October

I am going to put in a wee content warning. This essay features references to mental health issues, trauma, violence, hospitalization, and ideation. If these are problematic for you, please read with care and take care of yourself.

October nears its final days, the sky overcast, the temperatures dropping as though into an officious bow. I often find seemingly interminable gloomy days like this to be frustrating, impacting my melancholy temperament like a two heavy hands pushing upon my shoulders.

I have been thinking often of last October. A year ago, I was angry and anxious. The one fueled the other, then the other the former. Annoyed with the group Halloween costume theme at work, I defiantly did the Winnie the Pooh thing, but made my Eeyore costume double as a Wednesday costume, the sad ears covering my braids.

After work, I walked into downtown Macon, in the dark. I was scared, because downtown Macon isn’t a great place to walk in the dark by oneself. I sat in a coffee shop to do some writing, grimacing as one of the people working there said I was “sweeter” than the person I was portraying.

I walked to the pizza place to have dinner, a thrifty two slices and soda. I then shuffled into the retrocade, where a woman nearly assaulted me because I didn’t know I needed to hand over my ID to her for inspection. I was almost immediately hit on by a woman who asked me if I was a lesbian, remarking on the hotness of my “costume.” I shook my head quickly and silently, immediately left, then walked outside to hear the worst rendition of “Hurt” ever inflicted upon my ears. I saw a person passed out on the sidewalk.

Halloween was a bust. I was glad when the rideshare came.

What they didn’t know was that this Wednesday Addams “costume” was something I wore to work often, as a library assistant for the children’s department. Dress code was strict and this dress did not violate any of the codes. Sometimes I would wear it with braids, sometimes with another hairstyle. After a while, I liked to see if anyone would notice, considered it a way to troll an employer I had come to hate by that time.

Halloween last year marked the start of a change for me, a turning point.

I moved to Macon, Georgia as a last resort. I was not there for the Southern charm, the pleasant people, for the antebellum architecture, or the very complicated history. I was not there to get a house cheaply.

I was there because I was going to be homeless if I did not find some sort of housing situation. I had recently had my first few visits to psychiatric hospitals as a result of post-COVID burnout from working in a grocery store, and PTSD I picked up from a sexual assault in 2020. I ended up in several unpleasant housing situations over the course of 2022, and had lost a lot of money from being scammed by trying to find a place to live. By the end of 2022, I was broke and ready to leave a job that was going nowhere.

2023 was one of the worst years of my life. I was finishing an online MA program in technical and professional writing, living in a room in a duplex where one of the window panes was missing (in the cold of winter), and trying hard to finish the only thing that held me on this mortal coil, the MA.

If it hadn’t been for this program, I would not have moved to Macon, would not have had any place to live. Homelessness in Metro Atlanta is, in some ways, worse than urban homelessness.

I packed up my things quickly, moved the rest to the storage unit I had acquired, then made the trip with one of my mentors from my undergrad.

Macon proved to be quite different from what I had seen as an undergraduate at Wesleyan College. I stayed a few months in an apartment on Middle Georgia State’s campus, offered by the university as an option while I looked for a job and tried to get back on my feet. Near the end of this and my Master’s program, I had to take another trip to the hospital.

In that apartment, I was alone, with only a curious jumping spider for a friend. I spent my days trying to apply for jobs, talking to my therapist, and trying to walk. I befriended the sweet-natured Muscovy ducks near the water. I spent a lot of time in the library, alone, and masochistically happy to be so.

Most of the rest of my time in Macon ran along these themes: anger and isolation. After I finished my program in July, I moved between several extended stay Airbnbs. They were cheap, but they were not cheap enough, and some kind friends helped finance them.

I slept most days at first, when I was searching for jobs. I had no means of transportation, no friends. The friends I thought I knew from Wesleyan had all conveniently vanished.

By the end of 2023, I had acquired a job at the local library, as a library assistant. After a year of looking. I took it, as it was one of the higher paying jobs a person could get in the small town, and not in the retail field.

