A Summer Awakening

“Hello Labor Day, I made it!”

Saying these words out loud even though I was alone so no one heard them but it felt so good for me to hear.  Usually, when the highly annoying iPhone alarm clock emits that terrible noise that signals it is time to rise, I am not such a cheery person.  Most days, that sound would make me think, “oh gee, thanks God, another shitty day ahead.”  Not today. Today IS a different day.  

I truly find it hard to believe it’s already Labor Day!  Traditionally this is the end of summer even though Fall doesn’t officially arrive until approximately September 20. This is the time of year when school starts back up, the leaves start to fall, and football starts.  In Michigan, it’s also the time when the sunshine starts to dwindle and many people experience SAD or seasonal affective disorder which is a mood alteration due to the lack of sunshine.  So even though I know this is coming, I am glad to see the summer come to a close, not just because it was difficult but because of what has occurred.  It was no walk in the park, as my grandfather would say, but it was an accomplishment beyond my wildest hopes.  

Fear, scaredness, desperation, loneliness, deep depression, and anger were the highlights of Summer 2023.  So where’s the accomplishment?  Covid was over and people were out without donning masks but all that did not matter to me.  I was inside my own mind way too much and my mind did not care about the freedom from Covid. I just wanted freedom from my thoughts.  

One's headspace can be filled with anything they want or don’t want.  We don’t have control as to what goes into our brains but we do have control over how we deal with that information or stimulus.  Personally, I have grown so, much like my children grew up every summer when they were infants, toddlers, and preteens. They would grow physically and that would stand out more than their mental growth but this summer, I advanced my mindset.

Jim Valvano, the former coach of North Carolina State University once said, “If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day.”  This summer, I have had more full days than my 89-year-old grandmother has ever had.  Even the laughing part.

As a late 40s man that is going through a divorce, I was a pretty typical person.  I had a wife, two children, a solid job, a nice house, an affordable car, and a pooch who loved me. She was the only living thing that I felt love from.  When I came home, from wherever I was, my dog would greet me and be so happy to see me.  I am reminded of a meme I saw one time that said, “Dogs may not mean everything to you but you are everything to them.”  Jumping on my leg, trying to lick my hands, and telling me she wants to go play would never get tired.  Maybe it’s because I was so depressed and she was the only person (this must be a dog owner trait to refer to your dog a person) I wished to see. 

I hoped my life would turn around and that I would feel some semblance of love from my family just never materialized. And this lack of warmth and love just sent me into a spiraling plume of depression that was damn near impossible to escape.  Each day I would awake and pray that the good Lord would have plucked me from the Earth and taken me.  Alas, it hasn’t happened yet.  Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I should start believing in God and then he would have my ear and listen to my pleas.  Anything to make the pain go away.

“What’s the purpose of this life?” I would ask myself.  After several months and years of asking this question, all I could summon was, “nothing.”  The purpose of life is nothing.  I wasn’t curing cancer or helping a company grow or fixing people’s problems by either being a doctor, therapist, lawyer, or drug dealer.  I was nothing.  And I was doing nothing to help others or myself for that matter.  It was sad to think about and for most of you, probably sad to read about.  

So one day I left.  I told my family I needed to leave and I did.  They had seen the deterioration of my mental being and it was no surprise when I mouthed those words.  There is no doubt they still cared for me and maybe even loved me but this was not getting past my hardened exterior that I had built up over several years in order to protect myself from further pain.  I was a shell of my former self.  My wife didn’t recognize me anymore and my children stopped talking to me and even stopped calling me Dad.  If they talked at all to me, there was no address.  It was just, “I’m going to so and so’s house.  Back later.”  I never had a question like, “Hey Dad, how was your day?” or “Dad, did you see the game last night?”  Nothing.  What a shit life I was living!

Now before you stop reading this and make an appointment with your doctor to get on the highest dosage of the newest antidepressant, just know that it’s always darkest before the dawn.

I moved out and found a new place to lay my head and I cried a lot.(Wait, I thought he said this story was going to become happier?)  Moving forward was what I planned on doing but I found myself drinking and becoming sadder.  Alcohol is a depressant and even though I knew this and read about how it will not help me feel better, I still continued to feed the beast with copious amounts of lagers and stouts.  Feeling sorry for myself had become my number one personality trait.  After several weeks of alcohol-induced vomiting, I had settled for this life.  My self-esteem was decimated, as was my liver’s outlook.  Laying in a pool of dried puke, I thought that life could not end this way.  It was at that moment, I had a vision. Not from God or any other deity one might worship or even Mariah Carey (Vision Of Love anyone?) but just a moment of clarity.  “What was I doing to myself?   I was too smart, too optimistic, and too stubborn to let my life continue like this. How did I end up like this?  And why did I let myself get to this point?  For some reason, this was the moment my life changed and it wasn’t due to anything but luck, or was it?

The next morning I woke up, showered, and ate a breakfast that didn’t consist of cold pizza or last night’s half-eaten Steak-Um sandwich.  I went to work and did not leave early. Driving home, many thoughts went through my head.  Should I stop at the bar and have a few and probably drive home under the influence and hope not to get pulled over, like I had done dozens of times in my life?  Pass.  Should I go home and watch TV until I fall asleep? Pass. The casino is only half an hour away and they serve alcohol there.  Pass.  No, my moment of clarity had turned into a day of clarity.  

Doing laundry on a Friday night when others were out getting drunk and picking up women was an oddity to me but I loved it.  I wish I had someone to call and brag but I was alone.  And I was ok with it, for the first time ever.  Being content with what I was doing and feeling good about it were new feelings I had not experienced in such a long time.  Was this what normal people do? I could get used to this.  When I was drunk and sad, I did not ever think about where my life was going.  Tomorrow was as far off as next year so why worry about that?  I still did not have an outlook of what I wanted my life to be but I knew that the path I was going on would end badly for me.  I decided not to overwhelm myself with long-term goals.  I was living for the moment and the moment only.  Replacing my demons with non-demonic activities was the only solution I saw.  Instead of drinking, I would read a book.  If I felt sad, I would do push-ups so that my muscles would tire and I would just think about the soreness instead of sadness.  

As the summer wound to a close, I was alone and still had no one to talk to, at least not yet.  It was up to me to find that person and I was now closer than ever to finding him or her.  That day when I have a good friend or possibly even a wife, may never come but I was finally at peace with that and with myself.  This journey toward happiness has been going on for a long time but I finally feel like I have GPS coordinates to the destination but the route and the timeline are uncertain.  And I am okay with that.  

I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. 

What a wonderful summer it was!