The last year has been awful for everyone.

I was raised to believe that, no matter how bad things are going for you, there is somebody out there who is have a much worse time than yourself. This is not a new concept to anyone, I'm sure, and never would I propose that my life has been more difficult than anybody else's. I especially feel this way during the current Covid pandemic. Everyone has had an extremely difficult time, and I'm certainly better off than any of the >500,000 people who lost their lives to the virus. Luckily enough, I've never even had it. What I did have, however, was still a train wreck of a year.

Considering this is a diary entry - though I prefer the term "journal" to protect my fragile masculinity - I think it would be best to refrain from giving too much background on myself. The little bit of relevant information I will disclose here is this: I had recently dropped out of college, meaning I was in a financial hole and my self-esteem was shot. At the time I was also struggling a lot with mental illness, being in and out of psychiatric hospitals for multiple reasons. My living situation was precarious at best, and I was living in my hometown while all my friends and family had moved on. Basically, I started the year at an all-time low, and it kept plummeting from there.

January to February 2020

At the beginning of the month, I moved out of a friend's home, more or less against my will but I understood why they would have wanted to kick me out. I was having a lot of trouble holding down a job, and was just generally a burden on their finances and an obstacle to their lifestyle. No hard feelings, right? I found a cheap apartment relatively quick, and it was funny to me too because it was a place that my dad had lived at earlier in my life, so that was a fun little nostalgia blast. I went to the landlord's office building, signed a lease for the first time in my life, and got all set to move in. I felt like a real grown-up, and it was pretty sweet at first. My job at the time was third shift at a food packaging facility, where I worked with one of my two (2) remaining friends in the world. It was nice being around her there, having a friendly and familiar face at your job is something to be valued. Little else happened during this time, I basically slept all day and worked all night, and it was more or less fulfilling.

March

So I'm pretty sure everybody knows this is where sh*t hit the fan in the United States, pandemic-wise. I had recently been fired from my third shift job that I liked so much and was now working bench assembly at a car parts factory. This job was pretty enjoyable, I just had to sit down and use my hands. The two other people that were sitting with me at the bench were nice enough, though one of them had a raging infection that made them smell... unpleasant, to say the least. No judgment though, and she was a pretty good person so I always did my best to be kind to her, 'cause that's just basic human decency. At this point, my schedule is basically the same as it had been before: work, sleep, repeat. BUT there's a wrench thrown into the works there somewhere because I made the very unintelligent decision of contacting one of my ex-girlfriends and trying to make a go of things. Not only is that usually a bad decision in and of itself, but I find out that she (22 years of age) is hooking up on a regular basis with a man who's just shy of 50. She, however, is still acting very into me, so against my better judgment I decided to continue on this endeavor. We go on a few dates, she comes over and we make out, watch movies, yadda yadda. Of course, this all catches up to me when I realize she is the same as, if not worse than she was when we dated the first time three years prior. As the daughter of a lucrative-restaurant owner, she had always been fairly spoiled, while I came from a family of poverty and actually understood the value of things. There's also a rampaging sense of superficiality with her to the point where it makes my stomach sick. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. We continue seeing each other through the end of March and the rest will be told soon enough.

Then, of course, is when businesses started getting shut down and everyone gets laid off. The company who I was working for tells everyone to go home and that they'll update us, and this update takes about a week. At this time I'm battling depression pretty hard and I decide that I'm just not going to go back. The stimulus check made this possible, and I used that to pay my rent and other expenses.

April to June

So, picture this: a man in his early 20s who's been battling mental illness for quite some time, decides he's going to quit his job, have no income, isolate himself, and smoke weed all day. Sounds like a recipe for ultimate success, right? You may be surprised, but the answer is no.

The aforementioned ex-girlfriend and I eventually part ways and it is pretty ugly. We had already gotten back to arguing like we used to, I have a friend who is basically stirring that pot even more, and this whole thing has got my head spinning. On top of that, there is an awful fact about my family's history that I will omit from this account, but rest assured it is plaguing me like, well, the plague. Suffice it to say, my father was convicted of a crime which the whole town was made aware of, and ended up on a certain registry. So now that I'm back in my hometown and active in the community, I start feeling like people are keeping a keen eye on me, like hardcore. It gets so bad that it blossoms into full-fledged paranoia and I'm fearing for my life every minute. However, there are a few people who I meet and develop a "friendship" with. First was a girl a year younger than me who I met at a park at three in the morning, who was walking by playing some music that I was familiar with. Feeling brave, I decided to call out and be like, "Yo, [insert artist here], sweet!" This turns into a pretty long conversation and it was very refreshing. We exchange contact info and eventually go our separate ways.

Well, we meet up again either the next day or the day after, and I come to find out that she has some sort of fractured personality disorder. I want to say DID, dissociative identity disorder, but I can't recall exactly what it was. She tells me this, and I think very little of it other than that I'd like to be as supportive as I can be. I do my best to learn about the particulars of her condition, and while some things are a little off-putting I decide I'm not going to let that change how I see her as a person. Fast forward a few days and she's spending the night at my apartment. Cool, right? Again, the answer is astoundingly and emphatically no. The next day she has an appointment. I ask her if she'd like me to accompany her. "No," she says, "That's fine." I tell her, "Okay, well I think while you're doing that I'll be running some errands or whatever, so here's the KEY to my APARTMENT and come back whenever you'd like." If you need any more evidence to prove that I'm a moron I don't know what to tell you.

