn't know how I was going to get there, but I knew now that it was possible.
And that was the very last therapy appointment that I made. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I made it my absolute goal to make sure that I had a reason to be upset. That I had a choice in the matter. Nobody was going to make me happy - why should they bother? No, it was my choice. (I AM WELL AWARE THAT THIS IS NOT THE CASE FOR EVERYONE) But here's the thing: Quite often, our emotions are habit. We are sad because we are always sad. We are lonely because we are always lonely. It's a very ugly feedback loop, and the way that you break it is the same way you break every habit: You start by acknowledging that you have a problem, and then you learn to recognize it. But you've gotta find the tricks that work for you...they're different for everyone.
So I started living in a world where if I was getting pissed off it was for a good reason, and I found myself able to laugh a little more.
Now, I brought up the karaoke thing earlier, but I'm going to expand on it a little here. I really enjoyed sitting in that empty (yes, empty - I wouldn't sing in front of a large group - are you crazy?!?) (or nearly empty) bar. It was me and a guy who was a lot older than me who hung out there for the same reason I did: It was mostly empty, had decent music and pretty waitresses. And a karaoke machine.
Fast forward to my post-military, pre-degree years. I needed a couple of extra credits so took an acting class. Now, I was still kind of a shy person at this point, but...well...probably not compared to most "shy" people I guess. I still cared though, about what other people thought But I took the acting class because it was an easy couple of credits and was going to be lighter than most of the other classes I was taking - no big whoop, right?
Turns out I was pretty good at it.
This was the end of my loneliness (score!), but not the end of my depression. Yeah, things are out of order - cope. I have never wanted for friends since then (until now) because I've always been able to find someone who's entertained by my antics.
Only...I got married soon after that. And married life comes with all sorts of new rules about behaviour and contact, and propriety and all sorts of other things.
I'm the sort of person where I don't even like to give the impression if indiscretion, so since that time...
...my friends have been mostly coworkers and people that shared my religious beliefs.
The Ride
This is the last little bit, I promise.
My last epiphany - this is post-depression, but at the time I was a miserable, angry, spiteful person. Oh, I didn't get angry at "little things", but I allowed myself to get way angrier about the big things than I should. Oh, sure, I was overworked - 80 hour work weeks, 24/7 on-call for over a year...it takes it's toll. But my wife was also working excess hours, and she was going to school, and our son was having issues of his own...there was...a LOT...of stress.
And I quit my job for something better...only that didn't work out, so I was unemployed. Fortunately by this time I had beaten my depression - I don't think I would have survived otherwise.
My wife and I were on the outs, and she suggested that I get on my motorcycle and take a ride to "wherever". I was unemployed and overstressed and she thought that I could use a break - I thought that was pretty freakin' cool of her.
So I did - and over the course of my trip I learned quite a lot about life. Mainly that everyone is faking it, the "rules" are just guidelines, and perception counts for a helluva lot more than it should.
I lived in a homeless shelter when the bike broke down...wow...that really sucked. More on that another time - but it really let me know how good I really truly have it. I have a roof over my head and I don't have to worry about having my stuff (or my innocence) taken during the night - that's something to be grateful for on ANY day of the week
So I used to chat with my religious and spiritual groups...they were my rock...my sounding board.
Only now I'm an Atheist, and it just doesn't feel right to go back to my old haunts, you know?
*sigh*
But I consider most of my life (so far) to be successful - despite the ups and downs (and believe me, this only scratches the surface), I have landed on my feet more often than not. I've been luckier than some, although maybe not as lucky as we'd all hope to be
I have a current layer of drama that will certainly pass, one way or another, and I have just a large enough ego to probably let me land on my feet
For now, I leave you to lament your lost 30 minutes. No, I cannot return the time to you - but you have learned something about my posts so it's time well spent
I grew up in the middle of the sticks with parents who weren't exactly focused on making sure I had playmates. I learned from a very young age to cope with my loneliness (although I didn't appreciate the solitude at that time). I have since found much consolation in my ability to enjoy my own company.
That doesn't mean that I don't need human contact or that I have a particularly large circle of friends...but I guess I'm in-between circles right now.
So fast forward a few years to the usual high school outcast story - not smart enough to be smart, not doped enough to be cool, and not athletic enough to be a date rapist (that's a joke, folks) I just sort of faded into the background.
When I joined the military I learned pretty quickly that when you are dropped into the middle of a brand new situation, your reputation is entirely up to you. It doesn't matter if you were a ladies man (or a gentleman's woman?) when you were at home in PoDunk, Iowa, because absolutely nobody around you knows the difference. It was quite a few more years before I realized that nobody else really cared, but that comes later.
