Cliff notes

Been almost a month since I posted here.  

It's been over three months since I had my last unmanageable anxiety attack.  That's quite a roll for me.  Ever since the day I found out I was approved for disability, a lot changed.  The stress on me over not being a provider of any sort was weighing on me pretty heavily, and although the payments are only half of what I was earning when I was working, at least it's something.  

Still, I'm left with that lingering feeling that I shouldn't be on it.  Why?  Why can't I just be happy and thankful that I live in a country that supports people like me who run into this type of situation - in this case, hard-to-manage anxiety brought on by multiple physical and mental trauma?  I get this feeling in my craw that I should be working.  I want to be working.  

But I have to stop and think about exactly what I would be doing.  Retail work is a no-go for me for good now.  Although that last ten years of work wasn't directly retail, as I was a receiver, I still took a lot of flak from store traffic, which I've learned I have a hard time deflecting.  Also, recognition is kind of important to me where I like to actually work hard.  It sounds very silly and petty - but there was an 'employee of the month' thing at work, where fellow employees and management nominate a co-worker for going above and beyond, as it were.  In those ten years I was nominated a total of three times; once because I literally asked for it!  That seems sad, reading it back.  So then, it makes me question whether I was a good worker at all.  Then doubt sets in, self criticism, then anxiety, then.... ugly things happen.

In short, I would need to work a job where my efforts are noticed and that I enjoyed with low stress levels.  That eliminates pretty much everything.  My last long-tenured job was delivering for BJ's Catering, a sandwich shop founded by the family of my very first boss, Donnie Goguen.  That man was one of my life's biggest mentors.  I still find myself asking sometimes, what would Donnie do?  He shaped me into being the committed worker I became.  But once he left BJ's, a series of unfortunate events befell the shop, not the least of which included a fire, and I had to leave when things got a little too hairy.  Not long after I left, the shop was sold to a third owner.  I wound up leaving to work at a drug store chain as receiver at three different stores covering a period of nearly 13 years.  Things changed a lot there when a giant corporation swallowed up the store chain and the employees got treated worse and worse.  When my manager of ten years left, not long afterward, so did I.  As did everyone who worked for him.  He was much like Donnie was, but had less control over situations where Donnie was the actual business owner.

Of course, I left because I nearly severely injured myself in a major anxiety attack, and Janice took steps to get me out of that job once and for all.  I did send in a letter of resignation, but couldn't go to the store to deliver it personally because of... well, anxiety.  I thanked my employer, but received no thanks in return, no card, no nothing; when I know everyone else who leaves gets some kind of fanfare.  So not getting any recognition whatsoever hurt a lot.  I haven't even heard from anyone there at all.  

So, I have to be careful not to subject myself to a work environment that toxic again.  Thing is, the last number of jobs I've had were that way.  My anxiety ramps up and I lose control.  Medication helps, but it's not a cure-all, because what's going on with me is different from others with anxiety and depression.  Unless there's some other group of us out there that got cranked in the head as often and violently as I did and had the same circumstances during the pre-awareness era for concussions.  I've seen counselors.  They offer little to no help.  The last one I had was a fucking joke.  That was $400 not well wasted.  

These days now, I sleep fairly well, although lately my tremors during the night are creeping back in, along with the bad dreams and nightmares.  I dream a lot about getting in trouble at work, or the wife leaving me, or just being alone in very spacious, dark places.  I never thought I would retire, but this is not how I would have envisioned it.  I guess I just have to find a way to accept it, unless something comes along that I can actually handle working at without going off the deep end.

All that said, I'll just have to try to enjoy summer for once.  Last summer I was off, too, not working, but I was miserable.  Everything was uncertain and hanging in the air; but the doctor insisted disability was necessary.  Janice did too. This summer, maybe I should just make the effort to take life in, rather than buck it back like I've been doing most of the past year.

At the house here, things are finally getting done.  It's a little bit exciting.  Our bathroom's plumbing issues just might be fixed once and for all.  Next week we've got a drywall outfit coming in to begin replacing some of the walls that needed attention since we were first here in '98.  We won't be able to afford to do everything, but at least things are moving now.  

I've been in a funk playing my drums for a while now, so I need to get back on that.  Essentially, I'm just playing by myself - with some nifty Beats headphones, so it's kind of fun, but I need to get back into the right headspace, I guess.  It certainly appears my jamming or live playing days are over.  There was this time in the 90s when I guested as the drummer for a guy I know that played on Main Street sometimes.  He told me to come jam with them, I said 'what songs do you play?'  Ah, just come jam, you'll know them!  Well, that was an unmitigated nightmare.  The songs were like old Neil Young and America kind of stuff, or CCR or what have you, which is all well and good... but I didn't know them at all.  The guitar guy had me speeding up and slowing down mid-song as I just played generic beats to this music as best I could without knowing the cues or punch notes or anything.  At that point I'd made up my mind that I wouldn't play live again, EVER.

