What a long, strange trip it has been

 

It's been a long time. It's been eight years and one month since the last time I posted a blog, as of writing this sentence (which will probably get published later.) There's probably a lot to talk about. Too much to talk about to try and bother recapping it all. I'll recap some of it, but only in service of the things I want to talk about and find interesting or relevant. We'll see where it goes (if it goes) from there.

The last time I wrote something that wasn't about Mass Effect being a disappointment, I don't even think I was married yet. I was living in California with no real goals or dreams to speak of, just kind of living in the moment in what was easily the strongest relationship I'd ever been in up to that point in my life. It's easy to say I was living in one age transitioning into another slowly enough for me not to notice, but nowadays I think that is always true. Especially when you're talking about people in their 20s. Your life is always in transition, it's just rotating slowly like the earth and you don't see it.

One of the reasons that drew me back to writing here actually is contained in those posts from a bygone era. Specifically, the feeling. I don't know how to describe it except misplaced passion, which for me now is amusing and also a little bittersweet. 

When you're in your 20s, it's extremely easy to be passionate about basically anything. Take Mass Effect as a perfect example. You have so much passion and energy and idealism and hope, it's practically firing out of you. You can beat a (stupid, pointless) video game (that no one remembers today) and then stay up until 4am obsessing over the ending. 

If you're lucky as I was in that time of my life, you have this perfect beautiful ignorance of the finite nature of life. All your friends are going to be your friends forever. You and the person you love only need love to make it. The people you are closest to will always be around if you want them to be, and the only thing holding you back is you. None of this is technically false, it just requires a lot of energy and a bit of luck, and at that age you're likely to have at least one of those things. 

Life's negativity has a way of acting like radiation. It's always around you, albeit in varying amounts, and the longer you're in it, the harder it is not to be affected by it. It is so easy to become jaded. In a way, it's safer. The more sure you are of outcomes in advance, the less threatening they are when they happen, and no outcome is easier to achieve than a negative one. The narrative begins to write itself. The mind is an incredibly powerful thing, and you are stuck with yours until one or the other unravels. And just like radiation, you can easily poison yourself over time with the wrong kind of thinking. It feels warm. It feels familiar. But if you let it go on long enough, your skin sloughs off and you melt into a pool of miserable goo. 

I am a firm believer in the concept that you live several lives of the course of a normal human one. You could look at it like chapters I suppose. 20-something me is not 30 year old me. 30 year old me is not 36 year old me. It is a hard and obvious delineation. The only thing tying these lives together in my mind is the inner struggle of constantly learning myself.

In the course of what felt like a year, I went from "I'm going to live here with my wife for the rest of my life" to being divorced, dropping half my friends permanently, and moving to a completely new state to start my life over. I went to a funeral for someone I knew who was way too young to go, and then right as I was leaving the state, my uncle died in his sleep. The last real conversation we had was a brief phone call when he found out I had separated from Felicia. I told him it was a long story and I think he told me without telling me that he wasn't going to spend time in her art studio anymore. Probably to show solidarity with me. I didn't need him to do that, and honestly I didn't want him to do it either, but I don't think I told him either of those things. Being in her art studio made him the happiest I'd seen him in so fucking long. He had always wanted to be a comic artist, but he had treated it the way I treat wanting to be an author - a little work here, a little work there, and years of not picking it up at all. "I'll get to it one of these days." Every artist that never went anywhere knows exactly how this dance goes.

Except before the separation, he was finally doing it. He was posting his art on instagram, it looked like he was actually getting paid to do it too. It was becoming serious, substantial. I remember visiting her at the studio in better times when he was there and he was just so damn happy. It was great to see. Then I got separated and he died in his sleep not long after. 

I ran into him randomly at one of Felicia's art shows, we hadn't coordinated and for some reason I was surprised to see him. I think I talked to him for maybe three minutes, then I was headed somewhere else. I'd catch up with him later, I had stuff going on. That is the last time I remember seeing him in person. 

Separating from Felicia was a nightmare of my own creation. In more ways than one, but that insight took me years to dig out of the experience. I recall her coming home one night and saying that she wasn't in love with me anymore, or something to that effect. That started this long dark spiral of bad decisions and bad thinking and total lack of personal accountability from me. I've always viewed myself as a good person by virtue of trying to always be a good person and do the right thing to the best of my ability. That's great in theory, but in practice the end result was that my initial conclusion to this was "I'm not a bad person, therefore I can't be in the wrong." Surely this must at the very least be both of our faults (technically true), but because I'm embracing the idea of me trying to be a good person, there are no real adjustments for me to make. I just need to make it more obvious that I'm a good person.

