Dick Ward

It seems like everyone I know is just getting out of a relationship, unhappily single or – if they’re lucky – in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be working out too well.  Don’t get me wrong, I have friends that are happily married or otherwise intertwined with a lover or significant other but they don’t stand out. They’re the exception – an anomaly that messes with my statistics.

So what’s the point?  The point is that I’m really questioning things right now.  I’ve only really had one significant romantic relationship and the rest have been short lived but intense or just imagined in my head.  The latter has happened more than once and it’s really hard to deal with.  It’s like my brain is purposely trying to fuck with me for filling it with beer and headbanging all the time.  The bastard.

There’s a Monty Python sketch where two women are talking on a bench.  The first mentions a man and says “It’s funny that he never married.”  The second one says that he’s a bachelor, to which the first replies “That would explain it!”

I have this sort of vision of the future where I’m destined to end up as some sort of perpetual bachelor.  I won’t be the kind you feel sorry for and try to fix up with a nice girl you know though.  I’ll be the kind that you hate and that married guys envy.  I’ll be relatively well off and I’ll be involved in a series of short relationships with beautiful women and no one will understand why I’m unhappy.  But I will be unhappy.  None of it will mean anything because I won’t really be interested in most women – I’ll just be with them to throw my depression into sharp relief.

Every once in a while a woman will come along that I’m amazed by and want to badly to be involved with in a real and meaningful way.  I’ll swoon and do everything I can to get her and keep her, but my reputation will precede me.  She’ll only be after what I’ve, up until then, been offering.  She just wants a quick fling and then she’s off to find something real.  Worse yet, she goes back to a husband I didn’t know she had.

The nice thing about this fantasy is that I’m at least moderately wealthy in it.  Not a billionaire or anything, but not badly off.  Even if I resign myself to a sort of miserable existence in my fantasy, I at least try and even it out a bit.  I also have really nice hair in this vision.  That’s important to me.

I’m lonely right now and it’s difficult.  I haven’t had a really strong connection with anyone for a while, or at least I don’t feel like I have.  There hasn’t been one of those moments where I just click with someone and the world seems clearer.  I’ve made some cool new friends that I completely gel with.  But I want more than that.  I want to feel that connection on a fundamental level so that no matter what happens in other places of the relationship the foundation stands solid.

I can’t tell if it’s other people or just me.  Maybe there’s just something wrong with my brain so the spark just doesn’t arrive.  Or it seems to but it doesn’t really.  But I don’t know.  I do know that I’m not the most important person in anyone’s life. I’m important to my friends I know, but I’m not at the top of anyone’s list.  Top 5 on some and Top 10 for others, but nowhere am I number one.  Maybe it’s unreasonable but that’s really bothering me.

I haven’t been telling anyone that I’m writing on my blog because this all feels very self-indulgent, over-personal and a little bit of a pity-party.  I’m sure I’ll move it off of this site at some point.  I’d hate for prospective employers or clients to stumble on this and read up on all of my personal business. There’s a small chance that they’ll be impressed with my honest and up front nature about my own particular brand of crazy but more likely they’ll send the resume into the bin.

On topic: All Charles Foster Kane wanted was to be loved.  He didn’t want to love and be loved in return – he just wanted other people to love him.  I worry sometimes that I’m incapable of being in love again.  I’ve been in relationships and I know how they start and how they end and I worry there’s no more mystery there to excite me.  I worry that I’m more Orson Wells’ Charles Foster Kane than Ewan McGregor’s Christian.  That’s part of the appeal of acting.  If I’m performing in front of a crowd, I can make them love me.  Or at least like me.  It’s not that I’m not giving people something in return though, even in the band I put everything I had into my performances.

I have more work to do now.  First I’m going to curl up under my desk for a bit.

When I started writing, it was as a form of expression – a way for me to put my opinions and my feelings out to the world.  After a while the excitement was gone and it all just became a job.  I cut down on any creative posting on The Bonus View and completely pulled out of work with WellPlayed, which is an eSports organization that I had a big part in getting off the ground thanks to hard work, creative input and plenty of writing.

