2008: The Worst Year Of My Life

Greetings to the five of you who even bother reading my infrequent brain ejaculations.

I know that I write these for myself, as a vehicle for self clarification, though in the back of my mind I'm always secretly hoping that any insights I may have will benefit someone else. Yes, I know. Wishful thinking.

This post is something I've been waiting to do for a while, and since we've hit December, it guess it is the time.

As you've no doubt noticed from the title, 2008 was without a doubt, the worst year in my entire existence. It's not that often when a whole year comes along that consistently and ceaselessly rapes you in orifices that it, itself, created. A bit over-dramatic perhaps? Sure. But in the midst of it, that is how it felt. That being said, the eventual upside has been the fastest growth in learning, understanding and awareness that I have ever experienced so far.

I already know what you're thinking. This is going to be a long blog where Niko bitches and whines about the fact the "life is hard" and "things didn't go my way" and "woe is me", taking the victim approach and yelling at "god" for what happened. No. But indeed life can be challenging, and many things did not go my way. However I am not taking the victim's stance, nor am I angry at a god. Although I may have felt like a victim earlier when I was standing in the tidal wave of experience, from this vantage point I see things quite differently.

"So what happened?" you may ask. Go ahead. . . .

This is year brought to me a personal deconstruction on four fronts. Emotional, mental, physical, and finally financial. I believe not in fate, or purpose for the occurrence for situations in my life, instead I view it as random and naturally generated, and unusually clumped together. I just wanted to clarify my perspective before I went on.

1) EMOTIONAL
2) MENTAL

I will speak about these two together as they are directly connected. I'm actually a bit hesitant to write this, as it's probably the most personal I've been. We are taught (or we learn) to fear being open and honest with our emotions in our everyday relationships with friends, family and loved ones. Brazen, yet tactful directness with honest feelings and thoughts need to be reintroduced into the subconscious, and then to the conscious. It almost seems foreign to many of us who are used to stuffing, or bottling our true emotions.

Relationships are rare for me. I've always been somewhat of a self-focused, introspective person who was quite often confused and afraid of inter-personal dealings with other human beings. I was always quite curious mind you, at how people interacted and why people would want to get together in a romantic sense. But for me, the relationship curiosity stayed just that, as I found much more interest during my younger years in the pursuit of expanding my mind, and working on my creative endeavors, chiefly music composition. At times, I would feel almost wholly separate from society, looking down on those who gave into their primitive animalistic urges, instead of pursuing the lofty esoteric goals of the bright minds, and creative geniuses in history.

So the few brief moments I have in something as surreal as a "relationship" are quite strange and uncomfortable for me, as unlike many people in my generation, did not focus a good deal of my time in the conquest of romance and sexuality. I've always been a romantic at heart, but due to fear, and directed by my personal ambition (as well as the fact that I have the tendency to be a pretentious elitist), I abstained for quite some time.

With that in mind, when I do find myself in a romantic situation, it is usually more impactful on me (due to it's relative unfamiliarity and newness) then on those I am with, that the end result of the inevitable separation can hit me harder then others. True was the case of the beginning of this year, when a chance, and rare relationship with an actual human being was terminated.

The causes were subtle and numerous. Age differences, personal differences making themselves more apparent over time, life crises (on both sides), as well as many psychological incompatibilities and disparate approaches to life, all of which combined to signal the end in what was otherwise a very exciting, and positively emotional moment in time. I could go on in deep analysis of the true reasons and underlying causes that resulted in the breakup, but I feel that would be A) too long of a tangent for this blog, and B) inconsiderate to the other person involved in this situation.

It was not by any means a violent ending. It was a complicated emotional decision in which I tried my best to be understanding with. But the fact still remained that I did not want to end something that was just starting to get comfortable, when I was finally feeling okay to let my personal guard down and allow someone into my odd, yet interesting inner workings.