That was the logic that pulled the thread out of the sweater. She had outlined a few fair complaints, and I put all the energy into saying "I'm the one trying here" and almost none of it into actually trying. The few things I ventured to try, I pushed her to take lead on. Which was another way of saying "you'll have to pull me to halfway and that's as far as I'll go." 

I didn't know how to cook and my proposed solution was, you cook and I'll watch and learn that way. Lazy. I didn't want to handle meat because it felt gross. We didn't have a dishwasher and I didn't clean any of the dishes for the same reason. I never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. I had stopped going to her art shows a while back, rationalizing that my hatred of what I perceived as her peers being tryhard would be a negative, and anyway it would be better for her career if she appeared single, which I shouldn't have to tell anyone in a relationship is extremely dumb thinking. Months before (I can't recall how many now), I had quit my full time job in protest over a policy shift that violated employee privacy. Very virtuous of me, except from then to relationship failure point I didn't get a job, not even part time. All of this seemed perfectly rational and ok to me at the time, because I try to be a good person. Try is interesting here, because I wasn't trying anything of substance at all, besides her patience and the boundaries of our relationship. The only thing I was really trying to do was feel good about myself, feel righteous in my actions, which is easy when you already agree with yourself.

All this was akin to dumping gallons of gasoline on a problem that I didn't even see and then daring her to light a match. And worse, in the end I lit the fucking match. All this energy spent on not addressing the problem but feeling like I did resulted in me losing patience with her demeanor towards me not changing. One fateful day I got the bright idea to pack up all my shit and dramatically present it in the living room when she came home. I even half ass cleaned some of the house, the more to remove my existence and underline my point (more righteousness signalling). She came home to half the house being ready to pack in the other half of the house, and me launching a speech at her about "what she made things come to" like a Turkish assassin.

In my mind, this was going to shock her into seeing how far I was willing to go to "do the right thing." I am making her miserable, and the only way to stop making her miserable is to go away extremely dramatically. Then when I'm gone she will see how big of a hole in her life I filled and we'll laugh and cry and figure it out. I literally believed this in the positive sense, that making my suffering visible was the cure all along and make both of us happy again. This is one of the downsides to having an abundance of passion in your 20s - it makes you an idiot sometimes.

From there it was like the slideshow of consequences at the end of a Fallout game. I moved out, a couple days later we talked and unsurprisingly she felt good about me being gone, a feeling which just continued to grow for her until one night she called and basically said she was done. I don't think I ever cried so hard in my life. I was so hysterical on the phone that she asked if she should come over. I felt even in my grief that that offer was not one that would solve anything, a pyrrhic victory under the best circumstances delaying the inevitable, and emotionally manipulating the shit out of her to boot. I took what I perceived to be the high road and declined, hung up and then wept uncontrollably. If I had moved out anywhere but into my mom's house, I probably would have shot myself. I want to say I was 29 or right on the eve of 30 at the time, and I literally walked into my mom's room and woke her up from sleep so I could cry to her instead. I never felt as defeated as I did then. I just wanted to sleep and not wake up.

The time period after that is an absolute haze. Recently I was going through my old emails and found one that I wrote to her - it must have been right after that incident. I was so angry and sad, and all I tried to achieve was to make her feel the way I felt. I honestly don't even remember writing it, but I know I did because I saw the evidence of it right in my face. It was more of this new version of me that purposely did negative things to elicit a negative emotion in her. I was becoming consciously toxic.  Probably still thinking this would somehow fix the situation in some kind of way.

At some point I moved out with my buddy Ian. I feel bad for him. I was not what he signed up for. I think in his mind it was gonna be two bros just being bros after work, playing games and having fun and getting into conversations and all that shit. But I was barely present. Somewhere in there I finally started working again, and then I finally started dating again, rationalizing that after over a year it was time to move on. That might have been true if I had actually done that. The reality is that I wasn't over it, I was just over being sad and wanted to feel something else. That was yet another mistake, but one I had to learn the hard way, like the one before it. Then my uncle died.

