I Don't Want Any of It

Seven days following my sister’s marriage, an event distinctly punctuated by a tear-flowing ceremony, a well-received speech from myself and others, and jovially showing around my girlfriend to my family (followed by awkwardly misconstrued dancing with her) I had mostly returned to my normal life, save for a feeling of freshness; as if a RESET button had been pressed I was awake and alert and appreciative of the things I have. The things being steady work—albeit between two jobs—I came from a family who granted me an environment of warmth and security, and in the past several months I had reconnected with a loving young woman, with whom I can’t imagine being unhappy.

For further context, I had gone through about four jobs in the past sixteen months; I began in a managerial position at a fast-food pizza chain and finally graduated, for the first time since getting my degree, into what the masses consider to be a “mature” job, one I found genuinely interesting. I acted in the next three months as a photographer for various vehicles for sale. A longtime lover of things like film and photography, I had grasped this chance. The pay was good and likely to get better over time.

But unfortunately, around that time I began feeling unkempt; a surreal scratching at the back-end of my brain under the surface of my cranium began to dictate my every move. I became very energetic, not in the way of productivity or certainty, but in the way of paranoia and unsubtle insecurity.

Needless to say, I projected. I was single at the time, and handled rejection poorly. I felt but contained the desire to yell and place blame, either toward the rejecting party for not seeing something of worth, or toward myself for not having been good enough in the first place.

It did not end there, for I always felt as though people were watching me, furthermore somehow concluding that I had inadvertently or unconsciously done something wrong in order to earn the observant eye, whether it be by my peers or the law or by God himself I did not deserve genuine privacy. The irony of resenting women for leaving me alone and my disdain of never actually feeling alone was not lost on me. But that’s one of the inconveniences which mental illness takes shape, in manifested contradiction.

Through this, I scarcely took care of myself hygienically and was constantly late to work. And lo and behold, the company did not want a consistently late photographer who reeked of cigarettes. And I was fired.

What followed would be a whirlwind of personal distress. I would spend a night in a hospital, flirt with the abyss with a belt around my neck, and endure what’s called a “partial hospitalization” treatment for about two months, all in the name of a new bipolar diagnosis.

For even the darkest tunnels have a peering speck of light at the end, however, so I kept going, and after finding an even concoction of drugs I eventually found a semblance of peace, to which I found steady work in a department store and reconciled with the aforementioned lovely young woman, with whom we’d had a history that was never tampered with by anger or spite.

Not everything was perfect; my psyche, a desperate and pathetic being, still searches for new sources of panic attacks, to which it often succeeds. And due to uncontrollable circumstances I was forced to acquire a new car, and with it a second job in the name of paying it back, driving said car at another pizza place.

But on the seventh day after my sister’s wedding, with the renewed sense of peaceful finality and things tying into place in a seemingly incoherent world, I was confronted with an unforeseen aggression, something as random as the cynic’s view of the universe.

I was at the second-pizza-place-job, and I was set to leave soon. And all about the shift, for the mere minutes I spent inside the building, there was someone a few years my junior recording me without consent, following me around, and spouting my name whenever he pleased. I did not think much of it, nor did I respond to any of it. Nevertheless he persisted.

And it was when I was halfway out the door, to which he spouted my name again, that I looked back at him, turned around, and decided to do something about it.

I, like most individuals, did not think this would be very problematic, nor a huge issue. I simply walked back toward him, to which he walked up to me as well. And I noticed suddenly the slightest of spite in his steps, and considered this may be more than a conversation.

I put it simply, “I just need you to quit bothering me, man.” He nodded in an animated, sarcastic way. I reiterated, “Just leave me alone alright?” He laughed, showing no real understanding of what I’d said.

It was at this point that another driver got between us and began speaking to me, seeing the anger on my facial expression that hadn’t yet reached my awareness. He told me that the insider in front of me that was harassing me “does this to everybody,” and that “he was not worth it.” I have reason to believe at the time of this writing that this driver may have unconsciously and inadvertently escalated the situation’s potential; for in response the insider said “He’s not going to do anything anyway.”

Unfortunately, I knew this to be true. I would not be placing the first throw in whatever was going on just for the sake of him to stop following me and bothering me, and, just as unfortunate, I knew he wouldn’t either. He just wanted me to do it in the name of getting me in trouble.

I asked: “What’s your fucking problem, man?”

He just kept laughing, muttering “No problem, no problem.”

The driver kept his eyes on me, repeating that he was not worth it and that I should just leave. I muttered to the driver, saying “keep your bitch in line,” and turned and walked out.

On this next point, I will remain unambiguous. The boss we all shared, who overlooked two separate stores of this chain, was horrible at her job. She constantly tinkered with my schedule and refused to give me the hours I’d requested whilst listing no reason for it. She would instruct me when to work at times without telling me which store to go to. And there is a small amount of money I earned from when I first began that I will simply never see.