Even though this wasn't one of the terrible movie breakups you see, it was very ingrained in my emotions, after all, I just let my wall down and the flashing red spot on the boss was revealed. I felt quite vulnerable and fragile. I did my best to keep a straight face while working and around those who knew us both, but it was a facade that most could easily see though.

Due to my relative "newness" with more serious relationships, the unfortunate and predictable result was that I would be significantly more affected then she would be, simply due to our uneven levels of personal interaction experience. It never feels good to be no longer needed, desired, or valuable to someone, which is an ingrained human trait that we all need to continuously satisfy in myriad ways.

The emotional weak spot (as in my video game boss analogy) was extremely tender and sore for far too long. In fact I still feel embarrassed for the amount of time I was reeling from the experience. This was not a long-term multi-year marriage, it was a short burst of intense emotion that lasted, at best, the better part of a year, if that. And yet we cannot control our emotional selves with such tyranny. I felt strongly about this for the majority or months that followed leading to the direct connection to my mental self image.

I would never have said that I had high self esteem or a strong self image by any means. My tendencies lean toward a personal mental/emotional masochism, in which I've somehow come to deem as "normal". My internal beating and mutilation (though entirely in my mind) was rampant and out of control. I was in one of the worst depressions of my young life. I saw myself in the most stark of contrasts. Everything about me was awful, pathetic and worth absolutely nothing in the eyes of others, and therefore, myself. I had no sense of personal value, even when logic would tell me otherwise, that tiny voice was instantly washed out by the tsunami of self-destructive and irrational emotions. I was, by my own accounts, the most terrible worthless thing I could imagine, namely, human.

As a quick and temporary distraction, I tried to find someone to fill the gap, as many of you do. I submerged myself in my past, regrettably, by getting ahold of several girls I was once in contact with, some with semi-romantic connections, others with only desired connections that never came to fruition. I knew the easiest way to get over someone is to find interest in someone else. Well, luckily, none of these worked out to anything, and those that could have, I realized quickly that I truly did not want them. I only wanted the feeling back, the quick fix of the emotional hurt, not the literal person I was in contact with.

Over the next several months, the over-analyzing and re-over-analyzing-again of everything that happened and everything I was, left a gaping hole in my psyche, a placeholder carved out from the parts of me that failed, the parts of me that could not survive going forward. In a sense, it was the process of natural selection for my brain. The ways I approached the world and myself. The ways I dealt with others. How I saw myself. Who I wanted to be and who I was now. All of these things had failed their test in the real world. If I was going to survive out there, I was going to have to rebuild myself and learn from the vast amount of mistakes I had made. For my mind, it would be survival of the fittest ideals.

3) PHYSICAL

I've discussed this at length in my "Touching Death In The Crotch" post, but I will still sum up for the purposes of a complete article.

So there I was. Two strikes against me for the start of 2008, still feeling like a wounded bird (and embarrassed for feeling that way over a relatively short relationship), but slowly pulling myself up and out of the mire.

*Movie trailer voice*

"But little did he know, that his world, was about to change."

In mid August I took ill with some sort of terrible stomach pain. I had been drinking a bit the previous night so I linked the two together as cause and effect (or if you prefer, Hall and Oats). It was a really bad sign from the start when I was walking home from downtown (yes walking) with the most awful stomach pain I could fathom. Forty-five minutes of walking home in excruciating pain. Good times. Try it sometime.

The only relief I had from the pressure and pain, albeit temporary, was to force myself to vomit, as for some reason, my body did not want to do it naturally, which I did find quite strange.

The biggest sign that something was really wrong, was the fact that part of my upper abdomen was bloated and distended to about the size of an egg, even to the point that the skin around it was becoming discolored. Not a good sign. I just figured I had some sort of blockage in my intestine and some stimulant tea would cure what ails me.

Well, after almost five days of this, with virtually no improvements, I was finally encouraged by my dad to actually go to a real doctor to at least know what I was dealing with. So, with help, I was taken to the emergency room at a local hospital, run through cat scans and such and given a sexy gown to wear.