 Not long after, I decided it was time for a full life reboot. Surely if I ran to another place, I'd become another person. And that was true, in a way. My whole life up to that point I had always worked with my mom, and our familial relationship really blurred the line at work in a bad way, for both of us. I was wracked with anxiety wondering what kind of employee I would be not working under her for a change. I was terrified at the thought that I'd be what I was in California: toxic, entitled, a total drag on my coworkers. I recall one time my mom calling me into her office and having what for me was a life changing conversation and for her must have been extremely awkward and unpleasant. She informed me in the best way she could that basically everyone I had ever worked with had complained about me and didn't want to work with me at all. Not zero of that was from my relationship exploding. But it damn sure wasn't 100% either. 

What really affected me was a couple people there that I really liked and thought I had always been nice too, and basically said they'd rather not work with me if they could avoid it. I was officially That Guy. Keep in mind they were telling my mom this, who was both my boss and theirs. In a shittier more toxic family, that would be a hell of a career gamble. And I could have taken it in a toxic direction too. Thankfully, I just felt really bad instead. In retrospect, that was really fucking good for me. I think this observation is important, and I really want to call your attention to it, as you'll see it again.

Anyway, I found work in Arizona and to my immense relief discovered that I had successfully switched from entitled, sarcastic and toxic to overearnest, overachieving and workplace-appropriate toxic. I poured myself into my job, and had I been working under a different person, I might have stayed there. 

I can't say it was all bad. I got to go on trips to places I would never go on my own. I felt like a new person. I was a new person. Business trips meant taking planes - I hadn't taken a plane since 9/11, and was extremely adamant with Felicia that I never would again, like it was some point of pride. But now that my life exploded, like the NTSB I began to audit and investigate every single piece of wreckage to determine the cause. The biggest hangup my whole life was fear of dying in a plane crash. But now I didn't care if I lived or died, so that hurdle was easy. The other thing propelling it was not wanting to look like a fucking baby in my new career, so I just pretended that I was fine even though I was fucking shook the entire way there and back the first time.

Aside from travel, I also finally began directly confronting the obvious issues I had, which at this point in time were unforgivable. When you're 24, if you don't know how to cook or don't want to touch raw meat, it's embarrassing but you're also a big fucking idiot anyway and no adult has real expectations of you. But at 30, there's no "well it feels weird" to bail you out. Besides, is the gross feeling of meat worse than dying? Certainly not, and if I wasn't afraid of that, then I really had no excuse.

I started pushing these self-sufficiency boundaries, growing small skills and larger ones, making totally new relationships with people I had zero history with and basically rebooting my perception of my own identity. It was good in a lot of ways. Around this time I wrote Felicia another letter. This one I actually remember, because I thought about it for a long time before doing it. By this point surely I had the clarity of being far away enough from the past, literally and figuratively, to see the bigger picture and admit all my faults. And I think I even identified some of them correctly. Not all of them, but that took me a lot more time to recognize. 

Unfortunately, the whole venture was tainted with agenda - in my mind, owning up to what I perceived to be my sins in the relationship could be used to signal the possibility of some future relationship rekindling, which really only served to undermine all of the positive changes I had gone through. I was in denial about this theme in the letter at the time of writing it, which tells you that the messaging was clearly there. Nevermind that there was no plausible path forward for such a thing anyway. 

But the idea was a form of comfort food in a way, perhaps a means of validating the change that I felt I had gone through. I wanted her to validate the changes, too. Also it's worth mentioning that the best part of being in love with someone is also the worst part: there's no obvious off switch. The whole thing rounds the corner, shifts into another form and then comes at you another way.

I remember sending the email and then thinking I will either get a response quickly or not at all. It turned out to be the latter, but that took me a solid week of chipping away at copium to finally acknowledge. At the time I didn't know if she had even seen it, and that allowed me to imagine that surely some great profound emotional acknowledgement was coming, any day now. Maybe I should send it again, or send it to someone else to ensure delivery? 

 I found out years later that she had read it and apparently didn't think it warranted a response. This hurt a lot, but it helped with the healing process.

