This past year saw a great deal of change for me, probably more than any other year of my life. I came into 2018 with certain goals in mind. Not New Year’s resolutions, mind you. I’m not a fan of making promises that I might not be able to keep. But goals. Objectives I set for myself that I wanted to accomplish by year’s end. And the good news is that I accomplished pretty much everything I set out to do, but there was a fair amount of pain and hardship involved in getting there.
The Doldrums
The word to define the first three months would be this — frustrating. I’d been job hunting for nearly two years by this point, and so far nothing had panned out. I had applied to hundreds, if not thousands of jobs over the previous 18-24 months, even had several very promising interviews. In the end, though, no one had been willing to take a risk on me. This was due, in no small part, to the fact that I’d already been unemployed for a significant patch of time, and that rarely looks good to a prospective employer. I was also open and honest in nearly every interview about my mental health, and I suspect that scared off a fair few of the employers I was interested in working for.
So I changed tactics. Since the work wasn’t bringing me to it, I decided to take the bull by the horns and bring the work to me. In April I launched my own web design and development company, a thing I have always wanted to do. But before I could even really get started with it, my life was upended yet again.
The Jailbird
In May I landed myself in jail for a span of seven days. The specifics aren’t important, and I won’t go into them here for the sake of protecting the privacy of others in my family who were involved. I haven’t talked about it before now because it’s an incident I’m not proud of and I’ve needed time to get some distance and perspective on the incident.
Suffice it to say that I allowed a combination of my anxiety, life stress, and harbored anger to build up inside my head and heart. All it took was a single catalyzing incident to provide the proverbial straw. I exploded. For the first time in my life, I experienced what my therapist describes as a fugue state. I have no memory of the ten minutes that transpired during that time. But in those moments I’m told I became a raging, violent beast, someone so unlike myself that it took my entire family by surprise.
The cops were called, I was arrested, and the next seven days were the closest thing to hell I’ve ever experienced. It was, in short, the single, most traumatizing event of my life. And while I would never wish to go through such a thing again, it also proved to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.
The Turnaround
As I said, it took seven days to finally get bonded out. In that time I had the opportunity to do little else but sleep and think. Within two days I had been able to calm down enough from my anxiety to at least study what happened. I examined my behavior. I determined the causes for it. And I started making plans for the changes I needed to make in my life to ensure such a thing could never happen again.
And then I had five more days to sit and stew on it. Again, traumatic, but in the end it proved beneficial for me. It got my attention in way nothing else had. It lit a fire under me, and a damn big one at that. It galvanized me to work hard and make sweeping changes in my life, changes that had been long overdue, changes that up until then I had been too lazy and complacent to make.
Those seven days in jail changed me, shaped me, instilled a drive in me that had been missing before. It hurt. It was painful. It scared the living daylights out of me. And that was exactly what I needed. It became the first step of many that would follow the rest of the year to successfully accomplish the goals I’d set at the beginning of the year.
Stay tuned. There’s more of this story to come…