how i became brannon, part V

part V: dead and varied 
"Now that I’m old I see the light I see it was never there
Everything leads to nothing nowhere and I don’t even care…"
-Showbread, The Death (Anorexia Version)

Back home.

Self-portrait and a big favorite among my FB friends.

My grandmother at me at Christmas. We usually only take photos during Christmas.

Seeing Josh again.  Great, great band.

My first attempt (at age 23) at growing a beard.

Getting fuller, although patchy.

This was as full as I let it get before the itching drove me crazy and I shaved.

Being diagnosed with a deviated septum and sinusitis.

After my septoplasty.

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The surgery was supposed to fix the cyst but made it worse.

In 2009 at age 23, I graduated from college and received my bachelor’s degree in animation.  My senior project took everything out of me and I was tired so by the time I got back home, I slept for a couple of days solid.  I didn’t want to think about getting a job or all the money I had spent the previous 3 years just to figure out I didn’t even like art.  I just wanted to rest, to sink into my sheets and let the warmth wrap me up and suffocate me.

But once I awoke from my post-graduate funk, I felt relief.  I was done with school.  No more assignments and no more all-nighters and painful critiques of my crappy artwork.  The only person I had to answer to was my mom, which wasn’t much better, I but I took what I could get.

Yet things never got better.  After the initial relief of no more school and after about a month of recovery, I saw that I had not recovered at all.  During the time I had curled myself up in the blankets, pushing the world away for a few precious weeks, I died.  The knowledge of my entire life crumbling around me was too much for my  heart to bear and it gave out.  I spent over 20 years drawing and creating art and setting myself up for college and I realized I probably didn’t even want to do it anymore.  Consequently, I gave up on everything.  I realized I was in too deep, too damaged and too deranged to make sense of things and pick up and move on.  But the world did not care that I had expired.  I had more impending matters to take care of.  I had to look for a job.

I did not immediately consider a job in art because I did not feel I had the talent or the heart for it.  Instead, I wanted to focus on an office job.  I did not expect more than entry level but as I filled out application after application and sent off dozens of resumes, I realized I couldn’t even get that.  I thought having a degree would give me an advantage but it didn’t.  Degrees aren’t always what they are cracked up to be.

My student loan payments were always in the back of my mind so I knew I had to get back to work as soon as possible to save up for the oncoming onslaught of bills.  There was no work to be found in my small town so I asked my sister if I could stay with her for a few weeks while I looked for work.  She lived in a large city with many opportunities and many jobs.  She agreed and I packed up and set off.

When I arrived at my sister’s home, I immediately looked for a job.  I looked through her newspaper and looked online.  I drove around and asked for applications.  Nothing panned out.  And my sister didn’t help.  She was cold and rude to me.  She suggested jobs and when I told her I wasn’t interested in that kind of work, she snapped and said we all had to do work we didn’t like.  Yeah, I know.  I worked that retail job for three years and I hated it.  I paid my dues.  It was time to at least try to find something I would enjoy.  Crappy jobs would be a last resort.

I called my mom and told her how irrational my sister was being.  That’s when she told me as soon as I pulled out of our driveway, my sister called her and told her she didn’t want me to come.  Mom said she almost called me right away and told me to just turn around and come back home.  I wish she would have.  After I heard that, I packed my things and left my sister’s house.  I didn’t want to stay where I didn’t belong.  It was the last slight from my sister I was willing to take.  I’ve never done anything but look up to her and it shouldn’t matter what small skirmishes we’ve had in the past, I was in need and she was family and I wished that she could have been there for me without being a bitch about it.  It made me so angry and I expressed that to my mom but she excused my sister by saying she thought my sister was having trouble with her husband.  Her husband was out of town working.  He shouldn’t have affected me staying with her.  I didn’t accept the shoddy reasoning and that just made my mom mad.

I’ll never forget it and it’ll always be in the back of my mind.  I don’t talk to my sister or see her except for holidays and I’m okay with that.  She’s just another relative to me, no one special, no one close.  And my mom picks up on the strained energy when my sister’s over for holidays and comments on it and I don’t say anything but she looks at me like she’s disappointed.  Why isn’t she disappointed in my sister?  She has never wanted me in her life, from the day I was born and even today.  And that kind of treatment isn’t something I can just overcome and it annoys me that my mother doesn’t understand that.

When I came back home, the only job I could get was at a call center.  I filled out the application and went into the interview and got the job.  I knew I would.  The only people they turn away are those who don’t know how to use a computer.  The platinum blonde emo friend from high school art class days worked there and I saw her during our breaks.  I went outside with her while she smoked and we discussed zombies.  She was the only good thing about the job.  She also eventually got married to a bodybuilder about three feet shorter than her and they jet off to the beach every weekend.  She’s in a good place.

Two weeks later, another job I had applied for called and they were located in a bigger city and offered more money so I quit the call center job and started the other, which ended up being worse.  Although my job title as customer service, I ended up collecting beer bottles and scooping soot from ashtrays while navigating through waves of drunks playing slot machines as they blew cigarette smoke in my face.  I was a janitor with a nicer title.  It was not pleasant.

