I hate what I've become over the last two years. I mean, in a lot of ways, I've become much better--the internal personal growth and change I've experienced through all this is actually astounding and wonderful. In one sense, I've finally become the man I've always wanted to be.
I saw it clearly when I went to New York, which I've always avoided, along with other big cities. Instead of being grumpy and irritated and miserable, like I would have been in the past, I was patient, and pleasant, and cheerful, and polite, and tolerant, and kind. And it wasn't because I was making an effort, it just came totally naturally. Exactly how I've always wished I could be.
But in another sense, the pit of inertia I haven't been able to break out of when I'm here alone is driving me crazy, and I hate it. So much.
This has happened to me three times in my life. The first time was after my accident, when I was stuck in a hospital bed in my living room for months and months on end, literally unable to move around or do anything, but under a constant, relentless, incessant burden of stress and worry and, I see now, PTSD. I went to a bad place then, and even after I was able to start walking again I had a hard time breaking out of it. But eventually I did. I went through my physical therapy. I learned to walk, and function again. I started going to the gym, I went back to college, I started working again, I rededicated myself to my marriage (though that proved to be fruitless).
Before that I was always active, always doing something. Mostly either working or doing family things, but even when I wasn't, the few things I did for myself were active: fishing, hunting, gardening, keeping chickens, training dogs, fixing or making things with my hands, cutting firewood, just going for walks. Back then I was always doing something: improving something in the yard or fixing something in the house; learning how to do something useful, usually having to do with being self-sufficient and providing for my family. Or I was working out, or running, or training to fight or whatever, to be a better soldier, or policeman, or whatever I was doing or working toward at the time. When I was a sheriff's deputy, I took classes whenever the department offered them: dog-training from the canine officers, manhunting and human tracking from a crazy old mountain-man; when I was working a graveyard shift in the jail, instead of sitting playing solitaire on the computer like the other deputies on duty, I'd go into the training room and watch training videos on arrest control or investigation; or I'd go through the archives and read old case files, to learn about crime, and investigation, and how the job is done. When I was a soldier, I'd go to work at 4 AM, do PT with my unit, which was usually a run of several miles 3 times a week, and calisthenics twice a week, work a physical job all day, training or doing maintenance on the tanks or whatever, come home, work out again, lifting weights on the run days and running on the calisthenics days, do whatever I had to do for my family, then get to bed in time to get 5 or 6 hours of sleep before I had to get up at 4 again to start it all over. The only sedentary pastime I had was reading. One of my favorite things was, after everybody else went to bed, making a cup of tea and opening a volume of Dickens, for a quiet hour or two. Sure, I had movie night with the family or whatever, like anybody else. But the idea of spending endless hours staring at a screen was hateful to me.
I pretty much always had at least two jobs. There was one point at which I had four. Even after the accident, when I went back to college, I would drive 30-45 minutes to my day job as an editor at a publishing company, leave there, drive the same distance to the Orlando campus of the college I was at, take classes, then drive all the way back past my house, up to the Daytona campus for evening classes, then back home late at night, to take care of the things in the house that only a father does, or on evenings when I didn't have class or on weekends, I'd go to my second job driving a taxi.
The second time was when my injuries and infirmities caught up with me and I stopped working. I sank into an even deeper pit then, which lasted for years. It got really bad. This was when I gained all that weight from being on the antidepressants. It was that one which I was working on escaping and recovering from during those years from when I went back to grad school in Tennessee until year before last. Or was it year before the year before last? Anyway, even through all that, even as hard as it was, even in the darkest, most horrible times, I never completely lost hope. I still believed that good things were possible, and that somehow they were coming for me.
And during that time, even when I had all my injuries, and disabilities, and pain, and sadness...still, I was out trying to make a change, trying to be better, trying to improve. You know the things I've done. I didn't give up. I enrolled in grad school; I built orchards and planted gardens; I hiked the AT, and the ECT; I trained in between by walking up and down hills with a heavy pack, in spite of my pain; I went to the gym, lifted weights, did cardio, even tried yoga; I took dancing lessons, and music lessons, and studied foreign languages, and volunteered at my church and at charities; I helped homeless people, invited strangers over for Thanksgiving, sent support to orphans and abandoned women in foreign lands; worked to rescue girls from trafficking and sex-slavery. I tried. I really tried, to make something of my life. To make a difference. To do something good in the world.
But this time...I just can't see my way forward. I can't see any goal on the horizon which is sufficiently worth working toward to gather myself to make the effort. I mean, I am making the effort, as best I can in the moment, like I said the other day, but...each day is still a very hard struggle. Almost none of the things I deeply cared about before seem to mean anything at all to me anymore. And it's such a shame, because I really am very happy with who I've become, internally. It's my actual life that's the problem. This is definitely the worst one. I need help. But help is not coming. And this is the only time when I've ever really, seriously struggled with and thought about you-know-what.
I've lost my faith. Not completely: I still believe, in the abstract. I still believe in Him, that He's out there, that He is here with me, in some sense. But I've lost the ability to believe in the practical present that there is any good for me in this life. I've lost the ability to hope. What's the point of being a better man if my life is to be lived completely alone, empty, with no purpose or meaning? What use is it to be good when there's no one to be good to?