We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us. (Or Not)

“Being enough is something you are, not something you earn.”

Curtis Tyrone Jones

I’ve been single for a bit. A spell. A few turns of the hourglass. A season. One might even say an age. I’ve recently decided that it’s time for that to change.

Dating has gotten progressively weirder the older I’ve gotten, and in my mid 40s, it’s the weirdest it’s been yet. I don’t think it gets talked about a lot (at least not in places I am looking) but when you’re putting yourself back in that arena at this age, it can bring up a lot of feelings. A bubbling cauldron of anxiety, optimism, wariness, weariness, hope, insecurity…and mainly feeling like you’re the only one in the world who can’t seem to get this part of life quite right. It doesn’t help that most of my friends are either married or the non-union Mexican equivalent, so there are some barriers to varying degrees about their ability to relate.

I ventured out into the world of dating apps, which were never great, but somehow seem to be devolving even from the last time I’d used them.

Now, I don’t want to disparage dating apps as a concept entirely. In this day and age, there are a lot of good things to say about them. They promote asynchronous communication, provide distance in the beginning to feel out if someone is worth your time to meet, or if you honestly feel safe meeting them. In exchange for those qualities, you have to sell yourself through a few pics and a few blurbs about yourself. It’s…not a great tradeoff…but it’s what you have to work with if you choose to walk that path. (I did once attend a singles mixer which was hilariously awkward, but ended up with me making a few wonderful friends) Besides, a few of the relationships I’ve considered to be my “most successful” to date were born of dating apps, and I have made several dear friends from dating situations that just didn’t really materialize.

So I sent a few messages, opened a few dialogues, even exchanged a number or two. So far, so good. This is the easy part. When I am made of words, I’m pretty incredible, if I do say so myself. My humor translates well to written form and that’s the primary bait on my hook. Then when things go well in this, my chosen arena, I have to come back to the real world, and that’s where things get unsteady.

Once, way back in my 20s I went on a date with a girl I met online. Bear in mind that this is in the age of pagers, before cell phones, smart phones, etc. We hadn’t seen each other before we met, though we had talked on the phone a few times, exchanged a few emails, and there seemed to be a mutual crush forming. We decided to meet up at a coffeehouse…and things pretty much fizzled immediately. There were other people there I knew, so the two of us were spared a lot of the awkwardness by virtue of making small talk with other patrons of the establishment. At one point towards the end of the night when we were alone again, she told me “if you were thinner, you’d be really hot.”

I think maybe she was trying to take the sting out of the sentiment by emphasizing the word “really.”

It didn’t work.

Maybe you winced reading that. I did, reliving it as I typed it. Ooooof. As you might have guessed, that left a mark, one that has stayed with me regardless of what variety of shape my meat wagon took. That single statement stripped away the value of everything that I liked about myself. It reinforced with steel something I didn’t like about myself. It taught me that no good qualities I have matter while I inhabit a fat body. And perhaps worst, it turned me against myself in new ways that I hadn’t yet encountered in a life already marked by self-loathing in a variety of flavors.

Now as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a part in a few relationships I would call a success (even if they didn’t last, I learned a lot from them) and a lot more that never really came together long term, but definitely were good times in the while that they lasted. For someone who is painting himself here as an unloveable pariah, I’ve had waaaaay more success with the fairer sex than I would ever think someone who looks like me would have. What this should illustrate is that there are people who see what all I bring to the table and are delighted by it. What I took from it was that I was somehow “tricking” ladies into giving me a chance. Which objectively I recognize as absolute horseshit. People do what they want to do. But that one fateful date some 25ish years ago, forever skewed how I saw myself as it related to desirability, which is to say I had none.

Take this and couple it with the notion that the world we live in ABSOLUTELY encourages this. Media does not frequently portray heavier people as leading happy lives with rich, fulfilling relationships. Instead we are categorized as being lazy, lacking willpower or moral character, frequently having poor hygiene, low levels of intelligence, and are definitely unattractive. The ceiling for media portrayal is comic relief, which is still to many degrees dehumanizing. Despite there being mountains of evidence to the contrary, obesity is still largely framed as being a personal failure, rather than the amalgamation of a number of varying factors about environment, genetics and issues unique to each individual. This is what all of us are being fed, over and over, and it sticks to us, thick and thin alike.