Eventually a very adult thing happened - the positive work experience had ran its course. I had plateaued in earnings, which meant I also plateaued in personal growth in a lot of ways. My responsibilities continued to rise but my pay didn't. I was coming home from work and going straight to bed, which left no more room for additional positive lifestyle changes. Also, I was constantly broke. The boss wanted me to start working 6 days a week with no indication of a pay raise, ostensibly to "catch up" on the unworkable amount of responsibilities that had been assigned to me. My strengths, of showing up and working hard and staying late and trying to rise, had rewarded me with a glass ceiling and an albatross. It was time to renegotiate or stop. I chose the latter due to feeling unappreciated.

Then the universe did something really strange - it found a solution to all of my banal problems at the same time. It almost felt like fate. My job had hit the dreaded Two Year Mark, my lease for my apartment was just about up, and with COVID locking the state down I fell aggressively out of love with Arizona. I hated the weather, hated my job, hated being stuck inside in the desert with curfews and masks and shutdowns. The only thing I liked was my coworkers. Right as all these problems were arriving at the same time, literally out of the blue Matt calls and says, "would you move out here if I paid for it?"

You know what? I would definitely do that.

Even my mom thought it was a good idea, and on paper it was a terrible idea. She's historically the one to champion caution. Drop everything again and start over again, how is that a good idea? Maybe it was a little COVID fatigue of her own, but she said "you know what, maybe that is the move you should do." 

I thought about it, and decided to give my resignation notice a weekish out from the next grand adventure. One of my coworkers Sandman-hooked me into her car to "go get coffee" when she found out about my resignation. She read me the riot act of how this was a stupid idea, we're just about to make a ton of money, why would you do this now of all times. I told her I had heard that story for two years, and all I had to show for it was all of my career and what I had absorbed of my superior's whom I replaced, but the money wasn't there. She made me promise to attend a retention meeting to try and change my mind. I agreed but only to placate her. I knew there was no chance of leaving there with a pay raise, and therefore no chance of me not leaving.

Sure enough, the meeting played out like a police interrogation, with my coworker playing the role of Good Cop, asking if I had attempted to make good faith steps and consider good faith alternatives and concessions. All of which I had already previously, to no positive effect for me. I pointed out the issue wasn't my workflow, it was that he just didn't want to pay me more. 

Maybe it was because he didn't like me (it's like that sometimes), maybe it was because he was just trying to save money and thought I wasn't worth it (it's like that sometimes too). The reason didn't matter because the reality was what it was. He didn't disagree or give any indication that he was having second thoughts of any kind; he was happy to let me go. And so my career there ended like it began, abruptly with little fanfare.

I worked my ass off the last two weeks, specifically because I knew anything I didn't do would get foisted onto one of my friends. I also tried to make explicit guides for how to do the duties I was handing over, so they wouldn't have to start from scratch. In my mind, I came into the job swinging for the fences, and I wanted to leave with a reputation of being a good person.

One of the problems I have in life is the tendency to make elaborate plans in my mind ahead of time, and then waste that time not setting the plan in motion, instead waiting until the last possible moment to take action. So went my plan to leave the state and start over again. In my mind, I imagined myself plotting the route, picking gas stations strategically along the way (I would be towing all my shit out there myself) and also picking places to stop and rest for the night. I would also pack up my meager belongings and have them staged and ready to chuck into the vehicle when the time finally came.

In reality, I did neither of those things. I kept setting deadlines for routing and plotting but then not actually following through. I also rationalized that because I owned so few things, it shouldn't actually take that long to pack. 

Both of those moves came back to haunt me in a big way.

The day before I was due to pick up the vehicle and load up, I decided then was the time to pack. I put some of my stuff in boxes and just staged the rest by the door. That's basically done, right? The day of loading, one of my friends volunteered to help to make it go quicker. But either he had a genuine emergency, or saw the volume of shit I had to move and decided I wasn't enough of a friend for all that shit, because after helping me move a few major furniture pieces, he suddenly had to go. That left me on my own, going up and down stairs, down the winding trail, into the back of the vehicle. I thought this would take maybe three hours at most. It ended up taking eight. 

That exhaustion led to more bad decision making. Halfway through loading I smelled a distinct, strong smell of cigarette in the back of the vehicle and realized that while I was moving back and forth between my apartment, one of my neighbors who was outside smoking decided to get into my vehicle and look at what I had loaded, presumably to take stuff. This made me paranoid, but I didn't have a lock for the door, and for some reason my brain told me that rather than drive to Walmart (which was a mile away) it was smarter to walk there and get a lock and come back, which I did. This made the whole process take even longer and exhausted me further.

