On work and friends

Dana woke up Saturday morning, still in pain following her surgery (see last couple of posts), and decided she missed her work folks. She has been on leave from her job at a LARGE shipping conglomerate, due to her surgeries, for about four weeks. In that time, she has talked to her work buddies on the phone, chatted via Facebook, and texted (one-handed) on her cell phone, but she misses them. So, we drugged her up on Vicodin and loaded her in the car - after obtaining a very last-minute babysitter - and went to the (unofficial) Christmas party for her work area. Everyone there was genuinely pleased to see her (and some of them me), and even though we only stayed about 90 minutes (she was nodding off at that point), it was fun for both of us.

This led me to start thinking about work friends, and just good old, regular, non-work friends, quite a bit yesterday. I am massively pleased that Dana has such a great group of people she works with. I like most of them, too. They are younger than me by a bit in many cases, and without the work connection I probably wouldn’t really be their cup of tea, and vice versa, but I have come to really care about several of the girls and a couple of the guys. I wouldn’t necessarily call them my friends, but they sure are Dana’s. That alone makes them important in my book, and I am certainly friend-ly with them all. At the same time, and this will sound odd given what I just said, I resent the hell out of them at times.

Told you – that sounds petty, huh? Here’s the scoop: I have been blessed with some wonderful friends in my life. I have a core group that I have remained friends with since high school. There are five of us, and even though we have in some cases really gone in different directions, and maybe not talked for several YEARS, I still consider those guys my best friends. I miss them terribly, and owe them much better friendship on my part than they are currently getting from me. Why am I not being a good friend? I wish the fuck I knew! Sometimes people just grow apart. These guys all deserve better than that, though, and I really need to take steps to rectify that. The crap we have all been through together over time… They all live within an hour of each other in the Orlando area. I need to look them all up in a few weeks when we are down there for Christmas. Marty, Rick, Matt and Mike, I love you guys (not in the gay way – well, maybe Marty…LOL) and miss you. Why don’t we talk to each other? We all don’t even talk to each other between ourselves, but that is no excuse for me.

Then, there are the friendships I developed as an adult. Again, terribly strong bonds were made with these folks, yet terrible lack of friendship on my part the last several years. Steve lives within three hours of me, yet I have not talked to him even on the phone in months. Heck, we could be playing golf monthly that close together geographically. Dave, my motorcycle-riding brother, and his wife have adopted a baby and had one since I have talked to them, and he was my closest confidant for some time when we lived in Jax. Ricky, Jaime, Dick, Rich – where are you guys and why am I not talking to you?

Then, the friends I made in my MBA cohort at Florida – a better group of people in one spot couldn’t be found. There has been a marriage, two babies, and who knows what else since I have talked to or seen Josh (and E-beth), Laurie and Shveta. I loved those four with all my heart for two years in a manner that can only be precipitated out from an intense situation (like 17 months of academic hell). I miss you guys terribly.

I even have some folks from work I really would like to be in touch with, but that isn’t happening either. I especially miss Judy, my mentor, boss and friend, who did so much for me in my career. Julie and Larry, Shelley and Stephanie (who I was just a tiny bit in love with, and whose black, lace panties I still think about…[long story, and no, it’s not what you think, so get your mind out of the gutter]), my Greensboro family. Wayne Vick, who was a good manager and friend, who walked the walk of shame with me in 1999, and who took me away from the Bank in ’04 (thank you for that).

Where are these people and why am I not interacting with them?
What the fuck is my problem? I have great friends everywhere! But, I am not being their friend. In fact, I am terribly lonely. This is not the most macho statement a 40-year old guy can make, but it is true. I am hideously lonely. Not “I’m depressed and I’m going to slit my wrists with a chain saw” type lonely, but pretty lonely just the same. Worse, I cannot seem to make the overtures necessary to overcome this isolation I have thrust upon myself. I am blessed to have some wonderful people around me here in Fort Mill. We couldn’t have picked better neighbors if we had been allowed to try, but even in those relationships, I have not allowed myself to really connect.

