Memories, 2003-2005, Part 8

This post is part eight of a series about what happened to me after I graduated from college. Everything in my life went horribly wrong over the course of 2003-2005, and I’ve written a long story (or a short memoir) all about it. I think it typifies the challenges that face my generation that no one is really talking about, but it’s also a story about heartbreak. These posts will go up automatically every Sunday until the story is over. All names have been changed, and some situations have been changed slightly for the purposes of anonymity. Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

Preface: It is not easy for me to tell this part of the story, especially not in a week when I happen to have a couple of new readers showing up. Thus far I’ve been trying to split up long chapters into more than one post, but in this case I had to let the whole story happen in one, so I’m sorry for its length. Also, there are blatant made-up companies here in order to protect the actual companies I worked for (and to protect me).

Attempt/July – December ‘04

In July of 2004, I got a job with Palin Drome. This seemed at least partially to herald the end of our misery, because it was going to pay me decently (I think it was $10/hr), and was a foot in the door to The Office Job. I’d been chasing this job since the previous year when I left the one I had in London. To me, The Office Job was the opposite of The Retail Job, the one where you are paid three digits a month and have to stand up all day. The Office Job promised air conditioning, civil co-workers, and occasional congratulatory cakes with icing that tasted like chemicals.

The PD job was for a Records Manager. I explained in my interview that I was looking to move up and be valuable and all that, and the interviewer, Isaac, said that was wonderful and just what they were looking for. He explained very little about the actual job, and I knew a lot less about interviewing then and didn’t ask. I had been more or less jobless for a few months, since my job at the mall blew up in my face, and again, going from retail and unemployment to business casual and elevators was unimaginably appealing. So they offered me the job, and I took it.

The records I would be managing were actually AK’s. (You know, the nationally known company AK.) Palin Drome was contracted by AK’s insurance wing, Aktown, to do various administrative tasks in the company. PD had underbid everybody else, so the labor dollars were being stretched, and we also had to be absolutely perfect at our jobs (or so my boss said), so AK would be happy with us and keep us on. This was my first experience in contracting work, and I was struck by how unnecessarily complicated it all seemed; why didn’t AK just hire their own people? They wouldn’t have to keep track of contract performance, or worry about the tension between one company and another, and their workers would have half the worry that contracted employees do.

Anyway, I started this job by training under Alex. He seemed like a nice enough guy, although we had nothing in common. He lived in East Hartford (a comparatively dangerous, poverty-stricken town in that part of Connecticut) and saw nothing wrong with that. I wore pantyhose to work. Etc. The task I was set with at first was interesting, but soon enough we were sent down to the basement, where files disorganized beyond imagination awaited us. Thousands of pages of information that needed to be sorted and filed were sent to us every day, and millions of pages (this is not hyperbole…there were literally many more than 999,999 pages) not filed by the previous contracting company sat around everywhere in piles. It turned out that we were also responsible for some (not many) mailroom duties, along with the records stuff, and overall the situation was less than excellent. Underwriters called many times a day looking either for a file, or for a specific paper that should have been in a file. I soon developed a sorting system and came to be able to find 75% of what the underwriters needed, but this was not 100%. After looking at the situation from all angles for several weeks, I found that there was simply no way to do what we needed to do with eighty hours in the week between the two of us.

Also, Alex began slacking off and I think I may have accidentally gotten him fired by answering our supervisors’ questions about him. We hired a couple of temps and new people, but my supervisors weren’t happy about that, because it meant we were over budget. I worked overtime and on the weekends for free, because I wanted to show how driven I was to succeed at this project. I brought plans to my supervisors for how to rid us of the ever-growing backlog. All to no avail. We were drowning.

Eventually I discovered that my supervisors were not interested in me or my work, that they didn’t care how the problem was solved as long as we in the basement solved it ourselves, and that this job was not all it was cracked up to be. I was still on my feet all day, I wasn’t gaining worthwhile experience, and the people I worked with were weird. I got more and more miserable there.

Every day I had exactly an hour for lunch, and I spent it driving Eric to his job in Holyoke, an hour’s round trip. I didn’t really resent this at first, because what else was I going to do with that time, but later I got mad about it. Driving him around was a constant sore point, of course, but in this case (as in all others…) there was no other way for him to get there unless if I drove him. I’m not sure if it was an unfair demand to ask me to spend my lunch hour in its entirety this way, but it got really annoying toward the end of my employ at PD, especially since my job was about six minutes, or exactly the span of “Tiny Dancer”, away from where we lived.

What finally got to me was the routine, the weary routine. Every day I’d wake up and beat myself out of bed; go to work, sort papers and look at the mound of work that it was impossible to do; go pick Eric up from the house and drive him to the mall and drive back to work; sort more papers and look at the mound again; fight politely with my supervisors; go home, eat and try to write; pick Eric up from the mall while half-asleep and fall into bed and then do it all over again the next day. This went on for five months. I realize that it’s really not so bad, that a lot of people have more repetitive and less fulfilling lives, but being under 25, smart and capable and creative, and having to do this every day for five months was a living hell. I hadn’t yet seen Office Space, and I didn’t understand what most jobs were like, not yet. And it may sound silly that I got so involved in something that was essentially not my problem, but that undone work, the massive stacks of thousands of pages that needed to be filed, really got to me. It was like that itch I get inside my ear canal when something I’m allergic to is in the air, right behind my earlobe but inside the tissue, impossible to satisfy. I started to feel like Sisyphus.

