If you missed the previous installment, you might not know that Uncle Scott is completely isolated - all my kids are distributed across other locations. For that reason, I am cultivating a deeper connection with my Joy Bridge friends, which includes my closest pals, many great friends from my real-world past (high school, etc), and prog rock family from around the world.
Isolation is literally life-threatening to those who have suffered dysphoria - anxiety hurricanes that destroy executive function. And along those lines, I have a story to tell.
In this story, I'm an observer. The protagonist is a close friend. I won't name him, because one of his kids is part of our family here.
My friend was, like me, a classic rock keyboard player in our city's music scene. In any music town, keyboard players will be few. Why? Two reasons: to be the keyboard player, you have to have a brain for physics and computer science, and you have to not mind not getting laid - the keyboard player gets less action than the bass player, and that my friends is saying something.
Consequently, we were both very much in demand in bands around town, because a band with a keyboard player has five times the range of a band that doesn't. We routinely replaced each other in this band or that, and became close friends.
We were bound by two other similarities: we both had two sets of kids by two different moms (including sons who followed in our musical footsteps), and we both had ADD.
My friend was much worse off, ADD-wise. I learned to control mine, for the most part, through cognitive behavioral therapy; but he never did, and couldn't tolerate the meds. A chef, he drifted from job to job, as the lateness and drifting focus of ADD don't go over well in restaurant kitchens.
And he got fired from band after band, for the same reasons.
Six autumns ago, he's sitting in my living room. He's in very bad shape. He has no job, no band, and had to sell his gear for money. Would I loan him some of mine, so he could try out for another band? Of course, I said.
As he sits there, I can see him crawling out of his own skin. He's melting inside, he's so stressed out. At that time, I had never heard the word 'dysphoria', I didn't even know it had a name - but I knew what I was seeing. He was experiencing what I had, at that time, experienced five times myself: the anxiety firestorm. It is relentless; it erupts 24/7, and lasts for weeks - sometimes months. It was the first time I had observed it in another person; it was my awakening to the fact that it happened to people other than me.
A week later he was dead. He ended his life with a bottle of Jack and a bottle of pills.
Last year, I finally learned about dysphoria - how it works, what causes it, and how to end it. And I realized, in hindsight, that I could have saved my friend.
When a person is dysphoric, they are irrationally convinced that they have no value, that they are unworthy of love. Childhood rejections surface, a lifetime of criticism and disdain swirl all around. The worst thing a dysphoric person can be is alone.
He was more alone than he'd ever been. He had no professional life left, and the musical community had shut him out.
Had I realized all of this at the time, I might have saved him. Since last summer, when I did learn about dysphoria, I have returned to my memories of those events a hundred times, lamenting that I didn't do all I could.
(Why is he telling us this?)
I'm telling you this because you might know someone with ADD. If you believe you've seen the symptoms I'm describing - please, reach out to that person in this long period of isolation. You might make a much bigger difference than you know.
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