How can you be lonely in a sea of good people? It’s my fault. Completely. After I was injured in ’05, there was a period of time where I was out of it. I mean, REALLY OUT OF IT. There is about a six month or so period of time that is gone from my life. Now, I always thought of amnesia as a “Guiding Light” kind of thing, and would have laughed had anyone told me I would suffer something similar in my life, but it can happen. I did not technically suffer from amnesia, actually. The issue had to do more with sleep, or lack thereof, more importantly. Something happened to the sleep center in my brain that basically broke my brain’s ability to turn off. While my body would physically mimic sleep, my brain never dipped down into the deep sleep we need to really refresh ourselves each night. You may have heard of sleep stages and most likely have heard of REM sleep. Well, the deep, regenerative sleep occurs in Stage IV and REM sleep. I was not getting ANY of either. The docs tell me it is no wonder my brain was scrambled.

Anyway, the first discrete memory I have of ’05 after the accident in May was my kids at Halloween – five months later. Even then, the rest of the year was a blur. My neurologist, Dr. Hemanth Rao, who is FANTASTIC, and his PA, Kseniya Bogotova (Kay), saved me by doing sleep studies to uncover the issue, and finding a drug that was being used off-label for a time, and experimentally on-label when I got hurt, to remedy the sleep dysfunction I suffered. It is beyond potent stuff, but it worked. The all-important deep sleep required to consolidate memory finally began to show up. I began to remember. However, I still had (and still do) a significant hole in my memory. I do not remember moving into our house. I do not remember getting hurt, how it happened, what happened after I returned to work, nothing, not until Halloween. I cannot believe I went back to work for several weeks after the injury. Hell, I couldn’t really drive well for six months after I started feeling better, to say nothing of what must have been happening right after the accident when I drove the interstate (I assume) into Charlotte every day.

So, I began to feel better, but my mind was still not working quite right. I knew it, Dana knew it, the people closest to me could tell. I could not read well, follow TV shows, keep up conversations, or even talk quite right. I ended up in speech therapy for several months to fix some speech latency. I began to feel odd and out of place around people. I always had one very sharp tool at my disposal in any situation in my life – my mind. Now, it was broken, and I began to feel very self-conscious about being in social, professional or public situations. I still feel this way to some extent today. I think that time period, from late in ’05, through early ’07, when we were putting the pieces back together, really messed me up at the same time it was making me better.

Then, I was finally cleared to return to work in November of ’06. I was given a start date of January 15th, ’07, which was then moved to the end of the month. I was on Cloud 9, and READY to return to work, even though my docs wanted to ease me into it by having me work part time for a couple of months. Well, I got to work on the appointed day, and was shown the door after 45 minutes. I was dumbstruck, and more damage was done. There was some lame-ass excuse given to me by the guy I had worked for when I got to Charlotte (though, frankly, I didn’t really remember him all that well), but I really feel it was because I had a massive workers’ comp claim they had been paying for. Oh well. It was a crushing blow, and seemed to reinforce to me, for whatever reason, that I was still broken.

So how does this fit with the friends issue? To understand, you have to know my friends. I have been blessed, as I indicted above, with tremendous friends. Also, with tremendously SMART friends. You have to be on your toes constantly with these groups of people. It’s not an effort, or a chore, but you don’t want to get caught up in the psychic undertow, either – LOL. Now, I felt in some way that I was substandard, I guess. That is not a good explanation, but I can’t put it into words, exactly. Regardless, I was already physically and geographically removed from these folks, and it was not that much harder to submit myself to a complete withdrawal at that point. It’s not that I felt I could not keep up, but I was facing a pretty strong current of self-pity, and I was horribly confused at how I had ended up at that point, at that point in my life. I still missed my friends, and wanted to interact with them, but I wasn’t getting home much, and then I started getting really busy when I started my own company in May of ’07. It was easy to drift apart.

Now, I am lonely - often, and deeply. And, I resent that my wife has great friends that she misses so much after only four weeks he has to go see them even though she is in pain and on heavy drugs. I envy that, and am happy for her, too. It makes me realize that we are only as good as the connections we have to those around us. That must mean that I am not a very good person at the moment. I love my wife, and adore my girls, but there is something large missing in my life and that is my friends. It is time to change that.

So, if you have received this in an e-mail out of the blue, or happened by my blog, and know you were one of my friends, I hope you still are my friend when I come to you and say, “hello, I missed the hell out of you, let’s catch up…,” because I need you. It’s rough for me right now, and I need your support. And, even though I have not been available for you, I hope you forgive me that and let me back into your life. I need you (but I promise I won’t get clingy).
Until next time…