That said, this bullying confrontation was simply the last straw.

I sent her a lengthy text detailing that incident, and said that “paired with the scheduling issues, I just don’t think I can work for you anymore.” She’d get back to me the next day, after my follow-up text about when I’d be getting my last check, where she “reminded” me, for the first time, that she simply can’t have drivers show up at my requested time. In response to this, and to her solution of the insider being to move me to another store and do nothing about him, I officially quit.

None of these events however, were so bothersome as what I began to endure in the week thereafter.

The dread, the psychiatric smog that had defined my days as an auto photographer and the months thereafter, had all returned. A scraping invisible itch was once again penetrating the back-end of my brain.

The antidote, the appropriate “scratch” for the itch in question, is applicable based on the nature of the circumstances, the initial cause of the suffering, the thing that I’m incapable of letting go of.

Whilst dealing with my anguish in preceding years, it was out of a perceived lovelessness, a sometimes accurate but sometimes misjudged status of outcast in various social circles, throughout high school and college, a desire for camaraderie or perhaps companionship. This desire had led to a sense of desperation that drove more people away than any other inherent or inalterable flaws, and at times would lead to myself deriving a sense of validation from malicious sources, defined by warped world-views and ulterior motives.

While that dampening sadness was enough to make anyone distraught, this was a different degree of anguish, fueled entirely by rage, pulsing at the fingertips, begging to be utilized in ways that are immediately gratuitous and unyieldingly violent.

Prior to my unnerve of social circumstances, in the ages following ten years old onward, I have found myself constantly at the challenge and occasionally at the mercy of people who are predatory, both in adolescence and as adults.

To put it simply, I have always found myself to be a victim of bullying, verbal abuse, and at the very least, harassment. It had peaked in my teenage years, years that are now a mere fog, memories shrouded by anger and made dizzy by unchecked psychiatric conditions.

To a certain extent I believed them to be necessities, natural parts of the developing mind. It was not until age nineteen when someone finally suggested I may be depressed (it’s said that college is where mental illness really presents itself).

But despite being emotionally stunted and having not one but two revelations of mental illness, I had managed to recreate the life of normalcy for a young American man of twenty-seven years. Not everyone in my place or psychological undoings can lay claim to the love of their immediate family, nor can they work, much less work their way to an apartment, however small, that they themselves pay for. And even fewer can claim the love of a compassionate and genuine significant other, none claiming the one in my life in particular.

Suffice to say, I haven’t a single good reason to not be happy, to not shrug off the annoyances of a poorly run pizza restaurant’s insider.

Yet every day in the five days after that happened, I have been unable to distract myself whilst alone. If I go for a brief drive somewhere to get food or gas for my car, I wind up taking a half hour and screaming in my car when I park. When I do mindless activities at work, times when I usually try to focus on the music or audiobooks on my phone through my headphones, I wind up silencing the device in favor of running scenarios in my head, feeling my head overheat to the point of almost boiling over.

I can only theorize that I am, despite all efforts otherwise through therapy and looking forward, stuck in the past. That once challenged, and told so confidently that I would not do anything, I was once again twelve years old and defenseless, hence back to the times that I would be reduced to tears, caught in shoving battles and aggression over school supplies, forced away from my aggressors whilst sometimes taking the blame they earned, other times managing to actually earn the blame myself in an inability to “just let it go.”

Stepping back and analyzing my life’s timeline thus far, in terms of events and personal psychology over those periods of time, makes me wonder if it is this pettiness, this spiteful red-hot steam that defines me, as someone who desperately wants to control what he cannot, whether or not I will continue to strive until my hand closes in on air. And if that is the simplest truth of my identity, I’d sooner tap out, be somebody else if it were that simple.

Do people really have the autonomy to change their behavior, or do they simply adopt different masks and costumes over the years, from decade to decade, until the flatline tears the final mask off?

In younger years I believed having genuine sociability and love outside my family would give a sense of completion. And now that I have that and more I cannot shake the feeling that it is undeserved, somehow disingenuous not because of this confrontation but because of my very poor and regressive mental state that is responding to it.

But pessimism aside, I truly have no options aside from simply moving forward. I will collect my final check tomorrow, effectively closing the book on my employment with this restaurant.

Whether change is impossible or not, I have no options other than to simply not give a shit; for the repetition or evolution of human nature will have taken no real shape as to what I have to do, the sole route being forward.

Perhaps it’s more about pursuit than accomplishment, and what’s truly needed to be done after I close the driver door check-in-hand is merely an attempt, a makeshift psychoanalyzing on not only why I feel such an irrational and competitive spirit when physically challenged, but how I can ensure that it never implodes my psychological state inward again.

Sometimes the only way out of a maze is by crushing through the walls and breaking into the outside. The only way to win the games of some, whether they be God or others or your own mind, is to not play their game at all and simply leave, by ease or by force.