I never considered myself particularly "able" at finding friends. I was always able to...I don't know...sort of "wedge" myself into a new group, but it never felt particularly comfortable and the people around me didn't seem to appreciate it much. The result was that I more or less kept myself to myself and I really didn't associate with many people. I watched a lot of movies, listened to a lot of music, pretended to learn to play the guitar and hung out in bars and strip clubs. (bars - not clubs)
During all of this I was also suffering from chronic depression. Now, I hadn't intended to dwell on this point, but it occurs to me that this was the first of what was to become many self-actualized improvements to my quality of life. Don't worry - no granola hippy stuff...I'm a different type of hippy. This post is about to get a lot longer. Sorry about that.
My Depression
It's been so long, it really does almost seem like a dream. That should - for most of you - offer hope. But before you dismiss me as another "I'm on your side, guy!" schmuck, hear me out. I'm no psychologist - I speak from experience, not training.
My childhood is probably relevant - you got the "middle of nowhere" thing above, but you didn't hear about the alcoholic father and the mousy mother. When I was about 8 years old I knew he was a jerk, and by the time I was 15 I had convinced my mother to (finally) leave him for good. (It worked out quite well for her - 20 years later and she's still happily married to my stepfather). My father wasn't physically abusive, but there was plenty of the mental kind. He also cheated on my mom which was just...well...let's say I'm keeping the swearing down because I don't know what's tolerated here. He wasn't a nice person and he didn't do nice things.
When I was about 12 was when I first started dealing with depression - and that became a chronic habit for the next 13 years or so. So much so that it was instrumental in my exit from military service.
While I was in the service, things got pretty bad. No, I wasn't in a wartime situation or anything crazy - I was just depressed all the freakin' time and I was a scared, young kid away from home. I was suicidal for a long time, but I didn't think it was too big of a deal. Same ol' same ol', right? I saw the chaplain on a regular basis...didn't have a whole lot of friends, but I kind of eked on by. I was drinking a lot, but it was never about the booze...it was all about getting away from the military for awhile. During this time I started singing Karaoke, which was a bit of fun, but still didn't do much to stem the depression.
Things got so bad one night that I slipped from suicidal into the much more frightening homicidal, and it was all I could do to not be a bad person. I spent the night frozen in fear, staring at my ceiling hoping like hell that I didn't have to go to the bathroom or otherwise move, because if I did...ugliness.
The next morning I called the mental health folks on the post and I got myself some help. Crazy, not stupid
They didn't really have much that they could do for me - they prescribed about a half-dozen different medications, all of which worked to none extent and most of which screwed me up for just about everything else. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but I believe that to be a felonious fabrication. I had chronic depression, it was no mystery. Beyond that, they put me in group therapy - anger management, which had nothing to do with my situation and was pretty useless. Yes, that's exactly what you want when you're fairly meek and suicidal - a whole bunch of people around you talking about how they hit their commander with the butt of their rifle for "smiling weird" or the girl that attacked a check-out clerk for overcharging on a pair of shoes.Because what I actually needed was help, I also started seeing a therapist off-post, non military - a proper therapist, who more or less helped me keep my poop in a group for the last few months that I was in the service.
When I got out the depression didn't go away, of course, so I started seeing a low-income therapist (I was unemployed - fresh outta the service). It was during this time that I had my breakthrough - but my breakthrough had little to do with my therapist. This was the very very VERY first lesson in "being a grown up and dealing with my rotten existence": Therapists can't fix your problems, but they can help give you the tools (or the steadiness of mind) to determine your own particular solution to your own particular problem. There is no "one size fits all" solution - sometimes only medicine can fix it, but sometimes it's in your head.
So here it is - the culmination of this first stage of my growth. Are you ready?
I rode my bicycle to work that day. My psychotic girlfriend lived near my workplace, so I just biked over from there. I was due for a therapy appointment around 1 in the afternoon, so I was planning on just biking over. I'm not particularly athletic - I was just broke and a chain smoker...I was looking for any excuse to get a little healthier and save money. (well, anything short of quitting smoking, of course). So I rode my bike to work, and around noon I left for the 15 minute bike ride to my therapist appointment. Yes, you read that correctly - I'm chronically early. If I'm OCD about anything, it's time (and pens, but that doesn't feature here)
I get out to my bike and my freakin' tire is freakin' flat! You can't imagine how upset I was - it started off swearing, and just progressively got worse as I pushed my freakin' bicycle to the gas station so that I could put air in the tire. I was livid. I was inventing all of these reasons why my tire could be flat - of course, all of the malicious and all of them leading me to think that the people at my workplace were "telling me something"
This was totally and completely typical for my flavour of depression - frustration leading to anger, leading to helplessness, leading to hopelessness. The cycle continues.