As I was loading the final box into the vehicle, it was one in the morning, and one of my other neighbors was getting arrested. I was exhausted, paranoid, nostalgic and more than a little delirious. I said goodbye to my apartment and I thought about the future that I wanted to happen there that now never would; finding a spouse, having kids, raising a family. I got a little choked up then and cried a bit as I wished the vacant space good luck with the next tenant and sorry things didn't work out. 

Then I compounded the stupidity. Instead of going into the apartment and catching some sleep on the floor, I decided fuck it, let's just leave now. As I was driving a big truck and towing a vehicle, I rationalized to myself that I couldn't leave it parked overnight or I would get in trouble, and I don't want all my earthly possessions stolen which they surely will be, and besides, driving is way easier than walking and lifting shit so I'll probably be fine.

And so I pulled into a gas station, bought three giant coffee energy drinks, and the journey began. I spent the next several hours listening to music, singing along, discussing my life choices with myself out loud. All to keep engaged and awake - better to be awake and a little crazy than asleep and a little dead. Amazingly, for the first several hours I did really well. I recall around 4-5 in the morning guessing that somewhere between 9-10, things would get more difficult and dangerous if I didn't take a break. I did not realize how perfectly I nailed it. 

Just before 10AM, I started losing vision in my left eye. I don't know how to describe it except the effect was similar to what it looks like if you push too hard on your eyes with your hands, that weird color-negative visual distortion. It came out of nowhere and I suddenly found myself squinting like I was looking through binoculars. As I had established the habit of talking to myself out loud, I naturally stated, "that's not good." Except my mouth did not say "that's not good." It more said "thaaassssssnnnnnnnnnfuuuuuuuuuuuck" and scared the absolute shit out of me. Holy shit, I am about to die in the middle of nowhere.

Thankfully, I was only 7 miles away from the nearest rest stop at that point and it was a mostly straight shot. I made it in, pulled over, turned off the vehicle and just sat contemplating death for several minutes in hysterical exhaustion. I called my mom and said "don't freak out, but I think if I keep driving I'm going to die." Unsurprisingly, she did not heed my advice and basically told me to sleep there for awhile then go straight to a motel and sleep for real. I hung up with her and called Matt. 

"Don't want to freak you out, but I might die on this road this morning."

"Well, don't do that."

Then he gave the same advice that my mom gave, which I agreed with, as I had agreed with her. But after closing my eyes in the full on blaring sun with the engine running and the air conditioning on full blast for around 15 minutes, I decided maybe I was fine now and could just finish the trip. Thirty minutes later I was back to reality and beelined for the nearest motel. All I remember is checking into a totally empty motel, parking sideways right next to my door, pulling out my computer from my car (the only thing of actual value I didn't want to worry about) and putting it besides the bed like a family pet and then passing out for six hours.

I woke up feeling a thousand times better and finished the rest of the trip. It was the most harrowing experience of my life. The drive ended up taking 23 hours including the motel due to the speed limiter on my vehicle. When I got to town, I literally threw the shirt I was wearing away - I don't know why, it made sense at the time. The hotel I was in had a giant tub and I filled that bitch with molten lava and then soaked in it like Luke Skywalker in the bacta tank.

This was the first time in my life that I ever felt fully confident in the decision I made, and it was a total gamble into the unknown. I don't know how else to describe it. I just felt like no matter what happened, I was going to be fine. That trip was scarier than anything that could happen anywhere on earth (which is clearly not true). This was the first time in my life that I didn't have to tell myself that I had matured significantly. I could feel it. The universe was saying it for me. 

At this point I'd like to take a detour because I've only described half of the time it's been since we last spoke and rather than recite the other half, I'd like to instead focus on what I want to get out of this blog now and going forward, some of which is exemplified in the second half of the time, but doesn't require the whole enchilada.

I said before that I wanted to get married and start a family in Arizona and I meant that, although at the time I wasn't successful at finding it and maybe not even capable of having it or attracting it yet. For me, an unfortunate part of coming to terms with getting divorced (which I didn't even get into, but essentially was as legally amicable as life will ever allow) was going through a series of bad romantic investments, primarily due to my own self-esteem. Going into getting married, I had a complex about the idea of ever being divorced as it had happened to my mom twice, and I didn't want to go through that, and thought I wouldn't (until I did). If I've established any kind of theme here, it's how one bad experience or decision for me begets another.

