how i became brannon, part V (continued)

The cyst before removal.

Before surgery.

After surgery.

After gaining over 60lbs, I then lost 50 pounds in 2012.

And decided to keep my hair short for good.

Because the baldness got worse.

Second beard attempt was more of a success.

Before and After: Christmas with my sister 2011 and 2012. 50 lbs down.

I discovered my beard was ginger.  It’s why I have no soul.

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Ugly sweater day at work with Work Girlfriend.

I just had to see what it would look like.

I missed my smooth face but everyone else hated it.

So I grew it back.

You’ve seen this girl a lot. She’s been the most consistent acquaintance of mine.

I didn’t feel smart for my age anymore.  When I died, my wisdom waned.  My social skills slowed to a crawl and my zest for knowledge also shriveled.  I couldn’t worry about trying to grow as a person because I was so busy just trying to make it through the day without putting a knife in my chest.  For a while there, it was literally all about survival.  It was about whether or not I’d make it home from work because I was going to drive off a bridge.  

The desire to die, to not just call myself dead, but to actually exit this planet, reemerged.  I owed so much money in student loans and I realized I’d never be able to afford an apartment and move away from my parents.  I was stuck at home and stuck at my job.  I had no friends.  I had no god.  I had nothing to hold on to and no reason to keep going.  My feelings slowly dulled to the point of numbness.  I no longer considered the feelings of friends and family like I did when I was younger and thinking about ending my life.  I had no friends and I felt more like a burden than anything else to my family.  I’d get rid of myself and rid them of the inconvenience of me.

The pain hammered into me daily.  I couldn’t zip my pants and the overwhelming guilt and disappointment inside me bubbled up because I should not have been going through that.  I should have conquered the weight by then.  I knew better but it was still a struggle.  I felt weighed down, both figuratively and literally.  My stomach shook when I walked and I wanted to rip all my flesh away.  The pimples kept popping up on my face even though I was using medication and I wanted to rip my face off.  I realized I was in me, that this was my body and face and in that moment, that was it.  I could not simply flip a switch or press a button and be thin.  Any progress I could make would take months.  But for the moment, I couldn’t zip my pants.

I was 25 and fat.  I was 25 and still single.  I was 25 and still working the same crap job.  I was 25 and had no future, only a pile of student loans.  I had exhausted my forbearance and deferment and after talking with a representative from the loan company, I had no other option but to pay what they told me to pay.  They would not lower the payments, would not work with me.  And because of my ignorance over their sky high interest rates, after paying thousands of dollars, I have not made a dent in my debt.  I tried to find other work, better paying jobs, but I could not.  And after being promoted to a supervisor and going full-time, due to company changes and job eliminations, my position was cut out and I was demoted back to my original department and my hours were cut.  More dead ends.

I thought about it a long while.  I thought of the ways to do it.  One night I even drove down a dark and slick road toward my work and accelerated, passing the speed limit, 80, 90, speeding up until my stomach churned, white knuckles across the steering wheel, eyes closed.  Just fucking do it.

But I didn’t.  I eventually calmed down.  And I have no impending desire to die anymore.  But it’s in the back of my head.  It is an option.  There’s a plan in place.  

The confusion surged within me.  I was an artist but I was not an artist.  I

was fat but I wasn’t but then I was again.  Asexual.  Critical.  Caring.  Considerate.  Judgmental.  Funny.  Depressing.  Desperate.  Lonely.  Deadly.  Dead.

For a while, I embraced the dead me.  The nice boy was killed off and replaced with an emo cadaver.  I even took comfort in it because at the time, it was the only way I felt comfortable expressing myself.  It was a label, it was a category.  I had something to name my condition.  I had shed my old identity so thoroughly that I felt skinless and spineless and completely barren.  I was everything and nothing and educated but jobless and cultured but still sheltered, a mix of evolved and stagnant.  Pulled between two portals.  

