(Written yesterday. I don't have an internet connection at home, so here I am at the library.)
Dear world,
I've come home from my first day of work. I signed on with a temp agency, and I've been sent out to work in a warehouse - unloading product from boxes, tagging it, and reboxing it. My shoulders hurt and my ears are still ringing - I guess I had never been in a modern mechanized warehouse before - but I feel good. I earned money today, doing so honestly and with no false assumptions.
You might think it's silly to remark on it this way, but for the past twenty months, I've had three jobs, each of which lasted about three months before I got dismissed (or, in the one case, fired). When my brother died just two weeks after I got engaged, taking his own life after nearly twenty years of struggle with severe mental illness, it wrecked me. I hated who he had become, because of his sickness, and I had given up hope of ever really seeing the man I knew as my brother again, but among other things... it made the possibility of suicide more real to me. It forced me to question my assumptions about myself and ask if, perhaps, I should also take my own life. I decided not to, but only partially because I'm attached to existence. The rest of it was that I defined myself in terms of how others thought of me.
Since then I have moved away from my home town, to Baltimore, MD, and things have changed. It's as though I'm a different person now. I am no longer the man who tears himself down every time he tries to take a step forward. I am no longer the man who questions whether his existence has any meaning whatsoever to others. I am no longer the man who cringes in fear every time his wife calls his name, in fear that she might find fault with him and leave him. I am no longer the man who wonders if he is worthy of love or respect at all.
I am the man who looks at his wife every morning and feels enormously lucky that such an awesome, beautiful woman married him.
I am the man who gets up in the morning and says: today is a good day, let me see if I can make it better.
I am the man who looks in the mirror and says: that's me and I'm proud of it.
I am the man who is not the best lover in the world, but who tries harder.
I am the man who wants to make the Space Marines of "Warhammer 40,000" human, and writes about that.
I am the man who wonders what it is like to be a monster, or to love one, and writes about that.
I am the man who happily carries a cigarette lighter everywhere he goes, because fire, and that's okay.
I am the man who has a rather unconventional idea of what's attractive.
I am the man who enjoys puns, the more terrible the better.
I am the man who is flooded with joy when he finds a simple jumping spider.
I am the man who feels a deep affection and affinity for everything cute and fuzzy.
I am the man who borrows a pen and sometimes forgets to return it.
I am the man who is more endowed with intellectual brains than common sense.
I am the man who can fix your computer better than most retail outfits and will charge less money.
I am the man who wants to make his parents and grandparents happy, not because he must, but because he can.
I am the man who ends his day by saying: tomorrow can be better and I will do what I can do make it so.
My wife says I am becoming not the man she married, but the man she dated. I'm not going to lie - the man she married was a wreck, still grieving four months after his brother's death. And you know, I still do. It's just no longer an obsession. Now, I am more cheerful, more optimistic. I get things done and I make bad jokes and act playfully with my wife.
You hurt me. You hurt me badly. I have probably shed my body weight in tears over the past twenty months. It's easy for me to recall the feelings of sadness, despair and self-loathing that hammered me from within with physical force, until I was doubled over and unable to do anything but sob uncontrollably. These things are true. I break easily. But I come back.
You have failed to crush me. You will always fail to crush me. And meanwhile, I am clawing back my pride, my love, and my worth, and even if I have to eat beans for the rest of my days I will consider myself well-off because I have pride, love and worth and you can never take them away from me permanently.
Sincerely,
YS