#With molting; nothing quite changes its simply the animal getting bigger and breaking free from its old shell

[reksink]

OFF With Humble Zacharies and A Molting Bad Batter

[justinjohn]

The past 6 months. Part I.  2.22.17.

God, is life insane. Insane, right? I just literally sometimes feels like I am on a roller coaster ride that I wish didn’t make my stomach drop so damn often throughout the day.. with, say, two seconds of stability, where I could actually have a clear vision of where I was going next, so I wouldn’t feel like I was speeding aimlessly in the dark. 

I mean, seriously. Between this presidency, which is like we’re all on the Titanic with a hole in the side, to work, relationships, family, exercise, haircuts, apartment cleaning, trying to stay happy, working towards long-term goals, doctor’s appointments, what we’re eating for dinner tonight, it’s just all too much. How did it get this way? Why do we do this to ourselves? 

I had a break down yesterday. 

I’m not actually hyperbolizing. I experienced a legitimate, psychology textbook breakdown, the kind where you’re in a room by yourself and you just wail out loud and hold yourself, while your shoulders convulse and you just collapse like a dam, all of the pent-up anxiety and sadness and pressure that the outside world has placed upon your shoulders rushing out in a cathartic but vulnerable moment of capitulation. For a second I was like, “if someone were filming me right now I would be a perfect scene in a movie about depression or after a horrible break-up.” But otherwise I was just inconsolable. At one point I even started petting the dog just in a transparently obvious need for comfort, who, gingerly approached and sat on my lap and started licking my hand, which then kind of made it worse, because animals are the most amazing wonders of nature / have more empathy than 90% of people I meet in public, and I just held him like, “you are somehow the only thing in this moment that can make this okay / see this happening because I’m a goddamn mess.”

I don’t think I’ve had one of those since college. 

Why did I have a breakdown? 

Well, let me explain.

These past six-twelve months have been legitimately some of the hardest in my life. I left a job with which I stuggled, and a city- New York- with whom I’d fallen out of love- to chase my dreams as a writer and stylist, philanthropist, and be closer to family and my aging parents: those feelings that many of us have in our latter twenties and early thirties. So, I did it. I was bold. I gave up a prestigious career in luxury fashion to chase what I thought life was about: family, togetherness, love, making a difference, time for ourselves. I was optimistic but more escapist in mindset. I just needed out. I needed out from a stifling job, a costly-environment that always felt like a tidal wave over my head, and I wanted the comforts of home: mom and dad, a bigger apartment, a washer and dryer, old friends. 

Only, it wasn’t until I arrived back in Chicago that I realized that life can be a relentlessly cruel test of strength. Immediately upon return, my parents began fighting. It tarnished the move from the beginning, as instead of feeling welcome, I felt as if I was encroaching on a bad time in their crumbling marriage. Upon move-in, my mother and I argued about where I could put my belongings because she “didn’t want my shit all over the house.” I found myself hanging up all of my beautiful sport jackets and ties in a corner of a closet with distant nostalgia of when I would ever wear them again, feeling like I was simultaneously hanging up my career in the process. Nights were awkward- seeing my father but not my mother, wondering what the upcoming holidays would be like. I wondered when I would feel refreshed to see my friends, when I would feel the desire to venture out and try to re-learn my city. It was uncertain, like walking on new awkward feet again. Trying to understand the feeling of a new city while trying to also figure out myself. 

The first two weeks were joyous- filled with a deserved sense of relaxation and much-needed recuperation- physically, mentally, and emotionally- but soon after, the tides turned.

The time ‘off’ quickly changed from relaxation to a sense of scared urgency to make money and find a job. Waking up to make my own schedule started to seem daunting, and every hour that passed idol felt like I’d simply washed it down into the drain. These small ‘drips’ of wasted time molted into an even greater stream of loss: of my identity, of the life I once knew, my apartment and city to which I was once so connected- I felt shipwrecked somewhere on this new road on which I’d embarked. I’d dumped my career and identity into the trash in pursuit of something new that I thought I wanted, and in the process realized that I hadn’t completely mentally detached from my affection for New York but also wasn’t excited about continuing to deepen my relationship with Chicago, either. I was stuck in between having left New York but not quite embracing Chicago, ‘naked’: not clothed by an identity or sense of self, and with no sense of connection with home, a career, friends. 

Suffice it to say, it was a bad place to be. 

I began to cry regularly. Good days were countered by ego-shattering ones, feeling an existential free fall: stuck in my parents’ apartment, feeling guilt about that fact, but not allowing myself pity as this was my decision. Having no money to spend wrestled the admission that “this may be the only time in my life I can do whatever I want” to its knees. So at times I spent recklessly as if there literally was no tomorrow, which was exhilarating and yet frightening all at once for the to-be imminently-reckoned consequences in my checking account. And yet I felt it necessary to claim a sense of rejection to a rising checking account balance addiction. The truth was, any ephemeral highs simply distracted from a faster-approaching bottoms.

There’s no lower low than recognizing that, in the process of self-repair you’d so earnestly wanted, you’d inflicted a much worse internal wound. While I was no longer physically exhausted from long hours, while I was no longer prisoner to a job that dictated my worth, no longer sucked into an environment for 60 hours a week that prevented me from living actual life, I was now completely broken in a different way. A motherboard way. And I was struggling just to get through the day and know who I was anymore.

What I thought unemployment would be: freedom, empowerment, re-sculpting the hands of the clock into a marvelous self-serving machine, turned into what-I-can-only-describe as abject desolation. The days were indolent. The desire to be productive sparred an existential exhaustion- a need to ‘get my life and sense of self back’ outside from an office, to recover sleep, to re-capture the true meaning of recreation and self-care, to not be a slave to the corporate schedule- and yet now I was beholden to a hemorrhaging bank account and entire days devoid of a sense of meaning or purpose. Out of a tug-of-war between my desire for personal freedom a need for business to pass the time, I ended up creating a 9-5 environment full of hollow internet activities, making futile client outreach initiatives, that amounted to nothing and subsequently felt a mounting sense of desperation for how to re-coup the losses I continued to generate. 

And my relationship suffered. While I no longer had an all-encompassing job holding me back from seeing him in Austin, now I had no money- a second blow to an already-fractured relationship. Plus, I don’t care what anyone says, depression takes a toll on a relationship. I would try to ‘put myself in a good mood’ before calling him at night, trying to pretend, just for 10 minutes on the phone, that things were fine, for fear that I sound continually miserable night after night. I forced myself to find nuggets of goodness in an otherwise stale and stagnant day to create the illusion that I was moving in a positive direction and not simply complaining about a life I’d so deeply yearned for myself. 

And then at the darkest depths, something amazing happened. 

More to come. 

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