by Band Back Together | Sep 3, 2015 | Anger, Depression, Help With Relationships, Loneliness, Romantic Relationships, Self-Esteem |
When I was seventeen, I was kind of a heavy kid. My largest weight was 240 lbs, weighed by the scales of the United States Navy. The recruiter was very interested in getting me to join, on account of my having a very high score on their tests. He introduced me to a master chief who was in charge of recruiting people to work on the nuclear power plants aboard naval ships. They tested me and found that I was smart enough to enlist as a nuclear power specialist.
The only bar was my weight. I had to get down to at least 180 pounds. The next year was full of jogging, eating salads and wrapping myself up to sweat off the pounds. It didn’t work fast enough. I still had around ten or fifteen pounds to go.
The date came nearer and nearer for my final entry. My recruiter, who was a first class petty officer, had me drink a laxative for a couple days before my last medical exam before basic training. It was awful. I ate nothing but salad and laxatives, but I came in at exactly the cutoff weight. I was sick enough that I didn’t really feel that I had accomplished anything.
I left for basic training that September. The days were long and the nights short. I was at NTC Great Lakes. Then came the time for psychological testing. The only two specialties that had this testing were those who were aiming to become SEALs and, yep, nuclear power specialists.
Honest answers got me disqualified from service altogether. I wasn’t fit to be in the service. I was angry, disappointed. This was supposed to get me out of the town I hated and into a new life. Why didn’t they test like this before I got all the way to NTC Great Lakes? I was shuffled into a ‘separation division’ the very next week. I read a lot, and I met people from all over the world there. There was even a recruit from Nigeria!
I stayed in the seps division for a week and a half. The petty officer in charge told us about his struggle with depression, and how the Navy was providing the help he needed because he had finished his training. He thought that it was kind of messed up that they didn’t screen earlier too.
I arrived home via airplane. Chicago’s O’Hare airport is HUGE! I bought a pack of smokes and walking what seemed like a mile from the gate to the smoking area outside, while waiting for my flight home. I was depressed. I thought that I must be the biggest loser ever to have come all this way just to be sent home.
My parents waited for me at the gate in SLC International. My mother was an awful mess. She was spiraling into another one of her episodes, brought on by my leaving home. My father was stoic as usual. The ride back to the shitty little town I grew up in was not fun. My mother had only a tenuous grip on reality. Great.
Days later, my mother lost it completely. She was screaming that my father was Satan. I said, fuck this and left with my cigarettes into the hills. Dad took her to the hospital. Again. I was shunted to the side. Ignored. What about me? Mom had to have attention and I couldn’t burden the family with my trouble, right?
I still had a bit of money from the Navy. I had earned nearly two thousand dollars while there. My friend introduced me to crystal meth, so I spent that summer in a haze of drugs. It made me feel GOOD. I’d never felt like that before. The novelty wore off after a while, and I put it down because I saw that the humans around me were becoming less and less human from that drug. I didn’t like the days after a binge either, feeling unwashably dirty and depressed.
I was finally arrested at a drug party, nearly a year after I came home from the failure in the Navy. I was lucky. I didn’t have any drugs of any kind on my person, but they still charged me with ‘internal possession’ from a dirty UA. I took a plea in abeyance and got a job.
For the most part, I kept my nose clean. I paid rent to my parents, paid my dad back for the lawyer he hired to defend me, and drank beer nearly every weekend with my friends. I wasn’t happy. I felt inadequate and like I was a failure. Certainly, philosophically I’m glad I’m not a sailor. The thought of being responsible for killing other human beings isn’t something I enjoy contemplating, even if they are enemies. Yet, I cannot help but wonder what might have been.
I think back to that young man. He wanted to be someone important. He wanted to be part of a group that accepted him as he was. But he was met, yet again, with rejection. He was pissed off that, when he came home in such a state, once again, he couldn’t count on his family to help.
I hid away from the world and my family after that. After so many years of rejection by peers and social groups in school, the separation from the Navy was like the cherry on top of a shit sundae. I was a fucked loser for dreaming anything at all.
