The old cycle begins again.

Starting into Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw I'm reminded of something: All this shit, this incredibly long, nitrogen-induced depression and horrible break up; it all came from somewhere.  Bourdain writes about a dinner he was invited to that, by all means, he shouldn't have been.  He's surrounded by chefs he looks up to, and feels he'll never touch culinarily.  This dinner causes him to reflect on the road up to that point.  Strife with trials, drug abuse and heartbreak, he knows that life can get better, and has.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting lately.  Self-depricating reflection, and with the help of others (because I can't do it on my own), helpful introspection.  It took years, but I finally realize that Depression is my drug.  I lead a boring life. Sure, I try and dress it up every once in a while by taking a vacation or never stepping into the same restaurant twice.  I try anything I can.  Fencing and waltzing come to mind.  Look for me on any average Tuesday night, though, and you'll find me sitting on the couch watching recorded TV shows I didn't really need to record because I was home anyway.  It all feeds the Depression.  When I was nine or ten, I knew what suicide was.  At least, I had a vague idea, and Mom had an abusive boyfriend.  Not abusive towards her, you see, but I caught a lot of it.  He drug me around the house once by my hair because he felt I hadn't cleaned the shower well enough before Mom got home.  He just wanted to show me, and I wasn't walking fast enough, apparently.  There wasn't too much physical abuse.  A push and some yelling matches occasionally.  It was hard though, and I was seeing a counselor at the time because the problem was with me, I guess.  Right.  Eventually, the idea of suicide seemed like a release.  I went to the kitchen, opened the knife drawer and started running the knives along my wrist.  Even at that young age I knew to go down the arm instead of across.  Creepy how kids grow up so fast.  Mom walked up the stairs from the basement at that moment, and caught me.  There was some yelling, and a lot of crying and explaining, but she realized that I was sad.  Things turned around after that.  The boyfriend came around less and less, eventually disappearing.  Good riddance.

What did I learn from this?  Being sad and desperate for a way out can get you what you want.  That's one of the few lessons from this life that sticks in my head.  That, and tying the cords together between a power tool and an extension cord so you can't pull them apart accidentally.
I wasn't always sad.  I was a very happy kid.  People tell me stories about myself, and I see the possibility of that again.  Flash back five years and you'd find me back on top.  Senior year of college I was not someone you fucked with.  I was fast, hard and riding the crest of a wave so beautiful and round you could start at the Outer Banks and finish the day sipping mojitos in Hemingway's old stomping grounds in the Keys.  I was the Associate Editor of a nationally recognized literary magazine.  Yeah.  I was the asshole that you called and couldn't get ahold of, and I returned calls at ridiculous hours when you were sure to be out of the office.  Maybe telling your significant other in bed about how you needed to talk to me for approval on the proofs before the margins were set and printed.  You were lucky if I returned your calls.  Days and long nights spent in an office with more cobwebs than an Indiana Jones movie and haunted house combined.  I was working on a Mac that processed words a sentence slower than I typed.  Corralling the student interns and getting them to try and proof ten poems in a week, and then revising all their work was near impossible.  It was irritating, beyond difficult, and I was amazing at it.  You know those movies where the computer hacker guy flies around the room in a desk chair and always seems to be six steps ahead?  I was that guy.  I budgeted money; I signed time sheets; I was the face and the behind the curtain guy of one of the only undergraduate presses in the country.

Women?  I got the woman of my dreams back doing that job.  She'd sneak down from her work-study job to my private office and sit on the desk talking about our weekend plans with friends.  I'd visit her at her work-study job and we'd flirt over the mailing machine.  I had rug burns on my knees from that girl.  Granted, it was a bamboo rug, but I would have gotten them from any other softer rug too.  We went at it every day at one point.  This is a girl that has to be obsessively sure about a guy before she'll sleep with him, and we were doing all kinds of crazy shit and not even officially dating.  There are probably still handprints on the walls of our dorm rooms from some of the stuff we did.  I was sexy.  I was too busy for you and your problems.  I was very close to the peak of human existence.  I was the fucking Übermensch and you couldn't touch me.  I had a full-time student load, two majors and two theses to write.  There were three work-study jobs.  One for credit, and two for pay.  I was making my own hours, staying up late, partying, running myself ragged, dragging myself to class and stabbing my arm with a pencil to stay awake through it all.  This girl thought I was amazing, and all my friends looked up to me.  My professors were in awe, and knew I would succeed.

