It was the best of times... it was the worst of times. Doesn't that just describe life for everybody? Shit happens. Some shit stinks worse than other piles.
All the way back to February was that last anxiety attack when I made up my mind that I needed to be on meds. This is an observation that's constantly changing - in flux. I'll take them for a prolonged period of time, come to the realization that I've become too numb or unfeeling, and then decide I ought to taper off, so I can 'feel' again. That's the trade-off to anti-depressants. Sensations become dulled, as does the lust for life. Interest in things you used to love doing wanes. You can become less social and less engaged in things. The upside is that, if you're someone like me, that urge to self-harm is largely neutralized. When I suffered that huge attack I had on April 22 of last year, potentially almost breaking my own back, Janice vowed to get me out of the job I was in and get me home where I wouldn't subject myself to that everyday. The environment radically changed there four months prior, when the boss who hired me ten years before, left. He was quite understanding of my plight, and I'm very much grateful to have been by his side throughout the '10s. I had flare-ups while working for him, but he was more than understanding with it. It was when Loblaw took over the company that things began to accelerate south. When the new boss came in, I found out my hours were about to be demoted from full to part time, I got the worst raise since working there (the obligatory 10%, not even matching the cost of living increase), and it was clear we weren't going to see eye to eye. His style and mine did not mesh. My wife wanted me alive, and didn't know if one day I wouldn't be coming home that way. The meds at that point in time were not serving their intended purpose.
There were more anxiety attacks to follow in my time off since, though none of the magnitude of that fateful day April 22. I collected unemployment until that following August, after which I was in the hands of those who decide whether or not I should qualify for disability. During that time in limbo crept in a deepening sense of uselessness at my inability to collect income, based on what I saw as mental and emotional incompetence. When I switched meds this past January, it proved to be somewhat life threatening. I began to spiral. I quit meds completely for a month or so before suffering an attack where I spun so out of control, I didn't know if the hole I was in was too deep to climb out of. Then I was accepted by disability, and a sense of security was restored. I resumed my meds and carried on mostly peacefully since.
But the spectre of being unemployed looms over my head. The question of how useful I am to those around me loomed large. Am I carrying a different stigma around now? That of being a social liability? The money I get monthly is paltry, half of what I brought in when I was employed. We survive on it, with the wife's full time work. But that's about it. There will be no big trips or vacations or big ticket items being purchased anytime in the foreseeable future. Even though those around me know little to nothing about what I deal with or what it all entails, it's like a giant tumor I'm sporting on my forehead. It's not there and no one sees it, but I feel like it IS there and I'm being judged for it. As a result, I shy away from gatherings for the most part, and ignore a lot of interaction. This isn't to say my family and friends are judging me at all, either. Perhaps I'm judging them undeservedly for that, though. Just not intentionally.
In February, I resumed 50 mg of my old meds daily, down from the 100 mg I was taking before the year started. I hoped that dose would carry me through, because the more I take, the more numbness there is. I resisted increasing it because of the dreaded desensitization that comes with that. As summer drew near, I made a half-hearted promise to myself to make this summer one of the more enjoyable since my days working as a driver back in the 00's. The job I had back then I liked so much that I didn't even take vacations, and worked six, often seven days a week. The folks I worked with were wonderful. What I guess I didn't count on was when this summer arrived, I wouldn't be surrounded by people like that. I would be alone, except when the wife wasn't working. What was supposed to be a summer of joy wound up being a summer rife with insomnia; inability to sleep consistently through the nights and making up for it sleeping through the days. I could go back to work, right? Except every job I've had since '07 has come jam packed with anxiety leading me into dealing with attacks often resulting in injury. I had to face the fact I have a real, genuine disability. Meds alone can't control this. But getting professional help is basically impossible in the age of Covid. Never mind that I've been trying to get help for the last 26 years. Even at times bordering on suicide, it would take my wife to pull me back from the brink.
As summer wears on, it was becoming clearer that the effects of 50 mg was not going to sustain me, but I was in denial about it. My fuse was getting shorter. I was losing patience with myself. Sometimes I lost patience with my wife over the most mundane of things. These are red flags that I often need someone to point out to me - by a professional, which I can't seem to acquire the services of.
