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Monday October 19, 1998 At lunch
In real life, I’m extremely shy. So, many times
I’m more of an observer of life than a participant in it. On the other hand,
sometimes you learn more by listening. Take this morning for example.
You know I take the bus to work. What you don’t know, is that for about the middle
20 minutes of my 30 minute ride, the bus fills with a couple dozen teenage boys on the way
to an all-male Catholic high-school. Usually their conversation is about sports and I just
tune it out and look out the window. This morning, the topic was gay men. This perked up
my ears.
I was expecting the usual homophobic slurs and derogatory comments. What I heard was
discussion wondering why gay men are treated badly by some people. This really shocked me.
They discussed an openly gay teacher who wears the colors at school, and they laughed at
the gallows humor on a shirt he recently wore, (it said "Thank you for not killing
me" and had the triangle,) and most remarkably, they discussed Matthew Shepard.
Amongst the dozen or so in the back of the bus with me, who expressed an opinion on the
subject, every single one recognized it as a hate crime, and they couldn’t figure out
why someone would do such a thing, or how they could. I didn’t come out to them or
join in the conversation because I wanted to hear what they said when they didn’t
think anyone who is gay was around.
Naturally I was delighted that unprompted, and not knowing they were in the presence of
a gay man, that they expressed such positive attitudes. And to top it off, they’re
students at all-boy Catholic high-school, in the same Diocese where only weeks ago the
Bishop ousted a priest from his parish of over 20 years for ministering to the GLBT
community.
One step back for the older generation, and two steps forward for the coming one. I
guess we’ll take our advances as they come.
Monday October 19, 1998 4:30PM
And then this afternoon comes around a memo and sign-up
sheet that begins: "The next Medical Center Blood Drive will be held … "
I passed it on and fired off this note to the coordinator:
I’m sorry Judy, even though A- is usually in short supply, under the current FDA
guidelines, I’m ineligible to give blood as they make the preposterous assumption
that every gay man in the country is HIV+. And this, despite the fact that every unit of
blood is tested for evidence of exposure to viruses that might cause diseases, including
HIV, two strains of hepatitis and a number of other diseases.
Just something I feel strongly about, since for years I donated every 2 to 3 months
religiously, and I’m gay and HIV-.
Tuesday October 20, 1998
7:00PM
I was delighted today when I got the reply to the e-mail
I sent yesterday about the blood drive. Here it is, followed by my reply:
That is (one of) the most ridiculous thing(s) I have heard in a long time, but coming
from the FDA, am I surprised? It's probably neither their first nor their last stupid
decision …
Yup! It's right there on the Red Cross web site
too. A few years back there were petitions going around complaining about discrimination
at the Red Cross. That's why they're so sensitive on the issue and cite the FDA
regulations. Strange. I've never though of blood as a food or drug.
Anyway, thanks for understanding. I want to participate, but I'm forbidden.
I’ve been wondering about Willie lately. The last e-mail from him came not quite
two weeks ago. This morning things were a little slow on the Help Desk, so I sent him a
note. He was online at the time and the exchange of e-mail that followed for the next two
hours was more like a chat.
Job offers have not been forthcoming, not for his lack of trying. He had the flu last
week, and this week he started offering tutoring in HTML, Java and C++. He signed off
saying there was a job fair for recent graduates right down the street. Later he wrote
back that there were some very good possibilities. One firm has positions open both in the
UK and in Spain.
E-mail him good luck wishes at .
I’ve had a pretty sad Danger-Boy around the house lately. L Debbie seems to have left
him. We’re not really sure what’s happening with that. The last he saw her was
last week Thursday, and there were no indications then that she was going to take off. She
called here Saturday night around 9:30 saying she was bringing over some stuff from
McDonald’s, and she’d be here in 15 minutes or so. It’s a good thing we had
food in the house, because that’s the last we’ve heard. She’s around
somewhere. There are Debbie sightings regularly around Monroe Ave, yet she hasn’t
been back to her apartment either.
