No one ever expects to find themselves trying to wrestle a shotgun from their husband’s hands so that he won’t put the barrel down his throat and pull the trigger. Yet that was exactly where I found myself in February 2010.
I met John in 2008 when I was working for Pacific Gas & Electric as a community relations representative based out of Redding. I found him sexy in a dark, brooding way. My yellow lab, Rawley, it seemed, had a very different opinion. The day I took Rawls to John’s house for the first time, he shied away from John, growling, and then pooped in the corner of his living room. I shouldn’t have needed any more warning than that.
But literally for better or worse, I disregarded Rawls’s advice, and after only seven months of dating, I married John in February 2009. Four months after our wedding, he told me that he was having thoughts of suicide. Being Captain Obvious, I suggested a counselor. He found one and started regular sessions.
By September, I had left my job at PG&E, and on September 12, 2009, 530 Collective opened its doors.
In another five months, just a few days after our first wedding anniversary, I found myself kneeling on the hood of John’s running white Subaru, my shins burning from the heat of the engine, the downpour making it difficult for me to stay on the hood, and he in the driver’s seat with the shotgun.
John had stopped seeing his counselor by then and had started experiencing increasingly frequent and severe mood swings. I witnessed multiple episodes of rage followed by bouts of silence.
I was terrified he would try to hurt himself; I was confused as to where this behavior was coming from; I felt helpless beyond measure. As if all those emotions weren’t enough, the demons of my own past—my mom’s suicide, the feelings of abandonment—were resurfacing with a vengeance.
On this particular day in February 2010, I was working at 530 when John showed up after his shift at work. I could tell immediately he was in a bad place emotionally. He stayed in the back of the store until it was time to close. We left together but in separate vehicles with him ahead of me in his work truck.
Dread latched onto my solar plexus and began to thrash about, slowly gnawing a hole in my core.
We got home, and John immediately went upstairs. I had a premonition that he was headed for the shotgun, and I was right.
He grabbed the gun and a handful of shells, shoving the shells into his pants pocket. I immediately tried to take the gun away from him, pleading with him to stop and talk to me, heedless of my own safety. He was just as heedless of my pleas.
John headed for the stairs, and I did everything I could to block his path. I knew there was no way that I could overpower him, so my strategy was to stall him, to wear him down to the point where he reconsidered his intentions.
We continued to struggle down the stairwell. Despite his best efforts to pull my hands off, I never relinquished my grip on the shotgun. Locked in that murderous dance, we descended the stairs and moved through the kitchen.
As John reached the sliding door, I grabbed onto his belt. He released the buckle, stripped off his pants, stepped outside into the pouring rain in his underwear, and got into his Subaru.
As he started the engine, I climbed on the hood. As crazy as it may sound, I didn’t think that he would hurt me. I thought if I stayed on the hood, he wouldn’t drive away knowing that I could fall off. I was partially correct.
I don’t know how long we were out there, John sitting in the car and slowly turning the steering wheel in an attempt to dislodge me, and me, perched on top of the hood, staring at him through the windshield, tears mixing with rain, still pleading with him to talk. Whatever the length of time, it was enough for me to have burns on my shins the following day.
Eventually I lost my balance, and I slid off the car. He drove off, the white form of the vehicle disappearing into the rain like an apparition.
I realized, heading back into the house, that he had left the shells with his pants, but I did not know if there was one still left in the gun.
I called 911, and then I waited.
Eventually, the Shasta County Sheriff deputy showed up, and shortly thereafter so did John. The gun had not been loaded. After we talked with the deputy at length, he agreed not to take John on a 5150—the code that allows a law-enforcement officer to take someone into custody if they present a danger to themselves or others—if we promised to go immediately to Mercy Medical Center.
They kept him at the hospital overnight, releasing him at 6:00 a.m. the following day; I stayed with him the entire time. Physically exhausted and emotionally drained, I called a friend to open and run 530 that day.
I had hoped, after that agonizing incident, that John might take the necessary steps to get better, either through medication or counseling or a combination of the two. Unfortunately, he flatly refused to do either. He told me that he would use cannabis, and cannabis only, to treat himself. While I would later see cannabis work what may be called medical miracles for some individuals, this would not be one of those cases.
John did, however, decide to take a leave from work, and with the recent records from the hospital, he was able to get on state disability.
The subsequent weeks and months were a never-ending soap opera; some were good, others not so much. I never knew when the dark days would strike or what would trigger them, but they always came. Most of the time John was able to hold it together at the store. The customers and staff seemed to keep him in check. Nonetheless, I was frequently apprehensive about his interactions with both. Would a staff member or a customer trigger him? If so, what would his response be? Compounded by and likely resulting from my apprehension, our interactions were often strained, and I’m sure anyone in the building could feel the tension. Some days, whatever demons he was battling seemed to overcome him, and he shut himself in the back office. I never knew what he would be like from one day to the next, and that strain took its toll.
His behavior at home was even more unpredictable and often volatile.
He smashed windows in our house, broke the sliding door, destroyed furniture, and burned our wedding photos. Maybe his violent outbursts saved him from ever laying a finger on me. Or maybe I just don’t know how close he came. It was terrifying, yet I never considered leaving him. At least not then.
