A Life of Loose Ends, Regret, Excuses, Loss, & Erosion of Hope

[Anonymous]

I am a 30 year old male from northwest Georgia. My parents divorced before I was a year old, so back and forth to my father’s house every other weekend. Early on in elementary school I was placed in the gifted program. As I progressed in school, my grades/report cards went on a downward slope. I had issues with behavior, ie. conduct, attention, speaking out of turn, staying in my seat, acting impulsively, and getting in fights. Along with my grades, my confidence and self-esteem went on a downturn as well. I was diagnosed as ADHD in the 7th grade at age 12. I began treatment which involved taking medication daily (Ritalin) and seeing a therapist once a week or so.

A year later my father was killed in a car accident. I was 13 years old, and I remember the shock of it to this day. The next day he was suppose to take my younger half-brother and I to the Atlanta Braves’ spring training in Florida.

A combination of my ADHD, growing up with divorced parents, losing my dad, being in high school and my lack of confidence and negative perspective of myself, made the next 4 years of my life incredibly difficult. I went on to college at the University of Alabama and things got worse. I got arrested for drinking under age, fighting, and my GPA my first semester was 0.00. I don;t remember having to answer to anyone about my behavior. I do remember being given way too much money, new cars, etc. My father left me a substantial trust fund, and my stepmother was the Trustee..so she paid my tuition, put more money in my bank account than I ever should have had at 18, 19, 20 years old. There were never any repercussions for my poor behavior and failures. If anything, it was positively reinforced.

When I was 20 my mother was diagnosed with a Gliobastoma Multiforme brain tumor. Which is one of the worse and most deadly type of tumors. I moved home from college to be near my mom. I enrolled at Kennesaw State University and did substantially better in my classes, although I did typically fail one or more each semester out of pure disinterest and impulsivity to skip class. During this time, I continued my ADHD treatment. I was first prescribed Adderall, then Concerta, then Focolin, then Adderall XR, and back to regular Adderall. during this time I also met and began to date Meredeth, the girl who, 8 years later, I would eventually marry.

My mother had surgery twice, radiation, chemotherapy, etc. But the prognosis remained dim. The average life expectancy for this type of cancer was 2 years. She made it 2 years and 8 months. She died 17 days shy of her 48th birthday. There I was, 22 years old, considering myself to be “an orphan” as I saw it. I was devastated, angry, bitter, sad, resentful…a ticking time bomb. About 9 months after her death, I was having trouble eating…feeling nauseated and occasionally vomiting, from being in such knots over her death, breaking up with my girlfriend, not knowing or having any control over my future or myself. So I went to the doctor, thinking I had a stomach ulcer or something, and he wrote me a perscription. I took it, and I immediately felt 1000 times better. When I went back I told my doctor this and learned that the medication was not for my stomach. It was 0.25 mgs of Xanax for what he believed to be ANXIETY!!! And he was RIGHT!!! After a lot of questions and reflection, I recalled feeling anxiety as far back as age 7, riding in the car to my dad’s house on weekends. So at age 23 I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Which was a gift from God. I finally understood and could control alot of my impulsivity and fears.

A year and a half after her death, I returned to the University of Alabama. This time, with even more money, and absolutely NO ONE to answer to but myself. I bought a new truck, got a house 3 blocks from the football stadium, and had “parties” 5-6 days/nights a week. But, I had reached the age that I actually cared, for the most part, about school, so I passed nearly all my classes. However, when I left the University of Alabama in 2007, I did not leave with a degree. I had accumulated 258 semester hours over my college career (30 more than most degrees required), but not the courses to graduate.

