The Jersey Years
- May 6
- 2 min read
Episode 6 The Jersey Years
If you stay with me on these episodes, you’ll come across some pretty scary stuff. If someone were to ask me what the worst time in my life was, it would be living in this little New Jersey apartment and working sales jobs.
A girl had caught my eye and wanted me to move closer to her. My ex-wife was finished with me. However, this new girl would only last 3 weeks. In retrospect, I realize I was very sick at this point. People with severe mental illness are not aware something is terribly wrong, and certainly not able to articulate it. My body was losing weight quickly. I was alone in this apartment I hated. I didn’t have my new baby with me (she was 4 by this time but still new). I was going through divorce. I was a sick loser who couldn’t get his life together.
Since acting school, I was vomiting every day. Especially in the morning. My nervous system couldn’t relax. I would later come to call this state a dark mania. During the next 3 years in sales, I would throw up every morning. I started to look like a completely different person.
There were no “ups” in these years. I was very poor and very depressed. I often had a hard time feeding my kid when she visited. The “happy” manic part of my disease couldn’t come from anything, and so it wasn’t there.
I can say the mornings that I traveled to New York from south Jersey in the blistering cold were some of the darkest times of my life.
Bipolars, according to some studies are more likely to commit suicide than any other mental disorder. I had some pills I thought would do the trick. I would try twice and was disappointed when it didn’t work.
I finally saw a doctor and explained how awful my life had become and that I believed it was from a life of high anxiety that had manifested into depression. She would prescribe me benzodiazepines. And suddenly I found my miracle drug. I was to take Xanax twice a day and trazadone at night. I was starting to see daylight. Still, I needed to get out of that apartment. I was certain I would die there.
That place would become the source of my PTSD during depressive episodes. Even writing about it is difficult for me. It represents my hell.
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