Howdy all.
Yep, I’m back after a VERY long hiatus from a deep and dark place where I seemed to have lost myself. Losing oneself is that which I have heard happen to others but never really experienced and had always scoffed at because of it’s pathetically-sounding nature. It was a gradual process, and one that pretty much slid into my sub-conscious without my actually being aware of it. I had spent so much time and money building up a persona that I thought was my own, and perhaps it was, but in the end, it scared me to death and it was simply unsustainable. I had spent that time and money at SAIT studying the art of Journalism. For a time, it was really nice to be someone and to do something important. I chased a multitude of articles about a multitude of subjects and interviewed hundreds of people, some of them were quite famous. Those people include Alison Redford, the former premier of Alberta, Barb Higgins, a former journalist herself and front-runner for the mayoralty of Calgary at one point, the mayors of Calgary, Revelstoke, Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, aldermen, ministers of this-and-that, deans, councilmen, professional and educational experts, cancer survivors, grieving mothers, private citizens, students and the list goes on and on. I even had a couple of great internships at the Calgary Sun and the Revelstoke Times Review.
But, such a thing couldn’t possibly last.
After a time, when I actually tried to get paid for this craft, by getting hired onto the Dawson Creek Daily News as a newspaper reporter, (no I will NOT provide a link) it all came crashing down around me and my psyche simply broke. In other words, I experienced a nervous breakdown. I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and the Journalist thing amplified its effects a hundred-fold. It scared the hell ‘n’ Jesus outta me. Setting aside the stress that a Journalist experiences, which is nothing like regular work stress, not by a Texas mile. I’ve been in stressful situations before, I’ve felt stress so badly that I had a headache for two days straight, such stress where you think you might just die. But nothing like the stress felt as a Journalist. THAT kind of stress makes you actually believe with all of your heart that your mind may not make it back from the deep dark hole that it put itself in. The kind of feeling that makes your mind race in a never-ending circle of terrifying fear and the feeling like you’re on the scariest roller-coaster on Earth and you have absolutely no control. Mix O.C.D. and that kind of stress together and WHAM!
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Yeah, that kind of stress. Get it?
For a while, I thought I could manage it. Of course, it wasn’t long before my body said, “Yeeeeeah dude, we can’t handle this anymore!” and a very real ghost from the ol’ closet reared it’s ugly head again: my heart attack in 2010. Yep. The chest pains started appearing regularly because of the pain my mind was going through and I finally came to the conclusion that I had made a terrible career mistake.
So, over the course of a year, my sense of who I was simply gave up and I have been lost in my own little world. There were times where my confusion would come and go and I could barely function as a human being. IE, wondering around at a supermarket for an hour when all I came there for was potato chips. I fuckin’ wandered around there and I didn’t care. At all. Experiences like that were compounded by the fact that after I actually managed to find a job back in Calgary, in an industry that I thought was totally behind me (the warehousing sector), I was making mistake after mistake and I got fired from it; something else that was all too familiar to me. Getting fired didn’t help matters at all (obviously) but I just happened to get hired into a job where the people were just as sadistic as the type of people that I tried so hard to get away from.
And so begins my journey of digging my way out of this mountain of debt and emotional fragility. I’m gonna need a LOT of beer for this…