And as much as I tried to label myself when I was younger and as much as I then tried to abolish all labels as I grew older, I again needed to name it because I felt so out of sorts with who I was and where I stood in the world.  Give me an identity.  Give me uniformity.  Give me clarity.  I made dead my morbid moniker partly because I felt not of this world anymore and partly because I needed people to know that I was hurting.  It was the kind of pain I couldn’t keep to myself so I had to share it with the masses.

Describing myself as dead also helped me separate myself from people.  No one likes hanging out with corpses, except necrophiliacs of course.  So to call myself dead and cut off from the living gave me an excuse not to interact with people.  People became the main source of my frustration.  People made me feel inferior.  People made me feel stupid.  People made me feel good and then left me.  In the aftermath of my death, humanity became my punishment.  People were my hell.  I didn’t need that.

But no, that was the bitterness talking.  I did need people.  Just good people.  People who would understand and appreciate me.  I bemoaned that such people didn’t exist but I knew that wasn’t true.  I had come across them throughout my life.  They just never stuck around and it wasn’t their fault.  I couldn’t blame them.  It was hard for me to realize that I probably played big part in the demise of many of my relationships but it was a realization that was necessary if I was ever going to get better at them.

One of the problems with introspection and attempting to grow is you face a lot of ugly facts about yourself.  You realize you aren’t as great or nice or considerate as you’d like to believe you are but once you do, you can try to change it.  Unfortunately, those revelations come with nasty side effects, like getting down on yourself.  And getting down on yourself makes it hard to try to change.  To try to change, you have to realize you are worth changing, that there is something good inside of you worthy of coming out.

At age 26 in 2012, I lost 50 pounds.  I did not starve myself but did it the right way: diet and exercise.  I was focused.  I felt better about my body.  I could wear clothes I had stored in my closet from my thinner days.

At age 27, today, I have gained back about 20 of the 50 pounds I lost.  My shirts are getting tight again and my pants are getting harder to button up.  And with that frustration, everything else starts to fall apart too.  I lose and I gain and I seem to have no control over any of it.  After all these years of back and forth weight gain and loss, it hasn’t gotten any easier.

I was sick of losing and gaining weight and losing and gaining my faith and losing and gaining the will to love.  My brain and body were bipolar and I had nothing to stand on, no foundation on which to rest comfortably.  I was always flailing, dead one day, dying the other, alive but in excruciating pain the next.  My heart beat and bled out and I wanted to love again and be a good person and a good Christian but life squeezed on my chest until all capacity to care was snuffed out again.  The artist asphyxiated.  The good boy buried.

It was the duality of desire and dislike that kept tearing me apart.  The old Brannon kept bubbling up from the recovering corpse of my heart and I didn’t know what to do with him.  I conceded to the idea that he died a long time ago but I have to admit there was a part of me that was happy to see him again, although he was only moving in small, labored kicks.  It let me know I wasn’t totally devoid of humanity but at the same time, I had already come to terms with my postmortem personality so I didn’t know what to do with this uninvited and barely alive guest.

I wasn’t sure there was enough room for a good guy reunion.  I wasn’t sure there was enough will to reconcile the revived and rotting.

I was always in a state of transition, whether transitioning from fat to thin back to fat or good to bad to uncaring to caring too much or wanting to love to wanting to be alone forever to fearing being alone forever.  Change can be good, as long as it’s change for the better, as long as there’s growth there.  But for me, there was no growth, only fluctuating between progress and regression.  I always came to a certain point and stayed there or went backward.  I’ve never been able to break through the threshold.  It’s that inability to move forward, to be clear of mind and body, that makes me want to scream, to cry, to die.

For the longest time, I didn’t know who or what I was.  I saw that I was not entirely dead, that I felt too much to be heartless.  So I simply stopped fighting the push and shove of my identity and just remained dead or alive but receding all the same.  I would lie in wait and let the time take over, the clock unwinding while the noose tightened.  I felt the longer I was cut off from my passion and my path, the deeper I felt the nerves being cu

t until it all became irrevocable.

For a while, I came incredibly close.