I'm not shutting down and I'm not giving up

I don't care how hard things get; I'm fighting for my future now.

When I get overwhelmed by life, and things feel unmanageable, I shut down.

When I got fired from my first job out of the Navy (a job that it took me three years to find), I shut down big time.

It was mid-December in 2008. I was going to community college, pursuing an Associate’s degree but really just spending my GI Bill on whatever classes looked most appealing.

I was attending school part-time during the day, and working the evening shift in SeaTac Airport at the Massage Bar (which has since closed). I worked three or four nights a week, giving 15-minute seated massage to passengers, airport employees, and flight crew.

I’d gone to massage school prior to getting the job, and I gave a great massage! I loved being able to help somebody really relax in just 15 minutes, and feel their tension melt under my fingers.

I really loved the instant gratification whenever somebody got out of the chair, smiled at me really big, and left me a big tip. I always got big tips.

The work was demanding, physically, but the job was pretty chill. I worked a four-hour shift and got a 30-minute break for dinner, and all I had to do was show up and wait for customers to come in and sign up for their massage.

Most nights, I was busy doing massage for at least three of those four hours. The goal for each shift was to get ten units of single, 15-minute sessions. We got paid for ten sessions even if we didn’t deliver that many… and every once in a while it’d be slow and I’d only do maybe six or seven units instead of ten… but most nights, I got closer to twelve to fifteen units.

We were a popular place in the early 2000s. Everybody wanted a massage before boarding their flight.

We didn’t get paid a lot. I know some of the people I worked with felt like they didn’t earn a living wage. I was lucky, in that I was getting paid to work and collecting a monthly stipend from the GI Bill, so financially, I was in a better position than most my colleagues.

I was living alone, in a one-bedroom apartment, equidistant to school and work. It was nothing special but it was mine. I moved there from my uncle’s house, where I’d lived for just a short while after my grandma died and her house finally sold, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It worked out well for me; I got to know my aunt and uncle pretty well living at their house. I hadn’t seen them since, probably, middle school… so it was really nice to reconnect… and I missed them a lot when I moved out.

But I really missed my grandma.

She’d died in early 2007, and I’d lived with her for the last two years of her life, and was her primary caregiver there at the end. My grandma is the first person I’ve ever lost who I was really close to, and I didn’t know how handle that.

Even though her passing inspired me to go back to school and to start pursuing my dreams… it also made me push away the other students, and everybody I worked with, because I didn’t dare get close to somebody else and have them taken away from me, too…

So it really, really hurt when my work friends turned against me and got me fired, and my manager took away the one thing I had in my life that made me feel like I had purpose and direction.

Looking back, it probably is my fault.

Okay, it definitely is my fault — I’m the one with the mouth I don’t know how to keep shut.

(Alright, I’ll tell you the story.)

When I was still in massage school, I made friends with a girl named Ariel who was two classes behind me. When Ariel got her license, I helped her get an interview with the Massage Bar, so I’m practically the reason she got hired (jk she got hired because she’s a great therapist… but me connecting her with the manager certainly didn’t hurt!)

I liked Ariel. She was fun and playful, like most of the women I worked with. I enjoyed teasing her at work and I probably shouldn’t have, but in my defense, young enlisted men and women tease the heck out of each other! And that’s the environment I’d just come from… and my years in the Navy were my formative years, after all…

One day another coworker asked me if I could fill in for them on a Wednesday evening, or whatever day it was… and can you believe I actually had a date scheduled for that night with a girl from my music theory class who I really liked! And I still agreed to take the guy’s shift because I just really wanted to help him out (and I did need the money).

So I was filling in for someone else… working somebody else’s shift… the day I teased Ariel and took things too far, and she and another coworker filed a complaint that led to me getting fired not two days later.

Ugh… this is kind of embarrassing… but I mean, I kinda feel like I owe it to you at this point, to tell you the whole story.

I have a stupid mouth. Even worse, I have a mind that will open my stupid mouth against my better judgment, and allow it to utter horrible, terrible, scandalous things… things that people who came up in the corporate world would probably never say… but my stupid mouth and my twisted mind think the things I say are funny.

We were probably halfway through our shift. Ariel was sitting, talking to a couple other coworkers. I’d just finished giving a massage, and we were on one of those rare slow shifts where everybody didn’t make their ten units… and I can affirm that slow shifts really are the worst… they just drag on forever…

Anyway, Ariel’s talking, and I sit down across from her, catching the tail end of the conversation. She says she’s tired and she wants to go get a coffee, or a Coke, or, in her words, “something with some caffeine, something that’ll give me that slap in the face and wake me up.”

I didn’t even realize until I’d already said it but my mouth opened and the words came tumbling out, “If you just want a slap in the face I can accommodate you.”

I swear to you… I never thought for a second that would be taken as violent, or threatening. It was just me being stupid, running my mouth, saying things that, like I said, never should be spoken, but it’s almost like I’m too immature to know any better.

