Chapter Twenty Nine:
A Most Bitter Pill
Now, you know, generally, how things were going for me in 2014. I was working at the Agrium project,14 days on and 7 days off. I was staying with my aunt and uncle for the first 6 months, but then I moved to the house that my parents owned, near the University of Saskatchewan. It was the very house that I had been living in during the years of the “eruption” of 1998.
I was back in Saskatoon. Of all the places that I could have been sent, I got sent to Saskatoon, which was, basically,.. Home…. After all of the time I spent living in the house, writing essays and ruminating about my never ending tab of worries, throughout 1998,1999, and 2000-2001, it had a sense of familiarity and that was nice, but it was also a little depressing. It had been fifteen years and I hadn’t really changed! That was the brutal reality.
By 2013, I had lost touch with the majority of the people that I had been friends with during and after high school, but there were a few people with whom I still had the odd correspondence. One of those people, my friend, let’s call him “Jim,” had been accepted to the college of Dentistry at the University of Saskatchewan, and had become a Dentist. We had been friends after high school and we had spent a considerable amount of time together, usually going out for drinks, or in other words, getting drunk together. We talked about all kinds of things and we went out for beer, a lot. We were “friends.”
Now, make no mistake, this story is one of more despair in my life. I was the offended and James, was the offender. Disappointment was felt by me, toward myself, and toward life and toward Jim, and Jim was the catalyst for that disappointment, and that may be a reflection of a flaw in my character, but it is the truth of what happened. How did it happen that I became offended? Let me tell you….
Jim and I had been acquaintances in high school. He associated with many of the same people that I did, and we took a few classes together. There was one thing that we had in common which was a fondness for drink.
This was back in 1994. In the fall and winter of 1996, we would sometimes cross paths, and then in spring of 1996, I had moved out of my parent’s house and had chosen to live with my grandmother. Then I took that job in the Calgary and Banff area as a Japanese speaking tour guide. That fall, I had decided to remain away from Saskatchewan, and to work at the ski resort, Sun Peaks, near Kamloops, British Columbia, to see if I couldn’t get my OCD under control, because, by that time I was obsessing a lot, everyday, about HIV, and many other things as I have written about in previous chapters. I did return to Prince Albert in the spring of 1997. Jim was there, and since we both loved to drink vast quantities of alcohol, in very short periods of time, we began to get together, to satisfy our nearly insatiable thirst and peruse the city for eligible female companionship…
Over the next few years, we were friends, but there were some things about Jim that I didn’t care for. You see, James liked to have a laugh at others’ expenses. I am not saying that I was perfect, that I never engaged in bullying or teasing, because I had, a few times while growing up, but by the time I was in high school, I didn’t bully or tease. In fact, I was a person who would cringe when I witnessed a public attempt at shaming or humiliation. Jim and I weren’t really close friends in high school and when I heard him making fun of people’s body weight or facial features and I saw those people squirm and writhe in the embarrassment that was being wilfully cast upon them, I didn’t raise a finger in their defense because I was too afraid. Still I noticed, and it didn’t sit well with me. I had been on the receiving end of that kind of shaming, and I dreaded it.
High school finished, and people went their separate ways. I tried so desperately to take charge of my life and to beat my neurosis in the years following high school and I had moved to Japan and I had struggled and now in 2014, being based in Saskatoon, I was once again in the vicinity of Jim.
I liked Jim quite well. He was funny and he could drink like a fish. We used to get drunk and make up stories,... “imagine if this happened or that happened,” and we would make up scenarios and we’d laugh, and Jim was usually pleasant. He had other weaknesses, …, flaws… and they bugged me a little. But it takes all kinds….
Jim was a simple man, he liked the simple things: women, good food and drink and money too. He even had a sentimental side. There’s little doubt that Jim was and is a good person, only, he hurt my feelings,..., and not just a little bit. He hurt my feelings so deeply that it felt as if a fire got sparked in the pit of my stomach and within seconds it had engulfed my soul and it blazed with a vengeance for months afterward. Please do not be afraid for Jim, as although I was upset by him, I harbour no ill will towards his family or his friends, nor did I harbour any ill will towards Jim himself…, I simply felt humiliated and deeply disappointed when I learned about the fine print in Jim’s life, I felt that I had truly missed the mark, as a breadwinner, and as a thinker and the person that I was supposed to have become,... and, I was destroyed….
