Steven Michael Kudelko

I haven’t written online in quite a while.  I’ve also never written online about anything remotely involving politics, current events, or controversial elements of pop culture.  I hesitate to do so for very many reasons.  I fear becoming the idiot young adult who goes around telling everyone they see how Palin and Putin are similar sounding names and that proves that 9/11 was an inside job and Obama is secretly a communist.  I don’t ever want to become that fucking stupid.  I read a lot of blogs from friends and people who used to be my friends, or people who used to be my girlfriend, and the complete disregard for intelligent argument and realistic perspective completely blows my mind.  It fills me with a stomach sickness similar to the feeling you get when you find out the restaurant you ate at three weeks ago has just been closed down for serving rotten food.

I’ve remained quiet because I admit I am not informed enough to write 300-paragraph essay about income equality, or healthcare reform.  I recognize that I don’t know everything there is to know about these things, and also that I don’t know enough to be well informed.  That’s the key.  Protest, free speech, petition, rebellion… those are all fantastic, but if the core of those arguments is incorrect, or non existent, then they will never be taken seriously.  I am 100% in support of the 99% movement, but the exponential rise of similar movements across the country makes me fear that spur of the moment, hastily organized protests could result in a “boy who cried wolf” appearance.

Despite the cringe-worthy moments where I watch a news clip of some bearded idiot spouting clearly uninformed dogma, and the unfair propaganda delivered to Fox News viewers that leads people to the conclusion that “Occupy Wall Street” is a bunch of uneducated, bitter, lazy people, I am incredibly excited for the possibilities the future of these movements bring.  Humanity, human rights, decency, and fairness is the heart of these movements, and that is something I can relate to and write about.

When I see police in riot gear beating the shit out of protesters at the request of a mayor whose name is synonymous with Wall Street, it blows my fucking mind.  These are public employees, every day people, with average salaries, average families, and average looking daughters.  They work hard, they’ve been wronged.  They are the fucking 99%!!!  So to be unleashed like dogs whenever their boss in a tailored suit demands, crossing the line, destroying property, purposely breaking things like tents, sleeping bags, canteens, and other things that are critical to survival, it makes me realize just how sad things are in America.  We are beyond the point of wealth inequality.  We are beyond high poverty, high unemployment, and high homelessness.  We are a country that has lost the fundamental decency, compassion, and common sense that is crucial for a healthy and prosperous society.

This isn’t a dictatorship.  The police are public employees.  The injustice they face every day, the moment they step out of their uniform and step into their homes, is being challenged, and highlighted, and crusaded against by the very people they’ve beaten and displaced and assaulted.  They aren’t Waffen-SS paramilitary troops that are bound by oath to attack and silence any dissenters.  Mayor Bloomberg isn’t Adolf fucking Hitler.  But things certainly seem that way.  And yet, the very people who were beaten and hurt and silenced come back even stronger, every single time, and continue to fight for all Americans, even police.

How can someone intentionally hurt their economic doppelganger?  How can someone living paycheck to paycheck, supporting their family, working long hours standing on tired feet take orders from someone much better off than they are that involve using violence to stop someone from standing up for those living paycheck to paycheck, supporting their families, and working long hours standing on tired feet?

That very question hurts my brain tonight.  Human decency shouldn’t be political.  Right and wrong, fairness, love, compassion, support, and community should not be for sale.  Republicans, Democrats, wealthy, poor, middle class, average, ugly, beautiful, thin, fat, black, white, citizen, immigrant, tourist, manager, banker, teacher, police, cashier, Walmart greeter… every single person, profession, and political party should be bound together to make the coming changes, revolutions and elections as peaceful and universally prosperous as possible.  Until that idea is the largest movement in this country, nothing will ever change.

Every night around this time, I take a pill to help me sleep.  With a glass of water, and a bit of hope, I’ll float off into the only place that I feel welcome… darkness, silence, emptiness… sleep.  This nightly ritual that I never deviate from is nothing more than a game I play with my brain to keep it from realizing that it’s now the time to dream.  Dreams aren’t welcome anymore.  I reject the idea of dreaming, because my dreams are populated with content pulled from the deepest recesses of my brain.  It’s a place where memories of girls I’ve loved, and friends I’ve had, parties I’ve attended and smiles I’ve worn while visiting beautiful places and having wonderful times in a world where there was always someone on the other side of the table, and when at my most lucky, someone’s hand always wrapped within mine.  In a dream, there are no rules, no boundaries, and unless the it’s part of the story, no rejection.  I reject dreams because I remember them the next day.  The stories where I’ve found love, or life, or success, or treasure… unroll on their own, without any way for me to shape them and restrict them with the sad realities of an ever increasingly lonely existence.  And when I wake up the next day, and the idea that things might have turned out just a little bit differently is fresh in my head, the sickness in my stomach brought on by the fear of ending up all alone prevents me from doing anything else but wishing I was someone else, or somewhere else, or in a different time.

