Lucky Me

I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic when I give that title or not. Sure, manic depression is a fairly rare condition (something like 1% of the population, right?) so I'm unlucky in that regard. On the other hand, its severity is moderate and is basically under control. There are certainly people out there that have it much worse than I do. Still, how would my life be different if I had full control over my mind?

Despite the recession, I hear that the vast majority of college grads are gainfully employed. Well, better to be under employed than unemployed. I graduated from Illinois State University in December of 2005 and have been working at a local grocery store deli since August of 2005. (How I worked at the deli while finishing up my degree is a frankly boring story.) "The Plan" started out being that I would work at the deli for six months to a year while looking for work. My mother died of lung cancer within a year of my being hired at the deli and job hunting wasnt at the top of my list at that time.

I took courses in journalism at the local community college starting in 2007, hoping to get a job as a print journalist. I have been "a writer" from the time I was thirteen years old, used as a coping mechanism after the suicide of my cousin. Tom and I were never close (I live in the Mid West and he lived on the East Coast)  but such a death was shocking to me. It turned out that I liked putting my thoughts onto paper and have been doing it ever since. I like to think that all of that practice made me adept at the process and decided to make some money at it.

I took courses and became the editor of the news section of the student newspaper. It was a fun experience but also embarassing. My manic depression effects my memory and that caused problems with remembering which reporter had which story and who had or hadnt turned them in yet. Maybe I wasnt as organised as I should have been but I dont think I'm as sloppy a person as my co-publishers must have thought. Though when I habitually forget things, the dunderhead appearance cant be avoided.

Unfortunately, print reporting is a dying news medium. So, I'm still at the deli. Like I said, better to be under employed than unemployed, even if I sometimes wonder about that. People dont believe me when I say how much work there is in a grocery store. Customers only see the clerks slicing meat and cheese, they dont see all of the other duties that are expected of us. Frying food. Making sandwiches. Cleaning. Making salads. Helping customers. Getting food ready for the next day. Cleaning. Making half price pizzas on Friday night. Washing dishes by hand. Sweeping and mopping. Cleaning. Oh, and getting out on time with everything clean.

Its all very stressful and stress wrecks havok with a manic depressive. Just when things get rough and people are counting on you to hold it together, you start falling apart. Pizza Fridays were the worst. We used to sell three hundred pizzas every Friday night. Check the oven. Take the order. Make the pizza. Slice it up the way the customer wants. Make sure it doesnt burn. It burned. Appologize and make another one. Another customer ordered a sandwich and took up your time, so the pizza burned again. Appologize profusely. You tell yourself to not get flustered but you sure as hell are.

It all amazes me when I remember that I have a college degree.

Its funny. I was a college bookworm. Didnt party, do drugs or sleep around. Sure I drank but not like a lot of people did. I even started smoking, which was pretty rebellious for me. Besides the booze and cigars, nothing had really changed since high school. I was a good boy that was no fun but would doubtless study hard and have a bright future. Thats what I fully expected when I started college in 1999.

My cousin even told me to study hard but to try and have fun while in college. My mother told me (when I told her the next semster's classes I was signing up for while at school) not to try to graduate in two years. I had planned to take nine classes, which wasnt all my idea. I was an education major at the time and education students usually have an overload of classes. It was tough but I liked the challenge and I liked that I was taking more classes than my high school buddies, who had all been in Honors classes. I hadnt been.

By the end of my sophomore year, I transferred out of my college and moved to Illinois State. Six weeks later, I dropped out and came home. I didnt know what was happening to me. I couldnt stop thinking about fucking the girl in front of me in class, to the point that I had no idea what the teacher asked me when I was called on. I put off writing an essay until the night before it was due and knew it was bullshit when I turned it in. Under any other circumstances, I would have been ashamed to turn it in but I was proud that I forced my galloping mind to focus long enough to write this piece of *** two page essay that took me hours to write.

I dropped out the next day and stayed out for a year.

The next three years were hard and unpleasant. I saw college as a prison term. I had an assigned room with an assigned room mate. I was "in" for something and was counting down the years until I could get on the outside. I was passing my classes, but with B's and C's instead of A's and B's. Maybe Illinois State was a tougher school than my first one and that's certainly possible. But it wasnt that hard. One of my problems was a symptom of manic depression called "cognitive derailment." It happens when you are reading (or in my case, studying) something and you suddenly forget what you just read. So you read it again. And again, the meaning is meaningless to you. Eventually you get so frustrated that you give up on reading. A bad thing to do as a history major, as the entire subject depends almost entirely on reading, writing and critical thinking.

So I graduated with a mediocre degree. My GPA was nothing to brag about and there is no big demand for history majors anyway. But I had my degree and that had to count for something. Four years later, I'm getting chewed out for not wiping out the crumbs in the fried chicken case from the night before. Never mind I stayed an extra hour to help cleaning, thus working an eight hour shift and making it mandatory that I leave to avoid over time pay.

My hope now is grad school, providing I pass the GRE exam. My hope is more school, when I was so very tired of it. It will be a lot harder to be a grad student than it was being an undergraduate, provided I even get into grad school. Still, if all that stands between me and a real job is a test, than I look forward to the test and saying goodbye to hearing "You missed a spot last night. I'm not your mother."