Middle Aged Men & Mental Health (PSA)

Hi all readers out there!

This is a real life PSA message, and I'll be talking about my personal experiences, so feel free to skip if you are here just for gaming goodness.

Alright, let's go.

I am 53. And like a lot of guys my age, I have spent decades supporting others and neglecting myself.

I spent those decades tanking through physical ailments and mental stressors. And I paid the price for it.

In 2011 I started a PhD in Japan. My life was pretty mellow before that, but my slack job teaching ESL at a nice uni allowed me the leeway to start my final degree on the side.

Then, in 2013, my son was born.

In 2014 my 5 year contract ended I had to change from my supportive workplace to a hotbed of workplace harassment and a 5 hour daily commute.

On top of which my wife was suffering post partum depression.

The stressors kept piling up. And I kept working like a beast.

I would wake at 6, train to my hellish workplace, teach a few hours, then return. In the crowded trains winding between Kyoto & Osaka, I would sleep or more likely do research and write my thesis on my tablet. I estimate about 80% of it was written in trains. Once a week I would also go to my seminar and fight over my ideas for the thesis in French. Stumbling home in the dark, my wife would basically throw our insomniac son at me. I would bathe him, then carry him around the neighborhood talking and singing to him until he fell asleep 1-3 hours later. Then I would crawl into my room and research for a few hours until I slept or passed out.

Then my supervisor began harassing me. I was incensed, began counter harassing him, went to a lawyer, and fought my way out of that dark workplace with a settlement while at the same time finishing off my thesis, a monumental effort most people tackle while single and not working.

In 2016 I graduated with a PhD in Global society studies, and moved to a supportive workplace an hour closer to home. The wife and I were slowly drifting apart, and I was unimpressed to have finished a PhD but still be stuck working as an ESL instructor.

Then, in 2018 I snagged a prof position on a beautiful island in Kobe Bay. It was a small but supportive university with interesting content classes. I was head of the seminar program, I loved my office with its view of the bay and palm tree lined boardwalk.

For an instant, I was happy. I travelled for research once a year, hitting Germany, Spain, and the US.

Then in 2019 we learned our beautiful, smart and sweet boy was autistic with ADHD. I didn't care, I love him. There was an American style autism center in front of my uni and two international schools he could commute to on a flexible schedule. The island also had ridiculously cheap condos, so I suggested we move there to reduce my commute and raise sonny in a supportive environment.

My wife refused. All her Japanese wife friends and their foreign husbands asked us why not.

There was no answer. I couldn't talk with her without a major eruption. At the same time she had insisted on starting an MEd, so I kept on commuting and sacrificing for family. I watched sonny more and more, especially when his ma went on internships to Vietnam and Australia. At those times when it was just he and I, we were incredibly happy.

Leo started elementary school in 2020, just as Covid exploded on the world. My wife kicked me out in February, and I spent days in a hotel filled with Covid patients when there was yet no vaccine in sight.

That is when I knew we were done. I limped on working, then sonny became violent as he was left behind and neglected at school, then sent for long hours to Japanese play schools everyday.

I wondered, how can I get my beautiful boy back?

In 2021 I began volunteer teaching at my son's school three days a week before heading off to work. Many Japanese teachers were nice people but untrained in adaptive methods, so I modelled the special ed techniques I had learned during my BEd in Canada. I also fought to let my son stay home and away from crappy for-profit play centers that exist to allow parents to work work work.

If you ask my son now, the only good memories he has of school in Japan was when I was there. I helped him through 2021 and 2022, then in November that year he came home and said, "I quit school. I'm not going back."

His mother and I agreed. We would let him recuperate at home and help him study when we could.

She finished her MEd and started teaching at a university in Kyoto. That summer she turned to me and said, "I am not doing anything for him anymore. Cooking, cleaning, YOU have to do it all."

I said, "OK. I'm taking him back to Canada then."

Once again I had to go to lawyers and fight an abusive person with power over me in Japan. But she wasn't physically or mentally able to handle our boy. She finally agreed I would have custody. On the day I was awarded tenure at work, I quit. My colleagues were sad, but understood.

