Hitting Bottom

Hitting Bottom

This next part? I never, ever would have believed that it would have been possible…particularly to a guy with my mental acuity and stability. How could it possibly have happened? I still have trouble believing that it actually did happen. So, anyway…here’s what happened.

First, let me say that maybe my undoing wasn’t so surprising after all. To begin with, I had a terrible time getting along with people. I was obnoxious, pushy, overbearing, and hostile.

I was basically unhappy. Was I unhappy because I had betrayed my spiritual path? I wanted to get back with a teacher, but how? Was I unhappy because of various childhood traumas? Both my shrinks at the VA (coming up) believed that I was unhappy because of the severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that I suffered in Vietnam…all those dead Marines. I don’t know. But although I seldom if ever erupted, my anger was kept just barely under the surface.

The thing of it is…I was the senior network administrator for a CPA firm doing a lot of computer support…and after a while, people really didn’t want me and my crummy attitude stinking up their offices. Sometime in early 2000, I was asked to resign my position.

Believe me, at 53 years old it’s very, very difficult to get hired into a new position after leaving my old job under such circumstances.

I went on interview after interview…but I knew in my heart that t was truly hopeless. Teri was supportive, but our family income was cut in half…basically because my mental instability and anger and underlying desperation had lost me a great career and any hope of getting into anything new.

I slowly started going on fewer and fewer interviews. I could also tell that the interviews I managed to get were hopelessly undermined by the manic level of my desperation. There was no hope.

I started sinking into despair.

I went to our doctor and started taking anti-depression medication. Then my doctor sent me to a shrink and he proscribed different anti-depression medications.

Time went by and I did therapy with this shrink. (After working with Nita, I was really way to hip to work with any common shrink.) I spent all of 2001 and much of 2002 in a funk of depression. (I’m not exactly sure of the timeline here.)

More time went by and I was spending 22 hours a day in bed. I was like one of those Civil War brides that you hear about that came down what was referred to as “the vapors”. It actually felt physically uncomfortable…threatening in some way…just to walk from my bedroom into the living room.

I think it was late in 2002 that Teri talked me into turning myself into a hospital for psych evaluation and observation.

I spent the first week on the Psych Ward hiding from the staff and spending as much time as possible in bed…the only place I felt “safe”. My new shrink started talking about Electro-Shock Therapy. I decided that I’d better at least pretend to start getting better. I spent a total of three weeks on the Psych Ward before being released…without any Electro-Shock.

Soon after I was released, I visited a VA center near Van Nuys in hopes that they might be able to help me find work. I was assigned a counselor who also referred me to a shrink. They both agreed that I should file papers for veteran’s disability due to PTSD. I filed.

Teri had also had me sign up for Social Security Disability when my state benefits expired.

About this time, there was a special program offered by Los Angeles County to spend four or five months preparing for an advanced computer certification in Cisco programming. This certification would have practically guaranteed a new start in computers. One could only qualify for the classes if you had expired unemployment.

I joined the class and studied hard. The VA and Social Security were both considering my mental disability.

I was actually…getting better.

At the time of the mid-term exams, I was second in the class of roughly 30 computer veterans.

I got up that morning and kissed Teri good bye and took my mid-terms…and stuck around to find out that I had aced the mid-term and moved into first place.

I got home that afternoon to find a note on the table. Teri had left me. Her clothes were gone. We were two weeks away from our 20^th anniversary.

I couldn’t really believe it. I was destroyed. All that computer work was for nothing. Getting a job was the only way that I thought that Teri and I could come back to being normal.

Teri had called the VA shrink and had him call me to check on me as a potential suicide. God, I really wanted to die.

Within the next couple of weeks Teri had put the house on the market and sold it. She came over to the house we shared for 17 years and we threw away 80% of everything we owned into two rented dumpsters.

A week or so later I was living in a $700/mo rental apartment in Van Nuys to be near the VA Sepulveda Outpatient Clinic and my new VA shrinks.

All this time…roughly six weeks or so…I had been walking around in a stupor. I really didn’t realize or understand what was happening to me. I was dazed…walking dead.

I had lost everything I had. I lost my wife…my job…any chance of employment…my house. There was nothing left except for some money in the bank. What good was money going to do me?

I really had nothing left. Nothing.

I had an apartment in Van Nuys…some books…clothes...paperwork and appointments with my shrinks…and no reason to live…just dazed and confused.

I drifted. I wanted to die. What do you do when there is nothing?

The proceeds from the sale of the house paid my expenses.

Before the great depression, I would read two or three books a week. Now I couldn’t read a book. I’d have to go back to re-read a paragraph time and time again. I used to do crossword puzzles in ink. I couldn’t even focus on a single clue. My mind was a wasteland.

I surfed the Internet with a new computer. I bought a new wide-screen TV.

I had lost everything.

I thought about death. I wondered what was going to happen to me.