Every morning after the sleeping pill fails, after a night of dreams playing out like a movie marathon, I search for the words to describe what I just felt, and what inside my head I just saw.  I scramble to slap together sentences that might deliver some meaning, but just as any other time I’ve managed to get my thoughts in order, the sentences mean absolutely nothing to no one, and the cycle continues.  I live with an increasingly painful, terminal hangover-like sickness brought on by my mind running freely with the idea that somewhere in the future, I will say something to make someone smile, and their reply will cause me to buckle to my knees, and the chain reaction that follows will spawn a story so epic that Romeo and Juliet will look like a young man and woman, brought together through an old fashioned arranged marriage without ever knowing one another, being completely incompatible and under the pressure of their culture to make things work, causing the man to develop a drinking problem and, full of the anger he has from being stuck in a mediocre job with no opportunity for promotion, to relentlessly beat his wife who longs for a familiar face she sees through the window that looks on the street below, forming a fantasy of him rescuing her from her prison and taking her away where they’ll live happily ever after.

I so badly wish that I was a musician.  I wish I could write poetic and beautifully structured lyrics coupled with the crescendos of instruments punctuating the lines of deepest meaning.  Music is so universally adored, and every person I’ve ever wanted to notice me has, at least once in their life, put on a pair of headphones, pressed play, and willingly let the tears flow as the lyrics touched their heart.  But instead of being able to create a monumental symphony that expresses the beautiful thoughts and simultaneously simple and epic dreams that fill my un-beautiful body, I’m a hack that spits out streams of conscious onto a computer.  I’ll never have the experience of standing on a stage, thousands of people watching me jump around and sweat from the adrenaline and rush of making an impact, performing to a crowd where there just might be one girl who, being bounced around the floor, hears the words I scream about the life I want to lead and realizes she wants those things too, and she feels the same way, and that I put a smile on her face, sticks her arms up in the air and is pulled above the crowd, and makes her way to the stage where she admires my performance from the side, until after the show when we can try our fucking best at being happily ever after.  Instead, my words are thrown into a file, converted into 1s and 0s that, from a distance, all look the same, pushed across the internet where they become one page in a place of billions, with no way of getting out unless a random search leads someone’s eyes their way, most likely becoming confined to a list of things no one wants to read, the description pushed further and further down the list as time goes on.

There is nothing I wouldn’t give to be able to take one person, just a single girl who I think is beautiful, who I find charming, or funny, or talented, or mistreated, and explain to her who I really am.  I want to tell someone everything about me, why I’ve ended up this way, where I’ve gone wrong, why I deserve to be forgiven, what makes me confident that a second chance is all I’ll need to change her world.  I’d love to call up one of the girls who popped into my dreams, and tell her I’ve been thinking of her.  And due to the unfortunate fact that I’m no one and mean nothing, reassure her that I’m not meaning to be creepy, or weird.  I’d love to let her know that I think she’s beautiful, and that I’ve always thought so.  And that I want to know how she’s doing, and what she’s been up to, and how life has treated her while I’ve been invisible to the world.  I’d do anything for the opportunity to outline the great qualities she possesses, and tell her she deserves the world.  And then I’d thank her for the privilege of being able to talk to her, and have a moment of her time.  In a perfect world, dare I say in a dream, she’d smile and question me back.  She’d listen as I told her how lonely and rough these past few years have been, and how the nightmare of depression and suicide isn’t any easier to recover from when the whole world is passing you by.  She’d comfort me as I confessed how afraid I am of ever being myself again, and of ending up completely alone.  And maybe as the conversation went on, she’d find that everything I want, and everything I am fighting for, is exactly what she’s wanted all her life too, and this conversation would lead to another shared over a cup of coffee, and then a walk in the park, and then dinner, a movie, a night on the couch getting drunk and messing around.  Or maybe she’d just wish me the best, and give me a generic compliment hinting that a girl not her would be lucky to have me.  Or maybe she’d just be a really good looking friend, and we’d confide in each other and share our deepest secrets, way into our golden years without becoming anything more.  But just the idea of being able to talk to someone, and share with them the thoughts that eat away at me each night, and turn to tears on those dreaded occasions when the sleeping pill takes too long to kick in, is something I long for with every ounce of my being.  

But words in a journal can’t express that.  They can’t make it sound appealing, or convince someone to give it a try.  They just reinforce the fact that while some people pose for pictures, kissing each other on the cheek, or spend nights on blankets looking up at the stars, or even nights alone with that tight feeling in the chest one gets when they can’t wait until they see their other half again, I have a sleeping pill, a glass of water, an empty spot in a king size bed where another body should be, and a computer.  But God, what I could do with a song…..