The news was great. Apparently I was suffering from what is known as an Incarcerated Abdominal Hernia. This is actually a bad thing. Imagine if you will (and you have no choice) the intestine and bowel getting kinked like a hose so nothing can pass through. Already pretty crappy. . .(pun). Then on top of that, imagine that this kink gets stuck in a tear in the abdominal muscles and is virtually caught right under the skin, which is not where it should be. Good times. Obviously no amount of juices, tea, and rest could have cured this.

The scary thing for me, was that the doctor then told me that if I had waited only a few more days, my bowel could have ruptured and most likely, I would have died. Yes died. In just a few more days. Now I'm not sure if that was accurate, but I'm not waiting around a few days to see if he was right. Just to hammer the death thing home, my electrolyte and potassium levels were so low due to all the vomiting, that I could have died from just that as well.

So I was put under and operated on that very night. I heard later, that kinked part of my bowel was literally dead, and part of it had to be removed, as well as portions of my intestine, though not much. Since everything was blocked up, the surgeon said that the upper intestine as swelled to almost ten times its normal size, and I didn't even get an award!

All in all, the surgery went well, and I began the extremely joyous recovery in the hospital. I had a tube shoved down my nose and IV's coming out of every vein. In other words, I've never looked better. My hospital stay lasted almost a week, and I can tell you that I've never felt more pathetic, feeble, and worthless, especially when combined with what I was still feeling from the beginning of the year. Even though my physical self was slowly healing, mentally and emotionally, the experience was quite devastating, which I never expected. This whole ordeal only helped to compact my state of mind and heart to nearly push me over the proverbial edge. Even though I should have felt great that I was not dead, and things went well in surgery, I could not escape the black hole of depression.

4) FINANCIAL

I remarked many a time to the few friends I keep that I was destroyed on "all three fronts" this year. It made an interesting story for sure, and maybe it was a gap in my imagination or understanding of whatever can happen will happen, but I thought I had reached the bottom of the barrel. Apparently, this barrel has a few sub-basements.

This is the least important of my four personal breakdowns, but still worth mentioning, as it pertains to the eventfulness (to use a work devoid of emotional implication) of this amazing year of 2008.

Right then. On with the show. I had been working all year (save for the first month and a half when I still worked the clubs. . .*shiver* . . .) being a freelance music composer. Pretty cool sounding isn't? However, I was mostly working with one client, my friend Kevin who wanted to put on this big theatrical production which I've also mentioned previously. The good thing was that I was getting paid to write music for a full on play, the bad news is he ran of money half way through the year. What is the good of being a freelance music composer, if you only have one client who is out of money? I'll tell you what, "to get to the other side".

Yes, it was stupid for me to try and venture out on my own without a stable handful of clients to keep the money coming in. I see that now, and even at the time, I knew I would have to go back to the gut-wrenching world of a pointless day job in order to pay rent and food for my (currently) pathetic existence. Some cracker jack deal eh? What I wondrous capitalist world we've created!

My "get a boring job that devalues my self image even more, in an environment where I get zero respect for the things I'm actually talented in" had it's brakes slammed hard when I almost dies in August. Once I was out of the hospital I need to recover for a good while, as I had trouble sitting or laying down. This was no condition for me to be getting a job. Mediocrity would have to wait for my old man stage to ware off. (Both quite worthwhile, but I would recommend the duck).

Time passed quickly as I slowly regained my basic ability to walk around and function normally. During this time I was able to get a lot of much needed work done on my third album, which I'm still very surprised I had the strength for. Creative projects aside, I needed to survive in Moneyland, USA, and musical masturbation is not going to solve that. I sold some music equipment and sustained myself on that for a month or two, until the ugly head of the demon raised it's blue-collared immensity before my eyes (Satanus Workweekus).

With my bank account almost completely drained, and the threat of having to move in with my father again like a complete failure (note: I'm still a failure, just not %100. Therefore I'm an agnostic failure), I begrudgingly spent what felt like an eternity hunting down dull jobs. I found the situation very humiliating and ironic, as I had to, on a few occasions, talk myself up and try to convince a prospective employer that I would be a great candidate for a job that I never wanted in the first place.