I first moved to Gulfport, MS, where my best friend had moved, and worked with him doing real estate appraisals and brokerage. After 9 months of that I moved back to Georgia. I started dating Meredeth again, and in April of 2008 we got engaged. I had over $130,000.00 in the bank, owned two cars (a Chevy Silverado and a Land Rover Range Rover). I leased a 2009 Acura for her in May 2008, we got a two bedroom apartment in Roswell, Georgia. We scheduled and planned our wedding for Jan 24, 2009. In early December 2008, nearly two months before our wedding, we found out Meredeth was pregnant! We honeymooned in St. Lucia, and in early August 2009 our daughter was born! Now, throughout her pregnancy, Meredeth’s behavior was erratic, which I was told to expect. At the same time, I had blown right through the $130k I had in the bank. I had worked for a while for a land brokerage firm, but the real estate market had collapsed. I got a job as a sales associate in a retail store, quit that in May 2009. Before our daughter was born in August, I traded the 2009 Acura and my Range Rover in for a 2006 Subaru Outback. After she was born I got another position in another retail store in October 2009, quit that in December 2009 to work as the Director of Real Estate Operations for a nationwide recreational property brokerage, contracted to receive an annual salary of $100,000.00. In January 2010, I signed an offer to purchase agreement on a 5 bedroom, 4.5 bath home that was in early phases of construction, but priced well (our anticipated monthly mortgage was $200 less than we had been paying in rent) and agreed to provide 2.5% down ($7500) in earnest money between January 2010 and April 2010. On March 1, 2010, after 3 months of not getting paid in this new job what I was promised, I quit. I went back to work at the retail store I had previously worked at. During the time since our daughter was born, my wife and I began to see our relationship take a turn for the worse. It seemed that her desires before marriage had turned in expectations afterward. She expected me to provide this life she wanted without any struggles, and no matter what I did, I could never live up to them.

After making the payments towards the balance owed for the earnest money, the last two payments were due and I didn’t have the money. So, I went to Titlemax and got a $5000.00 title loan on my 2002 Chevy Silverado to pay the balance. In April, we were surprised to learn that our mortgage had been denied, and the builder was planning to keep our down payment. One evening a week later, after I forgot to make the first payment on the title loan, I got home, went inside, came back out, and MY TRUCK WAS GONE with everything in it!!! Instead of telling Meredeth the truth, I lied and told her that a friend from work had borrowed it, thinking I could just make the payment and get the truck back. Wrong. I found out the next day I had to pay the entire balance due in 1 week or my truck would be sold at auction and anything in excess of what I owed would be paid to me. So, again, instead of telling the truth, out of fear she would get angry, I lied again and told Meredeth that the truck was in the shop to be repaired. Eventually I told her the truth, and between losing the house, me losing my truck, broken trust, and demise of our relationship, she left. She took our 8 month old daughter and went 15 miles down the road to her father’s house,, and left me at our house with no vehicle. She did, however, bring our daughter over to visit, and took me to work.

In the following week and a half, I arranged to rent a house for Meredeth, our daughter and I, 100 yards from my place of work, and I packed everything we owned by myself and prepared to move. On May 1, 2010 Meredeth agreed to move with me, as we had begun to see a marriage counselor. It was an 18 month counseling program. In July 2010, Meredeth decided she wasn’t going to counseling with me anymore and moved back to her father’s once again taking our daughter with her. In September 2010, she came home to the house midday confessing she had been having an emotional affair with a guy from work, who incidentally died in his sleep the night before of an Oxycontin overdose. He was married with two small children. Meredeth promised to “do whatever it takes to make things right”. I told her I needed to be alone for a little while, so I left and went for a drive. But I wasn’t gone 30 minutes before I started to receive text messages begging me to come home. So eventually I gave in and came home that evening after picking up our daughter.

She never made an effort to make things better. She acted indifferent and resentful, criticizing everything I did and didn’t do, until January 29,2011, four days after our 2 year anniversary, she left for good. Giving no reason. She had tried to leave while I was at work, but I came home and she had filled the back of her car with suitcases. I decided that I wasn’t going to just let her take our daughter AGAIN, so I started taking our daughters clothing and stuff out of her car. While holding our daughter in one arm, Meredeth tried to punch me in the face with the other!!! I ducked to one side and she hit my shoulder. She then called the police, claiming I wasn’t letting her leave.

When the police arrived I was standing in the front yard, still baffled by what had just happened, and Meredeth was in the drivers seat of her car, with our daughter buckled into her car seat. Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me, there was a warrant out for my arrest for a returned check written nearly 2 years earlier. So, Meredeth went to her dad’s with our daughter and I went to jail.

To Be Continued………..

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[Anonymous]

Hi RM,

I am glad to see that you ended your post with to be continued…. Keep your head up. You are human.

It doesn’t sound like you are on any meds? It is time to take control of what you can control. Get to a doctor and get your head straight so you can move forward. Do not self medicate!

Get into a local church and find some solid ground to stand on and people to lean on.

Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened, ask and it shall be given you. Stop trying to “do” life on your own, We will only continue to mess it up worse.

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[Author]

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