*Trigger Warning*

Long story short, while I'm gone she comes back and takes my box cutter to her wrists. Then she leaves. I come back to find quite a bit of blood on the apartment floor, and my boxcutter missing. When I messaged her on Facebook she told me what had happened and that she was going to go home to a neighboring town. I ask her to meet me before she does that, because I would like to talk about what just happened. We meet, and go for a walk, and during this she keeps talking about how nobody will ever understand the thoughts in her mind, that she'd be better off dead, and a lot of things that I had been feeling for quite a while as well. So I explain to her that she's not alone, there are people just like her everywhere who may not have her exact condition but would understand it and appreciate her nonetheless. In reply, she discredits everything I said and just repeats what she had been saying. At this point I just want to make her feel like she isn't alone, so I decided to reveal some of my deepest, darkest thoughts to her. What I hoped to achieve here was a sense of mutual understanding; what I received was her looking me dead in the face like I was a freak, and saying, "What is wrong with you?" Like, really? Considering some of the things she had said and done, I thought what I said was pretty mild. We did end up spending more time together that day, but - whew - how it ended is the worst part.

After all of that we decided to go to her friend's house. I had been there before, we all got along, they were fine people so I had no problem going over there. At one point, however, this girl says that she'd like to talk to her friends alone, and she was wondering if I could go grab some of her stuff from my place. Sure, I'm happy to abide, so I go back to my apartment with another one of her friends. He drives me, I get her stuff, we go back. Then he tells me to wait in the car, because he's going to go inside and see what the deal is. Little did I know that I was actually being locked inside of his car to where I couldn't get out. Once I realize this I am overwhelmed with anxiety. After sitting there for a few minutes I decided that I couldn't take it anymore, and I was just going to get out and walk home. I unlock the door manually and open it, but once I do his car alarm starts going off. Since I'm already freaking out, the extremely loud and unexpected noise is like a bomb, and I lose all motor function. Then, the next thing I hear is him screaming from their friend's house, "Get the f*ck back in the car!" which I obey for some reason. By the time he gets out I'm ready to beat the sh*t out of him, but I was able to keep my cool and instead resolved to never associate with those people again. Which was pretty easy because none of them wanted to see me again either, after the girl who caused all of that told them what I had said, as well as a few things I hadn't.

That being done and over with, I found myself in a pretty rough state. I started drinking every day, coupled with my then-overwhelming paranoia. A few friends are made, a couple are lost. There's another long story somewhere in there but at this point I haven't the heart to get into it. Maybe I can write about it later. At any rate, everything begins deteriorating mental-health-wise, and I ended up going to the hospital three times over the course of May. The last time I went, my family and I decided that that was it, I was no longer able to hold a place in society, and I was better off staying in a long-term psychiatric care facility until I completed a good deal of therapy. It was extremely hard to admit that, but I knew that it was for the best. It took a couple weeks, but by early-mid June I was placed in a nearby town's nursing home. I stayed there for the remainder of the year.

June to December

I'm going to do my best to consolidate everything that happened in these six months, and honestly it won't be too hard to do because nothing really happened. I was transferred from the hospital to this new facility. What I was expecting is a whole lot different than where I ended up. You see a nursing home or something of the sort on television and sometimes it is pictured as a nice, open place with a large outdoor area, activities, and at the very least group therapy sessions. This place, though, was a fairly decrepit building, with a central yard that was probably 150 square feet. Most of the patients there were way older than me, and considerably more progressed in their mental illness. Nonetheless, I was determined to make the most of it. I immediately began undergoing my therapy, starting with making sure that I was on the right medication. I immediately realized that I was living alongside a lot of people who were worse off than me, (interesting how things kind of wrapped back around to that). The experience definitely gave me a great perspective on my own issues, and the medication that I was prescribed was effective in reducing the symptoms that I was experiencing.

The worst part about staying in this place is that it was during a pandemic. There was none of the regular freedom that the patients there had, which usually included home visits for ten days out of the month, outdoor activities, excursions to the park or the library. The only thing that we were allowed to do outside of the normal schedule, while I was there, is smoke. Of course, I am a fairly heavy smoker, so I took advantage of the smoking sessions that we were given.

During this time I was increasingly stable and my cognitive abilities improved greatly. There was a brief episode of paranoia and anxiety, where I was worried that my roommate was trying to take my life. Of course the fear was unfounded, but sometimes once you get an idea in your head that you obsess over, you end up using absolutely anything as evidence for that thing being true. Anyway, this episode was mitigated very easily by a room change and an adjustment to my meds. While I was staying at this facility I learned a lot about myself, and by the end of that stretch of my journey I was able to communicate my feelings a lot more clearly. I was also able to reconcile many things that had been bothering me about myself, my life, the past few years in particular, and things that I had been repressing for a long time. Eventually I felt like I had learned all that I was going to, and I knew that I was stable enough to go back into the outside world and make a life for myself. I do not regret my time spent there at all, and I know that I'm in a much better position now.

Now

Since I left the facility I was staying at, I've been regaining traction on my life slowly but surely. I've been keeping up with my medication and had been searching for work regularly. My life partner now insisted that I find a job that I will be making a good amount of money at, that includes benefits, and so I've spent a fair amount of time unemployed while waiting for a response to the applications I sent to everywhere that fit the criteria. Now, I start my new job on Monday of next week. I'm very happy, living with a woman who I love very dearly. Every now and then I struggle with emotional issues like depression and I have realized that I still have quite a bit to learn about the way that my emotional state responds to things. I will never stop trying to improve myself, and I look forward now to the road ahead.