(#StayAwayStigma Not every story will have drug references, some will. This one does as well as some suicide references, this is important to me. My life has been affected multiple times from others suicide attempts. You will probably never see me write about any of those attempts, some things are too close to home. So, I deal with them like this. If you do not like it I am sorry. This is me…)
Right after college, I got a job at a large insurance company in Jackson. While in business college, I had heard about strong business cultures. I had no idea what they were talking about, but this job was gonna teach me. Everyday I was forced to wear a tie. Can you imagine a more miserable situation? Don’t get me wrong, I love to dress up when I want to. But when a job starts messing with my freedom and forces me to wear it for 4 years, they were lucky I didn’t strangle myself with it.
Almost everyone I worked with there was miserable. Short of a John Hughes film, I had never experienced this much angst. Bueller, Bueller, Bueller…. All of my coworkers were concerned about getting married and having kids. They didn’t tell anyone, but I’m pretty sure everyone was getting really worried that the rest of their life was gonna include cubicles, holding a knife to someone’s neck until they went to have their wellness visit each year, and ending each conversation by saying, “Have a Healthy Day”. Sometimes when I was talking to someone, I would catch them looking longingly at my tie. I know that they too were visualizing someone wrapping the tie tight around their neck; no one was strong enough to do it to his or herself. I mean we had ‘things to live for’, but I bet a few would have appreciated the help if they were being honest. To snap them out of it, all I had to do was say,”Have a Healthy Day”. Our training had us hardwired to automatically reset and restart every time we heard someone utter those 4 words.
My concerns were a bit different, much more important and practical though. Back then you couldn’t get heroin in Jackson. During most of this time, getting high was more important than breathing; to really be able to keep up with what I had going on, I would have to drive to New Orleans three or four times a week to get heroin on the West Bank. My job was getting in the way of my fix; I wasn’t having it. This was it; I was gonna have to rebel.
I know so many lawyers have taken on big insurance. I was prepared to do my best Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio and become the hero of my own The Firm/Basketball Diaries film , if only John Grisham or Jim Carroll were writing my pages I may succeed, instead I was playing writer, director, ,and star. It was very very exciting for everyone involved (by everyone, I mean me). );everyone else probably hated it. The problems were I am no lawyer, all of our nations laws were written to unjustly prefer a tax-paying company over a heroin addict, and, on top of all this, turns-out Grisham or Carrol aren’t God (thankful for that because Grisham doesn’t even know my name, Carrol doesn’t know where I’ve been or where I am going, but my God does).
There’s one very important thing I would like to say since we were talking about suicide. In case y’all haven’t heard, Jefferey Epstein did NOT kill himself.
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