Then YQM happened.  We made a CD release and did one gig and it was over.  A series of events happened after that which soured me on the scene altogether, including actually putting an ad on Kijiji to play with somebody, and it appears I'm probably too old or something.  Or not that good.  I certainly don't feel like I play too great, anyway.  Still, I've got a new-to-me drumkit that I have to use.  It's good exercise anyway, the way I play.  My audience are the spiders or mice or whatever's checking me out in the basement.  In short, drums were a passion I had that's faded to just a long lost love.  They say follow your dreams.  I can't follow mine off a cliff or anything.

Then there's the gym.  We've been very faithful going there for the last number of months now.  That makes me feel pretty good, doing a two hour workout every other day and going home and showering and having supper.  By no means whatsoever am I "built" or "sculpted" or something.  All I know is I feel good and my heart rate is nice and low, and as long as I stay in the 185 pound range, I'm good with it.  Even more importantly, the wife is doing great with the gym herself.  She's become scary strong, which is good, because her job requires a fair amount of exertion.  When you consider she used to be near 260 lbs, and today she's hovering around the high 180's, that's progress.  Her health is a priority of mine.

Something else I did a few weeks ago is get my Irish Catholic Cross tattoo, right smack dab in the middle of my breastbone.  I guess I didn't think it through.  I was laying on the table while my lovely tattoo artist did her work, which took upwards of three hours, perfectly still and quiet.  On the outside.  The inside was a different story.  I pressed my finger and thumb so fiercely together in my pants pockets that I think they traded fingerprints.  I clenched my jaw so tight that I'm pretty sure I don't have any more receding gums.  And in my head I was speaking in tongues.  "SON OF A MOTHER ****!!  HOW MUCH LONGER??  ************!!!!!"  I was amused to find out when she was done, she proclaimed "you did really, really good, that's one of the most sensitive areas to get work done!"  Well, honey, if my brain was hooked up to a speaker, there wouldn't be enough swear jars in town to collect for the colorful words I was coming up with!  Alas, in the end, it's a lovely tattoo and I'm quite proud of it.  It reflects my faith and Irish heritage.

For those of you that keep tabs on me somewhat, that's a basic update of what's goin' on.  I know it's a fairly uneventful post here, but sometimes no news is good news, eh?  Here's hoping the next time I provide an update, it won't be about some anxiety attack I had that I couldn't stave off.  

I appreciate your kindness to read this humble blog post.  

Take good care, my friends.

Our Everything

 Back in April of 1996, Alexandra Spring Cook was born.  What a glorious day.

I never thought prior to finding out when Janice was pregnant that I would ever be a dad.  As it turned out, I feel like I haven't been a very good one, but I take solace in hearing otherwise from Janice and Lexy both.  Sometimes I'll even hear it from someone else, albeit rarely; but this is about Mother's Day.

Janice is more than just a wife or the mother of my child to me.  She's my earthbound saviour.  I say repeatedly to anyone who will listen that I exist because she came into my life.  It's a bit eerie when I think about it.  In the mid 80s when I started working at Green Gables store, not long afterwards this tomboyish girl came into my work hobbling on crutches with the biggest smile and charm that electrified the air.  We hit it off immediately, at least in a friendship capacity.  That would continue to evolve and grow as she wound up with a job at that same store, and later inherited managing it.  I left to try to find 'greener pastures', and landed employment at the Irving Tissue plant.  What a time in life that was.  I broke my foot and lost my job, lost my girlfriend, lost the house I lived in all my life up to then, lost all my friends, my own mom was diagnosed with dementia, was on the outs with family... it was utterly hopeless.  Rock bottom.

But after I lost my job at Irving Tissue, Janice had been running another Green Gables store, and I offered to work for her.  That meant going back to working midnight shifts, which is what I did at the first store I worked at for seven years.  It's not the kind of thing you'd recommend to someone with mental illness, but I hadn't been diagnosed with that yet.  I'd been mentally ill since 12, though, in retrospect, and it just worsened through time.  Janice took me in to work for her, and since we'd been good friends all along, we got closer, and eventually got together by '92.  That turned out to be the biggest game changer in my life.