(Not to say I was justified in any way. What I said was really stupid — it just never occurred to me at the time that it was going to get me into trouble. After all, Ariel was a friend and a coworker. Surely she knew I was kidding? And maybe she did… I don’t know. I never learned who actually filed the report against me; I only know that one was filed, and it did lead to me losing my job.)

But I swear, I never imagined anybody would take it seriously.

Maybe I should’ve known better… but I honestly didn’t.

But as I look back now… I was getting restless anyway. Like for real, I was tired of that job. I was starting to feel stuck and I didn’t like where my life was going. I missed my grandma, and I was frustrated because I kept trying to make new friends and it seemed like it always backfired… even before I told ‘em I wanna slap them in the face, I just had the hardest time back then making friends with anybody.

So I was anxious to move on. And I don’t know but if I hadn’t been fired, I might not have stayed at that job much longer anyway… but at least getting fired made it to where I could say it wasn’t my fault. I mean it’s not like I just quit working. I didn’t show up one day and just be like, “No I think I’m done.”

I was let go, against my will. My manager did me wrong. My coworkers betrayed me.

At least, that’s the story I told myself.

It was a convenient story, too, and one that made it really easy for me to give up on trying to get back out there, and find another job. I mean, what if I randomly get fired from the next one, too, for something else that’s clearly not my fault? What if I get another low-paying, physically demanding job, and I put in enough time and effort to get good at it and get recognized for my ability and start to enjoy it, and then get that taken away from me too?

When I looked at it that way, it was easy to give up. It was easy to not look for a new job, but to let my PTSD finally get the better of me, and to move in with Mom and Dad and just quietly watch my life slip away from me as I withdrew into complete darkness.

I couldn’t understand what I had ever done to end up, at thirty-two, with no job, no apartment, and no desire or drive to get out there and find another one, and just get on with my life…

I couldn’t fathom putting in the effort to get back out there, knowing that at any time it could all come crashing back down… so I just quit. I dropped out. I gave up. I stopped trying.

I knew that no matter what I did, I just kept ruining everything… and I didn’t want to ruin things anymore, for myself or for anybody else… so I withdrew into my parent’s house… and I hid behind a lifetime of pain, and frustration, and not knowing how to let go of anything… and I allowed my failures to grind me down until I just. Couldn’t. Handle. Living.

I couldn’t die, though. I wanted to, but I wouldn’t let myself. I knew I was done fighting, and I didn’t think I’d ever get out from under all my bitterness and frustration. I didn’t even want to try, honestly. I wanted it to consume me. I wanted to waste away into nothing.

It would’ve been easier for me to lay down and die than to clean up the mess my life had become — especially since I don’t know how to clean up messes in the first place.

But something wouldn’t let me die. Something wouldn’t let my light go out completely. I tried… like I really tried to turn my light down. I tried to bury it under a mountain of excuses… of all the reasons why I can never live life like a normal person…

I tried to tell myself that I was nothing. That I had become less than nothing. That nobody save my parents even knew I existed… and nobody including my parents would miss me all that much, if I was gone…

I really tried to make myself believe that…

But somewhere, beneath the pain, I guess I knew that was a lie. I can’t explain how else I’m still alive today, except that I intrinsically know that I actually am worth fighting for, that I am worth keeping around, that I do have a good future ahead of me. I don’t think I always believed that. But I must have always known it, underneath all the fears and frustrations that were keeping me a prisoner in my own home.

I refused to leave that house. I couldn’t handle the outside world, and I couldn’t imagine explaining to anyone, why I had to isolate myself. But I knew I had to. I knew it wasn’t safe for me to venture out into society.

I didn’t know how to navigate all the things that had happened to me… so I just gave up.

When I get overwhelmed by life, and things feel unmanageable, I shut down.

And that’s exactly what I did. For seven years, until 2016, I shut down. I allowed each year to become worse, darker and more hopeless than the year before. I retreated further and further into addiction, into Netflix, into anything that would keep me numb and keep me from being able to feel the pain I wanted to escape from.

2016 was the first time I actually took steps to change. It took the next seven years, until 2023, for my steps to add up to where I was able to finally leave Mom and Dad’s house, and move into my own two-bedroom apartment, and start to reclaim my independence.

Compared to those fourteen years… the last two have been incredible. Things have moved so quickly, sometimes it’s hard for me to believe the change I’m experiencing is real and that it’s going to last.

Sometimes, I still get afraid that everything is going to be taken away from me again.

But when I do get afraid, I tell myself I’m not the same person I was in 2008 and 2009, when I let life overwhelm me and shut me down.

I still get overwhelmed… and I still shut down… temporarily… but only temporarily. I no longer allow myself to stay down in the darkness. I’ve done my time in that pit. I know what happens when I stay there too long. And I’m not ever going back.

I may not know what my future holds… but I know exactly what’s waiting for me, if I ever give up again, and give into the darkness that controlled me for so, so many years.

I won’t allow myself to go back to the person I was before. I have too much to look forward to, to let it all fall apart like that ever again.

---