Got To Choose

My parents made sure I knew I could do almost anything anyone else could do as I was growing up. I love them for that. While I never played organized sports, backyard football games with the neighborhood kids were a staple of the first ten years of my life, and I never felt like I didn’t belong.

I carried that confidence through most of my life and part of that confidence is what led me to believe that I could forge my own way and live completely independently, in a city far from home.

As a friend put it the other day, “Living alone is killing you.” And now my confidence is completely shot.

So, after agonizing for months, and at times seeing no way out, I have decided, for the sake of my health and my sanity, to leave Atlanta and return to Richmond.

I really hate that it has come to this, and at the moment I feel like a complete failure. The last seven months (dating back to when I left my job in July) have cost me so much, and now that this ‘experiment’ is ending, I realize that I haven’t solved anything; the exact same questions that I thought were being answered by moving to Atlanta will have be answered at some point down the road.

For now though, I just want to shake this depression and conquer this leg and stomach pain. It's no lie when I say that every hour is a fight to find something positive to hang on to. I’m not sure where I am going to live, I’m not sure what kind of job I will be able to land, and I am not sure how I will get around Richmond. Like I said in a previous blog entry, Richmond, the city, holds very little for me, but it’s the best option now because that’s where my family is and where some very important friends are.

Even though I feel like a total failure because this didn’t work out at all like I planned, I know that the support of family and friends is what I need now if I ever hope to get out of this spiral.

I want to thank my friends in Atlanta, especially Wendy and her family and Vickie and her boyfriend Travis. They have been nothing but fantastic to me since I had an Atlanta zip code on my picture ID card. They have been very supportive, and I love them for it. (As an aside to my Atlanta friends, if you would like to donate some boxes, I would gladly accept).

I want to thank my mom for coordinating my return with the help of her sister and brother in-law. The next few weeks for me are going to be nomadic and hectic as I try and find somewhere new to call home.

I am devastated that my plan for independence didn’t work out, and it hurts that, at the moment, my feelings toward Atlanta are a bit soured. The Braves’ first Spring Training game is in less than two weeks, but at the moment, I could care less about the baseball season. That may change once the games start to count in April, but right now, I don’t see it. That saddens me deeply.

Things I have learned over the last two months:

1)   I don’t own many solo albums by the members of The Beatles, but the one must own record was not recorded by Lennon or McCartney, that mantle belongs to George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass.’ The three-record set has been on my iPod consistently since Christmas and, some of those songs are as close as I will get to singing songs about religion. Even in the depths of my sadness, the songs on this set have offered solace and at times peace. I've owned the record since the mid-1980s, but it wasn't until recently that it fully resonated with me. If you don’t already own it, you should.

2)   Jackie Gleason as Sherriff Buford T. Justice in ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ and clips of an intoxicated Ace Frehley circa 1979-80 will always make me laugh, no matter how sad I am.

3)   At some point over the last 20 years, Apple Jacks cereal added green circles to the orange ones. Who knew?

I’d like to thank Rob H. for his blog, ‘Robster’s Place.’ His last entry from February 3^rd really hit home. Parts of it could have been written by me I identified with it so much. I tried for two days to formulate a reply on his blog page but never mustered up anything I was happy with, so I want to say here that your writing helped me a great deal and it meant a lot. Thank you for being so honest.

I will be back in Richmond soon, and eventually I hope to not feel like a completely broken (and broke) failure. Once I am feeling a ‘bit more like myself’, I’ll look forward to seeing those of you I haven’t seen in a long time. My immediate future will be spent extricating myself from contracts (my lease, Comcast, Georgia Power and, not to mention my employer) and trying to muster up enough energy to move yet again, for the third time in fifteen months.

I really wish things had turned out differently. This one's going to take a long time to get over.

As always, thank you for reading,

Barry

Ping Pong Balls

Almost two weeks ago now, I posted a blog entry. First, I would like to thank you for the comments, the texts, the emails, the phone calls and care packages that I received in the wake of sharing my pain.

Your show of support meant (and continues to mean) more than you will ever know, or that I will ever be able to fully express.

This is where I'm supposed to tell you I'm all better and the dark thoughts have left my head and I'm happy and healthy.

Oh, how I wish I could. But, even after writing it all down, I'm not past it.

Every day is a fight. Every day it's a struggle to find a glimmer of motivation to get up, start a day, commute to a job that, while I can do it well, I'm not very excited by.

These are some of the questions I wrestle with every hour of every day... questions that I wish I had an answer for:

*If I break my lease, how much money will that cost me, and would it damage my ability to be a renter in the future?

*If I left my job without giving the usual two week's notice, would it mark me as 'not hirable' among staffing agencies?

*If I moved back to Virginia, how would I get from point A to point B?