(Source: stevenmichael.livejournal.com)

I posted this on my LiveJournal, but also wanted to repost it here.  Not that I have the illusion that I’m a celebrity or have a following or anything, but there was a time when quite a few people would read my posts and I always looked forward to any feedback or advice they would reply with.  I’m cross-posting this to LiveJournal and Tumblr in order to get exposure to as many of those former readers as possible, since many have stopped following me on LiveJournal after I stopped writing for over a year, and after LiveJournal became a ghost town.  I haven’t made up my mind on whether I’ll use LiveJournal as a place for my serious writing and use Tumblr to just re-post things lacking substance (which seems to be the only thing it’s used for anymore), or if I’ll fully commit to using Tumblr for everything.  In the meantime, I’d mean the world to me if anyone reads this and gives me their feedback.

This post is a copy of something I was asked to write by my psychologist for a therapy session.  His goal, as well as mine, is to get me to start writing again as a therapeutic output in order to release a lot of the feelings that have been crippling me and keeping me from getting back out into the world again.  Knowing a lot more about my psychological condition, and realizing that bi-polar disorder left untreated, which so far has been the case since any psych treatment I’ve been receiving so far has been geared towards depression and suicidal tendancies, is more or less a roll of the dice when it comes to how I’ll feel or react and whether or not I’ll be social and outgoing or hide from the world, has led me to realize that I writing about what I’m going through, my feelings towards people and situation that I dearly miss, and my ambitions for the future and regrets of the past, is not what triggers the extremes in my behavior.  Bi-polar disorder can be very effectively treated with medication, and now that I’m going down a path that seems to be the correct one for the true nature of my condition, I can write like I used to without fear that a touchy subject will trigger my withdrawal from the world and complete isolation.  Anyway, without any more preamble, here is my first attempt at writing in a very, very long time:

One of my favorite posts I ever wrote in my LiveJournal was the entry about my dog being in heat and comparing it to my situation with Kayla. It’s one of my favorite because it illustrates how i compare every situation around me to what i’m going through emotionally, and how i’m plagued by worry and fear to a point where it almost cripples and suffocates me. the thought of loving someone or something so much, and having the fundamental belief that the ultimate purpose of one’s life is to be directly involved, influence, impact, and change, for the better, the lives of the people you love, the isolation and ignorance that is an inevitable part of someone else moving on, drifting apart, losing whatever feeling attracted them to you in the first place, is compounded by my racing, obsessive, and constant thoughts over and over into what I believe to be a massive failure of my ability to fulfill the duties that a friendship or relationship entails. This feeling of having let-down people who, free from the weight of these emotionally crippling criticisms that fill my every idle thought, can with exponential quickness move on with their lives, experience new things, meet new people and fall in love again until the memory of our friendship, or relationship, or experiences together, are long forgotten, because of my failure to be memorable, or attractive, or brilliant, or simply put, “good enough,” and my inability to victoriously distinguish myself from the competition, hurts me in ways that even the most painful wound or injury never could.

I have always believed that the true measure of a person was the company they keep. To be, not just loved and appreciated and praised, but of value and purpose, has always been my goal. I endured the most lonely years of my youth with the strength I gained from the belief that one day I would find a companion who would not only share this belief but that it would be the quality she would find most attractive, and would set me apart from th competition, and having, in the most primal sense, found my mate, I would have achieved all that life required of me, and my ultimate goal would be to nurture that love, continually reaffirm that I was the right choice with my words, deeds, actions, behavior. I believed that if I was given the opportunity to love someone unconditionally, along with their reciprocation, that was all I would need to be finally and forever truly happy.

Using that unit of measurement, I have failed miserably. Not only was I proven wrong, having won the fight, gotten the girl, and finding no relief from paranoia, fear, and anxiety, but if I were to instead measure my life’s success using the more traditional methods such as level of education, how far I’ve progressed along my career path, how much money I make and have, how many material things I possess, and how many girls I fuck on a regular basis, I have, once again, failed miserably. I had a pretty good run for a while. Though my earlier school years were filled with loneliness and isolation, the combination of being the only child in my entire grade to be deemed “gifted” and having undiagnosed ADHD stumping teachers and administrators who decided being in classes with older kids and “independent learning” scenarios by myself, some kind of magic happened when I hit my eighth grade year and I skyrocketed to a position of popularity and power, being chosen by the school administrators to take command of the district’s computer network in addition to fulfilling the duties required of me as a student, and while the underlying sadness and dream of finding my one and only would creep up on me when my head hit the pillow at night, I was generally happy and fulfilled.