Then on Monday, August 2, I snapped. A remote fell on the floor and scattered. This was a day when I was for some reason particularly agitated, and I felt an ominous surge of impatience, lifting the couch up with one hand to look for the pieces, slamming it to the floor. Realizing that I was breaking, I struck myself. The wife tried to restrain me, and I pushed her away and went out the door into the night, leaving her once again in uncertainty as to what was going to become of me. It occurred to me I upset her, and subsequently punished myself for it. I tore a large gash in my left forearm as I walked the streets alone, striking myself. I went to a nearby park and sat by the fountain on a bench to try to collect myself, knowing what I had just done. Five months of relative peace was shattered. The fog in my mind condensed into tears as I got up to walk a while longer before I would head home. Terminating myself, however, was not on my mind at all. I guess I just wanted to suffer because I felt I deserved it.
I got home around 1:30 am, with the wife having gone to bed already. I laid there on the love seat in the living room, thinking the wife gave up on me finally, and picked up something sharp and tore into my leg. The pain I felt from these injuries provided a needed distraction from the walloping feeling of failure for the pain I inflicted upon my wife. I was awake for most of the night, until I finally fell asleep only around seven or so. An hour later the wife woke me, saw my wounds, and took me upstairs to bed before she had to go to work. That's what she had to deal with in her mind at her job that day. The gash in my arm was pretty bad and needed bandaging and ointment, with it being changed and reapplied every day for at least a week. The amazing thing here, is that my wife never overreacts when these attacks happen. Of course she's a human being, and the shock hits her when it's first discovered, but she reins everything in and stabilizes the situation like a pro. When I collect my wits, I always apologize profusely and tell her how much I love her and how she understands me. This was no different. Many, many tears were involved, maybe mostly mine. But when I left the house that evening, I shudder to think of the pain I inflicted on her.
The gash on my arm healed remarkably well, but the marks on my leg ensured that I wasn't going to be wearing shorts the rest of the summer. I have family in town to visit this month, and I didn't want to go see anyone with this big gaudy bandage on my arm and have to face questions. We did indeed visit, and there are absolutely no regrets. Since that breakdown, I resolved to increase my meds to 100 mg, which levelled everything off, nullifying any impulsive reactions - though at the price of numbness. I needed to choose the lesser of two evils, and it's obvious which one was the wiser. I have the unwavering support of my wife, who chooses to absorb the situation to try to fix it. To breathe me. To bring air into my depleted lungs. Ultimately, to restore my life.
There is more to my story than what I tell in this blog, but it's not for me to tell. But there's a massive, huge cross I've carried about four or five years since we first moved into this house. I managed to find some closure, but the torment does linger at times. And I feel it's contributed to the difficulty in resolving my issues. I can only describe this cross as a 'lack of acceptance', and perhaps love.
The anxiety doesn't really end there this month. The weekend following that anxiety breakdown on late Friday night/early Saturday morning, as I was in bed with the wife reading, my rather sensitive ears picked up something happening outside in the night air in the backyard around three AM. I grabbed a flashlight and raced to the upstairs bedroom window, and the wife had woken up by now, and I raced downstairs, no shirt on with my ponytail, and grabbed a thick, wooden stick that we used to fortify locking the patio door. She came downstairs with me and I went out shirtless with this stick like Buford Pusser to confront whoever might be rattling around ours and the wife's mother's property, who lives next door alone. The wife saw someone jiggering the lock unsuccessfully on our shed, so I went on the hunt. Jan's mom's shed was broken into, with the door wide open. This is when I went into full gorilla mode.
"GET YOUR FUCKING ASS OUT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER, OR I'LL BASH YOUR GODDAMN BRAINS IN!!" I told Janice to call the cops. Boy, the adrenaline was pumping at this point. I didn't need a stick or any weapon really, but what if this intruder had something? I would need something too. Hand to hand, I was ready to go with my black belt. I searched the dark garage with a flashlight, and it was empty. I wasn't satisfied. The lock had been broken off and the perpetrator left after seeing the garage was void. I took to the street to patrol the neighbours' houses to see if I could find him. Sure enough, some guy was rummaging around a house about five doors down from ours. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?!" And with a big head start he started running.
