PICKING UP THE PIECES

Dear Diary,

I first began my college experience at MTSU in the Fall of 2008. I’d very recently been kicked out of my parent’s home after they discovered that I’m gay. I’d been in a secret relationship with a guy in Knoxville whom they found out about after going through my texts. My first year living without my parents while attending MTSU was an incredibly difficult time for me. I hadn’t been given much life training by that point. I was playing everything by ear. Not only that but I allowed my boyfriend to move in with me after foolishly ignoring many red flags.

My first job out of high school was in fast food. It was without a doubt one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had in my life so I sympathize with all the fast-food employees out there. I was able to get a cheap apartment for us, which was also without a doubt the worst place I’ve ever lived. I was now responsible for rent & bills, while also trying to support an unsupportive partner. All of this while still trying to manage a heavy course load.

The Recession was in earnest at this time & hours were scarce to come by at the fast-food job. I mistakenly assumed that I could open up my availability at work completely & that I just could skip classes whenever I needed to be at my job. I was the first in my family to go to college, plus I felt so disconnected from my advisor at the time so I was never made aware of just how much I was risking my education by doing that. Eventually, I could no longer make it to any of my classes & it was too late to withdraw, so I failed out. I honestly had no idea that I could just return to MTSU in a semester & retake my classes. I was under the impression that I could never return. I went into a deep depression for some time after this. It also did not help that I’d been in a turbulent relationship with an abusive & unsupportive boyfriend during this period who refused to work, & placed the responsibility for everything on me.

I constantly was made to feel like a failure & I was too scared to leave him due to death threats he’d made in the past. There finally came a time when he could no longer get what he wanted out of me & he moved out after breaking up with me. I know most of you would read that & think it was cause for me to celebrate, but this relationship had done a number on my brain. I went even deeper into depression. For about a couple of years all I had was my fast food job & my crummy apartment. Occasionally friends would pop in, or a date would come over, but I was mostly very much alone. Suicidal ideation became the norm for me. I felt like that was the only choice that I could freely make in a world where all the other choices had been taken from me. I was not able to afford proper mental health care at this time, not to mention the fact that the Affordable Care Act hadn’t yet been passed, so access to proper care was just about impossible. I would spend my nights just laying in the bed with my laptop resting on my stomach, watching bootleg movies until I’d taken enough Benedryl to force myself into a deep sleep. This time for me is such a blur. I honestly think I spent most of it sleeping or in a daze from sleep aids.

Somewhere along the way, I reconnected with an old friend from the year I spent at Clarksville High School. She was moving down to Murfreesboro to attend MTSU. I slowly came out of my shell & back into public life with this friend. She threw magnificent parties & I was able to connect with many other students because of that. I told one of those folks about my past experiences & they informed me that I could likely return to MTSU. This person helped me re-apply & gave me plenty of helpful advice for when it came time to return.

I came back to MTSU in 2012. I was still very much on my own & trying to support myself while attending a full schedule of classes, which for me was a very difficult balancing act. In the Spring of 2014, I found out that my grandmother had passed away from Alzheimer’s in January of that year. This grandmother raised me for most of my childhood. A wedge was placed between us by my parents due to my being a gay man. I was devastated by her passing, especially since I never got to say goodbye. I have heard from some cousins who later reconnected with me that she always talked about me whenever they saw her & wondered where I was. It makes me feel a little better to know she spoke of me so much, but it hurts, even more, to know that she missed me & wondered where I’d gone until the day she died. I could not handle the depression from her passing & I ended up missing too many sessions of one of my classes. This professor gave me an FA & told me to not bother returning to class. Although I’d passed all of my other courses, I would end up losing all of my financial aid for the next semester due to that FA. I was unable to get a private loan without a co-signer, so I just had to assume that I would never get back into school. I believed that my college career was over.

I tried to make my peace with this, though it led to another long depression for me. Soon after this, I discovered that my grandmother’s husband, my “Pawpaw,” had passed away. Of course, none of my family told me & I only found this out by reading the online version of my hometown’s local paper. Once again I became washed over with guilt from not seeing a loved one before their passing. I spent many months after this just staying with friends as much as possible so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. After a while, my rent had been raised so many times that I was unable to afford the apartment & I had to move to a very poor rural community out in the county. I found an old cabin with a wood stove & running water that I could rent for $400 a month. It was rough but I learned to adapt to it. I won’t say I ever learned to like it. I would not wish the cabin years on anybody, but I will say that my first little cabin out here at least had character, & every day was sort of like camping.

At some point during this time I got the bright idea to set up an OkCupid account with the hopes of finding a romantic partner. I soon got involved with a man who I would later discover was incredibly violent & unpredictable. I ignored all the signs, instead fully committing to a relationship with this person. Once he moved in with me, every day with him was like walking on eggshells. There were some mornings where I’d be awakened by him screaming that I was a pig, other times he would just deliberately break things, or try to make as much loud noise as possible. Things could be completely fine & then he would just fly off the handle out of nowhere. I became somewhat dependent on the idea that I would someday gain his approval, that there was some part of me that he liked & so I just would not leave the relationship.

I stayed with him until 2018, four years in all. The relationship ended after I’d gotten word that another grandmother of mine had passed away. I was deeply depressed. One day I was in tears & he sits next to me, put his arm around me & tells me that he is breaking up with me. I couldn’t handle the crushing weight of all the feelings I had at this moment. All I could say was why would you do this when I just found out my grandmother passed. All he said was “I figured I’d do it now since you were already depressed.” I was heartbroken. I couldn’t wrap my mind around why he would have stayed with me so long if he thought so poorly of me. Eventually, I would learn to be thankful for the end of that relationship.