*If I moved back to Virginia, where would I live?

*If I moved back to Virginia, and am unable to find a job, how do I pay for food etc.?

*Will the pain ever stop?

*If I move back to Virginia, does that mean leaving my job in July, and the last six months mean absolutely nothing? Can I live with that?

*I don't have anyone who depends on me, not a girlfriend, not even a pet...so would anyone really notice if I decided one day to go to sleep and not wake up?

*Has anyone else ever felt like this, where they have absolutely nothing to look forward to in their daily life, be it a workday or a weekend? I feel like I'm emotionally flat-lined, if that makes sense.

Those questions, and others, are bouncing around my head constantly. It's exhausting.

Wednesday last week, I couldn't go to work because my left leg was too swollen to fit in my leg brace. I spent the day with both legs elevated and did a lot of thinking and, if I am honest, crying. On that day, and every day since then, I have come to the internal realization that 'this', whatever 'this' is, isn't working, and I need to change something. Does that change mean leaving Atlanta and coming back to Virginia? I don't know, because, as several questions note above, there are answers I need before I pull the plug on this 'Atlanta Experiment.'

All I really know on a daily basis is that I am unhappy, terribly unhappy and have been unhappy since early December. I guess early December is when the daily barrage of pain started too, so, when you think about it, I have been taking way too much Advil for over a month.

I take Advil to combat the leg pain, then that causes severe stomach pain, so I stop the Advil for a bit...then the keg pain starts back up, so I take more Advil...it's a vicious circle, one that I've been on since I started my job, and Advil, for all the damage that it may do, is the only way I'm able to make it to work. Tylenol and aspirin have never helped with pain for me. If either did, I would try one to save my stomach.

I have faced battles my entire life, and almost every other obstacle I've conquered. This time it feels different, like I've suffered a knockout punch.

After being SO CERTAIN about moving to Atlanta, and having it turn into...this, I'm not certain of anything. I know I need to take a step, but I don't know what that step is, or where I'm stepping toward.

Something needs to change. I'm tired of this fight. I'm tired of sleeping away entire weekends...and I still want the pain to end.


Thank you for reading. The phrase I've heard from friends is "Things will get better..."

God, I sure hope so.

Barry
01.21.13

Deep Dark Truthful Blog

This will not be easy to write, and for some, it may not be easy to read. I owe (finally) writing this entry to my friend Rob H. He has a great blog called “Robster’s Place” and his entry on Saturday January 5 reminded me why I began writing this blog in the first place: To share stories, to share my opinions, but above all to be honest; sometimes brutally so.

If I am honest, I must tell you I tried to write this on January 1^st, then again on January 4, then again on January 6…each time hitting the ‘Delete’ button.

Then I re-read Rob’s latest post again, and figured, if he could share something so personal and scary, then I could too.

Biggest change since I last wrote here in November, at least on the surface, is that I now am employed by another well-known insurance company as a Help Desk Analyst. I am grateful for the job, and it is something that could turn out to be a great thing.

What I’ve learned since I began this job in mid-December is:

1) There is only one Frank Creasy and I will never have another boss as cool as him, period. (I already knew that years ago, but it was driven home to me in stark reality my first week on the new job.)

2) It seems saying ‘You’re Welcome’ when someone says ‘Thank you’ is a dying art. Almost everyone -- and I am not exaggerating when I say EVERYONE -- on this Help Desk responds ‘No problem’ when someone says ‘Thank you.’ I am also not exaggerating when I say that it is driving me crazy to hear ‘No problem’ all day long. This week I started taking calls using someone else’s accesses. (Confidential to my Anthem Help Desk Training Friends: Four weeks in, and most of my accesses to do my job are still hosed or not yet available; makes Anthem and the recently decommissioned Request IT look like a well- oiled machine!) On the phone, I am doing my part to bring back ‘Thank You’ to this Help Desk.

I also learned that, as far as ‘soft skills’ go on the phone (courteous customer service, attention to detail in documentation, and just basically ‘listening’), I can do that in my sleep. And, recently, I almost have.

You see, this job, as grateful as I am for it, has a rather long exhausting commute. For the first three weeks of the job, I worked 8am-5pm, which meant I was up at 5:30am, out the door by 6:40am and commuting to work via train and shuttle bus. Some days I got to work in an hour, other days it was a 90 minute commute. The one thing that won’t change with this commute is the walking. Now, don’t misunderstand, I fully get that any job I have in Atlanta will require walking and commuting. I just didn’t expect to walk into work exhausted. The evening commute has run about 70-90 minutes each day, and now that I have moved to my normal shift of 9am-6pm, I sometimes don’t get home until 7:30, again exhausted. Trust me, the last thing I feel like doing on those nights is cooking a meal so I can take a lunch. Several nights this week, I have gotten home, collapsed in a chair, taken off my braces, fixed a peanut butter sandwich, eaten that sandwich and then gone right to bed, calling It a night without turning on the television, and before 8pm.