But then it doesn't. This is where it was down to luck.
So I'm putting air in my bike tire and it looks like it's holding air. And I look around. And for a brief moment - just a moment - I realize that: It's a beautiful day. Traffic is light. There's no smog in the skies and birds singing in the trees. It was certainly no iconic Norman Rockwell scene. But it was enough. And it started something - and I can even explain why.
Because for once - one single moment, even in the middle of being pissed off - I saw a beautiful day. That's it. That showed me that there was something flat out better than the comfortable bliss of suicidal paralysis. I didn't know how I was going to get there, but I knew now that it was possible.
And that was the very last therapy appointment that I made. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I made it my absolute goal to make sure that I had a reason to be upset. That I had a choice in the matter. Nobody was going to make me happy - why should they bother? No, it was my choice. (I AM WELL AWARE THAT THIS IS NOT THE CASE FOR EVERYONE) But here's the thing: Quite often, our emotions are habit. We are sad because we are always sad. We are lonely because we are always lonely. It's a very ugly feedback loop, and the way that you break it is the same way you break every habit: You start by acknowledging that you have a problem, and then you learn to recognize it. But you've gotta find the tricks that work for you...they're different for everyone.
So I started living in a world where if I was getting pissed off it was for a good reason, and I found myself able to laugh a little more.
Now, I brought up the karaoke thing earlier, but I'm going to expand on it a little here. I really enjoyed sitting in that empty (yes, empty - I wouldn't sing in front of a large group - are you crazy?!?) (or nearly empty) bar. It was me and a guy who was a lot older than me who hung out there for the same reason I did: It was mostly empty, had decent music and pretty waitresses. And a karaoke machine.
Fast forward to my post-military, pre-degree years. I needed a couple of extra credits so took an acting class. Now, I was still kind of a shy person at this point, but...well...probably not compared to most "shy" people I guess. I still cared though, about what other people thought
But I took the acting class because it was an easy couple of credits and was going to be lighter than most of the other classes I was taking - no big whoop, right?Turns out I was pretty good at it.
This was the end of my loneliness (score!), but not the end of my depression. Yeah, things are out of order - cope. I have never wanted for friends since then (until now) because I've always been able to find someone who's entertained by my antics.
Only...I got married soon after that. And married life comes with all sorts of new rules about behaviour and contact, and propriety and all sorts of other things.
I'm the sort of person where I don't even like to give the impression if indiscretion, so since that time...
...my friends have been mostly coworkers and people that shared my religious beliefs.
The Ride
This is the last little bit, I promise.
My last epiphany - this is post-depression, but at the time I was a miserable, angry, spiteful person. Oh, I didn't get angry at "little things", but I allowed myself to get way angrier about the big things than I should. Oh, sure, I was overworked - 80 hour work weeks, 24/7 on-call for over a year...it takes it's toll. But my wife was also working excess hours, and she was going to school, and our son was having issues of his own...there was...a LOT...of stress.
And I quit my job for something better...only that didn't work out, so I was unemployed. Fortunately by this time I had beaten my depression - I don't think I would have survived otherwise.
My wife and I were on the outs, and she suggested that I get on my motorcycle and take a ride to "wherever". I was unemployed and overstressed and she thought that I could use a break - I thought that was pretty freakin' cool of her.
So I did - and over the course of my trip I learned quite a lot about life. Mainly that everyone is faking it, the "rules" are just guidelines, and perception counts for a helluva lot more than it should.
I lived in a homeless shelter when the bike broke down...wow...that really sucked. More on that another time - but it really let me know how good I really truly have it. I have a roof over my head and I don't have to worry about having my stuff (or my innocence) taken during the night - that's something to be grateful for on ANY day of the week
So I used to chat with my religious and spiritual groups...they were my rock...my sounding board.
Only now I'm an Atheist, and it just doesn't feel right to go back to my old haunts, you know?
*sigh*
But I consider most of my life (so far) to be successful - despite the ups and downs (and believe me, this only scratches the surface), I have landed on my feet more often than not. I've been luckier than some, although maybe not as lucky as we'd all hope to be
I have a current layer of drama that will certainly pass, one way or another, and I have just a large enough ego to probably let me land on my feet
For now, I leave you to lament your lost 30 minutes. No, I cannot return the time to you - but you have learned something about my posts
so it's time well spent 