I moved into a bigger cabin, got a job as a baker’s apprentice with the hopes of someday having a career as a baker. In that same year, I found a job at a pie shop in town. I won’t mention the name of it because the owners have very deep pockets, but I will say that their son harassed me & the other employees as often as he could. On multiple occasions, he made sexual comments at our expense & made jokes about our economic status. This was a small business with very little oversight from the owners. It also did not help that it was the son of the owners that was doing all the harassing. We reported him to the owners & of course, nothing happened since he’s their son. We reported him to TOSHA – nothing happened. Eventually, we just started contacting lawyers. We got rejected by every last one of them because we did not have the money to retain them. Myself & my coworkers were deeply troubled by all of this, eventually, we felt we had no choice but to quit.

After quitting my job as a baker I could not pay for health insurance & I was once again settling into a state of depression. I also began having severe anxiety & panic attacks not long before leaving the pie shop, so it was time to try to find some help. I learned from a friend that Tennessee had a program for the uninsured that would set them up with reduced-cost mental health care. I’d been working as a merchandiser after quitting the pie shop, so I was able to continue renting the cabin on my own, while also paying for a very necessary SSRI & affordable counseling through this mental health service. The SSRI “ironed out all the wrinkles” for me. People give SSRIs (or really any medication for mental health) a bad rep, but I tell you the medicine & counseling helped me reorder my life in a big way. I was finally able to tackle my days without issue. Soon after I decided it was time to get back into the dating world.

I reconnected with an old high school sweetheart & we hit it off. Though I would come to love him deeply, I would discover that he had a severe Xanax addiction. He tried so hard to quit so many times. He had a bad habit of disappearing for periods of time as well, without having any contact with anyone. I wouldn’t see him for a while & then suddenly he’d show back up to spend a week or so with me. One time he disappeared for a spell & I got so worried after not being able to find him. When he finally did return to the cabin he was in a bad way. I tried to express my frustration with him disappearing so frequently, which angered him. I became upset that he could be so angry at me for worrying about him, so I told him it was time to end our relationship. A week later I found out that he died from an accidental overdose. He had taken tablets he bought on the street which were full of Fentanyl & made to look like Xanax tablets. I screamed when I found out he died, I just collapsed to the floor. I will never be able to shake the image of him laying in his casket from my memory & I guess you could say I’m still learning how to forgive myself for leaving him. There’s always that thought of “well maybe if I didn’t leave he’d still be here” or if I had I just done things differently. I still find traces of him in the cabin sometimes: an old shirt or one of his poems. I break down every time. For quite a while I was heartbroken & felt like I was cursed, but there was always a part of me that said I had to push forward.

I soon realized that what I wanted more than anything was to finish my degree. I decided then that I would do whatever it takes to return to MTSU. I had applied for private loans in the past & was rejected many times, but I guess by this point my credit had grown enough to where I could take out a small private loan. I only needed to pay for 7 credits with that private loan & once I passed all of my classes I was able to get my financial aid again. I promised myself that I would do everything in my power to stay on course, attend all of (or almost all of) my classes, & retake every failed class from my first semester. When I came back I felt like I could finally be proud of myself & that maybe I still had some freedom left in this world. After a while, I felt like it was time to give dating a try again.

Tinder had been invented by this point (haha) & I rolled the dice with that for a while. Met many duds, eventually, I just gave up on finding anyone on there at all. Then one day out of the blue I received a message from a match that I had completely forgotten about. He was moving to Murfreesboro from Franklin, after having moved there from Texas a year prior to that. I honestly didn’t think he wanted anything more than for someone to show him around, so we met at a local coffee shop & I showed him around town. Soon we would start having dates & spending most of our days together. I have never known anyone that could make me as happy as him. I’ve never known anyone that has treated me so kindly & been so supportive. I never believed I deserved to have someone as good as him. I am so grateful for him & our relationship. He & I have been living in this cabin together for quite some time now. We have our own little world together. He is my partner & someday we hope to marry when our lives calm down. At the start of the pandemic, we received word that his father was in end-stage kidney & liver failure. We’ve had to find a way to get my partner down to his hometown in Texas for two weeks of every month, for the last two years. There are no jobs in the rural west Texas community where his father lives so he & I have just had to work here in Tennessee so that we can pay for him to go down to Texas as often as possible. My partner is so worn out, his Dad is only getting worse, & we can’t afford the travel expenses anymore. It breaks my heart to see him like this & now we have no choice: he will have to move to West Texas at the end of the month. I can’t go there with him. His family does not approve of our relationship, there are no jobs in that town, & I’m 6 months away from finishing my degree. I’ll have to stay here & try to keep everything together on my own. I’m not looking forward to it but I have no choice but to push through. God-willing I will be moving to Texas in the summer so that we can be nearer to one another, though it is impossible for me to live in his isolated hometown with him & support us at the same time. It will be a struggle but we’ve made it through two years of not having him home for weeks out of every month. I know someday we will be together again for good, in a home of our own. We promised ourselves that no matter what, we will be together again.

On the brighter side of things, I will be attending law school next fall. I hope to become an employment & labor lawyer so that I can help folks who have to contend with abusive & harassing employers. I don’t want anyone to ever have to experience what I experienced at that pie shop or in fast food, only to be told by an attorney that they are too poor to be helped. I am proud to say that over these many years of ups & downs, I brought my GPA up from a 0 to a 3.1. I am on track to graduate with a 3.3, not exactly Latin honors but I’ll take it. I am very proud of the fact that I made it to where I am now. I owe many thanks to my loving partner, but also to the mental health caregivers I’ve had along the way. I wouldn’t have been able to get my life together without their support. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I never got help. I’m not here to give some “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” story, I’m here to say that we gotta reach out & ask for help when we need it. Nobody makes it in this world on their own. Nobody. And if you’re suffering right now, please hang on. There will be someone in the future who needs your help.

Yes