So Jeff’s been living full-time at my place. He still doesn't like the sofabed, so
the mattress is on the floor. Frankly, it IS more comfortable there, but it's a
pain to put away, so we're always walking around it or on it. It is a little close being
one room and all.
Sadly, we won’t have to worry about the crowded conditions here for much longer.
In light of the trouble he’s had with school, work, and now Debbie, he’s
advanced his sentencing date from the end of December to this coming Monday. He’ll
appear in court at 3:00PM and will be taken into custody right then and there. L
We’ve known this was coming, but suddenly it’s less than a week away. Not
much time to prepare emotionally. But all he’s done is mope around here since last
Friday, so maybe it’s for the best. He hasn’t been eating, but in jail
he’ll get three meals daily. He hasn’t been going out or exercising, but
he’ll have an active social life and access to the gym there. I hate to see him like
this. Completely deflated. Nothing at all seems to perk him up.
As you’ve read, he’s been kinda looking forward to getting his time over and
done with. We both expect this will be the last time he sees jail from the inside.
He’s expecting about 150 to 180 days together on the two remaining charges, so
he’ll probably be out sometime in February, given the customary one-third off for
good behavior.
It kinda hit me like a ton of bricks when I got home from work tonight. I didn’t
even have my coat unzipped when he made the announcement. I’m still in the denial
stage. I’ve been focusing on what preparations need to be made, and distracting
myself here. I guess I’ll distract myself further and make dinner …
Wednesday October 21, 1998 At
lunch
I had my intake evaluation this morning at Strong
Recovery Chemical Dependency. And I enter one of their programs starting this coming
Tuesday. That probably doesn’t make much sense to you just yet. It will after you
read the entry I’ve been postponing since last Friday night/Saturday morning, which
I’ve spliced-in below.
I’ve held off on posting that entry because I didn’t want to put my job in
jeopardy. I’d already shared the URL and pointed my report-to to the site as an
example of my work when the note came around the other day saying they’re looking for
someone to maintain our Intranet site. I spoke with my report-to when I returned to my
department, and we’ve made the arrangements. So I feel safe now in coming out with
it.
As you already know, I’m a chemical dependent. What’s new information, is
that I’ve been in relapse for quite some time now.
It’s always a difficult decision to enter a program. This one’s been
compounded by the fact that I was looking at a program where I work. Strong Memorial
Hospital is the hospital associated with the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Strong Recovery Chemical Dependency is run by the Psychiatry department here.
Access to my patient records has never been an issue. The mainframe system they’re
kept on is fully audited. What that means is that each and every access to every patient
record is recorded – date, time, terminal ID and username. It’s a termination
offense, on just one occurrence, to inappropriately access any patient record, including
one’s own, (which is automatically inappropriate.) The issue of patient
confidentiality is taken very seriously here. I can’t even tell anyone when I see
someone I know walk through the lobby.
The issue has been what I choose to reveal myself in these pages. If I didn’t feel
my job was safe, it would cause me to hold back even more than I’ve been holding back
already. And that makes me uncomfortable.
Here’s what I wrote last Friday night:
Saturday October 17, 1998 12:30AM
I want to preface today’s entry with a few thoughts, so you can understand the
words below within the context or framework of where I am as I write them.
Although it’s technically Saturday, I see it as still being Friday night. I’m
telling you this to synchronize our points of reference. If I say today, I mean Friday
10/16. If I say yesterday, it means Thursday 10/15, and so on. Okay?
I use the words clinical depression because I want to avoid confusion with the popular
usage of the word depression. It’s used popularly as a synonym for feeling bad, sad,
blue, grief, etc. These are separate states from depression. True clinical depression is
more a state of mind than a feeling, mood or emotion, because you can experience all other
feelings, moods and emotions while within clinical depression. For the diagnosis, you must
meet several criteria, some are emotional, some are psychological, some are physical, and
one is a time component. You must have had "X" many of the other criteria over
the course of six or more months.
