• The person who awakens every morning before dawn long before an alarm clock beckons me to arise. Anyone who’s ever lived with me is probably stunned by that revelation. I am the person who, in February during the worst of my most recent episode, moved the alarm clock into the bathroom so that I’d already be halfway to the shower by the time I woke up. Now I’m routinely awake and refreshed before 0600, and often before 0500. The last time I was doing that, Boris Yeltsin was coming to power in Russia. [I say that because I distinctly remember watching footage on The Today Show of tanks rolling in Moscow one morning in our living room in Forest, Miss.]
• The person who folds laundry and makes his bed. [The hell?! I've never made my bed in my life except under duress.] I was doing this just a few minutes ago, and I was quite struck by it.
• The person who is far more cognizant of his eating habits. Look, I didn’t get to be as fat as I am overnight. I look at photos of me in college and am a bit shocked to look at the weight gain from then until now. It has been a long, long time since I’ve been anything close to what you’d call skinny, but these days, it’s honestly a realizable goal, one I’m starting to wrap my head around. From a quality of life perspective, this is #1A behind the #1 of “not being so depressed that I just flat-out can’t function in life above a subsistence level” that was, of course, the main push behind going into treatment in the first place. The big thing is this: I can see myself making the responsible choices that will get my weight under control. I can visualize myself being a skinnier dude and finding the will to make it happen. Quite honestly, I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I felt this way, but I do know that it’s been a while.

I’m really excited to see what this new me has in store. I look at what I have achieved over the last few years at work in a time where I’ve been so weighed down with my own negative self-perceptions and lack of drive to attack problems as they come that I’m honestly a little bit scared of what I might achieve unshackled from my former demons. I worked 67 hours last week, and until the end of it, I attacked problems with gusto, to the point that I was afraid that I was experiencing hypomania. [Yes, I mentioned this to my psychiatrist, and she determined that I wasn't hypomanic---despite the fact that I was exhibiting noticeable psychomotor agitation when I was in her office. Instead, she chalked all that up to stress and anxiety.] Sure, I was wound down by Friday and Saturday, but I had a reason to be wound down. [One of those reasons undoubtedly was being at the office until 2230 on a Friday night, then turning around to be there at 0700 the next day. But hey, the shit shipped.]

This is not to say that I am Right or Perfect or even Very Good. I can still be a raging asshole at times. I still make dumb decisions. I’m still not owning up to all of my failings. But I am so far out of the hole that I can see a whole lot of sky above me, and that gives me reason to keep on climbing. That’s as good an argument as any I know for seeking treatment.

I’ve obviously had a category called depression for some time. Typically I’ve written about depression as it was happening as a form of therapy—acknowledging the problem is how I’d pull myself out of the funk I was in. [Or so I thought; there are times now when I wonder when I've not been at some level of depression for the last few years. Anyway.]

Sometime after the first of the year, but truly and acutely the last week of February, I entered another episode of major depression. By mid-March, I was destroying all the relationships that were important to me at the time, and it was radically affecting my work as well. I never will forget a co-worker stopping and looking at me, saying, “Geof, come on … cheer up. It’s not that bad.” I remember looking at him blankly, the realization slowly dawning for me.

The crisis point was one day at work when the stress level got too high and I … well, I broke down. I shut my office and was alternately crying and catatonic for the better part of two hours. After pulling myself together, I did the hardest thing I’ve had to do professionally—walk into my boss’s office, explain the situation, and tell him that I needed time off. I worked the next day [it was our monthly program review with the customer, and my absence would've been conspicuous], but I took the rest of that week off and sought help.

On April 1st, I did the most wise thing I could have: walked into a psychiatrist’s office and started treatment. This coming Thursday will be my fourth visit, but I’ve got to tell you that I saw effects quite quickly. I’m aware that many folks suffering from chronic major depression struggle for months and sometimes years to find an anti-depressant that works for them; I had noticeable results almost immediately. In fact, I almost wondered if there was a placebo effect for what was going on with me, but as we’ve adjusted dosages, I’m aware that there is, at least for me, better living through chemistry.

And honestly, if I hadn’t sought help, well … the biggest stressor in life—my job—would’ve eaten me alive. It is not that I hate my job—I absolutely love what I do. I don’t love every day of it, but viewed from a perspective, I do really value the work that I’m doing and have a passion for doing it. Seeking professional help for a mental health condition was the best professional choice I’ve made in the last year—and in this last year, I’ve been heavily involved in bringing the company eight figures’ worth of business. My job does not get easier as Shuttle end-of-life approaches; rather, it gets harder. Had I not sought treatment when I did … well, I really don’t want to speculate what I might’ve done. I did not ideate in this round of depression, but I have in the past, and this low was far lower than the rest.

People view my life from the outside and think that I’m a successful guy. And honestly, I’m inclined to agree with them. Sure, I’m way fatter than I need to be, and I’m still single at 29, but I largely feel most days like I’ve got Life by the balls. But you can be that guy and also be the guy that Depression has by the balls and the scruff of the neck, ready to toss you in the nearest incinerator. It makes little sense if you’ve never been there, but if you have been, you’re nodding your head.

