Living Inside Your Own Skull...

 "If you're going through Hell, keep going..." -- Winston Churchill

So, where did the Overlord disappear to?

Let me begin by saying that it isn't easy being this powerful force for mayhem in the Universe.

The hours suck.

The rewards are few.

Everyone and their mother wants to know why you force-choked so-and-so within an inch of his life. 

It gets repetitive, you know?

On a serious note, the problem is depression.

I was diagnosed as clinically depressed shortly after 9/11. It was but one consequence of the event, for there were a myriad of other issues that arrived, simultaneously.

In the course of therapy, it had become obvious that I had been depressed pretty much since childhood. I have always managed to hide it pretty well, but there are times when it just can't be concealed anymore. The general rule was that the more I was depressed, the less I did for myself. It just didn't seem important or worth the effort, and so I turned my attention to doing for others.

I supported my family at age 20, being the sole breadwinner for a time.

Mrs. Overlord was ill and needed 24 hour care.

These were really the biggest examples, but there are plenty more of them and so for brevity's sake, I will not bore you with the details, suffice it to say that the biggest flaw in this coping mechanism is that at some point you expect a reward...something...even just a thank you...and it often doesn't come.

And if you thought you were depressed before, just imagine literally moving Heaven and Earth for another, only to be disappointed that not only are your efforts and energy most probably wasted (because people, in general, suck), but that there isn't any gratitude or even acknowledgement for what you have done, often done at great personal sacrifice.

If you didn't absolutely hate people before, you soon will when that happens. This begins the process of withdrawal, of disconnection, from the people around you; they can't be trusted, they can't be counted upon to do much of anything except either ignore you (having gotten what they needed), or worse, projecting their worst qualities on to you in an effort to discard you.

The last 21 months of life have been exceedingly difficult.

It began with the passing of Mrs. Overlord. Almost immediately, the fight over money began, and eventually (within weeks of the funeral, no less!) I had her family accusing me of all sorts of financial and ethical skullduggery, none of which had any basis in fact, but which stung all the harder when you understand that not a single one of them lifted a finger to help her in the ways she needed. They were all too happy to leave that sort of thing to me, until it came time to divvy up the inheritance.

That's when the courts and the lawyers arrive on the scene to make a difficult situation nearly unbearable.

In the end, I was vindicated, but it still hurt a great deal. It interrupted my own processing of grief and loss. It got so bad that I left New York entirely and took a job with IBM in Raleigh-Durham, NC, just to leave these assholes in my rearview.

It was a hasty decision. For Raleigh-Durham turned out to be just another form of Hell.

No friends nearby. No family. No support system, to speak of. I thought of it, at first, as a means of "getting a fresh start" and it became no such thing. Work got ridiculous: at one point, I was working seven days a week, 12 hour shifts, every night for six and a half months. Buried myself in work both as a means of forgetting the past and also to try to establish myself in my new surroundings.

It went unrewarded. I am now working two years without a raise, despite working over 1,100 hours of overtime just last year, alone. The isolation grows deeper, because you now live in a small town where they roll the sidewalks up at 8:30 every night and the only activities you can engage in regularly are drinking and eating BBQ.

Life now settles into a sort of self-destructive cycle. I managed to catch two doses of pneumonia in the last year. There were times when all I saw were the insides of my eyelids and my little home office for months on end. 

Go outside? Too tired.

Take in the local culture? There really isn't any.

Do something different? "Different" in Clayton, NC means choosing Burger King over Wendy's.

And when there's nothing to draw your attention away from the things you SHOULD be concentrating on, there's nothing but regrets to constantly churn over and replay inside of your head.

Was I slow to respond to her symptoms of the on-coming heart attack?

Did I do everything I possibly could to keep her healthy and alive?

Was I knowingly fighting a losing battle against Muscular Dystrophy and just too stupid or stubborn to give it up?

Did I do the right things when I was 15? 25? 40?

This is all so unfair: why does this happen to me, all the time?

It will sap your enthusiasm for life. It will kill any ambition you may have. It fills you with doubts, fears and engenders a strategy of surrender before you even start.

This happens every so often when you're depressed. I haven't taken medications for it in 20 years, or so, because I've always managed to ignore the signs or persevere through the misery. This is just what you have to do: fix bayonets and charge forward. Right up until that urge dies the inglorious death you'd expect and then inertia sets in.

At that point, you really just have to trust in the hope that you will eventually get angry enough to overcome the inertia and do something, anything, to get over it.

So, here we are today.

The first step was to get the ever-loving fuck out of Moscow-on-the-Neuse, and it's surrounding gulags of neat, cookie-cutter cardboard homes. Back to New York, then.

The second step is to get a new job. I will be lobbying very hard to get back to working on Wall Street, again. The stress and the pressure were never much of a problem for me to handle; in many cases, it brought out my best. 

The final step is to decide just what it is I want to do with the rest of my time on this Spitball in Space.

The focus of that effort, though, will be solely on myself, this time. I've had enough of other people's problems and I'm not fucking Jesus.

(Jesus, incidentally, is a very poor role model, I think. After all, he got himself nailed to two pieces of wood for all his love and altruism. I sometimes feel as if I've been crucified more than once).

Time to take some risks. Time to re-evaluate. Time to do whatever the fuck I want whenever I want to.

And yet that specter still looms over it all. That multi-headed monster of depression. I think, at this point, I'm sick of dealing with that, too, and it's time to tell that bastard to fuck off.

Much of what you have read here in the past, and on other platforms where I have written, was born of anger. That's when I was letting it out. That was healthy. It turned out to often be funny or interesting, but it was still the by-product of sheer rage.

When that animosity isn't released in a healthy manner, however, it gets turned inwards and that's when the problem reasserts itself.

Time to break the cycle.

Let's get to work.