This New Year/Decade

It seems like the only thing I write that people actually read is the personal stuff.

But I've been living so much that I haven't had the time to sit down and write about it. Over the summer I started this blog when I needed to start my life over. Everything I knew, every comfort (physically and psychologically) was abandoned. I was sleeping on an air mattress in Harlem. I was broke. I worked nights at the Daily News and only ever went out to drink by myself in dive bars.

I never was able to talk to people, except on the rare moments of social serendipity where everything flowed perfectly. Those rare times. The rest of the time I sat back and observed, judged, turned it inwards, stuck on a cycle of condemnation and guilt. I was a broken man, I made sure of that.

A year ago this weekend I admitted myself into the psych ward at St. Vincent's. My therapist recommended that if things got bad enough to go to the ER and that it wasn't a selfish act, but a brave one. I didn't feel too brave that Sunday morning at 6am, the cold winter wind slamming me as I trudged down Greenwich Ave. I thought that I should go get coffee and a bagel instead, but there was too much snow and it was way too cold to sit and eat it anywhere.

I would have to go back to the apartment. Her apartment. I won't say much here about that relationship but it was mutually helpful in the worst way, or at least it seems to me. I had a lot of childish issues to work out and all through 2009 I needed to grow up and deal with consequences. I would have to finally confront not only crippling social anxiety but also severe depression as well.

Working all through the holidays last year, on the night shift, alone in New York with no money, nothing at all really, except boxes piled up in the corner that you heaved into her apartment because you quit your job over a cutting back of wages and therefore becoming unemployed for months. Struggling with terrible freelance jobs as you come home and only seemingly irritate or feel insulted by your significant other.

Now it was a new year and it should have been time to move on and make my way out of this mess I've made of my life as I had a job at the Daily News which seemed a major step up from the paparazzi agency I worked at for years. But instead I came home every night, more like 6 in the morning, trying my best to ninja stealth my way into the apartment, often locking myself in the bathroom rocking and repeating phrases over and over, obsessing on thoughts.

In retrospect I suppose I was trying to help myself, punish myself so I felt justified enough to stand up and do something about it. To correct myself somehow. To fix this fatal flaw I had in me that wanted me to end my own life. I wanted to fight that impulse and rise above my internal suffering and be more of a man than I thought existed outside the ideal. But I wasn't done. I wasn't strong.

Or maybe I was strong enough. To take the situation out of my hands, walk myself to the hospital the day before Martin Luther King Junior Day and just submit my life to the will of the doctors and nurses. I felt selfish as I sat inside on a stretcher, seeing victims of intense violence, seeing their shirts cut off them, or their awakening from a car accident, the sobering of a lifelong alcoholic with no one to call.

I like to blame the stress of my job for finally doing me in. I had been working the night shift when the Haiti earthquake happened and I saw every picture that came in. I saw devastation unfold before me through cameraphone pictures, Tweets of rubble and panic. But when I saw the man, screaming grief erupting from so far deep within him, a depth I will never know, holding the lifeless body of his child in his arms, and I had to color correct his skin tone...

If I'm being honest, and that is what I do by nature, I can admit that I was jealous. I wanted to be him. I wanted to know a pain that immeasurable, that freeing, a liberation of guilt and concern of all that which does not matter. A pure emotion felt and expressed without reservation or hesitation. I was a weak, pathetic, privileged white male living in New York City, granted cheaply, and was so worried and upset and concerned...why?

Because my ego wasn't being attended to. Because I let small bitterness and subconscious jealousy, snarky replies and blind self-centeredness, make me ruin my own life. I let so many things affect me and it was all the reason I needed to do whatever it was that I thought I should do. And I thought that I needed to suffer.

Either for the sake of my mother, trapping her to my father as I did with my teenage birth, or my father for holding him back from achieving his dreams. For my grandmother who I wasn't there for in her final moments, unable to acknowledge the cancer that was eating away at her, that would take her life three days after Christmas dinner. For the guy that was in love with me in high school that I embarrassed that took his life on my birthday, or my senior year girlfriend I was cold and horrible to when presented with her undying devotion and affection.

These are the sins I carried around with me my entire life. I chose to hold them. I wore them. These pains were my existence. I punished myself for almost a decade. In the meantime I created a comic book which I feel responsible for its failure. Its creation carried me so far from where I was, got me back to a sense of myself that I don't know if I even knew was there before. I went from suburban isolation to metropolitan solitude, but I was so far outside my bubble.

So exactly a decade ago I said I wanted to write comics. I've written a graphic novel that is truly a work of avant garde genius. Then I spent seven years writing a novel, a schizophrenic journal, an abstract account of my life while making the biggest change I could ever imagine in my life. Moving to the city was much like visiting an alternate reality for a long time. Now I'm working on a new digital comic with an amazingly talented artist and the best friend I've ever known.

A year ago I was at the bottom and needed to come back. I took pills and made to eat food and told when to sleep and when to wake. When I got out I wanted a sense of reclaimed freedom, a sense of the impossible being very simply achievable. But instead I felt a better sense of personal movement, but I was still trapped in my head. I tried to reinvent my life, grow up, be responsible and take the initiative. Unfortunately I failed. Or the relationship failed, and I wound up sleeping where ever I could stay for a bit.

The I found an apartment with cartoonists in Sunset Park. I was still weird and needed to work out issues, but it was better than the depression and loneliness of the summer. Out on Match.com dates as I went home to an air mattress at 150th and Riverside. Feeling ever more like I was going to be alone forever. Finally accepting that I didn't need a relationship, or that I needed one too much, and so I gave up.

Then I found love. And it's true love. It feels like something that should be filmed in black and white, or technocolor and have an orchestral score behind it, with the occasional jazz number thrown in. It's dancing in bagel stores and subtle glances. Family and friends. Intimacy and vulnerability. Support and patience. And a whole lot of fun.

The gunk from the past still spits its way out, but I can feel the way clearing. God, now I'm starting to spout new age-y metaphors, I can feel them rising from me as the energy ripples up my spine towards the ceiling and beyond. hah, well, I dunno, this was certainly a ramble, but I think I put down something important. It was a good night, a healthy night, socially and mentally.

Thanks for reading this. Sincerely. It validates my existence.

K