Mental illness had been getting the better of me as time wore on.  I'd be self-harming, inflicting God knows how many head injuries upon myself, and just exhibiting irrational and erratic behaviour.  My judgement was way, way off.  I'd say and do things that would strike people as odd, to say the least.  Janice was there through all of it, and was unwavering in her support of me.  You'd have better luck lifting an anvil with a feather than you would taking Janice away.  She was and is stalwart, and nothing would change it.

We had to leave Green Gables once it was bought by Sobeys and changed to 'Needs', through a series of highly unfortunate events.  Her prized Sunfire car spontaneously caught fire, and insurance didn't have her back and the dealership wouldn't own up to it.  Things added up and she had to declare bankruptcy just to survive.  That meant the two of us living in the cheapest place possible and looking for new jobs.  She worked at a number of places, many of which screwed her over for the dumbest reasons.  I couldn't find work at all.  I cleaned buildings for a short time before I'd had enough of that and went back to a computer college for $5000, which got me not a minute of employment when I was done.  Then Janice got pregnant.  

The night before we were to discover she was, I laid in our bed saying "I CAN'T be a father.  I don't want to be a father!"  Then she got her pregnancy test back, and started crying out of dismay, perhaps feeling I wouldn't stick around.  The moment I saw those tears, I knew I had to man-up and get my shit together, and accept this oncoming reality.  "It'll be okay!" I told her as tears streamed down her face and we held one another.  She supported me through all those years.  It was my turn now.  

She would go to work at Vito's restaurant pregnant, half the time ready to hurl from morning sickness with the smell of food cooking in the air in the early mornings.  It was so hard for her.  She eventually got a job working at Plaza Bowl, a ten-pin bowling alley that just went up in Moncton's north end.  She was able to get me in there, too, only to see me get canned because I was looking for other work.  Long story short on that subject, she got a job at Loblaw's Superstore eventually which led to her getting screwed there too, and went to Shoppers Drug Mart.  As fate would have it, Loblaws went and bought out Shoppers Drug Mart.

However, Alexandra came to us in the thick of things, just after I'd gotten the best job of my life with BJ's Subs as a driver, where I was for eleven years.  We rarely needed a babysitter, because my boss was kind enough to let me cart our kid around on the job.  Alexandra was such a happy little kid!  The three of us were always together.  We never took vacations away from her, and always insisted she be with us.  We were a tight little family that did everything together.

But Janice was and is the rock of the family.  She was there when Alexandra fell out of a tree and broke her arm, and coached her to stay conscious.  Lexy wound up with a blood infection that would sideline her in the hospital for weeks with multiple surgeries, and Janice and me did 'shifts' at the hospital to be sure she'd never be alone.  When crucial bloodwork was needed to assess her condition at the French hospital from the city hospital, the city hospital misplaced it, and Janice became a human flamethrower.  She grilled the staff there relentlessly to find it, which they did, but they wouldn't have if she hadn't been so relentlessly forceful about it. That very act saved Alexandra's life, because that was the bloodwork that determined the infection that could have taken our daughter from us.  Lexy wound up with a pic line for weeks to absolve her of the infection she likely inherited from a bumbling doctor during one of the surgeries.  They attributed the infection to dirt that got in the wound when she got injured, which reeks of bullshit to us.  Ultimately, Janice the Rock saved the day, and another life, again.

Today, Janice works at the postal outlet of Shoppers, and has Alexandra as her right-hand employee, and trained her to be capable of anything she does; she would even claim Alexandra does it better.  Whenever Lexy has trouble in her independent life away from us living with her boyfriend, she would consult with her mom, and Janice would settle her down and level things off.  Janice is to her rescue at any time she needs her, and even when Lexy doesn't think she needs help, Janice is there.

That is what a mother is, and should be.

I am honoured to call Janice my wife and the mother of my child.  She is the center of our universe.  Without Janice, I wouldn't be alive; and naturally, Alexandra wouldn't be here either.  

To anyone who's been enriched by the presence of either Lexy or myself, Janice is the one to thank for that.  She effectively changed the world for the better.

I wish my wonderful, beautiful wife a happy Mother's Day.  

You are the world to us, Janice.  

We love you.

We Can Work It Out

 No news is good news, they say sometimes.  That's the case when it comes to me posting here. 

Then it kind of dawned on me, all the times I've posted here recently, between here and that Withdrawal Diary I had, I really should update a bit when things are going good too.  It might not make for as entertaining a read or whatever, but I know there are a few that read these that actually care about me.  So I kind of owe them that.

It's April 8 in the wee hours of the morning, 4:37am to be exact.  My lovely wife is sound asleep beside me, and Marbles the cat is between us all curled up in his own dreamland.  And I'm here with MSNBC on after having watched Seth Myers' late night show not able to quite shut my eyes.  In these late hours I've been experiencing, I've grown to really like Myers' show.  A lot.  It's a breath of fresh air for the late night show genre.  He even had David Letterman on recently and graciously let Dave be Dave and charmed everyone with his wit and humor hearkening back to yesteryear when he was the king of late night.  If I didn't know better, I'd say he was kind of passing the torch.