I don’t exactly hate the town I’m in, yet, all the things that I do value in life are of little consequence to the people here. They don’t consider deep questions. They get the easy answers from their religious dogma. Those who deviate are, of course, shunned to the greatest degree of shunning possible. Its like you’re invisible to these people.
I’m a long hair, a hippy. I have a beard and I wear t-shirts that I’ve bought at rock concerts. I read philosophy and science books. I read mystical stuff too. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover, the New Testament several times. I’ve familiarized myself with many schools of religious thought. I’ve studied psychology and read several books on the subject. The purpose of all my studies was to bring me closer to understanding myself and those around me, has but created a great divide. I feel that I cannot share my deep perceptions with any but a few. It’s as if the gulf between me and other humans, which I hoped to bridge using knowledge, has only widened with my efforts.
Society is so shallow. It’s been disappointing enough that I just don’t go out anymore. Perhaps I need to find a dating service like the skit on MAD TV: Lowered Expectations. Maybe my desire for an intellectual match has to be tempered with the fact that not everyone is interested in the questions of existence.
I’m just so damned lonely. I have friends to be sure, but I don’t have a lover. I have material prosperity, yet no significant one to share it with. All of my resources are hoarded for my kids. I have so much to be grateful for and to be sure, I certainly am. Many do not have what I do, yet I envy those who have someone with whom to share their burdens. I am not Ebenezer Scrooge who counts wealth as the sole measure of human value. I am not satisfied with this solitary existence, nor do I think that Scrooge truly was with his either. Yet, the missteps and missed opportunities become the regrets of old age. Is that my fate? To be an old and lonely man, regretting that girl in high school who would light up when we would meet. That girl who always seemed to be so happy to see me, yet I couldn’t see that she liked me until years had passed.
Going to bars is soooo awful. I really don’t like it at all. Karaoke is the sole exception. Grocery stores? Church? I want to scream out loud I’m so frustrated in this quest for companionship!
I just hope and pray the theme of my youth peters out. I hope and pray that failed liftoff isn’t simply an oracle showing me the dismal future. I know that there are many, many people in my same situation, dying for a friend, longing for a lover. Hopefully I can find someone who wants to build a new rocket together, one that will launch both of us into greater heights than either of us thought possible.
by Band Back Together | Aug 29, 2015 | Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Breakups, Depression, Fear, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
I’m 33 years old. I have issues with PTSD, anxiety and depression. My Conversion Disorder is in remission, and I was a T-7/8 paraplegic for four years.
Anyway.
I’ve had a boyfriend for four years, a personal best for me! We’ve been really trying hard the last year, went to couples counselling and everything. It just didn’t work.
When I moved in, I put all my household stuff in storage, saying if things are good in a year, I’ll get rid of it. He owned the apartment and had all the household stuff one needs.
For four years, we were a We.
It’s done now, mutually, yet I feel so scared. Six days left in the month. I can stay here longer but it hurts, for both of us. Neither of us will start the healing process while living together. I want out.
I want a little place of my own, where I can cry all I need.
Right now, I have nowhere to go, hoping one of the two places I applied to accepts me. I have no household stuff …bed, microwave, broom, dishes, little and big things, I don’t have any of it.
I’m just so fucking scared. No Us, no place of my own, no pot to cook in. I feel almost agoraphobic. Too many possibilities. I just want my own little place that’s warm and safe
by Band Back Together | Aug 28, 2015 | Anxiety, Blended Families, Breakups, Depression, Divorce, Help With Relationships, Infidelity, Stress |
Well, it’s been a long while since I’ve revisited this, and rather a lot has happened…
When last we met, dear readers, your hero was making it work, and getting by. So much change …so much upheaval.
When I left off, I mentioned that I was married, but we need to go back to the beginning of that relationship, as the background is important. I hope you’ll all bear with me again; getting these stories out is much like excising vital organs for me. It’s a painful process, and I’m very protective of them, and by extension, of myself.
My divorce from the wife in the first story was final in 2006. Around that time, I became reacquainted with an old friend, Becca. We caught up over the course of a couple of days, and later had dinner. At the end of the evening, she kissed me. This was confusing, as she had always been fairly …”butch,” for lack of a better term. We had a conversation about it, and she told me that her sexuality was uncertain; she was still figuring it out.