I got together with Jim, one day in the summer of 2014, when I had a day off. I hadn’t been speaking to him much over the past ten years. I hadn’t been calling anyone,…. I had talked to him a couple of times by phone from Japan, and I had not told him the truth about the quality of my life. I had kept up my masquerade, my facade of being “okay” and being “fine,” telling him and everyone else that things were “good….”- In truth, I had been envious of Jim’s normalcy, and, his successful completion into the college of Dentistry,… he seemed to be enjoying the best that life had to offer, and it was really hard to be happy for him given my daily reality.
Now, it is important to address another elephant in the room. This was the elephant of rivalry between Jim and I and between myself and many others. What I mean by this is that although we never spoke of it, there was always the comparative dynamic happening between myself and my peers, and that included family.
It’s not that I wanted to have a comparative element, (and don’t you dare say to me, “Oh, but why did you compare yourself to others!? Don’t you know that you're not supposed to do that?”) Of course, I know that,..It's a very nice theory, except, it doesn’t always work that way. I couldn’t help but notice that I was in a living Hell and other people weren’t, and what's more, is that they didn’t want to hear about it. That, or, they were unapproachable.That’s a fact. I noticed that. It was the most blatant thing. What made coming to grips with that even harder was being told by certain people about the private and very personal details of just how “ great” their impeccable lives were going. There was that, and there was the fact that I had really expected that I was going to be “successful” in life prior to OCD. I had thought that I was going to “beat” so many people in life…. It may not be the way I should have thought about life, but I had thought of it in those terms, for a long time. I was going to beat Jim. That was how I had thought for the longest time, but I was in for a very rude awakening.
In 2014 I was making about $8000 dollars per month, and despite my daily troubles, I was functioning, and I was earning decent money, pursuing a career in trades, because I was trying to lessen the severity of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,....
I had reasoned that if ERP worked, then, it would follow that if I did a job where I was doing the things that would normally cause me to have anxiety and doubt, like assembling and disassembling power tools and metalworking equipment, that I would get better at being around those kinds of things, basically, things, the nature of which, my mind could link to the physical harming of an individual if something was not done properly. That was why I was doing trades and construction. But the therapeutic results weren't happening. So, now I was putting myself in an environment that I really wasn’t suited to, and I was there on a hope and a dream and a plan, and it wasn’t what I inherently loved or what I was genuinely interested in.
I met up with Jim one day, and he was soooooo happy! Oh my goodness, he was just itching with happiness! He was almost dying to tell the whole world something extremely important, and that was…, how much money he was making…! We were sitting down to eat our chinese food and Jim began to speak about the Dentistry world and this and that.., and furthermore, if one made $600,000 dollars a year then.,.... I heard him say it, but I saw a form in front of me who spoke far too plainly and acted far too ordinarily to make $600,000 a year. I just dismissed his comment as being flippant-….
He and I spoke of our jobs, and our lives, and I played the “happy” facade, trying to be that slightly insensitive, strong and silent person who didn’t get anxious, and was an aspiring tradesman,… but, I didn’t love my job and I wasn’t feeling well. It was contrived and I knew it. Jim, on the other hand, was relaxed and at ease. He loved his Job, and when I asked him what he did, specifically, well let’s just say, he answered in an arrogant manner, with a response that was lacking tact: “I basically tell people what they want to hear,'' he said smugly. Now this was something that I also really thought was bad….
A couple of weeks later Jim called me up and invited me to a party. We had been to a dinner just before that and he had been bragging about his money and he had literally waved a twenty dollar bill in a server’s face and laughed, scoffing and chortling and chiding, to the server “Do you want this?,” When I saw that, I was angered again. What bothered me was the condescending and disrespectful arrogance that he had displayed towards the waitress and everyone, and the offense that he was so thickly dishing out (regardless of whether or not he meant to)! Things got worse,..., when I went to Jim’s party and he waited for a lull in the conversation after most of his guests had left his house and we were sitting face to face alone, in his backyard and he said to me, “How much money do you make a month Jesse?” Slightly taken aback at the private and personal question, I decided to just play along with his game and divulge that I was making $8000 a month. After telling him, I felt obligated to, and I asked him, as he had undoubtedly hoped I would, how much he made, and I sat there waiting for him to announce his $15,000, or maybe $20,000 a month, and I didn’t care, he could assert his position as superior money maker between us, BUT, he replied with great satisfaction, and a smug expression on his face, the same face that had coldly yet happily chastised the subjects of his bullying antics in High School:
“$60,000” he said smugly. “A month.”
