If you follow me on twitter or facebook you've probably noticed I have a lot of thoughts in my head these days. The last few days, my mind has been going a million miles an hour. I go through this every now and then. I can have 100 thoughts in my head at any moment. I start thinking about something and splinter off in eight different directions. My dad (bipolar) has dealt with this most of his life, and now I understand why his stories take half an hour to tell. It's called racing thoughts. One of my medications is supposed to stop this, so maybe I need a stronger dosage. Anyway, I need to get some of this out of my head somehow, or I'll go crazy.
So I've been thinking (among many many other things) about how things ended in Estevan. I never wanted things to end that way. I never wanted to leave under mysterious circumstances in January and then resign from my job in May. Estevan was great to me, embraced me as part of the community and the people I dealt with almost always got me all the info I needed for stories ASAP.
I met a lot of great people in Estevan, many of whom I count as friends. And some of them don't really even know what's happened since I left the Energy City. I didn't even tell people at the Mercury some of this.
As you know, I've been battling at times severe depression the last two years. Sometimes it was so bad I couldn't do my job, I couldn't leave my house, anything. If you paid close attention you probably noticed the quality of my work slipping over the last year I was there. Depression took away my focus, my concentration, my motivation to do anything. I found it hard to get motivated for the same old stories I wrote every week - how this minor hockey team did, and that team, and getting stuff from the scoresheets for road games. When it was really bad it was a struggle to pull myself off the couch and go to a game. I missed quite a few games in 2014 that I should have been at, and my coverage slipped as a result. My social anxiety was - and is - so bad, that I couldn't face people at a hockey game. Even if I knew them well.
I want to apologize to those teams and organizations. You deserved far better coverage than I gave you in 2014. Sometimes there weren't even pictures for home games because I was so sick I couldn't drag myself to the rink or the ball field. I'm embarrassed when I think back on that. And this stuff exhibited itself before my episodes of depression came on. One time when I was in Kindersley, I had to go to a dinner in Kerrobert on a Saturday night. I had zero confidence in myself. I was so scared of going to a dinner where I didn't know anybody, and having to talk to people, that I didn't go. And those people didn't get a story on their dinner.
Right till the end, I found that when there was a big story, I rose to the occasion. The Summer Games. The Western Canada Cup. A big Bruins trade. Anything big, I was still able to write a great story. Because I've never wanted to be anything but a sports writer. I've spent the last 10-15 years of my life getting ready to jump into this career that I'm no longer in. When the chips were down, and there was a big story, even at the end, I felt lucky to be doing the job I was doing. And I put everything I had into that story.
Looking back, reading some of the big stories I wrote in 2014, and knowing what I was dealing with at the time, I'm amazed I was able to produce what I did. But the weekly stuff, the team updates and things, more often than not I just did what I had to do to get it done. I was writing eight or nine stories on Mondays, plus all kinds of little briefs that took time. Some of that was my fault - there were usually a couple of stories I could have done before the weekend. But Mondays in the weekly newspaper SPORTS business are hell. Everything happens on the weekend. Looking back, I was under so much stress, much of it I put on myself.
And toward the end I just couldn't handle it anymore. There were two or three times where my mind just completely shut down on Mondays. I panicked and I couldn't handle the stress. I couldn't have written a two paragraph brief about my weekend. In my six years in weekly newspapers I had always, somehow, gotten through the workload on Mondays. Sometimes I was writing till 2 a.m. but I got through it. I couldn't believe what was happening to me. The other guys at the Mercury had to take on that big workload when they already had lots of stories they had to finish by the next morning. I felt awful. I hated myself for putting them through that. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't.
Last December, I had the worst episode of my life, other than the one last April where I almost did myself in. For four days I was miserable. The world was crashing in on me. I couldn't move off the couch. The future was hopeless. There was no reason to keep living. There's a difference between being suicidal and having thoughts about suicide - I had the latter. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could just end this pain. I wasn't actually going to do it. But then, and I still can't explain this, it's like there was this voice or something telling me to overdose on my depression pills. I know that makes me sound like a psycho or something. I've never experienced anything like that before or since. Something was trying to guide me toward doing myself in. And I went over to my pills, and thankfully I was almost out. I knew I didn't have enough there to do any damage, so I didn't try. I called my boss and asked him to take me to the ER (because the people I was living with were total neanderthals - but that's for another blog).