Which brings me back around to modern dating. There’s a woman I’m currently chatting with. It’s been a lot of fun, she’s got a spicy dark sense of humor that is right up my alley. We share the same political views and we’re both people who feel deeply about…everything. She’s even open to learning some games with me. When things were going well, I asked her out on a date, and she accepted.

When it came time to actually plan things, I had to step out of my word-filled fantasy world and back into the one where I pray that I can trick someone else into giving me a chance. I sent the following text:

“So I hadn’t discussed this yet, but as we’re planning to get together, I don’t want there to be any surprises here. I’m a bigger guy. Before the pandemic, I was very active and lost a lot of weight, and then a couple of years staying inside undid a lot of that work. I’m working again to reestablish those better habits, but it’s not an overnight process, and I’m dealing with some insecurity about my body. And I get that it’s me. I worry myself to death over it, every time I meet someone new. Only once in my life has anyone ever shot me down because of my size, but that once was enough to cast a shadow over every encounter since. My history indicates that I worry about it more than any of my past partners ever have, but even in the face of all of that evidence, it’s always a struggle for me.”

At the time, I was thinking I was just being honest about things. No surprises, not trying to catfish you. In the context of thinking about this and writing about it and with the benefit of time passed, I am absolutely cringing at it. It also bears mention that this is not the first time I have laid out this disclaimer when daring to admit that I am romantically interested in someone. I don’t think that there’s been a situation where I haven’t done this.

I warn her about me. I apologize for myself and include language that assures her that I Am Aware Of The Problem And Am Doing Something About It (TM). I proceed to overshare and talk about my historic struggle with this particular cycle, and the notion that despite my fears things have worked out generally well for me. Why am I saying all of this? Why that last part? Am I trying to convince her that if she rejects me, she’s the weirdo?

All of this, rather than just trusting to the fact that we wouldn’t be talking if she didn’t see some value in me. That there are plenty of good reasons why this is a good idea. That my happiness with our exchanges is as real for her as it is for me.

Everyone I know suffers from some sort of body dysmorphia. I don’t know if it’s a human thing or an American thing, but I am inclined to think that it’s more the latter than the former. I know all too well how shitty it feels to be judged on this, and I will go well out of my way to spare someone that shame.

I know I’m not the only one here who has felt this, and y’all, we have to do better. For ourselves. We have to try to escape the traps of programming and bombardment on all sides that we are undesirable, and deserve to be. The world is not going to change, but we can. We can believe in our possession of value, of worthiness, that we don’t have to trick people into liking us (which honestly, we never did). We have to fight back with self-love in a world that really encourages us to hate ourselves….and that’s really super difficult…but it’s not impossible.

For the record, she thanked me for telling her if it was a concern of mine, but it was not a concern of hers. We’re planning to meet soon. And regardless of the outcome of that meeting, I won’t lose sight of my worthiness. I can break the wheel. You can too.

Hairy Blogger and the Power of the Completely Mundane

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

– David Foster Wallace “This is Water”

Heeeeey, how about this? 3 weeks in a row with updates. I’m going to try to keep this up, and because I know that some of you, (hell, probably most of you) are here for my gaming insights, I’m going to try to make some games happen soon so I can scribble about them and dance for your attention. Promise.

Last week, I was struggling mightily with the concept of self-love and how maddeningly distant it felt, and how discouraging that can be. Just reliving any of that in typing that sentence is exhausting. I had a few people share their thoughts on mine (not here) that helped me to gain a little perspective and encouragement that I didn’t really understand how badly I needed.

I…am not really good at loving myself. In fact, I’m bafflingly bad at it. My historical high points in this regard have been peaks of neutrality, where I didn’t actively dislike myself. What I am really good at, is loving others. I am a caretaker by nature, and while I’m not the guy who will help just anyone, if I feel you are worth my help, there’s not much that I won’t do for you. I always rationalize this to myself as aspiring to be someone that I would want in my life if I needed that kind of help and support. And then of course when I am that person in need, I put up walls and isolate myself so that none of my ick can get on anyone else. A burden that no one should have to bear.