On March 10, 2023, sonny and I got a plane from Tokyo to Vancouver, then slowly made our way back to the east coast visiting friends and relatives across the country. And I have my smiling boy back.

Leo loves Newfoundland. To him, it is a fairyland where he is accepted, left alone, and the cooler weather suits him. I had never intended to live back here, but I am happy to save my son. He entered a good school in town, and was loved by teachers and students alike.

In 2023 we lived for 5 stressful months at my family house, with relatives who couldn't accept my son's disabilities and meltdowns. I got my DELF B2 French certificate, signed up to teach, found us a car, a house to rent, and a fulltime job. No easy tasks in a land that had grown dysfunctional in my absence. I exercised everyday to get back in shape, and cooked healthy Japanese food for sonny and myself. Work was hard as Canadian junior high schools had gone from peaceful spaces of learning to overcrowded and understaffed diploma factories with endless problems. I had initially thought to take it easy and substitute the first year, but caved into family pressure to get a fulltime job.

This was a mistake, and I was exhausted and rundown every day. Yet I pressed on for sonny's sake.

I also reconnected with a friend from my undergrad days. She was still beautiful, a fellow PhD and single parent of a special child. We fell in love, and I seriously thought of spending my life with her in my hometown, a celtic redhead goddess at my side. I loved being at her house or with her family, and put up with her need to socialize in bars downtown every week.

On the first day back to work in January 2024, life fell apart. Again.

At school, students were out of control after the holiday, and I lost my cool and yelled at some to STFU. I was suspended, and the district officials who interviewed me were accusatory and aggressive. In February I had panic attacks, trouble breathing and teary eyes. I reached out for my lover.

And she left me. Scott Galloway says men usually get left when they have mental or financial crises, but always when they have both. And so it went with me.

NB I don't blame her or hate her. She has her own history of trauma, and I was needy when she wanted space. It might have happened eventually even without a crisis due to our opposing attachment styles, but came as another huge shock to me. Especially when her friends mocked and badgered me when I reached out to ask her for another chance.

I spent spring in a depressive state, living only for sonny's happiness. I took counselling through my Employee Assistance Program, which had ballooned in response to the burnout factories schools had become.

Then in April, sonny quit school again. He had been doing so well back at Canadian school, even starting to make friends. I realized he had tried so hard to please me and masked his feelings so long, I accepted his decision. I had begun substitute teaching at good schools nearby, and began enjoying my time at work again. I realized this is what I should have done from the beginning. But it was too late, and I was alone again.

Although the EAP counselling had gotten me over the shock and depression, I still felt weak and vulnerable. I had cut out old friends who called me stupid, a relative who constantly attacked me over how I raised my son, and the ex girlfriend's circle, who drove me off Twitter and gaslit me, saying she had grown tired of me in November when she had still professed her love for me in late January.

I needed a change. That is when I encountered Nick Pollard online.

Nick calls himself 'the people displeaser', and he teaches how to stop people pleasing and start building and communicating clear boundaries that protect and elevate your mental health. After binging his instagram shorts for a month, I started his Boundaries Bootcamp with a cohort of people similarly wounded and isolated by their inability to make boundaries that keep assholes out and let the right people in.

I feel better than I have in years.

For the first time since sonny was born, I am relaxing and enjoying my summer.

I am applying for uni positions, as that is where I enjoy teaching and researching most.

I published a book chapter about my experiences with sonny in Japan. in a volume about barrier free learning

I just shot a scene as a background performer in a hit TV show made here.

Some of my RPG art and writing will be in a UK zine this year.

I have embraced the pleasure of my own company, and those few who have been supportive and loving.

I have dropped the need to people please, and cut off a swathe of 'friends' who pushed my boundaries and called me sensitive for complaining.

I started a Call of Cthulhu game with old friends instead of wasting time, money, and my liver downtown.

Dear friends,

If you are anything like me, please make the change before it is too late.

Get off social media, get counselling if you need it, eat right, and exercise.

Surround yourself with loved ones, exclude any negativity.

Live for you.

- Tedankhamen