I had worked in tech, but after getting laid off, I found myself working an hourly job at a distribution center at the end of 2017.
To understand how I got there, I have to go back a few years.
In 2013, I moved from Connecticut to North Carolina with two bags of clothes and a train ticket.
The world was mine, and I had something to prove.
I had been kicked out and banned from Liberty University when I was 20, during my sophomore year. My whole life felt like it had been put on hold.
Then I moved south and started over.
From 2015 to 2016, I worked as a business development representative for Samanage, a cloud-based ITSM and asset management startup in Cary, North Carolina.
In 2016, I became the highest achiever at the company and earned a $20,000 paycheck.
I was 25 years old. I had only completed part of a college degree. And I felt like I was on top of the world.
I had gone from getting kicked out of college to becoming a top-performing employee at a tech startup.
I thought I had finally proved myself.
Then I burned out.
After coming back from backpacking through Japan for two weeks at the beginning of 2017, I took some time away from my career as a business development representative.
That summer, I briefly worked at ListenLoop in New York, helping build their outbound sales process.
I lasted a week.
My medication ran out. I couldn’t sleep, and I was experiencing terrible suicidal thoughts that kept ruminating in my mind.
I felt ashamed. My mental illness had become symptomatic again, and I couldn’t control it.
Eventually, I found myself working at a call center at a distribution center in Wallingford.
Going from a top-performing business development representative in tech to working an hourly call center job felt like the lowest point of my year.
I don’t like labels. I’m Barnaby first. Then there’s the part of my life where I have to manage a chronic illness.
For years, I carried the shame of getting kicked out of school and later being laid off from Samanage. I turned those experiences into a story about who I was, and over time, I reduced myself to nothing.
In 2021, that shame and guilt contributed to a suicide attempt involving an overdose of lithium. I had become consumed by the feeling that I wasn’t living up to the person I was supposed to be.
I survived.
And slowly, I rebuilt my life.
No more shame. No more hiding.
I started embracing my ability to write and permitting myself to have a voice.
Today, I’m writing.
I started The Barnaby Times in 2024 because a few people encouraged me to believe that I had something worth saying.
I’ve written a memoir. I’m pursuing an English degree to sharpen my writing. And I’m learning to stop hiding the parts of my story that once made me ashamed.
I used to think 2017 was a gap in my life.
Now I think it was part of the story.
Maybe the hardest parts of our lives aren’t gaps at all. Maybe they’re chapters we haven’t learned how to read yet.
We all have a story.
Don’t give up before you find out what happens next.
~Barncat