Days and nights were just as lonely. I spent most of my socialization online, with two of my friends, on whom I leaned more than I had any right. My sleep, which had not been great since the assault, suffered, and I spent most of the time in an angry and anxious state, fearing who would knock on the door to the suite I lived in, which appeared to be the front of a converted house.

Fear remained with me throughout my time in Macon. I feared the gunshots I often heard at night. I feared the remarkably open racism I saw whenever I left my dwelling for the world at large. I feared getting fired from my job for my panic attacks and quiet anger. I began to fear the public transportation, walking in daylight, the cockroaches, the squalor.

Poverty hits different in Macon. It is an ancient poverty that is very clearly settled among racial lines. You can still meet people with very, very old names. People who have names that the founders, that the people who founded Wesleyan College, the people who “owned” many “slaves” . . .

And this made me angry, as poor white trash who grew up with very little, but who knew other people who were poor, who were from so many different demographics. You don’t see poor white trash in Macon. Not in the same way. I hated how clearly racist it was.

I saw how people spoke about race, how thankful people were to me because I thought Black lives do matter. I thought about the wrinkled and dirty Confederate flag I saw after the election, in the bushes of a house that had proudly displayed pro-Trump signs a few days prior. I saw an old shirt with Martin Luther King, Jr. on it, placed neatly in a derelict park. I heard tales of very important Black historical figures’ houses and monuments removed and torn down.

I wondered why no one else seemed to be angry, why it seemed to be so ingrained everywhere.

And I walked, even when it was scary, and I observed.

For me, Macon was a continuation of the trauma that I had received when I was assaulted. I saw things that did not allow me the time to heal, because there was no mental space. I was hit by a car when walking, albeit gently. I was yelled at by passersby who did not care when I looked into the eyes of the man who tried to run me down. It was then that I knew I had to live, after having spent four years daily considering how I could curtail my life.

On a goth group on Facebook, I came across a woman who, when I mentioned that I came from Georgia, gleefully said, “Oooh! You’re from where Vision Video is!” I asked what that was, then looked it up.

There was very little about the actual band, but I am a consummate researcher. I began casually listening to “Haunted Hours” and “Beautiful Day to Die,” but didn’t get firmly hooked until last October, when their album Modern Horror came out. I reposted the review I did of that album here.

The writer and musical force behind Vision Video, Dusty Gannon, was very open about having PTSD. When I started therapy with my current therapist, around this time, I learned that the anger and panic attacks I was experiencing were symptoms of PTSD, and that I was not going completely crazy. My body was trying to process the trauma.

I would walk downtown Macon blasting songs from Modern Horror from my phone, as I was afraid to put an earbud in my ear, lest I get run over by another car. And it helped. It helped me feel the anger, but process it. It gave me a small sort of courage in a world that was crumbling around me. It helped me process the trauma to listen to the music of someone else who was also processing his trauma.

I worked very, very hard with my therapist. I wanted to alleviate some of the symptoms. I learned that, unlike with the bipolar disorder I struggled with my whole life, with PTSD, it can get remarkably better with therapy. There was hope.

By December of 2024, I was in a much better position, mentally. I felt, for the first time, that I had regained a modicum of what small confidence I had before. I was less anxious. I was determined to make things better for myself by doing the work.

And I discovered Dear Heart.

We met online, and casually talked for a while, discovering we were both in Georgia, he in Atlanta. I decided to ask him if he wanted to go see the new remake of Nosferatu together, telling him that there would not be an obligation to be romantic from this first date.

I tried to get out of it many times. I tried to push him away. I feared meeting him, because I was afraid of another bad thing that would happen to me. He convinced me, a terrified and angry person. And he parked in the absolutely wrong place.

I spent long minutes walking downtown Macon, the Christmas lights sparkling, the nighttime streets bustling with the remnants of visitors and local boozers, and people who just liked to see the lights for the sake of the lights. I marched to where he had parked, in the dark, telling him of his incompetence as I spoke through my phone.

And he was in a darkened church parking lot, standing there, lurking, some might say. But he was safety. In a world where everything felt unsafe and wrong, he felt safe. And I drove off with him and had a lovely time making fun of the movie and eating my favorite tofu at the nice Japanese restaurant.

