Notes of a Paranoid Schizophrenic

 I am certain I am not alone.  Throughout my life I have always wondered why I was “different”.  In school, I was always distracted, prone to staring out the window or daydreaming.  I sputtered through grade school until Grade 7, when my parents became concerned enough that they decided the answer was private school.  The next two schools were private schools, Cliffside Prep School, and then Brentwood College.  From grade 7 until grade 12, my grades stayed at average marks, and I managed to finish grade 12 (although I didn’t get enough credits to graduate).

At the time, not graduating didn’t matter too much to me.  I was fairly happy and carefree, and I felt very carefree after getting out of school for good.  My parents had saved some money for my post-secondary education, but I passed it over.  The last thing I wanted was to go back to school.  It was not a wonderful experience for me, it felt more like a jail sentence.

I guess I was a pretty normal teenager socially.  I worked in my parent’s Dairy Queen as my first real job, and the DQ was the hub of all teen social activity.  I was popular, and loved working with all those girls!  After a while the DQ wages seemed a bit low, so I went up into the northern interior to Fort St. James BC to live with my newly married sister and her husband, and work in a sawmill.  The money was great, and I really didn’t mind being a blue-collar guy, it seemed like the right thing to be doing at the time.

My third real job was working for the railway, as a brakeman, in Nelson BC.  That was also not a bad job, but my poor work-ethic started to become evident, even to me.  I was on a spareboard, and could get called to work at any time of day or night.  Work was sporadic, I didn’t get called more than about 4 days a week, but I was 19 years old and wanting to have a good time more than anything.  So when my name came to the top of the list, I would get called, and I would turn down the shift, thinking I would grab the next one when my name came to the top again.  What I didn’t realize was that there was an “10 strikes you’re out” precendent, and I lasted about 8 months until I was fired.

Of course, I ran out of money, but I had enough to buy an old car, a 1969 Pontiac Parisienne (RIP Pontiac), which I then drove to Edmonton, Alberta.  I  had a suspended driver’s license, from too many speeding tickets, so I was not legal to drive; furthermore the plates on my car were units that had fallen off cars that were going through a car wash that my friend worked at.  The two plates did  not even match!

I guess it was around this time that I started to see myself as a rebel.  I seemed to be good at skirting around  the law.  I frequently drove under the influence, and never got anything stiffer than a warning.  It seemed I had horseshoes, and so being a rebel became my new MO, my new identity I suppose.  I also started to have severe bouts of depression (which have stayed with me to this day).

I got a new job with a new railway company, Northern Alberta Railways.  This work consisted mainly of yard work in the freezing cold Alberta winter temperatures.  Us workers would do 20 minute stints in the yard, shuttling railway cars around, then we would come in, warm up, and play cards for half an hour.  Other times, I had to be part of the four-man train crews (in those days a crew was made up of four men) that would do long distance trips up to Fort McMurray and back.  I always had trouble staying awake, and we were not permitted to sleep or read,  our job was just to look at the tracks and make sure the road ahead was clear.  It was intolerably boring to me.

More trouble with my attention span started to really become evident while doing the yard-work.  The lead hand would give us all hand-written instructions on clipboards, with specific directions of the desired railway car movements that were necessary to assemble trains for next day.  The instructions would tell us yardmen which switches to throw, and which sidings boxcars were to be directed down.  We had huge cumbersome two-way radios on straps around our necks with which to direct the engineman, who would follow our navigation: Two car lengths!  One car length!  Closing, closing, STOP!

Well I had trouble following these simple steps.  I would daydream during the huddle before going out to the yard, and I had difficulty remembering his corrections, or deviations from the list.  I didn’t know it then, but looking back, these are the classic behaviour symptoms of Adult ADD.  So, I would get in trouble, and I always felt that I was being picked on.  I guess this is also about the time that I began to develop a problem with my temper.  Again, it confused me then, but it’s not such a mystery now.

Anyhow, that job also came to an unhappy end.  I got fired again, and in response I threw my ten pound radio at the yardmaster, and squealed my tires on my way off the work site.  That’ll show them!  But now I needed another job.

The next job was driving transit buses in Edmonton.  This actually had a strong appeal for me, as I liked driving and I liked cars and their variants (I guess a bus is a variant?).  I felt that I was being trusted with a big piece of equipment, I liked the interaction with the customers, and I liked working in an unsupervised environment.  It also pleased me in some kind of twisted way that I had  professional driving  job in Alberta while being banned from driving in BC!  This was in the pre-computer days, remember, and the Alberta Licensing authority just took my word that I had never had a license before - yes, of course I lied!

Edmonton Transit in those days trained 20 recruits at a time, and within 2 weeks I had my class 2 license and was cut loose to drive on my own with passengers.  It was really fun for a while, I felt that I had job with a lot of responsibility.  But as with everything in my life, I soon got bored with it.  The money was good, my rent was cheap, and I liked going to bars and blowing money.  I also bought my first motorcycle around this time.  So, I started missing shifts so I could spend time playing with my motorcycle, and drinking and partying at night.  I soon discovered Edmonton Transit’s 10 strikes policy, and after ten FTR’s (Failure to Report), I lost that job too.

Again, I didn’t care.  I liked getting fired, because it meant that there was some new work adventure around the corner for me.  And I could always go on unemployment and goof off for a time before finding work again.  

This became a pattern for all my jobs.  The same pattern followed for relationships.  As I flitted from town to town, or city to city, old friends were lost and traded in for new ones.  I never bothered to stay in touch with any of them, which didn’t seem wrong or abnormal to me.  I felt like I was a rolling stone, a drifter, perhaps an adventurer always seeking the next exciting horizon.

In retrospect, I don’t believe this is normal.  I seem to have alienated myself from my family and old friends, never thinking I would ever be lonely.

This blog is my awakening.  I have had trouble my entire life with depression, and always wondered why.

I am 49 years old, I live in Whistler BC.  I am a Skier, Mountain Biker, former Glider Pilot (expensive hobby), Philospher, extreme worrier, manic depressive, certified ADD.  A real catch

Now also a blogger