I’ve now been on Oahu for four months and six days. It’s barely been one season, but it feels like a lifetime. I’ve been wondering what I’m supposed to be doing. I keep feeling like the culmination of such a radical journey of self discovery should be marked with a momentous event. As if I need to spend my final hours here out searching the streets of Honolulu for one final revelation.
So I set out from the loft on King Street, with only my laptop, determined to find what I’m missing. I walked a block down River over to Hotel Street. I remembered the first time I made the same walk, without the slightest idea where I was or where I was going. The buildings that once seemed so foreign to me are now just fixtures in the background. The 54 pulls up as I am rounding the corner and I know the 2 is just a couple minutes behind. I stop mid stride in front of the cambodian minimart and realize this place has become home.
Home. In the months before leaving Seattle I became obsessed with the concept. It’s such a simple word but it was also the major catalyst that brought here. Well, more the perceived absence thereof.
After the 2015 holiday season, my living situation was rocky at best. I had been struggling a great deal which led to drinking excessively and constantly. It felt like everything about my past was thrust into the foreground of my mind. Each mistake I’d ever made, everything that ever hurt me, anyone I’ve ever been, all at once.
It was centered around my substance abuse and the price that I paid for it. Most specifically the choices I made that led up to my first encounter with the most horrific face of God. After highschool I chose to get high instead of going to school.
I was terrified that I might actually turn out to be as smart as everyone thought. The expectation was too much. I had boundless potential but had no idea what to do with it.
So instead I lied to myself and said I was looking for some greater meaning. I justified using drugs as a way to better understand the mind. As if some three day bender would give me insight into the truth about our existence or more importantly explain to me why I wasn’t given a choice.
I regret that decision. No. I hate myself for that decision.
There were no hidden mysteries to unlock, only chains which I happily shackled to myself after burying my potential in an unmarked catacomb. It was all a sham concocted by the dragon that now haunts my sleep.
With the coming of the new year the dramatic increase in drinking concerned my roommate. Unsure how to help, instead he immersed himself in a new relationship. It quickly escalated from casual dating to her spending three nights a week at our house. The more that she came around, the less it felt like the place I’d called home. It’s not fair to blame her though.
David has a very aggressive demeanor which comes through in ways I’m not sure he realizes. Efforts that he made to better understand my recently actualized sexuality came across as offensive and discriminatory. He considered himself the pinnacle of masculinity and as such asserted himself as the head of household. My grievances were dismissed as irrelevant, which he justified due to my alcoholism and mental condition. I was marginalized and alienated in the place that should have been my sanctuary. The longer this continued the more I felt homeless.
During all of this I was frantically searching for a new job. A year prior I had taken a new position with the company that I had worked at for over a decade, KDL. I gave up my desk and moved into an office in the warehouse to manage operations. With the added responsibility came a myriad of unexpected complications.
I immediately began the massive undertaking of fixing everything that was wrong. With each day our systems improved and I would move on to the next problem. Within six months I had solved everything that was within my control but there was one that stood out above all others still.
Upper management had made a critical error in a moment of desperation and hired on the spouse of one of our sales people. They ignored her ineptitude and unwillingness to learn even the basic functions of her job. Her shortcomings were rationalized by blaming my unrealistic expectations. The entire staff and I were held hostage, I had to get out.
Everything seemed to fall perfectly into place when I was offered a job at University of Washington Medical Center. It offered me a way out of the hell I was suffering in everyday, while also affording me the chance to go back to school. It was everything I had ever wanted.
Leaving KDL had a greater impact on me than I had thought it would. The final months were so toxic I didn’t even consider that after 13 years my coworkers were more family than friends. It was my home and I was leaving it behind.
I was also still struggling with an identity crisis. I had no idea who I was or who I was supposed to be. I wanted to find my place within the gay community, but found myself spending more time having to convince people that I was actually gay. I would go out and drink to fight the anxiety I felt in being out. Then I’d drink too much and embarrass myself, or worse not remember, which would then result in depression and further anxiety.
Dating was even more tragic. For so long, I have wanted to find someone I could make a home with that I was blinded by future tense. I let a long distance relationship go on for far too long and it ruined any attempts I made to have meaningful connections with people near me. I kept going back to the same lackluster situation simply because I saw it as a comfortable place to wait for space to dissipate.
The distance between us was such a prominent dilemma to our relationship that it blinded me from any other warning signs that presented themselves. Then one day it all came to head and ended in an alcohol fueled rage. I will always regret the way I acted that day.
Then I met someone who I wanted to be with. Both of us still needed to heal from past relationships and I couldn’t see that. I thought that if I just tried harder I could make it work. I didn’t want to accept, just as a child impatiently watching water boil, I was powerless over time.
Any one of these factors would have posed a challenge for me. Combined they served as the setting for the perfect storm. Each element lending fuel to the next in an ever accelerating spiral of anxiety. When it came for me again, I went willingly.
“Blink.”
Take the pain away.
“Close your eyes and follow me.”
I don’t want to feel like this anymore.
“I can make it all go away. Just follow me.”
What are we waiting for?
I’ve tried reflect on what had taken me to the edge countless times. I have four other documents in which I got a paragraph in and couldn’t think of the words that come next. My fingers paralyzed by the thought of reminiscing on a point in my life that was so painful. I had no intentions of writing about it today and this is merely just an overview, but it hurts to relive all the same.
It’s been said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It seems coming to terms with what brought me here in the first place is to be the final revelation I had in mind. As for a momentous event to to punctuate my departure, given the relatively short time we have here, I think the rest of my life will do nicely.
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