I have always based my value, my worth as a human interacting with other humans on what I can do for them. It’s both selfless in that I will go to great lengths to prove that I’m worth associating with and selfish in that I do that because I desperately crave that kind of approval that I am utterly incapable of giving myself. And that care has to be kinetic. It’s never been enough for me to just be, to have value by virtue of existence. If I’m not always actively trying to impress you, then I’m pretty scared that you’ll not see a reason to be around.

Ooooooof.

I’m not saying anything here that a lot of you haven’t heard before, or possibly felt yourself. It’s honestly pretty crippling in a number of ways and judging by how I am feeling this second as I type this, I don’t think I want to elaborate on it any further. But I’m happy to report that I think I’ve had a bit of a therapeutic breakthrough since my last post. I think I have found a key to this extremely complex lock.

I’m really bad at loving myself. But something I am good at? I am phenomenally great at loving my kid. He’s amazing y’all. Such a bright and loving human. Someone who has dealt already with too many slings and arrows of ignorant people for someone of his age, and instead of becoming bitter and spiteful and withdrawn, he still champions education and inclusion of those different and forgives those people who have wronged him. I’m so stupidly proud of him that I’m struggling to see what I’m typing through the tears that are now freely streaming down my face. If someone were to threaten my kid in any capacity, oh man it would not end well for them. Or for me. But I digress. I couldn’t ask for a better kid, and I love him more than anything. And I am frequently terrified that his apple didn’t fall far enough from my tree. Whenever I see him become angry with himself, I immediately move to intercept and engage with the most potent tools I can bring to bear; patience, kindness and love.

That’s the easy part. Where it gets tricky is applying that same grace to someone I don’t really care much for, namely that colossal fuckup that I see whenever I pass a mirror. So…I’m skipping that part.

For the past week or so, whenever I have started to get angry with myself, I have stopped and asked myself what I would do if I were witnessing my kid getting angry with himself. And then with a surprisingly small amount of effort, I engage with myself with that same patience and kindness. If you have the same kinds of struggles I do, and you have a kid, I beseech you to try this. If you don’t have a kid, maybe just try to envision the victim of your cruelty as a toddler version of yourself. You wouldn’t be that mean to a toddler, would you? The love part is still a work in progress, but the parts that I am able to do? Holy hell. It’s been amazing. Not in some way that I have miraculously overcome my damage and am healed, but in a way where I can see that it is possible.

That’s a pretty big deal. I’ve never been a “glass half-full” sort. Most times I’m a “broken glass and a puddle that I’m pretty sure is piss” sort. I’ve tried being more kind to myself more times than I can count. Most times it resulted in an eye roll, dismissing myself, or a half-hearted attempt to do better, and at times, it just forced the self-loathing to evolve. I stopped getting white-hot angry with myself and tried a more gentle approach where I would forgive myself for whatever thing I did that made me angry and promise myself that I would do better next time. That when next I encountered a similar decision point, I would make the “correct” choice. The problem is that “next time” was always “next time” and what started as an attempt to be more gentle with myself turned into me becoming more and more permissive of poor choices and bad behaviors. Sigh. Pretty sneaky, Sis.

But when I take a moment to envision my situation as something that is happening to/with my kid, the correct answer is there, immediate, simple and crystal clear. I never have to question it, and it makes it a lot easier to act on it too. I have to force myself to look at myself through that very specific lens, but it works. It’s going to take a long time before I get to put down that crutch and can really value myself like that. It feels like it may never happen, but I know that with persistence, I will eventually wear down my own walls and really love myself.

Which ties to the second part of this post. A few days ago, I was looking at some videos on YouTube, and their algorithm felt that I would be interested in reaction videos. At that point my only experience with them was the dark parody Bo Burnham created for his masterpiece “Inside.” I got to thinking about the existence of reaction videos and became curious about how they came to be in the first place. What demand was this supply filling? I settled pretty quickly on it being a response to technology’s advances contributing to our further separation and isolation from one another. Watching a reaction video was trying to get some happy brain juice flowing by watching someone appreciate something that you like, giving you that sweet, sweet validation while keeping you clicking for the next video, but never giving us pause to foster any meaningful connection between you and other humans. Kind of bleak, right? I was a little distressed with this idea and I took to the internets to see what other people had to say about it.

The conversation derailed pretty quickly into people saying why they did or did not enjoy reaction videos, which wasn’t what I was asking about, but one of the participants in the conversation pointed out what is a pretty simple truth.