Even before those two things happened though, I completely stopped writing for me.  I didn’t create anything unless it was going to get me money.  At the time, it’s because I felt like I had nothing to say.  Or, I think more accurately, I had a lot to say but I didn’t know what it was or how to express it.

But this post isn’t about writing.

Over the last several months I’ve been exploring a lot.  I’ve tried new things, taken chances that I normally wouldn’t, and tried to expand my horizons wherever possible.  It’s kind of like on ‘Always Sunny‘ when Dennis coached Charlie on saying yes to new experiences. Except I was both Dennis and Charlie – pushing myself while at the same time wide eyed, innocent, afraid and excited.

I’ve also done a lot of introspection, which, if you’ve never tried it, can be a scary and difficult thing.  My dear friend Molly Laich – an awesome short story writer currently working on her first novel – would say that I’m a 7, referring to the Enneagram of Personalities.  Normally I’m not on board with her hippy dippy spiritualistic vegan pop-psychology, but this one makes some sense.  At the very least, the 7 personality type defines me well.

Anyone that knows me will say that I’m the kind of person who’s always full of energy, quick witted, fun to be around and pathologically optimistic. They’ll tell you that I see the good in everything and there’s never a dull moment with me around. Of course, they also might say that I’m obnoxious, child like, naive, afraid to face negative emotions and that I can’t relax.  It’s all how you look at it I guess.

Two big influences on my life right now are therapy and acting.  Therapy first.

I began therapy back in May right in the middle of a pretty major depression that I was completely denying I had.  The way I saw it at the time is that therapy was a kind of preventative maintenance that would keep me from breaking down the next time things got bad. Like an oil change.

At the time I was at the two week mark of a relationship that I was really having a hard time dealing with.  I was afraid of losing the girl I was with even though I wasn’t actually happy with the way things were going, and I was changing my life around her in hopes that this would solve all of my issues.

By week three I was taking this thing pretty seriously and by week four it was over and I was devastated.  Absolutely devastated.  A week later I was dead drunk, vomiting and crying on the side of a house during a party.  It was only midnight.

I’m aware, by the way, that taking a four week relationship that seriously is pretty crazypants. There are a lot of things that went into that but here’s the short version.  I was depressed, I was afraid of losing someone, I had zero self-confidence and I put all the blame for everything on myself.  There’s plenty more to the fairly complex issue, but that’s the short version.

After seeing my psychologist for a few weeks I asked to speak to a psychiatrist about medication.  I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was prescribed Lamotrigine, better known by the brand name Lamictal.  I’m now taking 200mg of the generic Lamotrigine.  Generics are $15 a month at CVS – I’m pretty happy with that price.

Through therapy I found that I was hiding a great deal of my emotions from myself and not acknowledging when anything negative was going on inside of me.  I wasn’t even consciously aware of positive thoughts and emotions that conflicted with the way I wanted the world to be.  I had walls designed to keep myself away.

I was like North Korea, keeping everyone out while running a giant propaganda machine in my own head to convince myself that everything was okay.  I wrote a really bad poem using that metaphor, but I still like the metaphor so I’m using it here.

Learning how to deal with all of this has been and still is a difficult venture.  I’d never really allowed myself to be mad at someone before, or if I did it was a very rare occasion.  Instead I put all the blame on myself, hid my anger and then sunk into a depression.

I quickly became aware of feelings I didn’t even know I had and dealt with them, in many cases, poorly.  I upset a lot of people and completely alienated a good friend that I’m not sure I’ll ever connect with in the way that I used to.  We’re working on it, but it’s hard to tell where things will end up.

Even though things didn’t necessarily go well,  I acknowledged that my feelings existed and then dealt with them in the best way that I knew how and it was a huge step forward for me.  Months later it’s still a challenge, but it’s getting better.

“Getting better” is where I’m going to leave things for now, lest this post drag on another thousand words.

I should mention, lest I forget, that I had some really good friends helping me out this whole time.  I’m super thankful for all of them/all of you.  But I figure if I start thanking people this is going to sound more like a suicide note and less like the sort of thinking-out-loud post it was intended to be.