I followed up high school with a half-assed enrollment at university 3 hours away from home that lasted only a semester. While I could justify coming home by claiming the classes didn’t interest me, and that my inability to focus and follow direction made classroom learning not suited to me, the true reason for my detachment from the college experience and the quick rush to give up was that I was home sick. I missed the high school world where I had things to do, people to love and that loved me in return, and the reputation I had earned as a creative, taskmaster who found success in all my endeavors.

It was after these years that I finally found the love I thought would solve all my problems. I had found a soul mate. I jumped in head first and devoted my every second to nurturing and tending to that relationship. And while it was perfect for the majority of the time we’d spent together, her enrollment in college and full commitment to the college experience which included exposures to ideology that I believed was the exact opposite of the beliefs and values our relationship was founded on, was a major factor that tore us apart.

Following this breakup, I was devastated. I had fought ferociously in the war for her heart and soul, and had naively never even entertained the idea that I’d be defeated. When it became clear that I had lost, I, like so many leaders of revolutions so self-absorbed with the view that only they could save the people, I launched a scorched earth policy and immediately started to self-destruct. When it was clear (or so I thought) that I had finally hit rock bottom and still had no effective outlet for the tidal waves of feelings that pounded the shores of my brain, I decided to finally seek help.

When I went to my medical doctor with the intent to seek an anti-depressant, I was already a full-blown drug addict regularly abusing opiates. Being an addict and a “pill-popper,”, I knew of no other solution than to continue to take an oxy, or a few vicodin, or whatever else I had or could get, and self-medicating was really a day by day behavior. My thoughts were too concerned with how I was going to get my fix that day, or the next day. There was no long-term strategy. I didn’t have a timeline that, if followed, would eventually reduce my intake and dependency or end with treatment or rehab. That same lack of a long-term vision was what drove me right into the arms of an anti-depressant. I already took pills every day. Of course I could handle one more. What would it hurt? It would get me out of this rut that I was in and I could be happy again and get back to my normal life, sans soul-mate. I never realized the nightmare this would lead to. Sitting in my car parked in front of the doctor’s office, baking in the heat of the springtime sun, I would have never been able to picture myself in the place that I am in now. Had I been able to, it would have frightened me more than any horror movie, ghost encounter, or run-in with a revolutionary street gang armed with AK-47s.

My experience with doctors and seeking medication to treat my depression and other psychological ailments can be compared to LBJ’s experience with the Vietnam War. The country, and himself as the President, were in a predicament but were not yet involved in a full-scale war. He never really wanted to go to war. He wanted a quick fix and to get out as soon as he could. But, with the misleading advice of his generals, the increasing brutality and relentless attacks from the Viet Cong, he let others convince him that agreeing to their proposition, going to battle, would bring victory in a short amount of time, at the expense of a brief period of minor sacrifice. But with every new request from the Department of Defense, LBJ’s commitment to war grew and grew until two years later, he looked back and wondered “how the hell did we get here?”

I feel the same way. I can’t blame the doctors, because I ultimately was the one who had the final say. They could promote the latest miracle drug and write the prescription, but I was the only one who could make myself tip my head back and swallow. But reflecting on everything that has happened and where I am now at since that first doctor’s visit, I can’t believe the reflection I see in the mirror and I can’t help but think “how the hell did I get here?”

This all is a crucial component of my thoughts on the diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, which was the topic on which I was to write. I look at the arguments I have with my family, and the reactions I have to the simplest irritations, and the way I’m now perceived by the people in my life who have stuck around since the good days when I was happy and full of life, and I wonder when I became so fucking mean. I always had so much patience and compassion. Now, when my mother comes home from the grocery and I find that she’s purchased every type of lunch meat that I don’t eat and not a single type that I do eat, I flip the fuck out and launch into a speech claiming she intends to inconvenience me or punish me with starvation while jumping around the kitchen and making gestures that would make Adolf Hitler appear as cool and collected as Barack Obama. I never acted like this before. And I know that this reaction is not only unfounded, but incredibly inappropriate. I realize this while I’m screaming, yet I can’t stop myself. This kind of behavior repeats itself over and over, and each time I end up apologizing, and claiming that I didn’t mean what I said, I know my actions were wrong, and explaining, but not blaming, my bi-polar disorder. I have the best of intentions, and my apologies are sincere, but I can only apologize so many times and claim that with therapy and medication I will eventually get better, before everyone just assumes it’s bullshit, and that I’m just a disrespectful, ignorant asshole and I always will be.

I realize that this has occurred for some time, and that I have always had episodes and outbursts like this long before I ever became depressed and sought treatment and even knew what bi-polar disorder was. What I didn’t realize, until I made a effort to really pay attention, was how severe this behavior has gotten. I’m terrorizing my friends and family when I don’t have any more friends or family to lose.