Dark Days And Silver Linings by Casey

Fall is in full swing, in fact it may have already swung by us this past weekend.  Nonetheless, I often find myself a little unnerved at least once or twice during the fall.  While having a fall wedding anniversary, a wife with a fall birthday, and some cool fall holidays help a lot, there are a lot of bad things that have happened in the fall.

Fall of last year I had a stroke.  This fall we almost lost Barney.  Every cloud does have a silver lining, I suppose; last fall was also when I began a pretty successful road to recovery, and this fall is the fall in which Barney got better, and didn’t die.

I think my life right now is a silver lining to another bad fall.  The fall of 2007.

In the fall of 2006, I finally moved out of my parents’ house into our current residence (but before I knew Jenn).  I say “finally”, because I turned 28 that summer, but that’s probably another topic for another post.  The point is, I had spent 28 years in a house with at least two other people.  Living alone made me feel good, and grown up, and independant, but it also got very lonely all of a sudden.

I really didn’t have any close friends, and my family isn’t too much for visiting these days, although I did spend some time with my sister and her husband.  But having your sister and brother-in-law as your only friends gets kind of old after awhile.

In January of 2007, I finally decided to lose weight.  I made the choice due to the fact that I was getting older (pushing thirty, yikes!) and I felt maybe it was time to live like a normal, active adult, and not like a lazy, gluttonous, lonely nerd.

The whole weight loss thing has been talked about before in our posts, so I won’t go into a ton of detail.  By March, with my exercise routine in full swing, I decided to admit that there was another missing component to my life besides my health.  I needed a social life, and a girlfriend.

I had never had a girlfriend before (honest), and didn’t really know how to go about it.  I had confided in a coworker, who had helped me get the weight loss ball rolling.  She suggested a dating website, so I tried match.com for a month and got no interest from anybody.  I cancelled my account and kind of put the on-line dating site idea on hold for awhile.

But by late summer/early fall of 2007, I started feeling defeated.  I had lost somewhere in the 70-80 pound range, but I wasn’t really feeling that much better, and I wasn’t any less lonely.  Work was my only life; I was using the gym we have at the office on a daily basis, so I was spending almost all my waking hours during the week at work.  I found myself confiding in my coworker friend more than ever.  My loneliness and frustration with life manifested into anger at stupid things.  I didn’t get invited to some day-long seminar and I rode the elliptical so hard during lunch that I thought I was going to break it.  Ever see one of those go 12 mph?  It makes some noise.

I started getting annoyed at a lot of my coworkers which manifested into me talking badly about them behind their back to my confidant.  I even dropped a “C bomb” about one of them once.  Luckily my confidant told that coworker that I was frustrated with them (not using my exact words, luckily) and I was able to apologize, as did they for the minor incident that set me off (as I recall, this person stepped in and interrupted a conversion once or twice).  I’m still not a big fan of this person, but I regret what I did and I’m glad I was able to get things squared away with them.

As the weeks passed, my anger and despair continued.  I skipped the office Halloween party and sat out in my car with my Darth Vader helmet and cried instead.  I continued to feel like I didn’t belong at the office, in fact I felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere.  I started voicing these sad feelings to my office confidant which turned into 30 minute-plus crying sessions at her desk.  I was hiding in empty conference rooms crying at random times during each day.

It got to the point that my confidant politely told me to “keep it professional” and stop coming to her with my personal problems.  This really made me sad, as I felt that our talks were my only emotional outlet (not that it was helping, looking back).  I am embarrassed by this now.  I broke some professional boundaries.

I was so sad over this, that I cried all evening.  I believe it was a Wednesday night.  I skipped supper and just sat in my room with the TV on and cried.  I felt like my life was a prison of loneliness and depair.

The day after Thanksgiving I woke up after having a dream.  I forget what the dream was, but I think it had something to do with me feeling left out at work.  When I woke up, the idea hit me.  Maybe I should just give up on it all and kill myself.

I looked on-line, and actually found a “pro-suicide” website.  It’s pretty disturbing what kind of crap is on the web.  I thought a little bit about how to do it…I decided to overdose on Tylenol or aspirin or whatever over-the-counter pain meds I used to keep in the house back then, but I never attempted it (I don’t even know if this would work).  In fact I mentioned this to my confidant, who naturally kind of freaked out.  She made me promise that if I was about to do something that I would talk to somebody first.  She kept telling me “Remember your promise.”  She even had me called in with her to our top supervisor’s office so he could apologize if I was feeling left out, and to tell me how well I was doing.

The confidant ended up suggesting a therapist she knew of, and I started seeing him.  I began to improve right off.

At some point over the fall I had found a free dating website called okcupid.com and had decided to give that a shot, although maybe a little half-heartedly.  The weekend of Thanksgiving, when I was at my worst, I got an e-mail from a girl in Westbrook named Jenn.  It all started going uphill from there.

Would I have done it?  I’d like to think I wouldn’t have, and that I have a will to survive that got me talking to someone.  A lot of it is kind of hazy, but looking back now, I must have recieved Jenn’s e-mail before telling anyone, so maybe that inspired me.

Up until now I’ve only told my confidant (who I am keeping nameless, probably obvious by now), my old therapist, Jenn (after 5 months of dating), Sandy, and Stacey (at some point more recently) about any of this.  I mainly kept it secret from my family, so they my parents wouldn’t blame themselves for any of this.  This was just a bad situation, and had nothing to do with them being supportive of my moving out, or upbringing, or anything like that.

That’s probably the hardest blog post I’ll ever write, and it’s one I’ve been putting off for months.  I hope for the next one to be a lot more cheery.