I spent a few days in the hospital. Felt better when I got out. But I knew I couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't keep putting myself through this. Sooner or later it was going to end badly. I had to be home, where I grew up, around the people I love.
That very afternoon, my first day back at work, my awesome boss Brant Kersey informed me that our new benefits provider had something called short term disability. If I qualified, I could go home for up to four months and sort out my depression, while drawing most of my salary. I saw this as nothing short of a miracle. I was desperate to get home and just get rid of the stress and isolation for a while.
So in January, I was approved and put the wheels in motion to go home. Sun Life kept extending me for dinky little one-week periods at first, so it wasn't until early February that I left. I actually moved out of my "apartment" - a little section of a family's house, a family that gave me zero privacy and thought because I had depression I was going to kill people - in mid-January. I didn't care if I had to sleep in my car for two weeks. Those people made my mental health much worse. They were toxic, treated me like shit and if I never see them again in my life I'll be happy. If I do see them, there will probably be violence.
When I left Estevan, I was hoping to come back in a few months, if I improved dramatically. But I always knew there was a chance of me not coming back. Think about it. Being home, not having the incredible stress of my job, seeing my close friends and family often - it's the best thing for my health, and I knew it in January.
I've been much better since I moved home. Just being in PEI, God's Country, makes me feel so much better. These are my stomping grounds. I have thousands of memories here. I know almost every inch of this Island. Charlottetown is one of my favourite cities in the world. These last few months have been like something out of someone else's life. I still have problems, I still have stress, I fight with my family sometimes, but not having to work and be somewhere everyday has done wonders for my mental health.
However, feeling better doesn't mean I'm not still dealing with depression, or that I'm ready to go back to work. Recently I had three bad episodes in the span of a month. They're unpredictable. I can't start a job and then have unpredictable episodes that prevent me from working. For starters, I'm still being paid the majority of what my salary was in Estevan. You take that salary and put it in PEI with its low cost of living, that's a good chunk of change. So I can't take a job that pays me less than I'm making now, because money is somewhat tight even now. I can't take a job that I don't think I'll be good at. The way my mind works, if I have no confidence in myself to do something, I won't be able to do it. So if I end up not being able to handle that job, surprise surprise, I'm now bringing in zero dollars a month. Kinda hard to manage an apartment on that or even buy a litre of milk. And at least in the beginning, I need a job with as little stress as possible. I've learned that I need to eliminate every source of stress I possibly can. I even stepped down as commissioner of an Estevan-based fantasy hockey league because it gave me too much stress last year.
I have more than depression. I have anxiety, I have social anxiety, I think about things far more than the average person. If I mess up something, no matter how small, it bothers me for days. I've gotten better at that - you have to in order to work in media - but it still bothers me.
One thing's for sure, I need significant counselling before I can even think about full-time work again. I've been in PEI for six months and it's been impossible to find a therapist. I finally just got one this week. I need to work with her on all kinds of things and get them to a manageable place before I can work. Yes, I'm physically capable of working. Yes, I could probably handle certain jobs right now. But it's the risk. I'm in a very precarious position and I need to do things properly in order to get out of it.
Right now I'm in as much uncertainty as I've ever had in my life. I'm not working, I don't know when I will be. I've just given up the only career I've ever wanted to do, and Lord knows if I'll ever get back into it again. I'm bringing in enough money to pay the bills and expenses and the odd "want" purchase, but I'm certainly not able to stop getting my money from Sun Life and survive. I have no idea what the next month holds for me, let alone the next year. Ever since I graduated university I've had job security and good finances. I'm where I want to be, but to do so I've forfeited those things. I'll take that trade-off, but not forever.
But now that I'm home, I finally have a therapist and I have some good things in my life, I have a feeling things will work out. I don't have a clue how they will, but things will be OK I think.
I'm going to miss covering the Western Canada Cup and Summer Games next year more than I can say. I didn't leave because I didn't want to be around for that stuff. I kinda wish I could fly out, cover those events and come back. I want to get into freelancing so I can at least do some writing on the side and keep my foot in the door.
To all the people in Estevan who embraced me and made me feel welcome, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have no idea how much that meant to me during the worst year of my life. That's rare in this business. I certainly didn't feel much of that in Kindersley. Keep in touch.
