The Times They Are a Changing: Part I - This is Not Failure

I

The Times They Are a Changing:

This is Not Failure

 

I’ve made a decision. The first thing you must know is that this decision is not based on failure.  I know this because I have failed before.  Have I ever told you that?  I don’t know.  I failed in 1997 in Maastricht.  I know what you are thinking, losing your mind isn’t failure, but it was to me.  

 

I was a small-town kid if you consider Terre Haute small.   I always did.  It is not Clay City small, or Vandalia small, but when you grow up there you constantly feel like the walls are closing in on you.  At 18, I moved to Bloomington for college.  During that move, there were signs I was carrying burdens with me.  I didn’t really understand them then.  There was the insomnia.  The constant fear of heart attacks.  Thinking I wasn’t breathing.  I was an anxious 18-year-old.  Too stressed out for the years that I have lived. 

 

Fast forward three years and four thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.  I still remember the first panic attack that changed everything for me.  Although at the time I didn’t know it was a panic attack.  It would take at least three doctors and too many drunken nights to count trying to quiet a mind that seemed to be fracturing to finally understand that I was not being possessed or having a heart attack, but rather having a panic attack.  

 

Walking alone on the streets of a foreign land, that one incident started the darkest days of my life.  It was when I found out just how powerful an individual’s mind can be.  Also, how precious one’s sanity and normalcies can be.  Without them you are lost and wading through a dark plain of existence in which all you want to do is make it all to end.  

 

Like most things in my life, my time in Maastricht was at the same time some of the best times I ever had and some of the worst.  Now, I only tend to remember the good times.  The fun I had and the friendships I made.  I bury the bad thoughts deep down inside, the anxiety, the stress of not being able to know or understand what was going on in my head.  We all have our demons, but mine were one long waking nightmare.  

 

Until I had made the decision and realized that times had really changed, I had forgotten so much.  Forgotten might be too strong, perhaps just dormant.  Keeping down in a place you never want to talk about because you don’t want people to judge and think, “my god that guy is a weirdo”.  However, guess what, I am a weirdo and damn proud of it.  

 

I firmly believe that, while you can never go back and you can never change things, you must come to peace with those things to move forward: you must go down the rabbit hole.  You must wade through the shit and deal with it, so that you can move on and be what you were born to be.  

For me to make the life altering decision that I made, I must remember that this is not a failure.  I am no longer a 21-year-old home-sick boy who had no idea he was dealing with anxiety, depression, and OCD.  The boy who would go to the hidden pay phone down in the basement of the dorm.  The boy who would go there and hide away from everyone and call his mom and cry to her about how he wanted to come home because he couldn’t understand why he was such a bad person and why his mind was cracking.  The boy who everyone else who was studying abroad with him in Maastricht looked at like a lost cause, and who couldn’t understand the madness he was dealing with.  A boy who thought simply being back on US soil in Indiana would make him whole again.  It didn’t and it couldn’t.  Only diving into the rabbit hole could.  

 

It took me a long time to realize that leaving Indiana was not the problem.  Ignoring some serious mental health issues was the problem.  It amazes me that, once you know the problem, you can look back and see where the fault lines were.  Where the fractures started.  I had my first real panic attack that I remember in Tennessee when I was like 10.  It was a fleeting thing, it was there, then gone.  I often wonder what would have happened and how life could have been different, had I not let that thread just fizzle out.  What if I had pulled it and dealt with things a lot earlier.  That isn’t the point of this, and I am side tracking, this is a topic for another time and place.

 

Fast forward from 1997 to the end of 1998.  I was now a man who had started to deal with his demons.  I was a more confident man.  Surer of himself.  Graduating from Indiana University and ready to take the first step in a much larger existence.  I was supposed to go to law school, but when studying for the LSAT, I realized that my brain didn’t work that way.  So, I decided to put my accounting degree to use, and I looked for a job with the Big 6 accounting firms, setting my sites on moving west to Denver.  

 

Denver didn’t work out, but I could be placed in San Jose, and, from that moment on, I never looked back. I moved to California in January of 1999 once again leaving Indiana behind.  I think I left with a lot of doubt in the back of my mind.  The only other time I had really left Indiana I lost it.  My father told my mom that I would come back one day.  I had a feeling that a lot of my family thought I would return too.  Probably with my tail tucked between my legs and home sick like before.  I was never going to let that happen.  I knew I was leaving Indiana chasing a dream.  My dream.  I just wasn’t 100% sure what that dream was.  I was determined that I would never go back, and certainly never in disgrace or failure.  

 

California has been everything I could have possibly imagined and more.  I love California.  I really do.  If I were to describe weather in paradise it would be Northern California weather.  I freaking love it.  Heat yes, but dry heat.  Never gets too cold.  Hot during the day but cools off at night.  Magic.  California gave me a second family, great friends, and a new lease on life.  I grew up a lot in California.  

 

That is why it was a hard decision to make, but as much as I love it here, I must go.  I must start a new and head back home again to Indiana.  I want more out of life than just good weather.  I have been given a second chance to bond with my mom.  As the years and her health concerns add up, I realize that I want to see her more than I can with a five-hour flight once or twice a year.  I have a sister who is 18 years older than I am and I want to spend more time with her as well.  Time is precious and, unfortunately for all of us around the age of 50, it is getting shorter.  I have already attended two of like six consecutive years of high school graduations because my nieces and nephews are growing up and I am missing so much.  I want to spend time with family.  I want to spend time with my two best friends since childhood, Chip and Adler.  Each time I have gone back to Indiana since Covid, I leave a little bit more of myself back there.  It is time for me go home. 

 

I go home on my terms.  A successful accountant who did well for himself.  A blogger who loves to write and, at 47 years old, is still chasing the dream of becoming a writer.  More importantly, I go home 200 lbs. lighter and on the verge of doing my first century ride.  I return to Indiana as an athlete and cyclist.  I might not have found everything I wanted to find in California, but I found enough.  Most of all I found out that I wasn’t a failure.  This decision isn’t a failure, I succeeded here.  I found myself here.