Published: Good Men Project (March 24, 2015)
A man who very rarely takes sick days—or weeks—discusses how he recently collapsed from exhaustion.
___
The movie poster is probably fake, a cheap knock-off sold by an unscrupulous Amazon vendor, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m transfixed by the image of a single quarter, either carefully placed or carelessly tossed onto droplets of blood, which is featured dead center. George Washington’s profile is upside down and the year on the coin reads “1982,” a detail that I lovingly embrace as I recall that this is an advertisement for the movie “No Country For Old Men,” which was set in 1980. No matter how many 40s of Steel Reserve or Hurricane I pound down, that error satisfies me to no end. I may be drunk and numb, but at least I would have seen the damn movie before designing a poster for it. That makes me superior, no?
My phone buzzes. A message from a close friend—the inimitable Ariel Gordon, a grad student who specializes in psychoanalysis. My thumbs must have been chatting with her while my eyes were hypnotized by the grisly currency, but I hadn’t put too much thought into what I was saying. That changed when I read her text:
“This is all we ever talk about anymore. I’m pretty sure I’m losing my friend.”
In an instant my booze-induced mental bleariness dissipates. She has my undivided attention.
???
Let’s cast aside the present tense and provide some context. As I’ve discussed in previous articles, I have long suffered from anxiety and depression. To cope with these maladies, I felt compelled to overload myself with work; by 2014, I was wearing multiple hats as a full-time PhD student, freelance op-ed writer, political campaign worker, and local elected official, to say nothing of dutiful son (my mother had suffered a heart attack in May) and boyfriend (two serious relationships started and ended that year). By keeping myself busy—oh so very, very busy—I found that I had quieted my inner psychological tempest. Even when crises struck (such as the break ups or my mother’s aforementioned heart attack), I felt able to cope by simple virtue of how much else was going on in my life. The core pain was still there, but workaholism had proved a reasonably effective topical anesthetic.
Then exhaustion set in. Like muscles that have exercised for too long without rest, my spirit began to cramp.
Before long, the anxiety attacks I had once kept at bay returned with vicious force. Before long, they convinced me that I needed to take a leave of absence from my graduate program, which had dominated my mental life for the previous four-and-a-half years without break. I removed myself from the dating scene, significantly reduced my workload with the Northampton County Democratic Committee (to which I had been elected in May), and threw myself whole hog into my writing, the one form of work that without exception always felt like play. While this was partially done as a conscious decision to protect my health, much of it was involuntary. A human being only has so much energy to expend, and when that supply begins to dwindle, they will inevitably slow down whether they want to or not.
Of course, now that my anxiety had returned, my depression swung back with full force, and I didn’t like that one bit. Given the meager local options insofar as mental health care is concerned, I found myself without any effective way to dull the psychological pain I was experiencing every moment of every day. Writing about it often helped—quite a bit, in fact—but there is only so much that one can write … or, for that matter, which editors are willing to publish. With that form of catharsis being inherently limited in scope, I made a habit of drinking when I wanted to numb myself and turning to my friends when I needed to vent.
Apparently they noticed that there was a problem. And even if they hadn’t, it didn’t matter; on the same night that Ariel told me she had noticed a change in my personality, I metaphorically and literally collapsed.
???
It was as if every cell in my body had a tiny brick attached to it. There was no single weight holding me down, but billions and billions of little burdens that had finally calcified over my entire being.
Adjectives like “drained” are often used to describe a state of total psychic weariness, but it’s hard to appreciate how accurate that term is until you truly experience it. After unconvincingly attempting to reassure my friend that everything was copacetic on my end, I fell asleep; when I woke up the following morning, I simply could not get out of bed. Initially I thought this was a hangover, but I soon realized it was something very different. It was as if every cell in my body had a tiny brick attached to it. There was no single weight holding me down, but billions and billions of little burdens that had finally calcified over my entire being. All I felt, aside from the aforementioned exhaustion, was the throbbing pain of the anxiety and depression that had been reemerging over the previous few months.
Again I turned to alcohol, but this time it only made things worse. Here my memory blurs, but I recall this much: I soon contacted another close friend, Susan, who became concerned enough about my health that she insisted I go to the hospital. Because I was too spent to even call off work, she was kind enough to compose emails on my behalf to my editors so that I could acquire the necessary sick days. With my newfound resting time (broken up only by a series of interviews with the CBC that happened to be scheduled for that week), I found the need to ask myself the unavoidable question:
What had gone wrong?
???
My first mistake, I sense, is that I swung from one extreme to the other. While overworking allowed me to simultaneously maintain a productive daily regimen and numb some underlying psychological distress, it also proved too exhausting to be a sustainable alternative. By doing too little, however, I gave my inner demons ample room to roar. And they roared away.
In addition, I hadn’t aggressively sought the mental health care I needed to treat my anxiety and depression. True, there aren’t many great options in the Lehigh Valley, but further investigation has revealed that some decent alternatives exist. None are ideal, but doing something less-than-perfect is still preferable to nothing at all.
Most important of all, I had allowed those negative feelings to define who I was. Thankfully I had plenty of friends who noticed the change in my personality so that, when I finally found myself incapable of coping alone, I could get valuable feedback about what was wrong and confront the problem from an informed and (somewhat) detached vantage point.
And, I suppose, that is that. This is an article written about a sick week by a man who very, very rarely takes time off. I needed to get it out of my system. And now I need to move on.