The End

Somewhat arbitrarily, let’s pick Thursday, 6 March 2008, as the beginning of the end. That was the night I had my partner take me to the ER because of the latest and most severe of the headaches I’d been having. The bottom line was that a team of neurologists couldn’t find anything wrong, but the insurance company insisted on a diagnosis. They wrote “men’s cluster headaches,” a sort of distaff cousin of a migraine, on the form—even though my symptoms didn’t match the ones in the book. The treatment for men’s cluster headaches (which they knew I didn’t have) was Imitrex and oxygen, so that’s what they ordered for me. It was only after I started to freak out that the nurse told me possible side effects included panic attacks.

Suffice to say that a panic attack, if you’ve never had one, is just as bad as you’ve heard. I was sweating, nauseated, shaking uncontrollably, and my brain was whirling like a blender. My hospital room was on the sixth floor, and if the window had been glass instead of plexiglass, I would have jumped through it. It was the weekend, so there was only a skeleton staff, and I was screaming at the nurse to get me a fucking doctor now. He disappeared and came back with a dose of Ativan, a heavy-duty benzodiazepine, and within a few minutes I was more or less OK again, though badly shaken.

But it was far from over. Eventually, I figured out, with the help of a chiropractor, that what I had was occipital neuralgia—characterized by a burning sensation in the scalp and a pain that felt like someone was gouging my right eye out. The cause was stress and a lifetime of lousy posture. You might ask, if I could figure this out with no medical training, why couldn’t a highly paid team of neurologists come to the same conclusion? I believe the answer is that treatment for occipital neuralgia is massage and rest. Not drugs, not surgery, therefore it’s not a condition of interest to the majority of the medical/insurance/pharmaceutical complex.

Eventually, thanks to the aforementioned chiropractor and a skilled and determined massage therapist, the pain subsided. But that first panic attack had opened a door, and I had several more of them while I was recovering. I was able to control them with Ativan, but I also knew that benzos are highly addictive, and I have a highly addictive personality, and I was afraid to take them unless I had to.

Fast forward to Friday, 3 November 2017. This was the day I wrote the last pages of new material for a very, very long and very personal novel. A month and some after that, on Thursday, 14 December, I finished my last day of work as a contract technical writer, a job I’d been doing (with occasional detours) since 1976.

I was really looking forward to 2018. I had the basic idea for a new suspense novel, and some thoughts about a new novella. I was signed up for Social Security, had a reasonable amount of savings, and figured I had all the time in the world.

Instead, both the novel and the novella failed to pan out. I realized that I was extremely burned out after eight years of work on my last book. I was severely depressed, beyond the usual post-partum pain of finishing a major project. I was starting to have tremors. If I tried to sit and read for long periods of time, I became unbearably restless. Then I got called for jury duty.

The case was a nightmare: the brutal rape of a developmentally disabled woman. At least two people on the jury began to have panic attacks, one of them being me.

I knew what I had to do. I consulted with my doctor and she put me on a minimum dose of Prozac, 10 mg. I knew at the time it was probably a one-way street, that once I was on antidepressants, I would probably stay on them for life. I was OK with that. I couldn’t go on the way I was.

After two weeks of hell, the drug and my body chemistry made peace with each other, and I had the most amazing feeling. I felt normal for the first time in years, possibly in decades. But I had no urge to write fiction. Between the burnout, my continuing lack of commercial success, my sense that I’d said everything I had to say, and the Prozac, the well seemed truly to be dry.

Friends have reminded me not to say “never.” This is not a formal announcement of retirement, nor a Dick Nixon moment.1After losing a 1962 election for governor of California, Nixon bitterly declared, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” If only. (https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/richard-nixon-dies-81-tumultuous-life-1994-article-1.2391961 : accessed 31 Dec 2022.) I could be stricken five minutes from now by an irresistible short story idea. It just seems less likely all the time.

I have never really understood the concept of leisure. Probably as a result of my upbringing, I felt I had to constantly justify my existence. I pretty quickly figured out that what I needed was to find activities where the various skills I’d acquired over the years would be genuinely useful to others. It had to be part time, and I didn’t want to be paid for it. My first two gigs were at the public library and at a used bookstore run by a nonprofit group. Covid ended both of those, but luckily one of my former bosses got me involved in something else. I became an amateur genealogist, searching out the life stories of people buried in an abandoned local cemetery. I work from home, whenever I feel like it, for as long as I feel like it, and I’m really proud of the work I’m doing.

 The tremors turned out to be Parkinson’s (a mild case, luckily). The restlessness was treatable with another drug. So, counting vitamins, I now take a total of 20 pills a day at six different times. This makes travel complicated, to say the least.

Last year I cleaned out a storage shed and sold or donated most of my books and some furniture. I gave away my drum set. I boxed up all my papers and letters and early drafts and donated them to the University of California at Riverside. My partner and I got official legal wills and powers of attorney.

A lot of my life has been about control. I think that’s true of most kids who took some amount of abuse from their parents. It’s satisfying to be still alive and yet be able to look at my writing career (such as it was) as a complete thing.

I could easily have another 20, or even 30, years ahead of me. That’s OK too, as long as the quality of life is acceptable. I’m basically done here, and anything else that comes along is a bonus. Every year I’m less inclined to travel, less inclined to socialize in person.

In a recent piece in The Guardian, Andy Partridge of XTC said he originally turned down the interview because he has entered his “withdrawal years.”2“‘My dream had died’: XTC’s Andy Partridge on mental illness, battling the music industry and losing his muse,” The Guardian (London) 20 Oct 2022. (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/20/my-dream-had-died-xtcs-andy-partridge-on-mental-illness-battling-the-music-industry-and-losing-his-muse : accessed 30 Dec 2022)., 3Partridge is three years younger than I am; I was born in 1950.

I like the resonances of the term.

First there’s the obvious part about pulling back from social interaction.

Then there’s the cold turkey sense of getting off a drug—in this case the drug of materialism, which is what Friends of Sid G. is all about.

Finally, I’m also withdrawing from the various accounts I’ve built up since I was a kid—Social Security, IRA, savings. I’m cashing in lost sleep in the form of naps, and lost time behind a desk in the form of daily walks. I’m also trying to trade some outdated anger for love. Now there’s a withdrawal devoutly to be wished.

 

Notes

 

[created 26 Nov 2022; revised 1 Jan 2023]