March was quite a good month, really.  No real troubles to report.  Nothing out of the ordinary anyway, like exploding hemorrhoids or anything.  Since being on 50mg of Zoloft daily, after being off of it for quite a while, it feels like its effectiveness was kind of rebooted.  The trade off being that there's that numbing kind of effect, but my mood has leveled off very nicely over the last month.  I would say this is the best I've felt maybe in years.  

As my daughter's birthday approaches, so does the anniversary of my last day at work.  One year ago, I came home after a rough day/week/month/year, lost control and literally back-dropped myself from five feet in the air onto the hard floor.  On purpose.  I felt like I might have seriously injured myself.  Janice decided for me that I was going to be taken off work -- and much later, doctors and advisors semi-convinced me to go on permanent disability.  I say "semi", because I just don't see me not working again, but, I can now choose what work I want to do without any pressure.  I can actually pick a job I like.

But I'm wary of my mindset, and when I'm ready or not.  This week I got a bit of a wake-up call of sorts that I'm not quite ready.  Faced with stress or pressure that brings about triggers, I've found that I'm not 'there' yet.  There were two times in the last week where I was confronted with the urge to self-harm.  It's a very, very unsettling sensation that I can't quite put into words.  Suffice to say, my wife was with me both times, and helped me de-escalate.  Plus I was aware of what was happening and took steps to curtail the incoming dark clouds.

I spoke to a brother-in-law of mine that offered to help with a project for the house.  We chatted a bit on the phone, and he and my sister are friends with a cousin whose husband is a neurologist, who's privy to my brain injury history.  I found it extremely reassuring when he told me that this medical professional insisted that what I'm dealing with is not quite ordinary, or transient for that matter.  My in-law expressed his understanding of my situation and related that, with my sister, to others in the family, helping bring about an understanding about my issues.  This goes a long, long way with me, knowing that I actually have a neuro-surgeon to back up everything I've been saying all along.  I can never be rid of what this is that afflicts me, but I can control it, like a diabetic controls their disease with insulin. It also opened my eyes to the fact that I likely will be on some type of medication to keep it in check permanently.  Zoloft is a mighty weapon against this affliction, but it's not a silver bullet.  Thus, stressful situations like some work (I will say this... I'm completely done with retail!), I should be avoiding.  And I admittedly deal with a learning disability in conjunction with it all.  That's not to say I'm stupid.  But the water takes a little longer to seep into the soil, so to speak.  

I'll be testing my learning impairment with a couple of gadgets I have that I'll dig into soon.  I have this thing called a Tune-Bot, which is a little machine about the size of a guitar tuner that helps tune drums.  It's simple I think to the average person, but I'm actually an average simple person.  I should be able to get a handle on it if I persist enough, and watch my trigger points if I don't grab onto something about it.  That's basically a guarantee to happen.  The other gadget I have is a Fostex 8 track digital recorder I got second hand on the facebook marketplace.  That thing will be considerably more of a challenge that I'll be enlisting help with, but I want to study the owner's manual for it first.  My music hobby is just that, a hobby.  I have no illusions of grandeur about becoming a 'recording artist'; hell, I can't even find a band to play in.  But wow, does my creative motor get running when I'm on that Utopia oil.  Then of course I forget my ideas when I sleep and then wake up.  Hence the Fostex.  Still, like a drawer or painter does artwork for themselves, I'll do this for myself.  It's kind of a therapy.

Something else that's been helping is going to the gym.  The wife and me go pretty much every other day, sometimes more, and we train for 2 to 2 1/2 hours.  We start with 20 minutes of cardio, then we'll do what we call CHARMS, SHACK or LABS day.  Or chest and arms, shoulders and back, legs and abs.We work one of those groups each workout.  One week, we'll do freeweights, the next we use machines, and alternate.  Each cycle, the first would be high reps and less weight; the next cycle would be lower reps with higher weights, or drop sets.  It's been very effective for both of us.  Neither one of us are body building or anything, either.  This is for our health and for fun.  Both of us are out to impress each other and that's it.  I do know that for a couple of folks like us, there aren't a lot in our age group that go as hard as we do.  And Lord, I've built my own She Hulk in my wife.  She purely means business when she's in the gym.  

That's all there is for now, I think.  Might do a Random Thoughts thing over on the other page.  Thanks for coming by, I appreciate you doing so.