And if you’re nodding your head, friend, and you’re not seeking help, go. Now. I mean it. You owe it to yourself and the people that you love. Taking care of your mental health is no less important than taking care of your physical health—and I might argue that it’s almost more important, because mental health problems harm the very thing that is most important in life: relationships. Take it from me—get right.

Why this is hard for me to do is irrelevant. It’s important for me to do it to keep from continuing to hurt people that I love and care about deeply. I’ve betrayed some confidences lately in ways I didn’t consider [at the time] to be all that closely held. I’m now quite clear that I was wrong about that. Knowing that I’ve caused pain in this situation … well, any words I’d have for it aren’t quite adequate to the task.

I guess it’s important to say that, as much as I can, I’ll be open about me. But I’ll have to be closed about other things, and I’ve got to learn to do that well. It’s vitally important.

True admissions here:

1. I only applied to one university, my alma mater. I had my Mississippi State application virtually finished, but I never sent in the paper signature that would have seen me fully enrolled. [MSU ignored this and still offered me a scholarship package that would have essentially paid me a few grand a year to go to school.] I visited here once, knew it was the right place, and that was it. [I've told that story here before, and hopefully I'll link it when I'm finished re-shuffling the deck chairs.
2. I never went on a job interview coming out of college. The only engineering job interview I've ever had was as a co-op in the summer of 1999. I got a couple cold calls my last semester in college, but I knew I wanted to work for Teledyne and I knew my boss wanted me.
3. I talk a lot about how I did these searches for my churches, but honestly ... I've only attended services in two United Methodist Churches in the greater Huntsville area, and I have been a member of them both.

I've wondered why I do this. I don't generally engage in risky behaviors. I waited until I was 28 to buy the sports car, and it's not like I fly around driving it at high speeds all the time. Okay, sure, I charge up Bankhead Parkway at 55 if there's no traffic, but that's it. It's not like these are impulsive decisions that I make. [Okay, some of the time they are. Hush, Mom.] But I just … seem to have this intuition for what is right for me, and when I go, I go all out. The upshot of this is that I often have large periods of life of what seems like inaction, because I’m waiting for The Next Thing I Must Rush Headlong After. I mean, I enjoy my life when I’m not in dogged pursuit, but man … when I’m all in, there is nothing like it.

Nothing like it at all.

Of course, it’s pretty great that I have a very good track record of these things. It takes a while to marshal up the forces, because it’s so draining, but I can bring them to bear.

And so I have.

As a result, I’m starting over here. I’ve never been a great adherent to the what-goes-where school of thought with managing all these Weblogs, partially because I’ve never had great focus for any one of them. I’ve been thinking about what I do [and don't do] here in this space, and I think I’ve finally found a focus: looking forward, looking back.

This certainly means that some of the entries will stay. Some of them, though, need to go, to be moved other places. I’ll accomplish that in the next week or so, powered by some SQL-fu and some awesomeness thanks to John Godley’s Redirection plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for the patience and for being a part of it.

Geof

I first visited campus in the summer of 1996. Mom and I had planned two trips for me to visit colleges, based on the (grossly little for the amount of importance it truly had, if I am honest with myself) research I had done into prospective colleges. My plan was simple: two trips, visiting two schools each. I was interested in five universities overall, ranked as follows:

1. The University of Illinois
2. The University of Missouri-Rolla
3. The University of Alabama in Huntsville
4. The University of Tennessee
5. Mississippi State University

State was my safety school: it had the major I wanted [although not the emphasis I was interested in] and would more than pay for itself. Honestly, I was interested in Illinois and Rolla because they were far away from home. UT interested me only because I was born there and thought that I’d enjoy going to a SEC school.

Our first visit was to UT and UAH. We drove out early to Knoxville and visited with two of my dad’s old cadets, who’d married and had kids and all that rot. They’re the cadets my folks talk about the most when they reminisce about our Knoxville years. I had a good time that night, but when I visited the department the next day, it was all wrong: poor computers, old books, etc. It was not on the cutting edge. I left there having mentally crossed them off of my list; I was only interested in their scholarship offers in an effort to extort more money out of potential suitors. [See also: how I used Mississippi State to get more money out of UAH.]

Our next stop was, of course, my now-alma mater. Despite the trip being hosed up eight ways from Sunday—I brought us into town down a route that is an hour longer than the most efficient, so we were late and there were all sorts of issues getting checked into the dorm for the night—something clicked. I’ve never really been able to express what it was that I felt—or what it was that I still feel, honestly—but it felt right. After a great visit the next day, I was sold. On the way home, I told Mom that we could forget the other trip. I’d found my top choice. I don’t remember what we spent the money she’d saved up for that trip on instead, but it was something worthwhile.