We continued to see one another for a few months, and anytime things would become more intense, she’d slow it down. This was fine with me, as I was still pretty vulnerable from my marriage. We had a good time, and I always had a sort of unspoken understanding that we were going to end up together.
Things changed.
Eventually, it came to the point that she was just using me for “stuff,” and I distanced myself from her. All well and good, but it was still hurtful.
In 2007, I met a woman who changed everything. Long distance again. (Yes, I know.) She was intelligent and well-educated and fun. We would visit one another around every other weekend. Lots of activities, and the intimacy was there, too.
Then, she started shopping for a home in my hometown. It meant so much to me that she was willing to uproot herself so that I could be near my family. We found a wonderful fixer-upper for a good price, and started working toward buying it.
Those of you who have bought a home know that it is a very stressful process, and the stress took its toll on her immensely. She wasn’t the fun-loving Jen I had gotten to know, anymore. Still, I stuck it out, but eventually, I wanted the “old Jen” back badly enough that I told her to let the house go. She did, and I hoped for things to go back to normal.
Shortly after that, her father became seriously ill, and she was heavily stressed over that. Still no good old Jen. I was right beside her through his surgery and recovery, still hoping for a return of what we used to have.
She bought a house in her hometown, which stressed her out even more.
I proposed to her in 2009, and she said yes. Surprise, surprise, planning a wedding is very stressful as well. I was at wits end by this point, but I was committed to giving this relationship the best possible chance.
We married in 2010, and my daughter and I moved into the house she had bought. Stress. I was in a new city, in a job I hated, with no friends, and nobody to talk to but the woman who was increasingly frustrated with me. She had never lived with anyone before, and had all her ducks firmly in a row, and suddenly she had a husband and a stepchild, in her space, all the time.
We enrolled my daughter in the private school that Jen had gone to as a child. The people there were horrible and elitist, and my daughter acted out. The intimacy Jen and I had went away. First, Jen started sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom, because she said it was better for her back. Later, she started sleeping in the guest bedroom, because she couldn’t stand the sight of me. She worked nights, and I worked days, so we managed to barely see one another. I would come home from work and do my best to drink myself into a stupor, and she would constantly berate me about the things she needed help with.
I am not a smart man. If you want me to dust the dining room, just say, “medic77, dust the dining room for me,” and I will do it. If you want me to clean the guest bathroom, just say so, and it will be done. Jen, however, believed that I should be able to see what needed done and take the initiative. It wasn’t an easy concept for me, but I won’t make excuses.
She would catch me in the middle of a project she had given me, and ask me to, for instance, mow the lawn. Ten minutes later, once I had gotten to a stopping place in project one, I would go outside to find her mowing the lawn herself, and mad about it. It made me crazy. She was a therapist, so she KNEW it made me crazy. I turned into a “yeller.” I’m not proud, but we would have epic screaming matches while my daughter cowered in her bedroom and wished for it to be over. Jen threatened to have me committed.
In February of 2011, after living under the same roof for less than nine months, we separated, and I came back to Ohio. Jen later told me she was mad about that, too. She thought I should have gotten an apartment where she was. It just wasn’t possible. I didn’t have any savings, and I had only worked my current job or a few months. It just wasn’t possible.
Back in Ohio, I went back to work, and got a second job with state benefits, which eventually became my only job. Jen and I weren’t interested in communication at that point, so I was very low.
We went through cycles of talking and silence. I had friends, but Jen always suspected me of being in secret relationships with the female ones. It was just another lack of faith. A couple of years ago, after we had been separated almost longer then we were together, I met a girl at work, Lorrie, and we started a relationship. I was happy.
One night, Lorrie and I were laying in bed talking, and I heard a noise. Suddenly, Jen was standing in the bedroom. It was as bad as it sounds, but it could have been worse. At least we were clothed and only talking. Still, not long after that, our divorce moved forward and was final.
I am still with Lorrie, but our intimacy is gone. We haven’t had sex in months. She says she loves me, but she just isn’t interested in sex. I feel as though I did something to cause it. She doesn’t touch me. She doesn’t kiss me unless I initiate it. She SAYS that if I want sex, I should just say so and do it, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I feel like sex should be a union; a collaboration. Not just, “Hey, hold still a minute.”
