Hello guys.
Last week, I posted an insight on the first time I fell ill because of manic depression. This is Part 2, even though it's not titled as such. I also decided to accept donations after all, at the urging of two of my biggest supporters.
To get in the mindsight of writing about a truly traumatizing experience such as this, it requires careful thought and going back to places that aren't always comfortable. I'm stepping far from my comfort zone on this one, and literally just had to take a deep breath to continue writing.
After I left the hospital in 2000, I mentioned that I started reconnecting with childhood friends. I never could have imagined the disaster that would lead to in my not to distant future.
After leaving Kansas City in the early summer of 2000, I moved back to my childhood home and in with an old girlfriend from high school. Not long after that, she told me she was pregnant with our child. I wasn't nearly 100% at that time and fell apart completely. We had very little money, had just moved into a house, but it was barely three months before I was back at my parents house for a while.
I had a hard time just thinking about going back to work. I had just turned 25 and I felt my life was going nowhere. At my mother's urging, I enrolled in a technical school business program and found steady work selling cellular phones.
In February of 2001, my old girlfriend finally got in touch with me, saying that she needed me to support her now that our child was coming in March.
I literally dropped everything, except work, to go to doctor appointments, and when our son was born, I quit going to school entirely.
We eventually got a place of our own, but the one memory I have from that brief time after my son was born was that she went home from the hospital without telling me and took our son home to her grandparents, and refused to talk to me for the next several days.
When we moved in together in the summer, she wanted me to quit my job selling phones and take a job at the factory she worked at, because she hated that I was always friendly to women. Pure jealousy. But I did what she wanted because her and my son were my first priority and nothing else mattered.
She also talked me into buying her a diamond engagement ring with every last cent I had, so I thought we were on our way to happiness as a family.
However, money got so tight, even with both of us working and increasing tension between us that she ended up pawning the ring. She'd always end up getting it back, but after she pawned it the first time, I never felt the same about her. She showed me by pawning the ring that the promise of a future with me meant nothing to her.
We continued living together into the fall, but I ended up getting fired from the factory right before Christmas. I should have known better than to let anyone tell me where to work, let alone someone who sold my heart to the highest bidder.
We celebrated Christmas together as a family, but when the new year came, neither of us could afford the rent and utilities on our house, so both of us ended up moving back in with our respective families.
There were times after that we would still take shopping trips together or just hang out with our son. I still cared about her ,even though we both knew that we were better off just being friends.
I found steady work again after collecting unemployment for a while, but it was in the summer of 03 that we went for a ride together in her car, and she tried to decimate my relationship with my current girlfriend, while finally revealing what I had known but refused to accept. That she never loved me romantically.
That hurt. And I mean hurt.
I went on a drinking binge after that. A total bender. Had to go to rehab and dry out for a while.
After rehab, I totally shut down again. Just wanted to sleep. The person I thought I would spend my life with had told me she never loved me. Hocked my ring. My recent girlfriend had left me because of my dependence on alcohol.
I went back to work in 04 as a nurses aid in a care facility for the elderly. Tried hard to get my life back on track. I settled in, and even though there were a lot of double shifts and overtime, I found refuge in being there for those who had no one to turn to. I resumed drinking not too long after though, because of the stress of the job as well as my total inability to relate to the other members of the staff where I was working.
My sleep schedule was a total mess because of the heavy workload and the heavy dependence on weed and alcohol to cope with the pain and anguish of all that happened the last several years.
I ended up getting fired from the care facility in early November. I was so angry. I had a medical condition because of being overworked and caring for residents all by myself. They didn't even wait until I came into work that day. They just called and told me I was done there.
It hurt so bad. I had lost my one true purpose in life and it all began to unravel in front of my eyes. I took a job at an office I had worked at previously. Let me just say that retention work is not fulfilling.
I ended up quitting in February of 05 and plotting my next move. But I was a mess and it was starting to be reflected in every decision I made, no matter how small.
I had been friendly with the guy who was the collection manager at an office I worked at in 2000, when my first bout with mania happened. When he came calling for me to come back to the city again, I should have known better.
I scraped together what little cash I had to move in with him and his family, but found out very quickly that was not the plan at all. He lived next door to a woman who worked overnight's as a nurses aid at a care facility just like I had.
This lady was a complete hoarder. In my whole life, I had never seen anything like it in my life. And, to complicate matters, there were rumblings from my friends wife that she wasn't too fond of our constant partying. Needless to say, I ended up taking a job at a collection agency right down the road from the one I worked previously. With a lot of the same people.
It happened so fast. I never saw this coming. I had once again been blinded by people that were never looking out for me, but only their own interests. Looking back, he really made a total mockery of my need for acceptance.
I can't remember exactly when, but it was sometime in late July of 05 that the wheels completely fell off. I stopped eating and sleeping again.Got kicked out of my home. I was literally on the streets with nowhere to go. Ended up burning bridges with my family. Came to blows with my father.
I ended up back in Kansas City after being stranded on the streets of Columbia, thanks to a kind guy that just wanted me to be taken care of.
I had nowhere to turn. All my music was stolen from me. I barely had anything left, not even my clothes. This was rock bottom. My sister had tried to help, but I was past the point of depression. Full blown mania had taken over and this was how it was going to be for the foreseeable future.
I got a reprieve with a couple of week long stays at a hospital mental health unit, yet when I started getting better, they would throw me out.
I was living in homeless shelters, hungry and tired from the medication and the stress of having nowhere to go, no friends, no money, absolutely nothing.
I got another reprieve for a little over a month when a bed in a respit unit became available. I couldn't get disability nearly fast enough. They got me on Medicaid to cover my mental health expenses and medication, but the turnaround on disability was at least 90 days, so I was back on the streets.
It all became too much for me. One morning, I woke up before five a.m. at the homeless shelter. I didn't want to stay there anymore. I wasn't delusional anymore. Wasn't manic either. Now I was suicidal.
I walked up that hill to the hospital that morning, on a bridge just south of 18th and Holmes. I stood there for a minute. There were train tracks below. Only a fence between me and instant death.
My heart began racing.
I don't know how long I stood there. It felt like an eternity.
But the longer I stood there, I realized that I couldn't go out like that.
The anguish of thinking about how many people would suffer by me hurting myself was all too real.
I just couldn't do it. I literally ran to the hospital in tears at 5 a.m. Grabbed the nearest pay phone to call my mother. I was so relieved when she answered the phone.I cried the most bitter of tears.I remember telling her how bad I was hurting and she told me I would be alright.
I ended up sleeping until it got light out. A friend of mine from group could see that I was really hurting that day. I told her what happened and she took me to a mental health unit to get some rest and more medicine. I spent the day there and left the next morning.Grabbed a pay phone and called my friend. He was sad to have not heard from me.
He told me the best words I could have heard right then.
My mother had sent money for a train ticket home.
It was my mother that had saved me from myself, and after all I had put her through, she never stopped loving me.
Things got better slowly. I started going to therapy.
Ended up getting disability in 07.
I finally knew I mattered again. It was hard, but the worst of it was over. I have never truly thought of ended my life ever since that day.
Thank you Mom.
You really saved me.
Hope this helps all of you that read it.
Thank you for all your support.
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