I think back to that fateful afternoon when my younger brother first confessed his heroin usage in 2016, and I have resented him deeply for all the things he has done to my family and to others. I wish he’d never told me; I wish he was dead from OD, or in jail. I wish that he was never born, if I want to be perfectly honest.
This is the first piece I have written in well over… 7 months? 10 months? Whenever my fucking birthday was, as I recall. Bear with me, I’m a little rusty. For those curious, I am just coming out from under a crushing wave of depression, that nearly ruined my career and my entire life. More importantly, and what some have failed to acknowledge (up to and including my own therapist), depression isn't just something that goes away. It's not the fucking flu. It's my reality. It fucking sucks. But I'm still here. Things are a lot better, but it certainly did not happen overnight, and on some days I still feel like that broken man screaming obscenities at the walls again, in futile fashion waiting for catharsis.
I feel very lucky to have gotten out of the other side. My partner quote “literally had no idea” that I was going through as much pain as I was. Everyone I have talked to about these last few months, including her, saw a very real damage in progress from the ongoing situation. They were all completely breathless, however, when I finally admitted the full extent of the emotional Hell I had been in.
Everything was a gray, hard blur. My days turned into nights. The heat of the summer turned into a fever that never broke, my anger boiled into the wee hours of the morning, even after I had lulled myself to sleep on a malicious diet of Youtube videos and Deadspin articles.
One day, I trudged into my studio for another day of nothingness, staring at my angry life and regretting the act of merely being conscious and awake. What was it gonna be today? Would it be effective to think about my own suicide, or to chase the psychotic fantasy of renting a car, driving up to my parents’ home and murdering my brother and smearing his rotten blackened disgusting entrails all over the highway?
I began to clean up, as a pathetic gesture to myself to try and feel some semblance of organization and maybe shake something loose. The moment lent itself to a bit of visual arrest. I began to dig all these treasures out of my portfolio and my archives (read: garage shelves)…. And I saw a beautiful man with a beautiful dream that once held his art so dearly to his own heart. I saw an interrupted life, I saw an interrupted explosion of creative fertility. I saw tragedy that was ripe for a rebirth.
I wondered out loud, looking at these drawings of my doing, by my hand. I felt like I was staring at an extra limb that had grown out of my chest. But who was this man that drew all these pieces, this beautiful person who gave portions of his proceeds to womens’ charities when he could, who wanted more than anything to make a difference in peoples’ lives with his artwork? I had a hard time believing that I was this same person, and I kept wondering out loud to myself as I unearthed more testaments to a bright shiny yesterday.
Where did this man go? This person, a ghost that screamed into the ether with a calendar filled with busy, sweat of the brow contracts and frequent flyer mileage. Who loved to draw and write and paint, who loved the people in his life so dearly… particularly the women who have inspired him in ways both personal and intellectual.
This person nearly drowned in a swamp of sadness, of disenchantment and resentment. This person wanted to kill himself every single day for months on end, staring down his hatred in a daily battle that he lost the overwhelming majority of the time, for a whole year. He screamed at nothingness, and he hid all of his pain and sadness from everyone, not only to protect the ones he loved, but out of pure spite for the world.
All of his hopes, his dreams, his financial and social buoyancy, they all all vanished in a wall of tear-filled screams. He wanted to care so much for the people who were supposed to mean the most to him, but the cold of that rejection cut his legs straight off and he fell into an oblivion that nobody could save him from.
His brother decided that heroin, meth gambling were more important than honor, respect and love. His brother raped a 19-year-old girl on cocaine. This 140 lb of rotten human flesh flew 3,300 miles overseas with a ziplocked sandwich bag full of bootleg methadone supplements, convinced that he was stable enough to smile that big smile in front of our extended family, whom he will probably never see again in this lifetime.
Their mother decided that Jesus Christ was sufficient enough of a reason to avoid actual treatment. Their mother screeched incessantly, insisting that this broken angry man was being selfish because the situation was “not playing out the way he desired it to go.” This fucking family decided that Jesus Christ, that Christianity would be their salvation, that logic and counseling were unnecessary. It was the perfect blindfold, the ostrich in the sand, the lemmings blissfully falling into the sea, waiting to be devoured by the demons that have chased his walking corpse of a brother for the last two decades.
And this beautiful man vanished. Hate filled every crevice in his body. Thoughts of death swirled around his head, and robbed him of his desire to celebrate anything, up to and including his own humanity.
And then one day, he decided to pick up what splinter he had left in his soul, and decided it was time to move on. His eyes are closed to the outside world, but he sees everything that is wrong inside of himself. He sees the beauty amidst the mess, crucified on a cross made of doctrine and derelict scripture. He has acquiesced to the problems that no longer dictate who he is obligated to care about. The hatred for his brother burns bright, in the thick of fluorescent midnight, ready to be burnished into a specific brand of inspiration. He is ready once again, armed with a new soilwork beyond his stare of resolve.
It is onto the next wonderful nightmare, onto the next wretched lifetime.