And as the last part of this preface, I want to frame things for my employer (Ajilon),
the client (URMC), and my co-workers. You see, yesterday morning I put in a request for
some personal time off. And although I owe no explanation for such a request, it’s
human nature to be curious about such things. So I shared the URL to Wednesday’s
entry to show I was not being cavalier in taking time off. I was not in good head-space,
and I felt I could not do my job to my satisfaction until I got my shit together. I needed
a mental health day. Not in the context that most people use it, but I was truly not in
good mental health.
This makes me vulnerable. Any of them can read what I’ve already written on the
site, and what I’m about to write, and decide that based on what they’ve read,
they don’t want me working there any more.
Now, it’s not because I have a huge set of brass cajones that I risk my
career in this way. As regular readers of the site already know, I want, more than
(almost) anything, to be accepted and to be understood. I don’t like hiding who I am,
and I’ve grown tired of hiding how I feel. It saps too much of my energy, and it
makes me feel like a fake, a fraud, someone who is less than honest.
If this is read by my employer, the client or my coworkers, I would like them to read
it in this context: "If, as I’ve been told repeatedly, you think I’m doing
a good job now, just think of the great job I’ll do when I’m well."
So, on with the show …
When I had my regularly scheduled shrink appointment yesterday, I guess we had a bit of
a breakthrough. You see, I’d been holding back and because of that, she had no idea
that as far as I’m concerned I’ve been in clinical depression for a couple of
years now. In retrospect, much of my adult life has been spent in clinical depression. She
had no idea I’ve been feeling suicidal on and off for nearly two years. And she had
no idea I was drugging again.
Hmmm. Sounds like I’ve been holding back here too, doesn’t it? Well, yes I
have. Caroll, my shrink, said she had noticed that early on, I wrote about me. Later I
wrote about events that happened around me. And most recently, I’ve written about
Jeffrey. It’s been a good long time since I’ve written about me.
I’d been thinking the same thing. When Jeff has been writing, he’s said,
"I wish I could write more like you." When I posted what he wrote, it was the
first time I’d read it. Not because I wasn’t interested in what he wrote, but
because I respect his privacy. I’m not about to go snooping through the computer to
read things he’s not ready to share. Anyway, when I read his stuff I was thinking to
myself, "I wish I could write more like he does."
Somewhere along the line, I lost the honesty. I started to fear that if I wrote what I
truly felt, people may not like me. So I wrote about other things.
Jeff’s been hurt and frustrated too, because I’ve been holding back from him.
He’s felt that it’s not fair that he bares his soul to me, and I show him only
the façade. He’s right. That isn’t fair.
Time for a change.
When I made Wednesday’s entry above, I’d have bet my last dollar that Jeff
was in jail. When he left here Wednesday morning at about five, I’d have sworn that
his intention was to commit a crime, intentionally get caught doing it, and go back to
jail. "Home" as he sometimes calls it. That was not the case. He was emotionally
and physically exhausted. He slept for almost two days straight.
Whether it’s the case or not, I thank God for that.
I slept a good share of yesterday, last night and today. I’m going to lie down
again soon. But not until I get this off my chest, even though I’ll probably not post
this until sometime tomorrow (read: later Saturday.)
I’ve been on a long slow journey of self-destruction for years now. I’m not
happy. I don’t like myself. And I don’t know what to do about it. For years I
turned to drugs. I knew it wouldn’t cure me, but drugging at least brought respite.
Briefly I could forget I wasn’t happy. Forget that I didn’t like myself. Forget
everything.
When I quit drugging seven years ago, I felt worse than ever. I had been drugging for
20 years. I had never learned how to deal with myself, my emotions and all of life’s
little (and big) issues and problems. I’d drugged them all away. So I arrived at
middle-age with absolutely no coping skills. Slowly, over the course of years, I learned
how to cope with life without drugging.