Well,.... I was destroyed! I tried to not let it show. But it cut me down to the core. I sat there, stunned. I felt like such a failure. It wasn’t that he made that much money, it was that he was the way he was, and he made that much money. And me, and my 15 years of trials and tribulations and being in this situation, losing the battle to a person like him. And me trying to always tell the complete truth, and being worried about so many things….It stung. It stung like the bite of a thousand Hornets. What a fool I was, I thought, working away -from-home, doing ERP, and most of all that I was a person who experienced irrational thoughts and anxiety on a regular basis…. And he didn’t! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh God! I hated it!
And then as quick as thought, I had the brain wave,…, that I could beat Jim! I could beat Jim and be a lawyer!
I quickly thought that I already had a university degree and I had a knack for communication! I reasoned next, that if there was that kind of money to be made in the practice of Dentistry, then I would be willing to enter the legal profession because they were similar in that they both professions that I associated with money and prestige. I left the party with a cornucopia of new ideas and I was very determined to give it my best.
Now, admittedly I was thinking in a very emotional way, and I was extremely agitated. I considered my current situation and what it would look like to have several hundred thousand dollars a year, and to be at home in my bed every night, and to be in a more scholarly and academic type of work, and I decided I would continue with my trades job, but I would also order some text books for the Law School Aptitude Test, and I would do my utmost to write it and score as highly as possible.
An important point to make right here is the fact that I found it was impossible to “get over things….” I couldn’t let things go. That was at the center of Everything. I would ruminate over the conversation, again and again and again, and with each passing mental review I would be offended and cut and hurt, a little more each time. It was a non stop cycle- And I fell deeper into the hurt as time went on. This is OCD. This is a huge part of it. For me, OCD had nothing to do with being neat or tidy or having things all in their places. I didn’t think about that stuff. For me, it was about my worth as a person, and about morality and cycles that were created and grew seemingly by themselves.
I ordered the books and dug into the study for the LSAT. I hired a tutor for 75$ an hour. I studied diligently for six months. I pushed myself. I wrote the test twice. It was costly and challenging but I was focused. The more I studied, the more I was digging into the obsessions, and in a sense, studying for the LSAT was a compulsion. It was all because I wanted to prove something… I was going backwards. I scored decently, but when I applied to the college of Law at the University of British Columbia, I was rejected.
I was disappointed, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I had my trades job. I could have applied at other universities that had less competitive standards, but I didn’t. I realized that my anger and my frustration was the main reason for doing all that work. I didn’t really have any interest in the Law. It was just a means to an end and so I eventually let it go…, slowly,.... It was a lot of stress and a lot of study though. And for what? To prove a point? To whom? About what? That I was,... successful? But the main point was that it really affected me. Jim's disclosure of his income really affected me. With each passing day, I was regressing, but I thought I was progressing, …. I could see that when it was all over, that I was working so hard to my own detriment, and it was not good.
I tried to let it go. Two summers later, I told Jim that I didn’t want to be his friend any longer, because he made me feel so bad when he made a point of telling me how much money he made. I decided I was through with being so tolerant of people. I started just throwing the filter to the side, the filter that always decided against rudeness and confrontation, and I began to adopt the policy of saying what I really felt no matter the consequences. It was a fine idea, if and only if, you don’t mind spending a lot of time in confrontation, closing the doors on relationships, and burning all of your bridges. I was at the point that I was ready to try even that, for truly I had been dealt a raw deal, and I wasn't going to sit idly by, and be treated like I deserved all of the adversity that life was hurling my way, not any more. I was determined to tell those who were in the wrong what I thought of them, and I wasn’t going to go lightly, on any of them.
JH