I know I’ve got depression and anxiety, but I can’t help wondering just what it is that makes me so forgettable. Why I can’t seem to find anyone who just WANTS me.
So, yeah. I’m surviving, but just.
by Band Back Together | Aug 27, 2015 | Alcohol Addiction, Anger, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders, Breakups, Coping With Anxiety Disorders, Coping With Depression, Depression, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Loss, Major Depressive Disorder, Murder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stress, Trauma, Violence |
A woman who has major depressive disorder decides to go back onto her medication:
This is her story:
Today, I decided to go back on anti-depressants. This is a battle I’ve waged for years; do I really need them, do they really help, are the side effects worth it, am I just a loser who can’t deal with life’s vagaries.
Last weekend I drafted a post that contained the line, I feel like a bucket brimming with tears, and the slightest, inevitable tremble of the earth makes them overflow. It’s an inelegant metaphor, but worse, it’s a pretty clear symptom that things are not going well. It’s partly a bad birthday, partly the break-up, partly some harsh health news. It’s mostly, if I’m honest, cyclical, recurrent, my noonday demon.
“Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”
— Andrew Solomon
This is a family tradition; at the cousins’ table at last weekend’s wedding, we raised a toast to Lexapro and discussed having a candy bowl of all our meds on the coffee table of the rental house we’ll share at the next wedding. It’s funny, but it isn’t. Undiagnosed and untreated depression, manifested as alcoholism and other self-destructive behavior, blackens the family history like soot after a fire. Not everyone, not all the time, but too many, too often.
For me, it begins with a lack of resilience. My normal ability to adapt diminishes and diminishes until I can’t remember that I ever had it. Then, despite the pride I take in being self-aware, I start to judge my good life unworthy and tell myself that my unhappiness, my deep profound malaise that rips the joy out of each moment and shows me only the glaring photo-negative of each happy event, is actually the only sane and measured response to a terrible world and my own failures to strive against the terribleness. That’s the most insidious part, for me; my beautiful brain turns against me, whispering that I am correct in my assessment of my own awfulness and that I deserve to feel bereft, that my sadness is borne from clearly seeing the world and my own bottom-rung place in it. That the life that stretches before me will always be this bleak and hopeless, and that it’s my fault, and that I’m forever lost.
I mostly retain enough self-awareness to know how first-world self-pitying this sounds to anyone but me, but knowing that doesn’t combat my secret belief that it’s true.
My first episode of depression hit me during my fourth year of college. I was living by myself, and working two jobs, and so sad and overwhelmed that I began skipping classes to sleep and sleep, until I got so far behind that I saw no option but to quit. The rueful backstory here is that my parents had already yanked me out of my beloved city and school once, for financial reasons, and I had fought bitterly to return to the life I thought was rightfully mine. And then I ruined it. No one, myself included, ever thought my actions might be aberrant because I was ill; I was just a failure who fucked it all up.
“…a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn’t a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
I’ve tried and tried to write about the beginnings of this last trough, when my sister’s boyfriend was shot and nearly killed on our front porch in 2006. Well, I have succeeded in writing about it–the awful terror and despair of the days and weeks that surrounded the event, and my subsequent PTSD and years of broken sleep and terrible anger–but I’ve failed to write about it in a way that is useful. It’s simply too raw and ugly still, and there is no happy ending, only pain and permanent disability and broken hearts. The long-term effects led to my worst low ever, eventually, and to an appointment with a psychiatrist where I wept uncontrollably and confessed that I was afraid to leave my house and afraid to stay home alone and at the bitter end of my ability to conceal how bad things were. I was scared that I would die, that I was broken in a way that could never be put right.
Medicine was a revelation, a silver bullet that lifted me up and out in weeks. I’d gone so far as to get a prescription for anti-depressants before, but never taken them. Once I started, within six months I’d launched a new business, gotten a promotion, found a new place to live, and started dating again.