What I’ve never learned is how to cope with myself. I’ve never learned how to
like myself. I’ve never felt worthy of success, happiness or love. I piss it all
away. Not because I can’t be successful, happy, loved or in love. Because I feel
I’m not worthy of those things. So I punish myself when they come my way. I spend
money foolishly until I have none, I set myself up for failure, I either push people away
or run away from them.
This has been going on for nearly all of my 41 years. A heated internal conflict
between the light side and the dark side.
When I stopped drugging seven years ago, it was because I felt that drugs were my
problem. True, I quit smoking because I saw my dad in the hospital having heart attacks
and I felt the fear of an early death. As you may recall from the Introduction, my world collapsed like a house of cards after that and I stopped drugging all
together shortly after.
Instead of bringing me health and happiness, sobriety only let me experience my pain
more fully. Yes, I’ve learned how to get along in life without drugging. But I
haven’t learned how to get along with me. And frankly, it felt good to experience the
full depth of my pain and self-hatred. I could experience the full fury of the attacks
upon myself.
Fortunately, the part of me that longs for success, happiness and love has never been
fully suppressed. This light side of me occasionally wins out against the darker side.
Here are a few examples in sort of a Reader’s Digest condensed version:
In high school I was a straight A student. By the end of my sophomore year, and had
already been accepted at Cornell University’s School of Architecture and Interior
Design. Subject of course to remaining a straight A student. And, based upon my skills as
a draftsman, and my creativity in architectural design, partial scholarships were bandied
about. Then the dark side discovered drugs. I barely pulled Ds in junior and senior year,
the offer from Cornell disappeared and I had to go to summer school to graduate, in the
490s of a class of just over 500.
Through the mid to late seventies, I became one of the best club DJs in Rochester, if
not all of Western New York state. The dark side caused me to become pushy and
argumentative with the customers and club owners. This eventually killed that career.
In the eighties, the light side took me from barely knowing how to hook up the first
computer Vince bought me, a Commodore 64, to running the entire computer department of an
interstate trucking company. The dark side made me procrastinate, miss deadlines,
push-back on the owners and my peer managers. The dark side was released in all it’s
fury after I stopped drugging. In only four months of not drugging I lost that job. The
new owners of the company had wanted me, my knowledge and my skills as part of the deal.
The dark side put them in a position where they had to dump me.
A year later, the light side helped me build Vince’s business from a hobby to a
major moneymaker. We made money like you wouldn’t believe. The dark side forced Vince
out of his own business and out of my life. It forced him to try to find his own happiness
with another guy.
Interestingly, his relationship with Bobby was very much like mine is with Jeffrey.
Deep platonic friendship. Although at the time it made me jealous, and while I didn’t
believe it in my deepest heart and soul, I accused Vince of infidelity and left. I left
him, the home our success in the 80s bought, and the business we’d built in the 90s.
Since then, I’ve managed to feather my new nest rather well, been able to travel,
and I’ve been able to begin to rebuild a new life for myself. Still the dark side
plagues me. Just when I get ahead, get a decent job, and just when they start making
noises about a direct hire after the contract runs out, the dark side has torpedoed it.
In the past year, I’ve lost two jobs, a boyfriend, and all my savings. And that
was several months after I’d started drugging again. It started innocently enough. A
drink or two on the occasional night out. Maybe once a month or so. After a while, it
ramped up to several drinks each night out. Then the occasional nights out started coming
closer together. It became every weekend, and then both nights each weekend.
Just over a year ago, I started smoking again. In less than a month I went from one or
two while out drinking, back to a pack a day, sometimes more. At the end of November last
year, Michael and I split. The following week, I caused such a huge scene at work that
they had no other choice than to fire me. It took me only the month of December to piss
away all my savings and drain the checkbook as well.
