Proper Machine Maintenance

Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, Automobile Crashes, Mixed Metaphors (I don’t know, those last two could trigger some people)

Preface: At the end of this month is a big anniversary for me. It marks the 5th anniversary of the last time I tried to take my life. 2 Days ago is a new anniversary, the one of the time of the most recent time I stubbornly didn’t die. I won’t go in to too much detail, because the details aren’t that important, but on the morning of August 15th I was in an accident that ended up with me crawling out of a flipped car. I’m physically fine, I’m mentally okay now.

I had been thinking about writing an essay like this for a little while because while I’ve always been good at the motions of taking care of myself (making sure I eat, doing laundry in a timely fashion, going to the doctor if I feel ill) I’ve never been good at the essence of taking care of myself (Getting enough rest, taking time for myself, not overextending myself while trying to help others). I treat myself like a machine more often than I do as a person. Making sure that the physical form has enough fuel to function and oiling the creaky parts from time to time, but I don’t care for it the way people care for their high end cars or antique typewriters. I think a lot about how machines usually meet one of two ends, they either get overworked until they burn out or they slowly breakdown until their no-longer functional. Occasionally one gets to keep going as people tend to it and make sure it’s lovingly cared for and restored. I often find myself wondering which of these ends I’ll meet. I’ve always been pretty certain that it’ll one of the first two.

This summer has been a lot. I’ve always prided myself on being able to compartmentalize my own needs so I can focus on helping those who are important to me. The first “Post-Covid” summer has led to a lot of people bursting out of their shells or trying to learn how to be themselves in the world again and that can be messy sometimes. That can involve overindulgence. It can involve biting off more than you can chew as you rush to catch up with the times. It can involve discovering parts of yourself and making radical life changes. It can be shedding some relationships that had become increasingly toxic but we held on to because in a time of such insane uncertainty we didn’t know what else to do but to cling to the small pieces of an increasingly breaking ship that still managed to keep us afloat. This summer I’ve helped my friends and family deal with a lot of that. Some these were small, helping a friend deal with being the subject of unrequited love, teaching another how to properly care for their first pet, teaching my mom how to adapt to the new technologies she needed to learn to be able to do her job. Others were larger, coaching a friend through ending an increasingly mentally abusive relationship, moving another out of the home they shared with a violently abusive partner while they were away at work, helping my folks come to grips with the fact that their daughter’s addiction issues made her an increasingly unreliable narrator.

You’ll notice one pattern here is that none of these are me dealing with any of my own things. Those have always been on the backburner, It’s the only way I know how to be. I’ve found myself increasingly sad and depressed sometimes because my relationships aren’t what I wanted them to be but that was my own fault. I never bank on myself or even really admit to myself what I need, because in my mind my function in life is to help others. And while that’s a noble aspiration, it’s a flawed one as well, because in order to be the best at helping others, you also have to help yourself, because otherwise that good will slowly transitions in to resentment or unhealthy infatuation. Both of these are suboptimal outcomes. I have very distinct memory of trying to play wiffleball while one friend feared their partner might be dead and another was fervently trying to hide anything that could be used as weapon in their home. I remember being annoyed for a second not realizing what a blessing and compliment it is to be someone that people feel they can rely on. I think back on that day and on the conversations I had about it a lot these days because those were the first times anyone had pointed out to me that the thing that I thought was good at hiding was glaringly obvious to people who actually care to see it.

This brings me back to machines. The thing about machines is they need to be maintained, and unfortunately up until recently, not many of them were good at telling when. They just keep running the same way they always have until something gums up the works so badly that they self-destruct or until they’ve gone long enough without maintaining that they just gradually disintegrate. This is a path that I’ve been putting myself on for at least 20 years, if not longer. It’s because much like a good, well-oiled machine, I’ve always thought that the best way to function is to be helpful without being really noticed. One time I found my sister passed out in a subway station from an overdose and carried her to the hospital because I knew it would take less time than it would to call 911 and have EMT’s arrive. I came home and told my folks that she was in the hospital, but none of the other details. In fact, that happened 15 years ago and they just learned about the full story a little over a year ago. I had buried it because in my mind those details would only serve to make them worry about the traumatic effect it might have had on me, rather than focusing entirely on the well-being of their drug addled daughter. Just like I buried my anger when my friend accused me of stealing something I knew his brother in law had stolen because he wanted things to go back to normal and I didn’t want to rock the boat. Or like how I buried my anger when a friend told me about how her boyfriend would say such mean things to her that she would walk home in the middle of the night crying because I was afraid that if I told her that I was angry about that then she wouldn’t tell me if there was something happening that I really needed to be angry about. The thing is, I’m learning, that I’m not as good as I thought I was at burying things completely. I think that’s subconscious, like I wanted to feel like I was doing a good job of protecting myself and my emotions but wanted to leave just enough peaking out from the surface so that anyone who wanted to see could find them.

The thing is I’ve been blessed recently to have people who have wanted to find them, and that makes me want to take care of myself so that I can find the person they see. Some of these people are newer people in my life, some are people I’ve known for a decade and only recently decided to work at making our relationship less superficial, some fall in between those two poles. My friend Erin and I were talking a few months ago about someone I had feelings for, and she told me this thing that has been seared in my brain ever since. “John, if this is someone you care about and someone who cares about you, you’re not going to crush them by sharing how you feel. If they seem like they don’t want to hear it or deal with it, then that’s not someone I want you to be around because they’re not on your side. Assuming that your they’ll think your feelings are too much or invalid is disrespectful to yourself, and quite frankly, disrespectful to them.” This was something I took to heart but honestly found very hard to commit to in practice. But it became a recurring theme amongst people I cared about and not in a bad way. If you really care about someone nothing is ever hurt by reminding them that they’re also important and need to tend to their own gardens sometimes. In the months since had a few different people whom I love talk to me about their concern that I often put taking care of others over taking care of myself and as trite as it feels to say, it was one of the first times in my life I really felt “seen”.