Anyhow, not long after that trip, I was accepted to UAH—yes, a full year before I graduated from high school. [As I remember it, they had to key things into the system to note that I'd start fall 1997 rather than 1996; subsequently working in Admissions that next year, I understood. It was a screwy system.] I tried to get other friends of mine to come with me, but I ended up being the only member of my graduating class there. [Alternatively, 25+ members of my class went to State.]

There were times when it looked like we weren’t going to be able to comfortably afford UAH, but in the end, some really good days taking standardized tests were paired with my hard work in school and I went to school pretty much only having to pay room and board. Mom made me a deal: she and Dad would pay for the first two years, but after that, I was on my own. I paid a lot more for my education than my parents did in the long run, because I went another three years and all that. They helped me out a fair bit with money and more than my fair share of moral support. But the taxpayers of Alabama are really who put me through school. Thanks, y’all.

As I drove through campus at lunch, I realized that today is the ten-year anniversary of the day I moved to Huntsville. I have lived in this area longer than anywhere else in my life, and it’s the first place that I chose to live independent of my family. [Yes, I'd left to go to school in Columbus prior to that, but I was restricted to being there because I was a Mississippi resident.] I have, at times, regretted coming here, but that’s when I thought that I was headed in the wrong direction. I think that I’m mostly headed in the right direction now.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for ten years. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but then there are many new things on campus since I started:

1. A new University President.
2. Two new dormitories.
3. The University Fitness Center.
4. Greek Housing.

I was but one voice of many in arguing for all of these things [save replacing Frank Franz; I love Frank] as a student. It’s great to see UAH making great progress as we go forward into the future. I was at UAH at a great time to be a student there, and it’s getting better every year.

I’m proud. To be. A U-A-H Char-ger.

I still think my best experience in life when it comes to race relations was living on a white-minority hall at MSMS for a year. I did a lot of listening that year.

I guess what I needed to say—and didn’t—is that I learned a lot by shutting up. I need to do that a lot more.

The other thing that got me to really thinking recently was watching the first six hours of Eyes on the Prize. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me at any level other than intellectual before, but as I watched, I realized: “The decade I value most as a fan of space history and the decade to be most valued in bringing about civil rights change are one and the same.” It helped me to realize that all these important events in our nation’s history—truly starting us down the path of equality—just weren’t that long ago. When I think about that, it gives me pause. What it drives home is a very simple message: these changes started not long ago, and we are still feeling the first- and second-order effects. Our racial rifts in this country formed over a couple of centuries, and four decades is not going to erase that collective memory. It’s a start. We have to keep walking … together.

Today, I’ll stand by him again as he grieves.

This is not easy, but it is necessary. :sigh:

I think that, like the rest of my family, I just feel pretty wrung-out right now. The hard part for me, I think, is that I’m usually such a verbal person, and when not verbal, I write. Words are how I deal with things and how I think things through. [Just yesterday, a colleague of mine---who is, himself, notoriously verbose---asked me to "use shorter sentences". This was on a teleconference, so the co-worker on my end and I had a good laugh at that.] My way is certainly no better than any other; it’s merely what works best for me.

So when I’m at a point when the words don’t come easily, things are definitely sucking.

I think that part of the issue lies in the fact that I feel like I have to dam a lot of the flood of things going on in my head. I mean, for my brother’s sake, I should shut up and stop verbalizing all this crap, because, on the scale of things, we all know that his life’s been far more rocked than mine. And as with the passing of any family member, the absence of Cindy in our lives merely reveals the flaws in all other relationships, as those relationships become strained as we all struggle to cope with this new existence. But as with many such things, the strain also strengthens things. [You can take the boy out of mechanical engineering, but you can't take the mechanical engineering out of the boy.]

But in the midst of everything else, well, my sleep pattern is radically off. I put some of that on environment—I never sleep well away from home—but that surely can’t be all of it. All I do know is that my body really struggles to know what time it is right now. [At work, all it knows is that it must be quitting time somewhere.] That’s just sapping anything else that I’ve got going, and it’s making me damnably ineffective at anything I try my hand at. Of course, that’s always a dangerous spiral, because I have this weird conception that, if I’m not any good at something, I just don’t do it. But right now, that’s being a bad negative feedback loop—not coming up to par on anything that I’m doing, I don’t feel like doing anything. And that, well … that’s bad.

So I’m trying to take it a step at a time—writing it out a bit, and also seeking to take some better care of my sleep habits with the idea that being rested will have positive benefits. Here’s hoping. [And if you're saying, "Yeah, he wrote himself out of this even as he talked about writing out of things," you've gotten the point. This is far more for me than it is for you. It's probably only for you if you have to put up with me. :)]

I take it as a matter of faith that y’all will respect the radio silence around here. I’m still finding words for the thoughts going around in my head. And all this feels very cheap to write, because, well … you know, I’m not Doug right now, who has a far heavier burden to bear. He’s not bearing it alone—thank God for that, quite literally—but it’s a heavy burden.

God? This sucks. But you didn’t promise us a bed of roses.