On Therapy… Part Deux
This is the second in what is a series of posts on this topic. The first post is here. Hang with me as I get through all this background info. It gets more interesting, I promise!
My first less-than-productive therapy session left a really bad taste in my mouth. It was a shame because, man, I could have used some assistance. The next several years were an absolute whirlwind (as if the first 25 hadn’t been). Less than six months after being named one of the youngest Product Managers ever in the Digital & Applied Imaging division of Kodak, I accepted an offer to move to New York City to work for a gray market film & paper dealer in Brooklyn who (unlike Kodak) saw the writing on the wall and wanted to move into digital. He put his money where his mouth was, pushing my salary (just) into six figures. Oh, Mr. Ego was ever-so-happy about that! It was also good and necessary, because living in a $3,000 a month apartment in Manhattan and paying a mortgage on a house in Rochester that took six months to sell burns a lot of cash, but then, I have a knack for that!
Sideview. Venice Beach, California | January 2019
That position lasted less than one (very stressful) year. I was recruited to be the VP Ops by some other ex-Kodakers for an event imaging start-up in Pittsburgh. Because why wouldn’t I want to repeat the patterns I learned from my father and jump to every job offered to me? I started that job in February of 1997. Amy very reluctantly followed me on Memorial Day. A week later, they shut our division and let everybody go (except the two guys who recruited me). Oh, and the president showed up in a brand new Cadillac on the day of the layoffs. Classy! We moved to Chicago on Labor Day, owing to the incredible resourcefulness of the late Neil Shaw, a former sales manager of Amy’s, who found us both positions with Danka Office Imaging. They had purchased our old division from Kodak. Recap 1997 – three jobs, three states, one badly tattered marriage. They said the grass is always greener on the other side. Until you have to mow it.
Though I was working as a Digital Specialist for Danka, the entrepreneurial bug I caught in college, where I started a computer consulting business, wasn’t out of my system. I began consulting for what was left of the group in Pittsburgh, traveling the country to install and train photographers on the new fangled digital photography systems. I was supporting a local, Chicago-based team for Danka. Imagine my surprise when I returned the call of a rep one day while I was in Spokane, Washington and he asked, “509? Where are you?” (This was the early days of caller ID and before the proliferation of cell phones where you took your number with you anywhere you went!) “Uh, uh, never mind that. How can I help?” I demurred.
This consulting, coupled with a contract to print a bunch of photos for a modeling consultancy, based on connection I made in New York City on the very day I had given notice to the Brooklyn guy, coalesced into what became DeltaQuest Imaging. I quit my job (again!) and launched the country’s first exclusively digital photo lab. I plunked down $30k (that was a lot back then, kids) and signed for $150k worth of equipment leases, rented a cool loft space next to where Wishbone used to be and we were off to the printing races! Eight months later, just as we were getting our sea legs under us and, more importantly – positive cash flow – we got a call from a US Attorney in Connecticut. They had just shut down the modeling consultancy (which, in hindsight, was pretty damn shady) that represented 85% of our revenue. Interesting times….
Due in large part to Amy’s strategic foresight and my connections in the world of digital portrait studios from whom we had been turning away business in order to service our “whale” we pivoted and began to actively court the portrait printing business. I had literally just told the guy in Pittsburgh the week before that I couldn’t take any more of his digital portrait studio referral business because I needed to focus on my big client! Humility, thy name is “We need to pay the rent”. That was a fun phone call. We dug in and turned the boat around within about a year. Timing is everything.
The toll of my childhood, all the moves and the stress was beginning to make itself known on my mental health and our marriage. I’m still not sure how we made it through the three months in Pittsburgh. Mostly by not talking to each other, I think. Somewhere in here Amy reached out to Billy Kaplan of Housecalls Counseling. Back in the day he still made actual house calls. For therapy! Imagine that. This was pretty cool, all things considered. So Billy came over for an hour every week or two, ostensibly for couples counseling. At some point fairly early on, it was pretty clear (to everybody but me) that the best use of Billy’s time would be working with me directly. I mostly enjoyed the sessions with him. Not having him slap a label on me and try to force a prescription down my throat definitely helped.
Right about this time, Amy & I decided, simultaneously, that we wanted children. This was a new and rather surprisingly development because we were heretofore adamant that we were going to remain childless, all the better to make all the money, buy all the things and travel to all the places. It also put us in a bit of a predicament. If you’ve been following along you may have noticed that I had a pretty full plate. This (conveniently for my as yet unknown but deep aversion to true intimacy) didn’t leave much time for Amy & I to engage in baby making activities. So, Billy sent us to a therapist specializing in such matters. As my first and second born daughters will attest, that particular therapy was a resounding success!
Our first daughter was born in April of 2000. In early spring of 2001, in spite of the great joy of being witness to her birth, my mental health remained poor. I was withdrawn, sullen, dark and mostly humorless. Business was good, but it was demanding. I was under a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to do better. I continued with the therapy and it didn’t seem to be making much of a dent. The fact that my diet sucked, I never exercised and worked 18 hours a day, six days a week certainly was not doing much to elevate my mood. I decided, very reluctantly and with Billy’s assent, to go on Zoloft. Because, pills are magic, right?
Coincident with that decision, I decided to stop drinking alcohol. (There’s a whole post on this topic alone in the works.) It didn’t make sense to me to pay for therapy and medicine to treat my depression and then actively thwart those efforts by drinking anywhere from two to six (or more!) beers every weekend. My heredity was a headwind on this journey as well. You can’t swing a dead cat in my family without hitting a couple alcoholics. “Why tempt fate?” I thought. Plus, based on what was my first experience of pure, unconditional love in the moments after our first daughter’s birth, I was deeply committed to being present and being the best father I could be to her. Fighting through the cobwebs of a Sunday morning hangover definitely put a damper on those ambitions. There weren’t a lot of shades of gray back then. I was (and still can be) an “all in” or “all out” guy. And booze was out.
The Zoloft helped for awhile. I began dreaming in color again. I hadn’t realized I’d ever stopped. My mood improved somewhat. On the flip side, I gained weight. I never really lost the pregnancy sympathy weight I so willing put on, so I was 5′ 9″ and pushing 200lbs. Not a great look (unless Dad Jeans are your thing). I was always hot and never horny, if you get my drift. So, it was better, but still not great, as I wasn’t really dealing with the things that were causing the depression in the first place. I’ll get into all that and more in future posts.
Tune in next week, when our hero moves to the suburbs and buys a station wagon…