In January I started this journal, so you know pretty much what’s been going on so
far this year. What you don’t know is that my state of mind has continued to steadily
deteriorate. Yeah, I wrote from time to time that I was feeling better, but it never
lasted more than a few days. By April suicide was a daily contemplation. I had long since
given up on keeping the apartment clean, eating properly and pulling my own weight at
work.
Then one Friday night in the middle of May I met a guy. As you may recall from the
journal entry that chronicled that weekend, I thought he was a very special guy. He was
someone with whom I felt a strong, nearly overpowering connectedness, even before we knew
each other’s last names. Actually, from before we even spoke to each other. That
weekend I met my beloved Jeffrey.
Strangely, my feelings for him didn’t change when he told me he was a full-time
rentboy, thief and crack-cocaine addict. I was more amazed at this than anyone, because
I’d always been so judgemental. I was there when he was apprehended for shoplifting
at a local grocery store. (It’s one of the two charges he’s awaiting sentencing
on.) And I’d known him less than 48 hours. Yet what I saw, and continue to see,
inside that man blows me away. Behind the façade lies the most special person I’ve
ever met. My attachment to him grows every day.
The dark side cannot let this happen. It has hurled insults and verbal abuse him. It
has thrown him out of the house, twice. It has fed his addictions. It has jerked him
around and messed with his feelings. And none of this has been sufficient to drive Jeffrey
away. Because I love him, and he loves me.
The dark side is infuriated. It cannot allow someone to love me. Nor can it allow me to
love someone. It must put an end to it because the final self-destruction it longs for is
so near. And this stranger, this crack-addicted thieving rentboy, is standing between it
and it’s goal.
The dark side knows no boundaries. Since it can’t make me leave Jeffrey, it must
make Jeffrey leave me. Only a few weeks ago it began it’s most ingenious, most
twisted attack. The dark side figured that if it couldn’t make Jeffrey feel bad
enough about me to leave, then it must attack Jeffrey in such a way to make him feel so
bad about himself that he must leave. The dark side began a two pronged attack, one
against the light side, the other against Jeffrey, and guaranteed of success.
In Wednesday’s entry I wrote of the guilt I’ve inflicted on Jeffrey. It is
the dark side’s weapon against him. The unspeakable horror that cuts him right to his
heart. The one thing that makes him feel so bad about himself he will leave, either by
running away, or by suicide.
The plan was put into motion one night when it said, "Hey, let me try some of
that." The dark side picked up the stem and the lighter, put it to my lips, and
smoked crack.
I am a crackhead.
The dark side has almost won this battle. It will surely win the war if it wins this
battle. And it may be too late to stop it. For as the dark side feeds on cocaine, it fuels
the guilt within Jeffrey, and camouflaged as a wonderful sense of well-being, it strangles
the light side.
But there is hope. And where there is hope, there is light.
The counselors and I have selected one of the MICD programs. MICD stands for Mental
Illness - Chemical Dependency. We feel my drug abuse is symptomatic of larger mental
health issues, so a dual-diagnosis program should yield better results. The program
I’ve enrolled in is sort of a medium-intensity outpatient one. We feel that since I
can go to work and be (relatively) responsible, a high-intensity outpatient, or an
inpatient program are not warranted. But since this is a relapse, with a new drug (and new
drug of choice) in the picture, a lower intensity program would probably be a mistake.
So starting next week, we meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:00 to 11:00, (hence the
need adjust my hours with my report-to) and Wednesday evenings from 5:30 to 7:30.
Naturally I can’t discuss the specifics of what happens in the program. But expect
to hear more frankness, honesty and dirty laundry than you’ve come to expect from
these pages. As you may recall from this past summer, Jeffrey and I had both been
concerned that I was falsely representing myself as some kind of knight in shining armor
here. You have seen the light side. All the dark side things I promised to share are
still, after all these weeks, just below here. (Ain’t insert mode fun?)
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