And then in January I quit. I felt good, I was falling in love, I was emphatically not a person who would be on meds for the rest of her life. I wanted to be the plucky heroine of my own story who’d had some lows and left them behind. I didn’t want my dates to see the pill bottles. I didn’t want to be damaged goods.
But I don’t want to be mired in black sadness and self-doubt any more either. I’ve met so many people lately who are doing amazing things with their lives, and I’ve lost so much time already. I write this to remind myself that I have more to offer the world than I’ve been able to give, that the drum of failure and hopelessness inside my head can change its beat. I get a flash every once in a while of what my life could mean, of what I could accomplish with the talents and abilities I have, and I need to hold on to those images and walk toward them. If I have to pause in my march each day to wash down some false pharmaceutical courage, it’s a small price to pay.
by Band Back Together | Aug 6, 2015 | Anger, Breakups, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss, Parent Loss, Sadness, Suicide, Survivor Guilt |
My ex husband killed himself two months ago, and I’m not coping.
He has left behind a four year old daughter, and as we are still married, I am his next of kin.
I left him 18 months ago, he seemed happy and he seemed to get on with his life.
Since leaving him, I have been dating someone new.
I found my ex hanging from his loft. Since then, he is almost all I can think about.
My partner has been great, amazing, incredible, but I really cannot shake a feeling of guilt, and sadness, wondering why he did it, and how if I hadn’t left him, he would still be alive.
It’s breaking my heart, and it’s breaking my soul. Every time I feel strong again, the slightest thing sends me right back to square one. I saw him hours before he died. Why didn’t I notice any signs or see anything wrong? He seemed happy and normal and himself.
I am so cross with him. How could he do this to our baby? How could he not see that she adores him and hangs off his every word?
He will never know how many regrets I have. He will never know he is so missed. I don’t know how to rebuild my life, as a 20-something widow, single mum of a grieving four year old.
by Band Back Together | Jun 16, 2015 | Depression, Guilt, Happiness, Help With Relationships, Marriage and Partnership, Marriage Problems, Pregnancy, Romantic Relationships |
I have a good life.
I have a Bachelor’s Degree in elementary education and a good, stable job. I have amazing friends and family and a husband who loves me. I know all of this. Most days I am incredibly thankful for all of it. Most days. But then, the doubts start creeping in…
Am I where I wanted to be at this point in my life? No.
I was supposed to be happily married with a home and children of my own to raise. Isn’t that what the fairy tales promise?
Instead, I got married young to a man who has this incredible potential but refuses to get off his butt and do something with it. He’s had five jobs in four years, all of them at call centers. Each time he promises it will be better, but 4-6 months in he gets stressed out and apathetic and I’m back to pinching pennies to get by.
And kids? Pffft. Right. Even if, by some miracle, I was able to get pregnant, how am I supposed to raise a child when I married one? I know that I shouldn’t expect him to change who he is to meet my expectations as he is still the same person I married.
But I’m not.
And that, I guess, is the root of the problem. I am not the same person I was two years ago, much less the six we’ve been married or the nine that we’ve been together. But, even as I type this, I feel that I am being disloyal to him somehow. He loves me. He has never abused me, physically or otherwise. I feel guilty and well, to be perfectly honest, I feel like an ungrateful bitch.
I’ve never been on my own. Never had my own space. I’ve always had to answer to or been responsible for someone else. The funny thing is, I chose this. I chose to marry the man who I knew was irresponsible. But, faced with the option of marrying or being alone, I chose marriage.
I settled, I see that now, but not in the way you may be thinking. I don’t mean, “Oh my GAWD what was I THINKING?!?!? I’m so much better than him!” What I mean is, I settled into the idea of being married because I was terrified I would never find anyone else. I was never the pretty, popular girl, with her choice of dates. I was was the overweight, mousy, wallflower trying to blend into the background.
So, when someone actually did pay attention to me, I tended to latch on for dear life.
I settled, and now…now, I don’t know. I used the Almighty Google to try and find someone who knows where I am coming from, but in every post I found there was a paragraph about how the poster had found someone better than his/her significant other. That’s not the case with me. The choice isn’t between my marriage and someone new.
Ultimately, the choice is between my marriage and myself.
I don’t even know if any of this is making sense, or if I sound like a blathering idiot…
