Episode For: A New Hope

So I came back here to the mouth of the river. To look at my own reflection under the moonlight, and see what it says for myself, where down my whole body it is written: “P.S. See me for who I am. We’ve got work to do.“

– Buddy Wakefield “Human the Death Dance”

*taps mic*

…is this thing on?

Yeah, I know the title has a misspelling. It’s intentional, you nerd.

Wow. So, uh, yeah. I guess it’s been a while, huh? And what a while it was. How radically different a world we live in than the one where I last spoke to you, my 2.84 readers. We all witnessed a shitshow of the most epic proportions with the turn of leadership in the country. We saw the world grind to a halt under a global pandemic. We have all changed.

There’s a lot to talk about, where I’ve been these past few years (SPOILER ALERT: hiding under a rock), what I’ve been doing, etc. And then more importantly to talk about where I’m going. So let’s jump in, shall we?

“You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here”

Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been a terrible narrator. I can’t even blame the pandemic. I stopped writing here long before that was a thing. At the time, I was going through a pretty rough breakup. I was struggling with my mental health. While I was seeing a therapist regularly, I was off my psych meds (more on that later). It took a long time for me to pull out of that. I had tried to remain friends with the ex in question, but that proved too difficult. She took me to lunch for my birthday in…2019? 2020? She told me that she would always love me. And I had to tell her that the only way for me to heal was to cut her completely out of my life. That was an incredibly difficult decision to make and to execute. She had told me then that she’d gotten me a gift for my birthday already but it had not been delivered yet and she still wanted to give it to me. A couple of days later, there was a plastic shopping bag hanging off of my apartment door with this inside of it.

She bought it for me before I excommunicated her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And a choice piece of irony that her last gift to me, bought before the meeting and delivered after it, embodied what had to be. Of course it didn’t strictly end there and I continued to punish myself for reasons that I can’t even make sense of in hindsight, before a dear friend of mine pointed out that my behaviors were more like an addict than the bearer of a broken heart. Which I needed to hear. That perspective really helped me to bring that chapter of my life to its finale.

And then the world closed.

The pandemic was…not good to me. Dutifully, I was vaccinated, boosted, and kept pretty strict adherence to social distancing rules. Maybe too good. I leaned into the curve a bit too hard there. My work had become remote. I had groceries delivered rather than put myself amongst the hoi polloi. I avoided people whenever I could, and was masked when I could not. But then I started avoiding people online too. I was becoming more and more reclusive, and isolation was having some weird and unfortunate effects on me. It got to a point where I was having mild panic episodes about the idea of being around other people. And so I stayed inside. And worse, it more or less undid all of the work that so many of the other posts in this clownshoes blog talk about. I’d put on weight. I’d started hiding myself more. This is not to say that the whole time I simply devolved into madness. I actually did end up meeting someone else through a very unlikely means, whom this post is indirectly dedicated to. Things ultimately did not work out, which is besides the point save to say that it brought me back here. But failing that, I was frequently alone with just my thoughts, which have historically never really been my friends. I felt more and more distant from the species, and this was a struggle for me to begin with. Even in relatively “good” times, I frequently felt like life was a movie being projected on a screen that I was standing in front of and trying to blend into. To anyone looking remotely closely, myself included, it was obvious that I did not belong. But this got worse. I got to a point where I felt like an astronaut drifting in space, and I was terrified to look behind me to see that I was no longer tethered to the shuttle, that all there was left was me and the vast, cold emptiness.

Therapy was having diminishing returns. I wasn’t talking to much of anyone. I was desperately lonely, isolation was actively damaging me. People would make plans with me, and I would secretly pray that something would force a cancelation, even though I needed that connectivity point for survival at that point. My therapist had recommended that I go back on my antidepressants. I’d been off of them for a number of years, citing the solid progress I was making in therapy. I didn’t feel like I needed them anymore. I certainly didn’t notice the glacial pace of my degradation, but the bigger issue was that I didn’t care. I had front row seats to my decline, and was utterly apathetic to it. With nothing left to lose, I went back on my antidepressants. A month later, things were making more sense. None of my problems had gone away, but my ability to process and deal with them had greatly improved. In fact, this last week was the best I’d felt in years. Better living through chemistry, indeed.

And then the bottom dropped out.

I’m not going to go into detail about specifically what happened to catalyze such a huge change, at least not yet, but I can tell you that the fallout was ugly. The past 3 days I have spent mostly crying. I normally have a very manly cry. Some balled up fists, a single dramatically stoic tear, sometimes even two, and some short panicked breaths before I regain my composure. Oh no, this was bad. Ugly crying. Screaming, wailing, gallons of snot. I was completely out of my mind. Oscillating between a searing fury and the deepest and most profound sense of loss I have ever experienced. I didn’t cry like this when my mother passed away. I didn’t cry like this at the aforementioned breakup. I’ve never cried like this for anything. I went from feeling engaged and optimistic and ready to take my life to new places and experiences and dare I say heights, to spending last night on a crisis hotline at my lowest point. It’s been…a lot.

“ummmm…*exhale*….ah….are you okay?”

I bottomed out. I’ve had a lifetime dealing with depression, trauma and self-loathing, and I’ve never been as angry with myself in my life as I’ve been the past few days. I’m talking white-hot anger. It burned me out, and left me hollow. And when the flames subsided, the embers cooled, and the ashes were carried away by the wind, all that remained was me alone in the quiet darkness, with a single glowing strand of light to pull myself out with.

Hope.

I’ve dealt with so much hate in my life. Most of it directed at me, by me. It has at times acted as a motivator of some sort, but if we’re honest, it was always more of a burden than a help, even at its best. And I’ve never really had a lot of success with self love, but I feel that this is the only thing left to me. And it’s very alien. A vast sum of currency for a country that no longer exists. A book with all of the answers written in a language I cannot comprehend.

“Okaaaaay….soooooo…what now?”

What comes next is my attempt to grow. To create. To maybe even become more human. And I can’t do it alone. That’s where you come in, my 4 readers. I’m making a series of commitments here. I am relaunching The Captain Hammer Project. It’s funny to me that I could update my end fitness goal to something more relevant, but naaaaah. I’ll be documenting that journey and all of its ups and downs here. I’ll be starting to write about games again. Or trying to. Playing games that people want to read about means playing with people in real life. Which just typing that made my stomach clench. I’ll be doing my best to update regularly. With no more excuses about why I have not.

And in a wildly uncharacteristic fashion, I’m asking for your support. I don’t know how to love myself. But I have to learn, and I know I am not alone. We are all healing from something, so let’s do it together. Feel the fear…and do it anyway.

Leave comments. Let me know that there are eyes on me, always watching, always judging, and if you feel like it, maybe even always cheering. At some point this will turn into something I do for me entirely, but until then, I need to know that I’m doing it for you…for us, and I don’t want to let you…us down.