And things with Eric were not that good. We fought all the time over stupid stuff. Money, mostly, but also his emotions and my failure to express my own. Our roommate situation sucked, because it was later that fall that Henry showed up at our door. Also, Jim was drinking more and Nick was starting to be problematic. Soon my depression began to exhibit itself. This caused more problems, since I withdrew from our roommates and from Eric as well, and Eric wanted me to get along with them and talk to him. Plus, Eric’s utter insecurity about our relationship led to almost daily fights. He was angry about my growing hatred of my job. After all, this was The Office Job, or some low-level version of it. Couldn’t I be happy with what I had? I’d guess it started to seem like I was just a brat, unhappy with any job that I had where they didn’t let me do exactly what I wanted.

Finally, in early December, I had a meltdown. I crawled into a full tub with all my clothes on and tried to drown myself.

Later, in counseling, I tried to explain that I had just wanted to see how long I could hold my breath, and how it felt to not be breathing, but I realized later that was so much horse-pucky. I didn’t want to see how it felt; I wanted not to be breathing anymore.

This wasn’t the first time that suicide had entered my thoughts, but this was the closest shave I’d had. When I was a preteen, I thought of suicide because I just didn’t want to try any more, but I didn’t do it or even attempt it because I thought my mother would probably never recover. I don’t remember at all what was so painful about being 13, but I do remember barely being able to drag myself through the day. In high school it drifted in and out of my thoughts from time to time, but I had started to see by then that life is composed of a long series of breakdowns and restarts, that if your life freezes, or even if you get the Blue Screen of Death, you just gotta Ctrl-Alt-Delete and reboot. I did have a bad phase in college where suicide was in my thoughts for about a month, but not in any specific way. At that time, when I explained it to her, my mother said it seemed to her as if I was just looking for a way out. That made sense then and it does now; every time death occurred to me it was occurring to me as a door that would lead me away from the room full of pain where I had been residing. There are other doors, but death is the only one that guarantees an end to whatever hurt causes you to think of suicide in the first place. Elizabeth Wurtzel talks about this in Prozac Nation, how the pain you feel in depression is so very bad that it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do something that isn’t the pain. Even a total nothing (i.e. death) would be preferable.

I think this attempt was half attention-seeking and half desperation. I wanted Eric to see that he needed to pay more attention to me and less to himself, and that the way we were treating each other would not do. I was probably willing to end up in the hospital to make him see the latter, to show him just how wretched I felt, because of us (mostly) and because of everything. I was not willing to lose Eric, but I was desperate for things between us to change. I also wanted everyone in my life who would know about this attempt to acknowledge that I was in serious pain. If the household could see that I was not in my right mind, maybe they’d stop harassing Eric about the fact that I didn’t say hello to them every time I walked by the couch.

Part of me thinks that all my life I’ve been wanting exemption from normalcy for one reason or another. This is too nebulous a feeling to put other examples to, but in this case, I wanted to be given exception because I was having a period of paralyzing mental illness. I wanted the people at my job to know this and understand, and let me alone; I wanted the people in my house to see this and stop treating me as if I were a normal, sociable human being, and instead treat me as the hermit I wanted to be; I wanted Eric to see this and treat me as the delicate instrument I am, instead of a regular person who can be fought with and cried to and demanded of. I’ve also wanted people to treat me specially because I’m smart, or talented in a certain way, or because I’m not an early riser and just can’t always get to work on time (and not because I’m just lazy, I swear), or because I’m from a military family and a divorced family and I’m an only child. Please, world, treat me differently for any one or all of these reasons. Just another version of NOTICE ME, PLEASE.

After a long hour, I pulled myself out of the bathtub.

I couldn’t handle Eric, so I drove away from the house and parked in a parking lot a few miles away. I tried to think about to whom I could turn for help. My thoughts were hardly what you’d call orderly. I wish I could recreate what I was thinking and feeling, but it has been four years and I hate to think of that night at all.

I racked my brain for supportive people in my life who wouldn’t react in a way that would hurt me if I called them out of the blue. My mother and father would only make me feel worse, and anyway I didn’t know where my father was. Rick had probably had enough of me. I wasn’t speaking to Kara, and I didn’t have contact information for any of my other friends from college. I didn’t have any other friends at all. I felt utterly alone.

The only name I could come up with was Elia’s. So I called information, and got the number for his old house on Ocean Drive. When I called it, his younger sister Julie answered the phone, and I told her I had to reach Elia. Julie told me that Elia asked for his information not to be given out to people from our high school, but that she could call and ask Elia to call me back. I found this practically nonsensical, especially since I was having a nervous breakdown, but I said that was fine and waited for my phone to ring. In less than ten minutes, it did.

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Read part 9.