“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

If you approach anything from a place of compassion and love, then you will most likely encounter compassion and love in your findings. If you approach from a place of cynicism and depression, guess what? When you go looking for trouble, you almost always find it. So the second part of this is to do my best to limit unconscious decision making. Catching myself in those moments requires being present, which is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. I’m getting better at it, little by little and taking time to stop myself when I’m annoyed, angry, dismissive, etc., to ask myself if I can make a better choice. Making the better choice is always a no-brainer. Catching yourself in the first place is the hard part.

The quote that starts this post is from a commencement speech written by David Foster Wallace. I’m going to link it here because I think it’s pretty wise, and while it’s probably best not to look to much deeper into the author’s history, for at least this, he was right on the money. It’s 23 minutes and change long, but I assure you it’s worth every second.

I’ve listened to it multiple times, and every time I have the same reaction, that this is the real deal, or as he would say, “the capital-t Truth”…but then have failed to act on it. But lately I’ve been working on staying present, staying mindful. What I’m doing with trying to treat myself as I would my kid is definitely helping me to stay more in the moment, but it’s hard work. It is supremely easy to slip into a place where you are making unconscious decisions and reactions, and a lot of these will be negative, but we don’t have to do that. We can take the time to decide how we want to feel about something. We can take the time to appreciate the myriad of miracles that we are all constantly surrounded by. Or we can roll our eyes and say that everything is bullshit. I’ve done that my whole life. I’m absolutely not done doing it. But I’m trying be more present, to know that I do have a choice. It’s hard work, and I won’t be seeing any long term benefits from it for a while, but I’m pretty jazzed that after as many times as I have listened to this, recommended that others do, etc., that I’m starting to actually internalize a bit of it.

And if I can do this, anyone can.

Stumbling Out of the Gate

“If I didn’t have so much of this life all wrong, I would have gotten it right by now.”

– Buddy Wakefield, “The Information Man”

So here we are. When last our heroes met, I talked about how I was rebooting the Captain Hammer Project, and embarking on an action-filled romp with an ethnically diverse group of kids to find a lost treasure only to discover that the greatest treasure of all was inside of us all along. Meaning of course, self love.

And then I pretty much face-planted at the starting gun.

Historically speaking, I’ve been able to accomplish more burning hate as fuel. I’ve done some impressive things in terms of weight loss, but it comes at a pretty terrible cost. You use self-hate to motivate you, to power you through that workout, to make the better intake choices, etc., and when you succeed, it validates that hate. Feeds it. Makes it grow. Something something two wolves inside of you. I had lost a person’s worth of weight, and was no happier for it. People would shower me with praise, and I could only see what I hadn’t yet accomplished, and it made me bitter. Hate in, hate out. I made my demon stronger even as I was making huge strides towards my fitness goals.

Strides that as I mentioned in the last post have since been undone, but not because I learned a better way. All of that ended up being for nothing. I wrote the last post clawing myself out of blackness and setting an intention to learn to do better, both by means of results and the methods taken to achieve them. Then I was told something that really tore all of that down, and reintroduced shame into the menu. It took a bit for it to sink in. It was a difficult enough conversation by itself, I’ve alluded to the insane difficulties I’ve faced in the past few weeks. The short version was being told about someone else’s accomplishments in a way that made them….better than me? Oh, maybe there’s some nuance, or maybe that’s not the communication that was intended. but that’s what stuck.

And it burned.

Even now typing this, my jaw is clamped shut in silent rage. But, that’s okay. These are fires I know how to grow. This is my specialty, and I aim to start a fire visible from orbit.

*sigh*…which is NOT exactly the right lesson to learn here. I told one of my best friends about this, and how consumed I was feeling by the desire for revenge, and how this transformation would make me “win.” My friend just told me to examine and reflect on what my definition of win was. And she was right to do so. Buddha said that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Revenge can’t be a part of this, for about a million reasons. First, it’s short-sighted and this is a long game. Second, that kind of sustained rage is really bad for you on multiple levels, this is something I have extensive experience with. Third, and maybe most important, it. just. doesn’t. fucking. matter. Accomplishing everything I talk about here doesn’t change what made me feel this scorn. So what is the point of that save to torture myself? What am I doing bothering to write this out if I refuse to learn the lessons I so desperately need to learn?