Sometimes, PTSD feels all-encompassing. Sometimes it feels like it grips me in a vice, wrapping strong, spindly fingers around my throat. On more than one occasion I lost myself, considering ending a relationship that was a happiness I’d not known before. I dissociated, grew angry, and had more panic attacks than I had ever before.

But I kept trying to do the work. And the feelings I’d been having since 2020 started melting away, the feelings that I needed to be the ender of my life.

Therapy helped, as did the slow, slow process of learning to control my impulses. I learned that the desire to end is more a desire to end the feeling than the desire to end everything.

I am not where I would like to be, but the progress I have made has been more progress in one year than I’ve had with therapists over many years. It is the mindset of working toward something that truly counts. And has played a huge part in keeping skittish me in a very good relationship from which I have tried to run many times.

Nearly a year after my time walking around Macon with Modern Horror blasting, I had the chance to see Vision Video in a small club in a small town in Georgia. Dear Heart purchased the tickets months in advance.

I am much older than I used to be, and, while music moves me in ways that other people rarely experience, I do not often turn to tears anymore. That night, though, I found myself sobbing on his chest as the band played “Stay,” a call to remain alive, even when things look dark. I spent the evening reassessing my life, seeing how far I had come from the past year, from the anxious, scary times in Macon, to the more comfortable and peaceful times in Atlanta.

I had the pleasure of meeting Gannon himself, a very affable person, whose very affability and relatability left me somewhat speechless. Having lived in isolation for so long impacted social skills that were never the best to begin with. I was honored that he offered to sign a vinyl I had purchased, and had to agree with him that this had been both my best and worst year at the same time.

Dear Heart has given me a safe place to lay my head, and I’ve had more time to start projects that I’ve been too afraid to even touch. I am lucky enough to have a gig writing for a company that sells philosophy-themed t-shirts, and to have published my first horror short story in an anthology. I’ve also had my first academic article published this year.

I can truly begin my professional writing career, after years of doing this for myself, hiding my work from the world’s criticism. I can give myself one more chance at looking into doctoral programs for philosophy. And I frankly just have time to breathe.

Living in Macon was, for me, a constant slew of anxiety, a constant barrage of fear, from the dangers of walking on the sidewalk to the nightly fears of the cockroaches and nocturnal disruptions of police or unsavory characters.

I wish I could convey my story better, but those who lived in Macon for years did not understand it, or did not want to hear it.

I end this October with tentative hope and the desire to stay to see what happens next.

I’ve learned over this year that, while there are many places where we often feel we don’t fit, the people who are your kindred will appear in your life. They will not appear where you expect to find them. They will appear in unlikely, and sometimes unhappy places or times.

During my time in Macon, I returned to my goth roots, making much out of so little. I turned to fashion and its experimentations as an outlet for my anger and my trauma. Being the walking funeral scared some people away, but attracted the attention of others I may not have met.

I recalled the isolation I had felt as a teenager in being the only goth around, and it echoed in the isolation I felt in Macon. It was, somehow, something familiar in a place where I was a stranger.

For me, goth, in music and aesthetic, was a way to be a visual difference, a reminder to others that “I am not you.” And it became a way to connect with others. As I stepped up my fashion game, more and more people approached me and complimented my look. Where I was something that sparked fear and dread in some, I was something like a strange fairy princess to others.

And it helped. Because I learned that those who might give me awkward looks or make cruel comments are people whose opinions I do not require for my own life, and are not people I’d want to be friends with, myself.

To those who are going through anything, I implore you to, as Vision Video sings, “stay.” It’s strange. You never know when your next day will end up being the best day of your life. The change in circumstance and fortune continues to blow me away, as someone used to misfortune.

Please stay with us. Your new best friend will miss you.

I want to keep all of my content on Substack free for everyone always. However, I would appreciate any tips you might be able to offer as a courtesy if you have enjoyed my work. Any amount of money will be helpful, and will help me live on a baseline and pursue more projects. Consider a tip through my Ko-fi profile. Any bit of funding is appreciated. Thank you so much!