When I took after him, he was around a corner and I'd lost him. Some lady, who was oddly awake, directed me to where he ran, so I followed it. Longer story short, I came across somebody suspiciously outside at three in the morning and asked him why he was out. He was a rough looking dude. "-fuck you want?" he said.
"What're you doing out this time of night?" I walked toward him.
"Going home!" He was rather defensive.
"Fine," I said. I stepped off the sidewalk and walked onto the street. "You walk into your house then," I challenged. Then he made all kinds of threats the moment I put space between us. He wound up walking to the place where the lady was who pointed me to him. "He live here?"
"I fuckin' live here, fuck's it to you?" He answered for her. I tried to explain:
"Look, someone was threatening my 97 year old mother in law next door to my house breaking into her property, and I wasn't..."
"You fuckin' wait right here while I get my gun and I'm gonna blow your fuckin' head off!" The lady he lived with tried calming him down. He was obviously inebriated. Drunk out of his mind.
"Look," I offered, "I'm sorry about this misunderstanding, I thought you might've been the guy who broke into the house next..."
"I'VE GOT MY GUN!"
Then a couple of other people in the building came out and started hurling obscenities. I just threw my arm up in a bit of disgust and turned around and walked home. This guy is shouting his head off the whole time, yelling he's going to tear my head off and kill me and all this. He followed me, albeit staying a whole block away from me. When I turned to walk back toward him, with the wife next to me, he disappeared. Not his voice, though, he was still yammering.
The cops showed up. They walked with me back to where the guy was living and he placed him under house arrest. He STILL hollered non-stop. The cop tells me it's not legal to take part in vigilantism, to which I said I was protecting my wife and elderly mother when someone broke into her property and tried to with ours. They took a report and said they'd get back to us the next day. They didn't. We called them, and they still didn't get back to us. That's the state of our police right now.
But in retrospect, it had to look funny, this long haired guy with no shirt on and tattoos with a big stick in his hand parading the neighbourhood at three in the morning. I told him I'm really not auditioning for an episode of "COPS". I would never have hit anyone with that stick, unless that someone came at me with a weapon. I'm just not the violent type. When I determined it was the wrong guy, I was apologetic, after all. The cop said the guy was crazy drunk and likely won't even remember anything the next day. I haven't heard anything about it since.
It's a bit funny, when the wife called the police as she followed me outside from a distance from the next street, the cops could hear me shouting at the guy I was chasing. "Don't you guys go outside, ma'am," they said. "We're kind of past that now!" she replied. So the cops got there sooner. Really, I just wanted to corner the guy until the police showed up, but the actual would-be robber got away. Though I doubt he'll be around our parts again anytime soon.
Since then we got a security light for the backyard with a motion sensor, where we can see areas at night we couldn't before, including my mom-in-law's property.
This is quite out of character for me, but not unreasonable considering the stress I was through earlier. I'm most certainly not the fighting, rough 'em up type, at least until you threaten my loved ones. I think most guys are the same way. What bothers me is that this wannabe thief was caught on security camera footage in a clear image across the street from us, and the police didn't show any interest in following up on it. And they wonder why there's vigilantism. I'll go full-on vigilante if there's no police interest and someone's threatening my sweet wife or dear mother in law.
Thing is, if I'm threatened myself, I don't feel the same sense of urgency to defend. Almost like I deserve it. Thus, the self-harm. If someone wants to hurt me, I more or less subconsciously welcome it. It's something I don't know how to fix. This whole 'you have to learn to love yourself thing', at least with me, is nonsense. I don't understand the concept of it.
But one thing's for sure, my wife loves me unconditionally. And that's the kind of love that comes along perhaps once in a lifetime. I have in a very real sense won the lottery in that regard. Crazy thing is, she would say the same about me. I wish everyone could have that.
As the summer winds down to a close, I thank you for reading this humble blog once again, if you've given your time to do so. It means a lot.
God bless.