I received no calls, and no one appeared to be hiring in this glorious economic time. It's a really shitty time to need a job. I felt I was going to have to concede and be the 27 year old who moved back in with his "daddy" because he could not cut it in the real world. Granted I am very much in my own little realm of existence most of the time. Living in an amazing world intellectual discovery and imaginative creativity (coupled with the traditional emotional masochism and mental self-mutilation sessions. . . . . . .damn. . . . I really do embody the "tormented artist archetype" don't I?). But this has nothing to do with the outside world, unless I get the opportunity to share my creative insight with others.

To sum up. I now have a job as a cupcake (I'm a host at an upscale bar/restaurant) which is easy, and should at least pay my stupid bills. Relegated to the drudgery of Everyman Land, drinking the bitter soup of those who gave up before me. Let this be a lesson to me to be more prepared next time I try getting back into the music for hire arena. I feel all of the things I felt before when I was mourning after the death of my relationship, the near-death hospital stay and my lack of financial stability. As usual I'm too focused on my creative expression and my high-gear pursuit of learning that I have trouble assimilating into the world around me.


WHICH WAY DO WE GO FROM HERE, DEAR LADS?

And that brings me to where am I now. In the back of my mind, I am open to the possibility of there being a fifth front on which I get destroyed immediately after I post this. But this time I'm ready. I'm not really sure exactly what that means, but I will not lament if I am hit again, nor will I place any supernatural forces behind them. In fact, the final result has been giant leaps in what could likely become a new start.

Yes, I did not enjoy any of the processes that I went through this year, but even early on, I was seeing something growing out of the ashes. New thoughts, questions, perceptions and perspectives were forming. I spent a good deal of time early on, having long conversations with my dad, and others about relationships, then moving into self examination (see my blog on self-perception for one of the observations during this time), human behavior, cognition, the nature of reality and more. It was, although still very emotional for me, my only moments of exhilaration; opening up my mind to new understandings of who I am, what I do, and how I think. It all starts with the self. In fact I'm actually quite shocked that I was able to glean so much information out of what was a very short (by most standards) and insignificant relationship. Good work brain!

This addicting quest is well within my nature, as I've always loved learning about myself and the world, but this new growth period was like being on steroids. This soon led me deep into other intellectual voyages into topics and subjects that I may have been interested in before, but never really studied.

If this year as a whole was the accumulation of vast knowledge in a short time span, then the last two months were an exaggeration on even that. Recently I've been devouring books like I have not in years, perhaps ever, and soaking up documentaries like a sponge. Some of you may have noticed my last post where I put together a list of many of the recent doc's that I had been watching, in the hopes that others may find them as exciting as I did. I notice there seems to be a lack of interest in that by many, which is disappointing, but at the same time, we all have our current areas of interest.

I joked in an email correspondence a few months after my breakup (to my ex girlfriend funny enough) that I was learning so much these days that I had to take out a loan on a second brain.

In this whole transformation process, as I see it, I've been given a quick crash course in human interaction, psychology, philosophy, and self perception. I am grateful that I have been able to transmute the negative moments, feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and perceptions into an absolutely mind-blowing re-construction of the person I would like to be. Am I there yet? No, but there is no final destination, only the process. My simple hopes are that I have at least lain the foundation upon which a stronger, wiser, more aware person can grow. I am at times, uncharacteristically optimistic about where I can go now, not that I am always sunshine and lollypops. I am still as analytical as ever, if not more so now, and am approaching my slow acclimation back into the real world with cautious curiosity.

Whatever random events 2009 has in store for me I welcome with open arms. 2008 has destroyed me many times over, and given me the opportunity to build myself anew, and if 2009 would like to deal me such a hand again, just think of how much more I will get to learn.

Thanks for reading,

NIKO