Ten years ago:
Three in the morning is never a good time to make a critical assessment of one's life. Those small morning hours only add doubt and regret to every piece of evidence. The fundamental issues take on such an epic size that even approaching them is an impossible task. The contradiction is that the feelings that surface late at night also seem to contain more truth, so they are very hard to ignore.
I couldn't sleep at all for a week, staring at the ceiling above me. I didn't understand where things had gone so wrong that I found myself laying in that bed, in that apartment. I created giant piles of "what if" questions, and beat myself with them one at a time. What if I hadn't broken things off with Diana in high school, but instead dedicated myself to making that work no matter what? What if I had worked out that scholarship to Wagner or Saint John Fisher instead of going to Cortland? What if I could have figured out how to stay on my feet in New York? It also had the dimensions of a spiritual crisis, although one made almost entirely of desperation without any further growth. If there is such a thing as a spiritual panic attack, I certainly had one then, looking for meaning within myself and finding nothing there to cling onto.
I felt that I was wasting time. I was wasting my life away in some apartment in a part of the world I honestly didn't want to be in, working a job that was making me feel like shit. All of my friends were hundreds of miles away and there was no way I was ever going to be able to reclaim that life. I had made poor decisions, and now I was dealing with the regret that accompanied them. In this mindset, it was really easy to dig a deep hole, leaving myself no possible way to climb back out. I stayed in bed when I didn't need to be at work. I left the apartment a mess, and it slowly became a physical demonstration of my mental state.
It felt like there was nothing worth saving.
Here is how out of it I got:
I got up in morning, turned off the alarm clock and took a shower. I went and caught the bus, got a cup of coffee at the gas station across the street from the mall, and cross the parking lot. Then, I had a panic attack because the gate to the store was unlocked and open.
Not wanting to walk into my darkened store and perhaps get assaulted by someone I don't know lying in wait inside, I instead rattle the gate like hell and make a lot of noise, as if this will somehow protect me. What it did was bring my boss out from the stock room to find out who the hell was rattling his gate. I saw him, and thought to myself that I must be getting fired or something, since that that was the only reason he would show up to open the store when I was on shift.
He looked at me puzzled, but then had this goofy grin on his face. "I open today. You close, remember? You make the schedule after all."
And he was right. I did make the schedule. If there was anyone on the staff that should have known exactly when they were working, it should have been me. Instead I stood there like a fucking moron, four hours before my shift. But clearly my mind was so distracted by its inward turn that I had lost track of it. I cursed myself all the way back home on the bus, and then again when I tried to get my caffeine-addled brain to sleep for another hour or two. As I closed the store that night, I took a look at the chart I had made only a week before, and wrote down when it was I said I was going to work.
In the midst of this, my parents came out to visit. The focal point of their visit was clearly at my brothers house, where there were things like a kitchen table or some furniture to sit on. I don't recall them ever stopping by my apartment, but they must have at least stuck their head through the door for a brief moment. I can't imagine that I stressed out over that situation much: I had an apartment and a job to support myself with, and that was going to be good enough regardless of the state of either of those positions.
I remember my mother telling me that she was happy that I had decided to stay in one place for a while instead of "doing whatever it was you was doing" the previous fall. I laughed it off because there was such a gulf of understanding between the two of us, and it wasn't even worth trying to bring those two concepts into some kind of compromise. It is one of the many times in my life where my mother has taken a critical situation in my life and turned it into some silly game I was playing. Sometimes I think that growing up in this dynamic is part of the reason that I have an overly-emotional temperament today.
Letting things play out this way was drastic improvement over the way I had previously reacted. I had learned to accept her nonchalant reaction to the things I held dear, and work around it on my own terms. It was the only way I was ever going to have any kind of relationship with her that wasn't based on anger or anxiety. I let her say her piece, regardless of how off base it might be, and then move the conversation past those awkward moments. It doesn't result in a particularly deep relationship, but it is one that doesn't break down so often.
The important part of their visit to me was actually laying eyes on my father, and confirming for myself that he was healthy. After his accident a few months previous, I had been aching to see him standing in one piece. But this was something I could not really convey in words, so instead we smoked together in that way we do, talking about the little things that we can talk about.
Surprisingly, I felt a bit better about things after their visit. Perhaps a few moments with something familiar allowed me to reset myself a little. It was an unlikely outcome for me, and one that I don't really understand. But I am grateful for the change that it caused.
Notes on a life in exile: A retrospective
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