In this case, feeling like a failure and feeling like I had abdicated my role in bringing happiness to my wife led to finding partners and becoming way too invested in putting their happiness above my own. In my mind, I needed a vacation from my happiness for my own good, as surely this is what made my marriage fail or at the very least a major contributing factor. 

This kind of neediness already attracts the wrong kinds of partners, but it gets compounded when you view their toxicity as validated by your past failures. That is to say, when they deal with you in bad faith but tell you they are dealing in good faith, your brain tells you the bad faith isn't real or is real but deserved. When you are with someone who doesn't want to be happy or can't be happy, the worst thing you can do is try to prove them wrong.

I'm not going to dwell on these relationships, because they didn't go anywhere and that's ok. The point I'm trying to get at is while I don't have kids, I dwell a lot on what it means to me to be a parent. Because I would characterize this entire journey since leaving California as a journey of learning to parent myself. And a good portion of that journey was through failing rather than succeeding. I have spent the last eight years losing battles but catching glimpses of the bigger picture as a result. And I have only recently come to appreciate that failure is not just a point of shame every time. It can be, and it's easy to feel that part of it because it comes naturally. But it's also an opportunity to learn and grow, and some of my best growth has come from some of my lowest moments. But I had to reach for that growth. No doubt some of that growth opportunity has escaped me along the way.

This is what I want this blog to capture. This is the sort of legacy I want to leave, whether it's for my hypothetical future children, my friends, total strangers, or even just myself. The awesome, incredible part of a painful journey is surviving it and being more than the sum of your scars. And how said scars over time explain their own true origins to you rather than how you perceived them at the time. I will give an example of what I'm talking about now and maybe more or maybe I will wrap it up after because this is a lot of goddamn words and I wouldn't blame you for not sticking it out even this far.

For my entire life, I have snored really bad. Every single person subjected to it has complained. God knows how much of it Felicia endured before the end. This used to be simply a source of shame but nothing beyond that. I'm just a person who snores. One of the untold benefits of getting older is that the problems you choose to ignore get worse. This is good because they eventually get bad enough to force you to address them. It turns out my snoring isn't just snoring. I self-diagnosed myself with sleep apnea years ago just based on reading about it going "yeah that sounds exactly like me." But I never took it further than that. How bad could it be, after all? I am still functional.

Well, I was functional. Or at the very least, I perceived myself to be functional enough, which is an important distinction. But two years ago, I started noticing that I was falling asleep behind the wheel when driving home from work, which needless to say is scary as fuck. My problem was finally bad enough that I had to acknowledge that it actually existed, and to try to make it go back to not being noticeable. Sleep apnea is aggravated by a lot of things, and the easy low-hanging fruit things are weight-related and sleep habit-related. So took a couple of baby steps. I quit drinking soda entirely and replaced it with water, which for me was huge. I started actually working out, focusing primarily on cardio. I made healthier food choices, although I didn't go nuts with it. I slept at least eight hours every single night, twelve on the weekends. This should help, I rationalized. And it should.

It didn't help. And that caused me to have another very adult moment. I had set a timeline of expected improvement, and did everything in my power and still failed. I had to finally admit to myself that this problem wasn't just going to go away. 

I went to my doctor, explained all my symptoms, and answered all her questions. She thought it sounded like I had some form of sleep apnea, maybe light or mild. They approved me for a sleep test, which turned out to be something you could do at home through the mail. My expected AHI (apnea hypopnea index) was expected to be 5-15 at the most, which is mild sleep apnea. 30 is considered severe. 

My score was 52.

Needless to say, my doctor was adamant on me taking the steps to get the machine. My blood oxygen level dipped to as low as 67%, which is fucking bad. Untreated, the likelihood of me dying by my 50s of this was way higher than fucking zero, and the odds would only get worse and worse and worse beyond that point. My sleep was described as "fragmented" sleep, meaning I never meaningfully hit deep or REM sleep. Meaning for all my sleeping, I wasn't sleeping, and wasn't getting the benefits of sleep.