Something is happening this week that has caused scar tissue I have on my legs, stomach and chest (and all of that scar tissue is at least 15 years old, some of it 34 years old) to turn a bright red and become very painful to the touch. It’s like the scar tissue is fresh, making each step, each knee bend excruciating and almost painful enough to make me cry. So I already know that I am taking too much Advil, and come mid-afternoon, I am tired and, at least I feel like I am on auto-pilot. It’s not fun, and I know it’s not healthy long term.

But, like Arlo Guthrie said, ‘That’s not what I came to tell you about.’

When I went back to Richmond for Thanksgiving, I already knew that I wasn’t going to be able to afford a return trip for Christmas. That reality, even though I had about a month to prepare for it, hit me like a truck. In mid-December, I deactivated my Facebook account just because it hurt to see all of the happy holiday photos and stories, when I knew that I was going to be spending Christmas Day far away from family. That day was very rough. I was despondent, crying at the drop of a hat, doing my best to sleep the entire day, just to get past it. That week, I went to work, gave the stock answer of ‘Fine’ when asked how my holiday was, and then every night that week, I went to bed as soon as I got home and I slept through the entire weekend.

I began to feel like I had hit a downward spiral. Doing the math with the anticipated paycheck, I realized I would never make enough at this job to pay all of my debts and eat. I also was in a lot of pain (I still am). And I just wanted to stop the pain. I wanted it all to end. I didn’t care about football. The Redskins made the playoffs, but on the night of their big playoff-clinching game against their rival the Dallas Cowboys, I was in bed before the 3^rd quarter was over, and, it will surprise those who know me, I truly didn’t give a damn about the outcome. I (still) don’t see any joy in the next baseball season, mainly because I know I won’t be able to afford tickets, and what’s the point of being in Atlanta when you can’t go to the game?

Rational thought was gone. I just wanted the pain to stop, and I guess it all came to a head on New Year’s Eve.

That night, I was very suicidal.

I got home and I had a full bottle (160 caplets) of Advil and a full bottle (30 pills) of over-the-counter sleeping pills. I figured I would very methodically take the pills with a soda and then sleep.

I fought those urges for hours. I cried. I intentionally turned off my phone; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was in my bedroom holding the bottle of Advil, trying to find a way out. I know I took about 12 Advil, and then I stopped, turned off the lamp on my night table and slept. I am not sure why I stopped. The bottle of sleeping pills is still in my room, and it’s still unopened.

The pain hasn’t stopped, and I have felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that I haven’t been able to shake. I’ve thought about breaking my lease and coming back to Richmond to live (in fact my mom had an ‘escape plan’ that she called me with on New Year’s Day. Obviously, she knew I was in trouble but she did not know how dark things had gotten for me the night before), but I don’t want to go from being depressed and broke in Atlanta to being depressed and broke in Richmond.

Again, I have to be honest, there are still days where I wonder ‘What’s the point?’ and I think about opening that bottle of sleeping pills. I’m in the city where (I thought?) I wanted to live, I finally have a job, and yet I am terribly unhappy all the time, and it feels like I’ll never be happy here, in this city that I used to love so much.

I am hopeful that things will get easier, that my legs will stop hurting. I have no doubt I can do my job well, if my body doesn’t give out completely. I feel like I am on a see-saw and things could go either way…up or down. In many ways I am a different person than I was a year ago. Case in point: Lady GaGa, Pink and Taylor [Swift, for the three people who may read this and not know who I’m talking about] all have shows set for this spring in Atlanta, and I don’t have tickets to any of them. While I am somewhat bummed about not having Taylor tickets, I am not that broken up about it. In fact the first show I’ve heard about that got me somewhat excited is Leonard Cohen at the Fox Theatre in March. Hopefully tickets aren’t too expensive and I can afford one.

Why am I writing this? Because I thought maybe if I wrote this all down, it would help me to ‘get past’ it. I’ve shared parts of the past few weeks with a few friends, so I must thank Mimi, Beth and Shannon for listening to me when I was at my lowest (and when I probably came off sounding like a bore). And special thanks to Wendy D., who got me out of the apartment a few times recently when I needed it (though I didn’t ever let on how depressed I felt).

I know I am not out of ‘the emotional woods’ yet, especially if my knees hurt like crazy when the alarm sounds tomorrow. I’ll do what I can to cope with the pain.

I just hope that at some point, life becomes more than just ‘coping.’

Thanks for reading,

Barry

[Bonus points if you know what is referenced in the title of this entry]