Growing Pains

The semester ended and I felt nothing but failure. Failure in school, failure at work, in training, in all the ideals I had wanted to change about myself. My goal was to be a new person, to have re-invented myself by Christmas and here I was, worse off than when I started at the Lake Geneva Triathlon when I was full of hope for the person I could become.

In November 1999, prior to Thanksgiving, I was highly manic, showing strong characteristics of mixed-state episodes. Hostile and irritable, I intentionally poisoned a large majority of work relationships because these people did not reflect the type of person I wished to become.

The logic was simple to me at the time: I wanted to be a certain type of person, these people did not possess or demonstrate those same characteristics, so I eliminated them. Granted, I still had to work there, but when you're manic it's easy to generate a layer of insulation around yourself that deters any unwanted influences from entering your space/mindset and interferring with the attainment of the goals you've established for yourself.

So I cut them off. No conversation, no acknowledgements, no polite nodding in the hallways. If somebody came to me wth a request that did not result in me growing towards my goals, they were dismissed, impolitely.

During this time I became a machine in the weight room. I was fixated, as is typical of somebody in a manic state.

I also spent hours throughout the night sitting in my lab taking self-ranking questionnares on mood disorders and learning disabilities to determine why, if I was supposedly so smart, why was I such an under-achiever, why had I terminated all my friendships, why did I refuse to speak to my coworkers and why could I not find one person in this world to enjoy the comppany of?

Here: Insert story about burn-out EE student that I tried to beat up in the Union on my way to the weight room for squat workout.

I met with a psychiatrist on Michigan Ave @ 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and told my story whuile he sat on the radiator listening closely for an hour. He responded "You seem like a stand-up guy that's trying to make something happen for yourself in life. I don't think there's anything wrong with you besides having ambition." This was good news.

However, after diagnosing myself with ADD, thanks to the advent of online testing, I made an appt. with a psychiatrist through my insurance company. It was a shot in the dark, but seemed worthwhile.

At our first meeting, I told my story and commented on my belief that I was ADD and needed medication to help me focus and start licing to my potential. He responded that, given my behaviors and beliefs, he would lose his license for giving me Ritalin, a stimulant to help me focus and instead prescribed the atypical antipsychotic medication Risperdal, 4mg/day, to eliminate what he believed were psychotic characteristics.

Who am I to challenge a doctor, right? I'm just a guy not making it in this world and looking for help. These doctors are all the same, I counseled myself, and if he says I need antipsychotic medication, then I do.

Well, let me tell you, I did feel a change rapidly, within several days. I was much calmer and not as upset or hyperfocused on tasks unrelated to making a living. I returned to running and felt safe to be alone at home or in public.

Then the weight gain started. I've always been underwight and very self-conscious about it. When I started seeing this doctor I was 6'00"/146#. Within a month I had gained 40 pounds and was ecstatic. If I was ripped and strong as a bull at 146#, just think of how dominant I could be @ 184#. Things were defintely looking up and I owed it all to medication.

Then something happened. The excitement wore off and my thoughts became very nuetral and bland. I blamed it on the winter blues and the fact that Christmas was over and we in the Midwest were settling in for a long cold winter. I buckled down and prepared for what was meant to be a dull, lifeless season.

My thoughts gradually transitioned over the next weeks. Instead of being uninterested in everything, I became fearful and distressed with an overwhelmingly ominous belief that something terrible was going to happen.

I believed my coworkers were plotting to have me fired, that my once magnificent physique and conditioning were eroding in front of my eyes and that my hopes for new, meaningful and gainful employment were evaporating with every day that I progressed deeper into what can only be described as a downward spiral.

These thoughts, while exaggerated, were not completely without merit. Prior to treatment, while I was still acting in an overtly hostile manner, my manager sat me down and said "Listen, I've talked to our Director and our peers. We all think it would be best if you took a week off and dealt with whatever issue that has been causing you to act this way. It won't count against your vacation, you'll get paid, there's no downside. The only condition is that you play basketball every day to relieve your stress and that you don't come onto campus property."

I responded in silence. A suspension. that's how I saw it. These people are too weak to have a strong personality and intelligence like mine in their midst, so they're getting rid of me for a week. It's not a vacation for me, it's a vacation for them - from me. I agreed in essence by responding in silence, then I worked nights, by myself, from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m and got more work done than the rest of the staff put together. I also spent days working around the house, making small improvements and going to museums in the afternoons.

While my thoughts were turning negative, I began interviewing, trying to get the hell out of the University and score a big payday that would get me the high end sport utility vehicle I needed to travel to triathlons in style and be one of the in crowd.

It should have been a slam dunk. The Information Technology sector was booming, companies were screaming for workers and I had the skills to pay the bills. Alas, one of the effects of rampant negative cognitions is isolation and I had stopped reading the news. The I.T. bubble had burst. The market fell on Black Tuesday and I.T. never came back. I responded to job-board after job-board thinking the next one would be a grand slam, but the only reply I received was silence.

Ever-tenacious, I kept sending out applications while the negative thoughts got stronger and took a deeper hold on my being. I even started contacting search-firms, a practice I swore I would never repeat based on my experience with them during my engineering career years earlier.

Soon, the only reason I would show up at work was to check my messages and email to see if I had any responses to employment inquiries. The rest of the day I would leave the lab and lay at home on the couch, eating chocalte cake by the plateful.

On the rare occassion that a placement firm did contact me, I showed up and put my best foot forward.

In times of distress and sadness, we remember the worst and forego the good events. It's a characteristic of depression - discounting the positive. At my low point of interviewing, I responded to the interviewer's question of how many repair calls do I get in a weeek in my current position with the answer of three, which was true.

She laughed in my face.

That's when I started looking to re-enter the field of electrical engineering.

Long story short, I got a job as a field service engineer with a Swiss printing press company. The money was good, but it was 100% travel. I believed I had to take it.

I had poisoned my work relationships and felt it best to leave rather than attempt to repair them, I had no offers to stay in I.T. and this gig paid enough to support the lifestyle I forecasted for myself. But it came with a drawback, too much travelling.

My new doctor told me not to take it, that I wasn't ready for that much of a lifestyle change. My family was against it, but it was my only way out and I took it.

It was miserable. I was heavily medicated and dealing with disturbing and upsetting cognitive patterns every moment of every day while trying to learn a new job and adjust to new people. The only constant in the whole disaster was my brother Tom. He was a rock for me.

Every Monday morning he drove me to the airport with my tools for my 5:30 a.m. flight to whatever city I was going to that week and provided a steady reliable presence for me to focus on and draw from.

One Monday, we sat at the gate having coffee while waiting for the plane to board. I told him I was putting money away to buy a high end S.U.V. so I could show up at triathlons without my bike stuffed in the backseat of the car. He said, with a puzzled look on his face, "Is that why you're doing all this? The new job, the travelling, the career you hate, to buy an S.U.V. so you can fit in at your races?"

"I'll put a $50.00 bike rack on your car and all your problems will be solved."

Moral: Always get a second opinion.