I can get into the weeds on what the process of getting and acclimating to the machine was like, and I may in a future post, just because I have a lot of very useful knowledge now in retrospect that a person considering it should hear before starting therapy. That said, the larger point I'm trying to get at here is not the nuances of sleep therapy, it's what sleep therapy uncovered for me.

The thing about having a problem your entire life is you do not perceive it as a problem at all. The problem is your normal. I sleep 12 hours and feel exhausted. That's normal. I snore like a chainsaw. That's normal. Obviously it's not normal. But that's not the only thing I learned from this journey.

An extremely large amount of my anxiety stems directly from lack of restful sleep. That whole bout in my 20s of being exhausted after work, not wanting to go anywhere or do anything and dreading any social interactions? That shit disappeared with sleep therapy. I work ten times harder and do ten times more now, literally ten years older than I did at my busiest point then. My normal was suddenly revealed to be extremely far from normal.

How much strain had this affliction that 'wasn't bad enough for me to acknowledge' actually put on my relationship when it mattered? Not zero. 

And don't get this wrong, this is not another attempt to surreptitiously woo my ex again. The actual point is that for years I internalized shame over a problem that I didn't even fully understand. I had incomplete data that led to wrong conclusions, that led to more bad and wrong choices. It's impossible for me to say whether or not this was the lynchpin that undid that relationship. There could have been a thousand other unspoken things. There could have been ten thousand more around the corner even if we had navigated everything totally differently. When you're young, you think love is enough, and while things are good, it is. But in the end, we still gave up on each other when it mattered. How I feel about it today can't change that. I don't think that's something you can recover from. Sometimes, that's how life goes. But learning this was a huge emotional revelation for me. 

My real surreptitious hope is that someone reads this and it flicks a light on in their brain and connects some dots they didn't see previously. Whether it's literally this or figuratively something else.

When I started this blog as a teenager, I wanted to express myself. Probably to be admired to some degree, to satisfy the ego or dull what I call the negative ego. But the primary goal was to exist out loud and be measured. That's not not the goal, but it has shifted for me. I don't need this to mean something for me and me alone. Self-expression is its own reward. I've been gone for eight years because I've been living my life, and was content to be the only witness to it. But today, as a 36 year old man, I read the musings of 25 year old me and think, one day maybe my kids will be reading this shit and I will be gone. But I won't be gone, because I'll be right here. Not all of me obviously, but a piece of me. And not just sentimental but practical too. I don't think anything I've ever gone through has ever been wholly unique. Perhaps in presentation, but not in structure or theme. This is who I am at this age. Below is who I was at that age. I'm probably at least a little bit like you. Maybe you'll learn something from all this nonsense. Even if all you've learned is that your thoughts were as valid as you thought they were. Or that people do stupid shit when they are afraid.

I want the people that I care about to succeed. I want them to live better, stronger, happier than me. Not that I don't want to be those things. I want to be the most of those things I can be, and I still want you to blow past me. When I was in my 20s my capacity to love was much easier to connect to. The great existential crisis of my 30s is getting back to that. Life makes it really easy to drift away from that, and it feels like the current against swimming back picks up in speed. 

And as it stands today, we are living in weird fucking times. When 9/11 happened, the whole world felt like it wanted everyone in it to be okay. We are as far away from that now as we've ever been in my lifetime. It's never been more exhausting to try and be vulnerable in this world. God knows what yours will look like, hopefully better than this. 

But even if it isn't, I want this blog to be your sleep test. I want to lower your soul's AHI to not dead by 52. I don't know if emotional heartbreak is a permanent state or not honestly. Mine hasn't gone away, only change forms and lessened in volume and intensity over time. I don't cry for six hours anymore, but under the right circumstances I can still feel that pain like it's new. And if you believe something is forever, then you make it so. If heartbreak is forever, I don't want it to be because I believed it into being forever.

But being broken is not a permanent state. It is a challenge. It's falling asleep on your drive home from work. You can avoid acknowledging it and someday you'll wake up upside down or not at all. Or you can take it on. Sometimes, the greatest success you can have in life is to just not fucking die. The victories will come later. You may have to drive 23 hours through the desert on gas station coffee to get there. It's like that sometimes.

 My friend played this song for me the day before I left Arizona, and I almost cried in his car. It's crazy how the universe can feel like it's talking directly to you.