I Was Not Always Like This

I was not always like this.  Fired up, relentless, ruthlessly optimistic, working sixteen hour days and dealing with the type of stress that would give most people a heart attack.  Courts entering injunctions.  Clients calling me on my cell phone in a panic at midnight because they're doing 600k of revenue a month and that's about to get shut down. Judges screaming at me to produce a bunch of documents immediately when that's impossible and most of them are HIPPA protected. A hearing tomorrow on zero notice. It's a mad world.  

Lots of days, I wake up at 4:00am, no alarm.  I just wake up.  My mind starts going and at that point I can't go back to sleep.  So I just get up and attack the day.  I feel fine.  I feel better than fine.  I feel amazing.  But I was not always like this.

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, after my sophomore year at Cornell, I dropped out of college. I was too broke to stay in school.  And my family back in Pennsylvania was a mess.  I wasn't going home.  I'd just wind up fighting with my old man as usual.  And I wasn't staying in Ithaca.  It was always so dark and so grey, I felt it killing me.  

I moved to San Diego.  I was maybe 20.  I rented a room in a crappy house in Rio Vista, down the hill from USD.  I started looking for a job, a decent job, but nobody took me seriously.  I wound up working temp labor through Labor Ready.  I was doing back-breaking manual labor for like $6 an hour.  Here I was, honor roll at Cornell, working temporary construction jobs with a bunch of junkies and barely surviving.  

Things went south in a hurry.  I ran out of what little money I had and couldn't make ends meet. I left San Diego in the beat up Plymouth Reliant station wagon that I had purchased from an old lady out in Chula Vista. Everything I owned was in the back.  I meandered east, heading back toward home.  I slept in my car and occasionally a cheap motel. My car broke down in Oklahoma.  I was there for a few days.  A kind man who owned the motel actually drove me up the street to O'Reily Brothers so I could buy a new alternator, chipped in $50 bucks for it because I was so broke, went back to the motel parking lot with me and installed it himself.  

I left Oklahoma and kept on going.  I drove slow.  I wound up and down.  I didn't want to go back home, but I had nowhere else to go.  Eventually, I made it back to Pennsylvania just before winter.  All hell broke loose on Christmas morning of 2001.  In my family lore, that day is referred to as the Christmas War. There was a big blow-up involving me, my dad and my then 13 year old brother. 

The cops showed up. We got my dad out of the house and got my mom a protective order.  It's a good thing the cops took him away, because I probably would have killed him myself. 

From there, it was hard going.  We were pretty poor.  My mom was working two jobs. I had a part-time job as a writer.  We shopped at the poor people grocery stores.  I fell into a deep depression and forgot how to sleep.  I didn't have health insurance.  I couldn't afford mediation.  I went to some health clinic that supposedly had a sliding scale and begged them to help me. They still wanted money and I didn't have enough.

A wonderful girl I knew started giving me her Wellbutrin.  I'm dead serious.  She'd get a big prescription filled, give it to me, then say she lost the entire bottle traveling.  She did that for a year.  She was so kind to me.  

At some point, I resolved that if I didn't get better; if I didn't come out of the darkness, that I would kill myself.  I was quite serious.  Because even though my early years had been rough, and I had been bruised and battered, I was always strong; I was always fierce; I could always fight my way through.  But after California, that all changed.  I couldn't stand and fight.  I had nothing left in me.  I was finished.    

I tried to get back into Cornell, but that was way before schools like that implemented better financial aid policies.  After begging them to help me get back into school, they agreed to give me more loans and let me come back in the fall.  I found a summer job that paid decent money.  

And I started contemplating this:  That I had dealt with the worst of it.  That maybe I could build myself back up.  Maybe I could get strong again or really strong for the first time. I would take it day-by-day.  And maybe the days would build. And sometime, way out in the future, after hundreds and perhaps thousands of days, I would look back, having climbed up the rough side of the mountain.  And I would be strong.  Since then, it has been more than 5,000 days. 

There is a line from Hemingway about how the world breaks everyone and how afterward many are strong again at the broken places.  I think that's what happened to me.  It's possible for any of us.  

JP