So, when I graduated I was going to lose it all.  My big plan A had fallen through, and there was no plan B.  I just figured those same professors would help a little more for someone that did so much for the college.  Guess not.  But, that's when I went back to the Depression.  For months after graduating, I sat in my room, doing what I wanted, watching movies and playing video games every day.  Eating shitty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  What made it worse?  They let me carry the school banner at the commencement ceremony, and they gave me an award for being selfless and community focused.  Just a knife in the gut saying I was good enough there, but the real world was going to swallow me whole.  The girl?  She was gone to Roanoke to be a zookeeper.  She had worked the summer before for nothing except to smell like animal refuse at the end of the day.  She had earned her place as a paid employee.  We began a long-distance relationship, and we were happy.  She would get upset that I wasn't looking hard enough for a job, and I would look for a few days and get bored.  Eventually, my back was against the wall.  I had to start paying back substantial student loans, so I had to start working.  A job came for the Christmas season with a retail bookseller, and three months later I was fired for not being able to learn the operations of the position I was promoted to after being a lowly cashier.  After taking every elitist customer's shit for the holiday season, and working Black Friday, I was gone with no appreciation.  Then I spent six months feeling sorry for myself and trying to find another job.  It got to us both a little more this time.  I was talking a lot about how I didn't matter anymore in the world and it would be better without me.  If I was able to be so successful in college why couldn't the real world see my potential?  The normal depressed shit.  She just couldn't listen anymore, and she left.  I don't blame her.  I would have left me too.

That's how it works, the Depression.  I use it for the maximum amount of attention I can get.  Telling myself I'm great and worthwhile doesn't matter as much as someone else telling me.  Being depressed gets people to come out and try to build me back up.  I'm a solitary person that doesn't like to go out in groups too much.  It's hard to put on a smile and fake having fun.  However, I can hit you up with a text message and tell you how sad I am hoping you'll write back to make me smile or make me feel a little more positive about myself.  But, friends can only do that for so long.  They have to work on themselves too.  I distanced myself from a lot of friends at that point.  Actual hard work and job hunting brought about a new job with a great company, and the girl and I started going on dates again.  Nights spent at restaurants and watching movies got longer and longer until I was sleeping over again.  At one point she came home a little tipsy and sad, and said something to the effect of, "Why fight it?"  Like Bourdain's story, she was my Zelda Fitzgerald.  A little crazy, and probably bad for me, but I love her and she lets me put my hand in her pants occasionally.

Getting older makes things a lot scarier.  Eventually, the great job and money wasn't enough for either of us.  Turning 25 hit me hard, and she saw that.  She got sad as I got sad.  She lost faith in me as I lost faith in myself.  Things got bleak, and with the fall, she left again.  Now, I spend my time thinking of every possible way to get her back.  I keep waiting for her to call and say, "why fight it?" again.  I wasted so much time thinking she would keep feeling sorry for me.  It wasn't going to work.  She fell in love with a totally different person.  A person that made decisions instead of waiting for them to come down from a higher authority.  A person with the confidence to know I was right and did what needed doing.  Now that she's gone, and I've spent weeks eating and sleeping like shit I can see that person starting to come back.  I see him every time I put up a little more weight at the gym.  I see him when my veins bulge.  When I forget to cry for a day because the pain never really goes away.  It just recedes.  When I want her to be happy no matter what she finds happiness doing.  When I realize she won't be happy with the next guy because I was the right one.  No one was as successful as I was when I was on top, and I'll be there again.  She couldn't even do it.  I'm getting there.  She'll see that.  When I get some really good lines written.