how i became brannon, part IV (continued)

The day after I got my lip pierced.

 

 

This girl and I had a date & "talked" until she blew me off for a jock.

Christmas vacation with Sam.

Good hair.

The student center became my sanctuary.

This girl was so good to me.

 

I discovered Photoshop and filters. Haven’t left a photo untouched since.

I miss my lip ring.

When the new quarter began, one of my

classes didn’t start until after the cafeteria stopped serving breakfast so it actually helped out my diet.  I slept in and missed breakfast entirely.  Missing that morning meal helped me save a couple of hundred calories and helped accelerate my weight loss.  And as much as I hated it, I ate salads from the cafeteria at lunch and dinner time.  When I was absolutely sick of the limp spinach and balsamic vinaigrette, I allowed myself one slice of pizza as long as I blotted as much of the grease as I could off the top of the cheese.

I’ve never been able to explain why sometimes I feel like I genuinely cannot control my food cravings while other times I have all the willpower in the world and can endure not eating all day without going through a psychotic withdrawal phase.  All my life, I have bounced from one extreme to the other and during that time, I was extremely dedicated to not eating.  I was too lazy and traumatized to go to the college gym but I walked mostly every where so I considered that exercise enough.

There were days when I tested myself to see how long I could go without eating.  While I usually had two meals a day, there were days when I only had one, the lame salad or that one tantalizing slice of pizza.  And then that was it.  Lots of gum.  Lots of water.  Lots of hunger pains.  I often went to bed with my stomach gurgling, asking me if that was it for the day.  While I was often hungry, I also felt satisfied.  It was all a mind game to me and I felt so weak in so many areas of my life.  I could not handle the art critiques from my professors and I could not handle the mean-spirited jokes from my roommate and I could not control my creativity but I could control my caloric intake.  And it was something.  It wasn’t much but at the time, it was all I had to hold onto.

I also saw a counselor during this time.  I noticed it was a free service and I was in no position to pay for therapy but it was something I always wanted.  As mentioned, I had very few friends and my roommate didn’t want to hear about my struggles so I thought a counselor could help me.  At the very least, I had someone unbiased and not connected to my life who I could talk to, if only to vent if nothing else.

I was paired with a tall skinny man with a horse face who did not help me.  I mentioned my struggles with my talent and weight and roommate and he kept pushing me to go to the college gym.  I didn’t feel like being surrounded by juiced up jocks while my pale flabby ass jostled around while running on the treadmill.  I didn’t think that was the right solution to my stress.  And then one day he basically told me I had over exaggerated my troubles and that it was all in my head.  I knew I was sensitive but I was not over exaggerating.  He heard me but he did not listen, just filtered my flurry of frustrations through the lens of textbook psychology.  It wasn’t as simple as he made it.  Things were not as straightforward as he implied.  I left the session and never went back.  I went to him to make me feel better but I only felt worse.

In 2007 during my second year of college, I lucked out and exchanged my one shitty roommate for three decent guys and I felt better.  I used them as my new security, a comfortable cocoon where I could stretch out and be myself.  Up until then, I was fairly guarded.  Everything was so new and I felt so raw and open and I so I drew back to protect myself.  But with them, I could be more of who I was.

The problem was I didn’t do a lot of exploration at that time.  For most people, college is a time of self-discovery but for me it was all about self-preservation.  I could not form new friendships because it took all the energy I had to maintain the fragile friendships I already had.  There was so many other things to explore and while I tried to juggle school and roommates and scrubbing the toilet in my dorm bathroom, I let myself get lost in it all.  I made no emotional progress.  And let us not forget that it was still college and I still had to do schoolwork top of the emotional and physical pains I had to endure.  I couldn’t just slap a self-portrait on poster board and be done with it.  Animation is an intricate, tedious, and time consuming.

I blew my once decent voice from screaming to music and to silence the damning voices in my head.  The poetry that once came so easily to me just dried up.  Words that once felt like they were injected straight into my brain became hard to grasp.  My once steady hand began to shake with nerves.  The desire to draw fell away.  All outlets for talent and creativity seemed to cease to exist almost instantly.  I had nothing to lean on, no direction, no recourse.