So hate can’t be the answer, but I really struggle with the love part. People keep saying “you have to love yourself” but I ask WHO THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE THAT CAN DO THIS?! I actually leveled this at my friend, furious at the suggestion that it is somehow simple, or even possible. She told me that for her, she didn’t drink herself unconscious anymore, and that she stopped sleeping around, and these were acts of self-love. This prompted further introspections on how to open myself up to this, She’d suggested that hating yourself is like sitting in a field with a pile of rocks. The rocks are all of the bad things that have happened to us. All of the reasons we hate ourselves, hate the world, hate other people, etc. All of the evidence we need to support that hate. We sit with our heads down, hitting ourselves over the head with rocks, throwing them at ourselves and at times others. In this practice, we also torture the people we love by making them watch us do this. She poses that if we take a moment to be mindful, we will notice that everyone around us also has a pile of rocks. Some people are hitting themselves with rocks, others are throwing rocks at other people. Self love, she says, is being able to sit next to the rocks, feel the sun on our skin, look at the ants and the flowers and listen to the birds.

This is another problem for me. I appreciated the sentiment, but…I don’t appreciate those things. I definitely take them for granted, and celebrating that feels silly at best and insignificant at worst. Opting to look at flowers and ants instead of hitting myself with rocks just feels like I’m trying to stop the bleeding, and I don’t know how to wring joy from that. You see, for me, love is a joyous concept. It doesn’t have to be an idyllic fantasy, a fairytale, something fantastic and ultimately unrealistic, but I really need it to feel good. I really struggle to recognize taking actions that just stop or slow my decline as love. Meanwhile, it’s exhausting to keep fighting for stability and to keep my head above water. How does one ever just .be. happy. with themselves?

“I cannot teach him, the boy has no patience.”

Thanks, Yoda. This peels back another layer in the rotten onion that is my innermost psyche, that I am famously impatient with myself while having a near bottomless well of patience for others. I need to get my two-cycle weed whacker of a brain on board with the concept that maybe the goal for now just needs to be the mitigation of hate. Something something walk before you run or something. That there’s no switch you can flip to go from self-hate to self-love. Like everything else, this is going to take time, dedication and effort, and you’re not going to see the results of it until they are unexpectedly tested and you can say “Wow, old me would have reacted much worse to that.” Everything therapeutic takes for-eh-ver. But this, as much as I hate it, is pretty clearly the correct answer.

The bigger takeaway from her point for me was how much it sucks to watch someone you love hit themselves with rocks. I recall a point when my favorite person on the planet had written something about how they didn’t want to be around anymore and how much that destroyed me. I think that this will likely be very difficult to put into practice, but I think that trying to occasionally see yourself through the lens of someone close to you is probably a good mental exercise.

None of this makes me feel anything. I guess I’m grateful that I don’t feel resentful or bitter about it, but it sure would be nice to feel good about it. About anything. Ultimately I need to learn to appreciate and love myself in a way where I can look in a mirror and smile at the guy I see rather than suppress the urge to destroy the mirror. And the road to getting there is going to be long and hard. These are the only tools I’ve acquired as to where to start with that. So with just a blank parchment to draw my own map on, I’m going to start with a plan. A series of behaviors to mold into habits, and a hope that maybe with enough persistence, something will click some day and this concept of self-love won’t be so paralyzingly inaccessible.

Today I signed up my kid and I with a summer gym membership, for both motivation and to lead by example.

Last night I did some online research and ordered myself a bunch of supplements and digestives to revitalize my gut flora.

I’ve already gotten back on my anti-depressants.

Sunday I wrote out a meal plan to hold myself to to guide my shopping decisions and to avoid getting food deliveries which frequently compromise these goals with low quality ingredients and portion size that encourages overeating.

I’ve put myself on a moratorium with the tabacky of the wacky variety, as I tend to not do anything overly productive if I’ve indulged. Eventually I would like to re-introduce this as a reward. I don’t get to do this unless I’ve accomplished the other things that I needed to do to further my goals here.

And of course, I’m trying to stay accountable by publicizing what I am going through to my 3 readers and forcing transparency on myself. Is this going to work? Can it possibly work? I guess, but it’s going to take a lot. I’m staring down a mountain here, and I will destroy it pebble by pebble.

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.