Lights Out

Episode 9-Lights out 

I was a married man in August of 2017. After knowing a woman for a grand total of 2 months.  This presented all kinds of immediate challenges. I didn’t want to tell my parents for a while. I wanted my new wife to meet them and see how things went. I knew what I did was crazy.  

There was another problem. My wife did not want to keep the marriage a secret. She wanted to post everything everywhere and did exactly that. Of course, my parents saw this and I was called immediately by both my mother and father.  I did the worst thing I could’ve done; I lied. I lied because I was ashamed that I got married so quickly.  It was reckless. 

The biggest part of this was that I worked for my father, and he had been seeing me in a new and very positive light ever since I started doing well for our company in Arizona.  The instant loss of his pride in me was palpable.  It also came at a time when the company had their eye on me for bigger and better opportunities.   

We came clean quickly.  I needed to. I somehow had to convince my dad that I should be back in Florida.  Surprisingly, he agreed. However, he explained that I would not be making nearly the same amount of money that I was in Arizona. He said, “maybe you can work on presenting our company to the doctors who were giving out medical cards”.   

I must explain this quickly: In a medical marijuana state the doctors evaluate their patients who are interested in medical cannabis.  They determine if they are eligible by the state’s requirements to receive a medical cannabis card. Most of the Florida doctors were very strict about this process. It needed to make sense to them medically as well. It wasn’t enough for them to just qualify by state requirement. My job was to help them understand our products. I gave a general understanding of how the endocannabinoid system interacted with our products, and most importantly, I put a professional face on our company.  This gave them some comfort in recommending us alongside the other cannabis companies in Florida. In short, it was public relations (PR).  

Most of this work was to be done on the west coast of Florida.  This was a problem. My wife wanted to stay on the east coast of Florida.  Specifically, Ft. Lauderdale.  This was because her job was located there, as were her friends.  However, this was not going to be easy.  Our headquarters was three and half hours from Ft. Lauderdale.  So, this meant I had to drive to the office for three and a half hours every day.   

My wife had picked- out and set up an apartment prior to me arriving with my things to Florida. This was not your average newly-married-couple apartment. It was one of the most expensive apartments in Ft. Lauderdale.  It overlooked the water with floor to ceiling windows.  I had never seen anything like it.  From the moment I arrived at that apartment, I began to feel sick. This was all just too much. I knew I had no business living in that apartment. My stomach turned instantly and I stopped eating.   

I have written a lot about my inability to eat.  I believe that this is due to slipping into a state of psychosis whenever I experienced an immense amount of stress.  It feels like having the kind of jitters that could only come from taking a serious “upper” or drinking 100 cups of coffee.  I became extremely paranoid, and my fight or flight response would engage.  This started as soon as I walked into that apartment.  I felt out of control.  But as usual, I covered it up. This mental state, for me, can last years. 

The first morning I drove into the office. I woke up at 4:30 and was on the road by 5:30 to make it into the office before 9am.  I remember walking into the office bright and early.  But what I remember most was that this time I wasn’t greeted well.  Most of my coworkers were curious about what I would be doing for the company now.  There was a noticeable shift in mood since I left Arizona as it pertained to my usefulness.  This pissed me off.  These people had me doing some stupid things while I was in Arizona, and I did them because I was so grateful for the job, (mostly due to what I had been through in Jersey).  So, I kept my mouth shut, did as they asked, then went on to do things my way, having to double my efforts to make up for some of their bone-headed ideas. But, since I had abandoned my post, I was back to being little man on the totem pole. I carried on. 

I did that drive every other day and used the day in between to set appointments with the physicians. We were about to start opening dispensaries, and I made sure I was meeting with the doctors that were around the dispensary we were opening.   

It is important to note that leadership had changed not long before I arrived in Florida. My father still had a place in the c-suite, but we sold much of our company (the majority) to a farm near Sarasota. The new CEO/owner was a good man, but he did not believe in the job I was doing. 

The most important thing to know about this window of time is that I stopped eating entirely and I was in psychosis. At this point with eating, I figured “why bother?”.  Every now and then my wife would cook, and I would eat at home, but I could barely choke it down. Four months into this job I was the very definition of “strung out”.  I had figured out a way to quantify and qualify my existence at the company, but by no means was I considered important anymore. My family wasn’t very happy with my reckless behavior in marrying quickly and lying about it, and my wife wasn’t happy with my income now and wanted me to leave the company I loved.  

So, there I was. Very sick and working hard to make everyone happy and as a result making no one happy.   

I have pictures from the 18 months that I worked with the doctors.  I looked sickly, the same way I did when I was an actor. The difference now was that I didn’t have my youth. I am 178 pounds as of this writing. At that time, I weighed 140 pounds. Which also happened to be my weight in the 7^th grade.  

In the middle of all this, my wife got pregnant.  This was hard on me.  I couldn’t make enough money at this company to support a family, and I was already stretched as thin as I could be.  I remember driving into the office some mornings and almost falling asleep behind the wheel. I can say that aside from my time in New Jersey, this is the time I was most unhappy. I felt like a disappointment to everyone and that fueled the mild psychotic state I was in. I say “mild” because a few entries from now we will explore extreme psychosis. 

My daughter was born in November 2018. During times that I was able to hold and cuddle her, it was noticeable that my psychotic state of mind would calm slightly.  I didn’t shake when I had her in my arms.  I could just feel her little energy, and it made me feel at peace. 

A few months after my daughter was born, the company would come to me with a new project.  This project, alongside an international pandemic, would be the cause of my schizoaffective episodes.  I would learn from these just how sick a human brain can get without serious medical attention. I had pushed too hard, and soon I was going to learn my lesson