A thing that happened to me.

About a year ago, about the same time I tried to start this blog, I fell into melancholy. Clinically referred to as mild depression, melancholy is something that happens to people for a lot of reasons. In my case it's usually just one of the emotional phases that I go through periodically. This time was different. It wasn't just a couple days or weeks of being at low ebb. For months, I was unable to be happy or joyful about anything.

I avoid conflict and stress instinctively, even more so than most other people. And while there are a number of healthy ways to do this, I often do so in unhealthy ways like put off important things that I feel insecure about or just plain don't want to deal with. Obviously, this doesn't solve the problem and in fact almost always makes it worse when I finally am forced to confront what I am avoiding.

In this particular case, I was supposed to apply for EMT class. It's something I have wanted to do for several years now and was intended to be the beginning of my career as an emergency medical professional. Thing was, I had a few things going in my life that were going to make that more difficult.

For starters, when I went to college, I flunked out. I wasn't a bad student and my grades were good. My major was criminal justice, I wanted to be a cop like my mom. Towards the end of my first semester, the pressure of deadlines and uneasiness towards a future of even harder classes got to me and I suddenly folded up. I made a lot of excuses for myself, but fundamentally, I just stopped trying.

Guilt and self doubt became good friends of mine at this point and they helped lead me into a years-long cycle of: Find a job, try to care about job, fail to to care about job, begin to sabotage myself at said job and ultimately lose job. Increase levels of self doubt and guilt, then repeat exercise in futility. Finally I tried to break the cycle. I put everything I had into my job, despite not liking it. I started angling for a promotion and after almost 2 years, I became a shift manager. 3 days later, I was fired for violating a zero tolerance policy for tardiness. I tried appealing to the owner of the establishment and was cussed out and mocked for my efforts. I felt betrayed and completely rejected. So I went back to my first love, law enforcement. I applied for a position at the local police department and began the process of qualifying. It was a competitive situation, they weren't going to hire all the applicants and my first attempt had failed (it was about a year after flunking college). I got to the same phase I had previously, an interview with three current officers to explain to them why they should let me be a cop. And... I choked. I just didn't show up to the interview. I told my parents and my girlfriend that my job had me scheduled for that day and time and wouldn't let me off. Truth was, I made no effort to be available for that interview. At some point, I had become filled with fear of rejection and failure. Once again guilt and self doubt crippled me.

Two successful, but poorly paying jobs later, I broke down and got a position at my dad's workplace. It paid well, I wasn't at odds with my dad anymore (I had grown very far apart from him in my adolescence) and I wanted to marry my girlfriend, Valerie. Her encouragement and support was a huge bright spot in my professionally unfulfilled life. Eventually I decided to find another career that I cared about emotionally as well as financially. I looked to the closest field to my law enforcement interest, emergency medicine. I got a job transporting people in wheelchairs to their medical appointments and started to learn more about the business. Eventually, I decided it was the field for me and I started to looking for education options.

Now we are back to just about a year ago. I'm working full time and I want to learn how to be an EMT and possibly then a Paramedic. However, I still had this personality defect of putting off things that intimidate me. And boy, was I intimidated. It had been almost ten years since I had graced the halls of higher learning. Ten years filled with bad life choices and patterns of behavior that I hadn't completely recovered from. I had been working in the medical transport field for about a year and a half already. The idea was to be already working for a company that would employ me as an EMT once I acquired the certification. So far so good, but I kept finding reasons not to go ahead and apply for a class. I found the course I wanted to take and had even contacted the people running it to make sure I could get in. And yet, once again, fear and doubt crept up and paralyzed me.

So I let the deadline go by without enrolling.

Immediately after, I left on a week long trip to indulge in my favorite hobby, boffer weapon combat. I had a great time and met many cool people. I forgot all about going to school, my career and all that stuff.

Then I came home. I went about my routine as before, working, playing, eating and sleeping. There was no event or moment that I can point to and say, “right there, that was when I became depressed.” You see, it happens gradually, creeping up on you until it's too late to stop it. And that's what happened. It was almost two moths before I was able to realize something was wrong. Valerie noticed well before then, but she only knew that “something” was off, not what. As I said, melancholy is a natural part of my spectrum of moods. Normally it comes on and then it cycles out in favor of something else. And for two months, it hadn't. I went deeper and deeper into numbness and joylessness. I'm not sure I can describe what this is like to someone who hasn't experienced it to that degree. You may think of depression as sadness or grief. That's not really accurate. A lot of people with depression often refer to it as being filled with nothing. A Nothing so big and impenetrable that it crowds out all emotion and feeling, even pain. This is more like what I experienced.

I won't go on about it. If you never understand what it's like, be at peace with that.

Once I began to understand what was happening to me, two emotions broke through the cloud of Nothing. One was terror, a fear more intense than any I had felt before. The other was rage. My own mind and body had betrayed me. Although I couldn't express these emotions outwardly, inside I was roiling. And I'm pretty sure these negative emotions are responsible for my eventual recovery. Because I started fighting back, hard. It was the most difficult thing I've ever done. I'm choking up thinking about it right now. Every day I got up and lived my life. And every day was agony, forcing myself to embrace the pain of terror and anger, because it was the only thing I could feel. You may think this is horrible, but understand, they were all I had and I clung to them desperately. (Three Day's Grace has a song called “Pain” that very bluntly describes this experience).

So I fought and I fought and I fought. I refused to give in to Nothing. At some point, I rediscovered sadness through listening to music and I cried for the first time in months. It was exhilarating and cathartic. I quickly dove into listening to music to try and extract the rest of my emotions from the dark place they had disappeared into. I talked with a counselor about things that might help accelerate the process of recovery. I prayed and listened to God, asking for my joy back. I mostly struggled privately, though I told a few friends about it afterward.

Valerie was immensely supportive and patient throughout this experience. She's an incredibly good listener. She doesn't try to make you feel better, just hears you out.

One day, I laughed. Actually I bellowed so hard I almost passed out. My ribs hurt, but it was awesome. The battle was over, I had won. It sounds too simple, even to me. And yet, that's where it ended. My joy was back. I could be happy, sad or whatever, and my mind and body were mine again.

A couple of months later, I enrolled in emt classes and am currently doing quite well.

So, there you are, this thing that happened to me.