The depression that sank in after realizing my time at college was mostly a waste was only made worse by that job.  It was an hour and a half drive to the job and an hour and a half back home and I thought I’d make enough money to eventually move to the city but I only wanted to move on to different work.  I had to fill my tank up

every two or three days and I realized the the pay wasn’t worth the commute.  I didn’t have to worry about quitting though because the place eventually shut down to do illegal business practices.  I was happy to be out of that job but I still had to look for work.  My mother pressured me daily to find something and the only other option I had was my old high school retail job, the job I vowed I would never set foot in again.  It was humiliating.  They welcomed me with open arms but as soon as I got back on, the depression just deepened even more.

I realized I was in the same place I had started.  Nearly 10 years had passed and what progress had I made?  I was working the same job I worked when I was a teenager.  I was in deeper debt and I hated the work.  I hated the people.  I hated myself.

 

I hoped employers didn’t discriminate against the dead. Apparently, they do.

 

Gradually gaining the weight back…

 

Gradually gaining the weight back.  Too depressed to notice.

 

Also, the last of the curly hair before it all fell out.

 

I can’t believe I let it get that bag again.

Miserable.

Miserable.

And smiling but still miserable.

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At a friend’s wedding, looking swole.

This was around the time my faith in God declined.  I had always prayed, always kept God close throughout college.  I went through all the techniques of praying and listening and having open, honest chats with God.  I told him everything, praised him, thanked him for the blessings and opportunities in my life, screamed, swore at him because I was told he could handle my anger.  Good thing, because someone had to.  There were days when I felt like I couldn’t handle it or hold it in anymore.  If it wasn’t directed at him, I could have hurt someone or myself.  I went to church when I was at college.  I made Christian friends.  I read my Bible.  And there were days when I simply sat down and listened, opened myself to his love, his answers, his encouragement or at the very least, his presence.
 
But the prayer and screaming and listening and begging for some kind of assurance went unheard, unseen, unacknowledged.   I had been left by so many people and I felt very much alone and now God was closing the door on me too.  It was the ultimate loss, a betrayal of sorts.  I did everything I thought I was supposed to do.  Was I misguided or was I just selfish?  Was I not supposed to chase my dreams?  Was I not supposed to be kind and considerate of others?  Did I not have the right to be angered or scared or jealous?  I was still human, still flawed, still flabby.  I did the best with what I had, which wasn’t much at all.  And it wasn’t good enough.
 
And then I had to crawl back to the retail job I hated so much.  I applied for jobs I would have enjoyed but I never got so much as an interview.  Why had God not allowed me to get those?  Why did all doors close on me except the retail doors?  There was no lesson to be learned there.  I learned everything I needed my first time around.  This was simply more punishment.
 
And then I gained sixty pounds because of my job situation and my financial situation and my lack of meaningful relationships with people and with God.  I fell into old ways, locked myself in my room and ate as a way to distract myself from my monumental problems.  All the years of weight loss and hunger, all shattered, all undone.  It’s interesting how when we find a way to deal with pain, no matter how ultimately damaging it is, we will always go back to it.  No matter how much we think we’ve learned, no matter how much we know better, the desire to kill the hurt outweighs reason and logic. 
 
And then I developed a golf-ball size cyst in my throat, which was eventually removed through surgery, and I started to go bald.  And I started breaking out again.  All the hard work I put into my appearance when I was younger slowly shot to hell.  Just when I got control of one thing, something else malfunctioned.  My face was plagued, my body cursed.
 
Everything I felt to be true was not.  Friendships were not true.  God was not true.  I was not true to myself.  I lost myself again, just when I thought I knew who I was and what I wanted, my expectations of who I would become shattered into irretrievable pieces.  Who the hell was I?  Was I the kid on the carpet with my tongue stuck out of my mouth as I concentrated on my drawings?  Was I the fat kid in middle school desperate to melt into my desk?  Was I the emo guy screaming along with the death metal vocals in my car?  Was I the chubby art student sitting next to an Asian prodigy of pencils and pastels?  Was I just dead with nothing left to say about it? 
 
Who was I?  How did I end up this way?  How did my past relationships and fears and physical appearance shape me?  And why did I feel so dead when I thought I made all the right choices?  What were the right choices to make?  Did I go to art school for me or because everyone said I should?  Did I dress and draw and scream and laugh because it was expected of me or did I do it because I felt it in my heart?  Did I even have a heart or was it shriveled away in wasted years and benzoyl peroxide?
 
I could not figure myself out.  I knew it was a process to discovery one’s self but over all the years of writing about my feelings and falling in love with the concept of art and culture and being a well-rounded person, I realized I still knew next to nothing about how I became Brannon.
 
Who was I?  Who was I?  Who was I?
 
Why was I?  Why was I?  Why was I?