I'm 50.
Half a century.
Time for a 2/3rd life crisis? Why 2/3rd's? Well, I really don't think I'm gonna see 100, but I got a shot at 75...maybe...I wanna at least make it to retirement age.
But today is an oddly quiet day. There is no party, my 40th had dozens of friends and family over to the house for a Roast of Rob, and I know that my solitary celebration is entirely my own doing. When I move through life, I have shed jobs and friends with some astonishing speed. My persona and interests have careened from devoted Freemason, party planner and sports organizer to depressed and reclusive hermit who only communicates through an online exaggeration of myself to cover his very real mental health struggles. Even in the 6 or 7 years I've been this beer guy, I have made and lost friends, some explosively and some because I became too much of a disaster waiting to happen for them to hang around. Regardless of the reason, I have watched it happen without much control because there is something inside of me that feels I am unworthy of any friendship and waits for the other shoe to drop and everyone to leave...even as I myself force them away. I don't know why this happened, I used to love having people over, parties for the smallest of reasons, hell I threw an Irish Wake for one of my fish when he died, going so far as to write a eulogy, build a coffin and have a service for Seamus "Pinky" O'Brien....that was his name...great party.
In 2012, when everything came crashing down, we struggled to keep the lights and heat on...literally. Having your heat cut off in late October or your phone's cut off the next month as you leap from one disaster to the other strains you. But I seemed to still be able to be somewhat like myself but I didn't see the edge of the spiral that was swallowing me every day. It was such a gradual devolution of who I thought I was that by the time I felt so low I contemplated what I was even doing being alive, let alone having friends, it was so far gone that I didn't know if I would make it to this very day. 50 seemed like an impossibility and there were more than enough days where I thought about the end that I wanted to make sure I had as few people around me as possible. It was somewhere in this darkness that that sort of logic grew and fed my anger at myself and the world I had built just to watch it crumble around me. I hated who I was and as I worked 70 or 80 hours a week in a job where I was clinging to the last of what was, I felt humiliated by my public failure that I had no answers for and spiraled deeper into that hell I knew I deserved.
A year later, mid 2013, I found a new job that led to a return to a somewhat normal life, still burdened by debt and doubt, but now with health benefits and a normal 44 hour work week. This seemed to slow my slide towards the darkness and when I started really getting into writing and talking about craft beer in late 2015, it really did feel like I had made it through some of the worst storms of my life and was doing more than treading water or worse. Life felt better and I embraced it.
That rolled on quite well into 2020 and as the pandemic came to dominate my every day, I began again to lose touch with the people I had gathered into another new circle of friends and began collapsing into the darkness once again. Three years on and I reach this magical number of years gone by and I look back to a life that looks like the rings on a tree stump, some fat and full of growth and life and others thin and short, filled with anger, depression and hate. It has not been at all what I imagined even at 30 years old, I couldn't have foreseen the massive changes coming to the world itself and my own small part of it.
I wish I could say I know where I'm going. I wish I could feel like it is all getting better every day. I can say that we did find our way to a better financial way of life, debt free and not living paycheque to 4 days before paycheque. It took a lot of lean years living close to the bone and keeping the house to reach the ability to utilize that equity to clean the sheets and give us a fresh start I never really had since my early 20's. With money not being a crushing weight, I wonder where the fear, the deep pit of self loathing and lie awake at night worries will come from next.
I want to be a better person, but I don't know if that is really who I am. I wonder who I will be in 5 years because when I look back at the me of 5 years ago, I don't really remember how it felt to be that guy, never mind 10 or 20 years ago. I'm trying to not just recapture what I feel are my glory days, that's not something any of can do, time passed is time gone forever, but I want to find who I am supposed to be as I enter this next phase of my life. It's not quite the endgame, but I do feel that pull of legacy and memory tugging at my not so swift feet. I always say you never really die until you are forgotten by the the last person who remembered you and I know that circle is pretty small for me now. My words and videos will outlive me by whatever time those platforms exist and perhaps my need to post something every day or share the minutiae of the nonsense in my head because I find it calming to create something, anything to leave behind a little stamp of "I was here".
Existence has been weird, but I wanna stick around and see how more of it turns out.
Polk
03/16/2023