All my instruments had died. 

And I was still lonely.  I went back to the idea of being in kindergarten and knowing we were all thrust together into this predicament called school because of our age and location.  But college was different because we chose to go there.  It wasn’t based on anything other than will and choice.  I hoped to meet more like-minded people but I didn’t.  I came close but I still felt different, still felt outcast, still felt like the little boy swinging by himself while everyone else climbed on the monkey bars.

 

Met my inspiration, Josh, songwriter of my favorite band, Showbread

 

Met the co-vocalist, Ivory, at the same show.  Great guys.

 

Then I went to their next show a few months later. Josh recognized me.

 

This was taken by a photography major for her class.

 

Having second thoughts about this college thing.

 

Halloween. I was emo. She was a sloppy Native American.

 

Last day in my dorm before graduation.

 

Me and my parents at my college graduation.

 

I spent how much money?

 

Happy to finally be DONE.

 

Despite the fact that I was the thinnest I had ever been in my young adult life, I felt fat.  My face was clear enough but greasy.  I was awkward.  I was boring.  I didn’t have much to say or contribute.  I did not feel important or valuable because I was never shown that I was.  I got in my mom’s way and was an inconvenience to my sister’s life and I don’t think my dad took much of an interest in me at all.  My gay friend went to college and made his own gay friends he could relate to more than me.  My first friend, the one who went through her own dark depression, eventually met and married a man and our friendship faded away.  By all accounts, her depression has lifted and she’s had no more suicide attempts.

I did not blame these people for moving on.  Everyone grows apart from those they’ve grown close to but once they were gone, I realized I had no one else.  I could not make friends because I was too scared.  I didn’t want to be judged, to be labeled as gross or of insignificance.    

To drive the knife in deeper, the o

ne I had such a strong connection with, the long distance diary friend, cut contact with me.  I was sad and confused and those boiling emotions eventually turned into anger.  After I made my feelings known, we both left our relationship with sour tongues.  But it was really just bad timing.  It took me a long time to realize that she was hurting and going through a hard time as well.  The way she dealt with it was by withdrawing.  It wasn’t personal.  She was just in self-preservation mode too.  We eventually made up but it hasn’t been the same since.  I suspect it never will be, partly because of the harsh words directed at her and partly because she’s found somewhere else to belong.  She’s getting married soon too.  There’s no ill-will anymore, only a vacancy, a bittersweet memory of what once was and what I still miss to this day.

And even though it wasn’t her fault, I felt this monumental shift in the way I saw people after she stopped talking to me.  We were extremely close, as close as two people hundreds of miles apart could be.  I thought if she could leave me, then anyone else could at any time.  Friends came and went long before her but when she went away, it was different.  I think it actually broke my heart.  And I haven’t seen people the same since.  I don’t use the term friend anymore.  I don’t attach strong feelings to anyone because they will leave me too.  And the loss of relationships didn’t stop with her.  She was the first of several broken connections and I’m just tired of hurting over loss and I know it’s foolish to cut everyone off and it goes against the advice I gave years and years before to my high school friends who had their hearts broken and vowed never to date again.  But I finally understand them.  I get it.

But I hope my separation is temporary.  I have to become stronger before I can let people in again.  I just don’t know how to gain that strength.  

During my senior year of college, I had this sinking feeling that I didn’t want to do art anymore, at least not at the moment.  It was great timing, right?  On the cusp of graduation and I was tired of my major.  Whatever passion I had, whatever possibilities I hoped for, were all gone.  The realization that I had made a huge mess of things both financially (due to student loans) and career-wise hit me in soft shards.  Once it became apparent that I totally screwed up my life, I did what I always did.  I ignored it.  I didn’t think about it because I didn’t want to deal with it.  I knew it wouldn’t go away but I also knew I was not mentally prepared to handle the consequences and burden of my poor choices.

I tried to rationalize that things would work out.  Maybe I was just burned out on art.  Maybe after I went home and rested for a while, I’d be ready to get back into the game.  It was the kind of convincing that felt empty because I knew better.  I knew I was pretty much done.  My entire life had led up to that moment and once I reached it, I basically threw it away.  I climbed to the top of a mountain only to tumble down the other side.