I find myself these days, posting a lot of encouraging words to friends who are going through rough times. Though it seems like I live a charmed life these days, it wasn’t always so and I want my friends to know that even during the darkest days, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
True, it may be a fairly long tunnel. It was for me in 2009. There was a point that year when I seriously thought about killing myself, with a shot to the head from my pirate doglock. I was in Florida at the time, my joke of a marriage was falling apart at the seams, and I came to realize that at that moment, there wasn’t anyone in the entire state who loved me. A very tragic, frightening place to be.
Here I was, 3,000 miles away from home. I was at a horrible dead end, not only personally but professionally as well, for the creativity gene is totally tied to the emotional senses. When you’re in the depths of despair on one level, you are creatively void on the other.
As a result, my business and I were both going through rough times. I was trapped in a house that I still owned but didn’t want, living a living room away from my ex, with no way out.
Small wonder I went through therapy for a bit, pondered suicide, wondered if I should just blow what little savings I had and do the walk of shame back home, or simply eek out an existence in a state that I had come to hate with every fiber of my being.
It was the worst place I had ever been in my life.
Oh, sure, I put up a good front for others. I don’t think any of my friends, or even my closest friends, knew I had almost taken myself out in April of that year. They really shouldn’t let depressed people have gunpowder and lead balls, at least when unsupervised.
So life hasn’t always been good. I hit rock bottom that year, going from bad to worse, finally bottoming out in December. There was really no place else to go but up from there.
I should have really come home at that point. I was so alone in Florida, so miserable, that coming home would have been a godsend, even if I did return with my tail tucked between my legs, doing that cross country walk of shame.
I didn’t though. I guess it was pride. I didn’t want to admit that I had made such a huge mistake, running off one day to Florida to be with a person I barely knew at the time, someone whom I would just a few short years later, come to loathe.
The road back was not a pleasant one by any stretch. Reading my morning pages today that I wrote back then, I can see how wounded I was, how I felt unloved and unloveable, how lost I had become. I told myself, in those blasts of brain dumps onto notebook pages (three pages – stream of conscience every morning), that I would be fine, but I wasn’t. I was a total mess.
I can’t really tell you which road I took to get out. Day by day, things got better, in part because I finally removed myself from a toxic situation that was highly addictive, though I didn’t know it at the time. Being with a narcissist can do that to you, turn you upside down and inside out without even knowing it.
Since I had given myself up in the process, finding me again was not easy. Some days I just wanted to give up. Others, I wanted to down a bottle or two of not-so-fine wine so I could stop thinking, at least for a while.
I admit that I did that more than a time or two. But it didn’t help. I paid dearly the next morning with a raging headache and was no farther along in putting a meaningful life together.
There were times when I took every wrong turn imaginable. Looking back, I can’t believe some of the things I did while I was in Florida, while I was trying to find north on my compass. I’m not really proud of a lot of it. I was really mean to some people, even hateful, largely because I hated who I had become and I hated where I was. I felt isolated, alone, worthless and listless.
I thank God that I finally came to my senses and figured out that one of the things that I needed to do was go back home. Strangely, my mother’s worsening health led me to that discovery. On my first trip back to visit her in rehab, I uncontrollably burst into tears when I saw the Space Needle.
That was in November 2011. A casual conversation with a West Seattle bartender set the final gears in motion. He asked where I lived and I said Florida, but that I was coming back home in April.
Speaking it into the universe turned it into action, apparently, for I returned home in April 2012. I had somehow landed a job with the state after a whirlwind series of flights back and forth and I took it with hardly a thought. It was the trigger I needed; the reason to move back.
If kids, mom and friends didn’t do it, a steady income, paid vacation and the peace that came with it after running a flailing, then failing business, did. I could return home not because I was such a failure, but because I had to take a new job.
It made all the difference in my life and today, well, I’m a pretty damned happy guy, with a wonderful wife, a good job, a nice house, my kids and most important, peace, security and most important, love, something I never found in Florida.
Still, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Florida. I imagine that I would still be living in the shadow of my choices down there, still trying to find a way out, going through the motions of daily life without any zest, zeal or pleasure
I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today, if I hadn’t taken that leap of faith and changed my address as well as my stars. It takes a lot of honesty to admit that your life is not what it is meant to be. But it takes courage, lots of it, to actually do something about it.
In the Emerald City, realizing that I am one luck son of a bitch,
– Robb