So we fast-forward to Sunday morning. I clipped a parked scooter, the way the scooter fell it basically became a ramp for my passenger side wheel which caused the car to flip. I pulled myself out of the car, crawling through broken glass and asphalt. I sat there in the street next to my overturned car, my thoughts racing and yet seemingly empty. I tried to think about how lucky I was to be fairly unharmed, about how much worse things could have been, but there was nothing. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to think and not been able to but this it’s a weird experience. You can think about the stuff you want to think about “Think about how happy you are to be able to see the people you love”, “Think about what happened” “Think about how you have your health” but all that comes through is a persistent buzz of “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”. EMTs and Cops ask you questions and you answer in the driest, possible way because the answers come when they’re asked, but everything inbetween is just that hum. You go to the hospital, they ask you more questions, you can answer those because in the moment immediately following the question, you can access that information but the rest of the time it’s just “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”.

When I finally got the ability to think anything but the hum, all I could think about was how it was strange to feel so alone while surrounded by people who are directly interacting with you. I thought about how I had a wonderful night filled with spending lots of time with people I love dearly and how I almost vanished off the face of the Earth a few hours later. Who would know what happened if I died? One thing I regretted was not fostering a better relationship between my dear friends and my parents because if something happened there would be no way for which ever side of that equation knew what happened to me to communicate it to those who didn’t. I would have simply disappeared. I thought about when I used to work in the uniform manager’s office in high school and how one year the giant machine we used to sew numbers on new jerseys had been replaced with a newer model. I asked my boss what happened to the old one and he just shrugged, nobody seemed to know what happened to this giant apparatus that had been a big part of our lives, the thing that we had spent so much time maintaining and prodding to work properly, had just disappeared. What if I was just like that machine? Ever present, seemingly integral, and then suddenly gone without anyone knowing where it had gone or why? Did it go somewhere? Was there some other school or business giving it a good home? Or had it just gone to some scrapyard, it’s work done forever? I thought about how I could have been like that but was blessed to be able to continue to function, to serve a purpose.

The things that you think about in moments like that are surprising in the miniscule nature. I should have been thinking about how lucky I was to see my dad’s 90th birthday or to hug my friends, instead I was thinking about “I need to message Betsy and Isaiah and tell them I can’t make the show they booked me on tonight, I hope they’re not mad” or “Allison is gonna be upset that I can’t give them a lift in to the city later”. Thoughts that should have been focused on bigger things were instead centered around the fact that it might rain and my rain jacket was still in the back seat of the heap of broken glass and metal that was a car. I think in a way it’s a helpful coping mechanism to focus on minutiae because if you think about the effect that something like that could have on the humans that matter to you, it becomes too big and it can crush you, much like I had been worried sharing my affection for the people who I held close would do to them. So you think about the little things because that’s stuff you feel like you can control. You can’t control how your friends react to bad news, how the people who are concerned over your well-being are going to react to the fact that you almost disappeared from their lives. You have a lot more control over stuff like bailing on shows or offering to Venmo someone a couple of bucks if they need it to take a cab.

When I finally got discharged, after getting a stern talking to from a doctor who kept calling me bro about how I needed to take better care of myself (There were no real injuries related to the accident but they found some stuff that was just a result of not being careful with my self as a person, like the an early stage kidney stone) I began thinking about how I needed to take better care of myself, so I could be around for the people I love and want to help but also, for the first time in a really long time, because I wanted to be alive for myself. I thought about how I wanted to experience the joys I had the night before for a long time to come. Almost as if by divine intervention as I was walking out of the hospital, in to the literal light of a new day, my friend sent me a picture she had taken of me and one of the friends who matters most to me in this moment. It was almost too much to handle. I sat on the curb outside of Bellevue hospital and just sobbed. I bawled as I thought about how my failure to take care of myself, as opposed to just fueling an ongoing existence, had almost robbed me of the ability to revel in the relationships that I valued the most. I wept as I thought about how grateful I was to have an opportunity to try to be better to myself so I could be the best I could for the people I want to take care of. I cried at the fact that I was able to have another chance to properly maintain this machine. (Sorry, the thesaurus options for “sob” are kind of limited and diminishing in return)

So here we are, alive (unless you’re reading this from beyond the grave, in which case, welcome my spectral pal) and ready to take the necessary steps to make sure I’m the best me I can be. I’m tired of assuming I’m going to blow up or burn out. I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s been a long time since I wanted to die, it’s been less time since I thought I wanted to not be alive, but I don’t want either of those things any more. I want to be one of those machines that you see on the History Channel that somehow has been ably functioning for centuries, that’s been lovingly tended to and is able to continuously pump out the same high quality of product for so long that nobody, least of all itself, ever questioned whether it would be up and running the next day. So that’s where I’ll leave it, with the image that brought me to tears of joy, gratitude and a renewed drive to not break down as much anymore and when I do, to take the proper steps to restore myself to peak function instead of a slapdash quick fix.

Love ya, mean it.