After the rage would come the remorse. He would say he was sorry, that it would never happen again. He even begged me to leave him to spare myself from the hell he knew he put me through.
But I couldn’t leave. I loved him deeply. He was my friend, and it was devastating to watch him going through this. I wouldn’t give up on him.
My own emotions flayed and raw, my heart breaking, I took solace in the dogs, in the routine of caring for them and their unconditional love. Their whimsical personalities were balm to my soul. There were three of them by this point: my faithful yellow lab friend, Rawls, and two puppy brothers, Diesel and Boogie. In January 2009, John had met a guy outside a local grow shop who was looking for homes for the pups. He brought Diesel home that day. A couple of weeks later, Boogie joined him. Had I known what was to come, I doubt I would have thought adding two puppies to the mix was a great idea. That being said, I don’t know how well I would have survived without them. At twelve years old, Boogie is still with me today, now a sedate senior citizen and, as always, my rock-solid companion.
I also found refuge in the store, its demands and the cyclical daily operations offering a kind of stability and welcome distraction from the emotional turbulence I was experiencing personally.
Throughout all this, I still showed up at 530 Collective almost every day and managed this fledgling operation. It was open seven days a week, 363 days of the year, and although the store traffic was slow, someone had to be there to run it. Balancing the needs of the growing business and the moods of a volatile husband was all-consuming, yet I was determined that both would survive.
In November 2010, nine months after the incident with the shotgun, I placed a second 911 call.
John had locked me out of the house, and, looking through the windows, I could see an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a box of Tylenol PM, and the kitchen table scattered with shotgun shells. Our butcher knife was on the floor by the sliding door.
I couldn’t see John, and I couldn’t see the gun.
This time it was not a regular Shasta County Sheriff deputy who showed up but instead two SUVs from the Shasta Lake Sheriff substation; they were Captain Bartell’s guys.
The officers forced entry in flak jackets, their guns drawn. This time there was no discussion of my transporting John to Mercy Medical Center. They took him in on a 5150.
As they walked John past me, handcuffed on the way to the car, he looked at me with dead eyes and told me I was the worst thing that ever happened to him.
I never stopped hoping that John might change, that he might realize how much I loved him, how much I was there to support him, how much I wanted that to be enough.
But I was to learn that it would never be enough.
John was a bottomless pit of need that I could never fill. You never can love someone enough to make them better, to make them love you back, or to make them healthy. Love doesn’t work that way. In fact, that really isn’t love.
But I am stubborn and tenacious, and I don’t quit. I hung in there, determined to show him how much I cared. The ebb and flow of his unpredictable behavior became the vicious cycle around which our life revolved for the next year and a half.
I didn’t have a pattern of codependency in my past relationships, and I’ve never been one to stomach any amount of bullshit. So, what gives? Why did I suffer his appalling and toxic behavior? Because of my mom, of course.
John was resurrecting all those dormant emotions from my past, and I think the deep-down part of me hoped that if I could save John—if I could be enough, if I loved him enough—that would somehow ease the old hurt of not having been enough to save my mom.
My simple, child’s love had not been enough to make her stay, but maybe this time with John, my complex, adult love would be stronger. Maybe this time I would be enough; maybe saving him might somehow make up for losing her. I was caught in an emotional vise from which I could not escape.
I couldn’t give up; I had to try to save him.
Throughout 2011 and into 2012, 530 Collective saw rapid growth, with every month busier than the previous. I hired more staff, including a full-time manager; the operations expanded; and I launched both 530 Edibles and my staffing company in that time span. It seemed that the more successful the business was, the more things were falling apart at home. We were forced to be together during most of the working day. At home, we were increasingly distant with each other. The more I tried to reach John, the more he retreated. Night after night, we found ourselves sitting in the living room, each of us completely isolated, focused diligently on laying the mortar in our walls of resentment and hostility. I resented that he wouldn’t talk to me or to a therapist, that he wouldn’t take medication; he resented that I wouldn’t leave him alone, maybe even resented that I didn’t leave him, period.
Marriage is tough enough to begin with, but add a dollop of emotional instability to the mix and the situation becomes downright unlivable.
Yet live I needed to do. For me. Not being convinced that John would ultimately come to that same conclusion, I also had to keep going for the business. My brave face went on the moment I walked through 530 Collective’s doors every morning and stayed put until I got home at night. The business needed me; the staff needed me; the customers needed me. I could not count on John, but I knew I could count on myself. If I had ever needed affirmation of my own ability, of my own tenacity, this was it. The lessons learned through this tumultuous experience were many, but the one at the top was that I will do what needs to be done; I will see it through. Following that lesson closely was the one that I will never again go into business with someone with whom I am romantically involved. No way.
In the middle of 2012, after some shitty remark I cannot even remember, I had had enough, and I left John.
He responded by finding a psychologist—a good one this time—and he started to do the work.
He said all the right things: that he missed me; he was sorry; he was himself again.
So he said.
After six months apart, hoping against hope and against my better judgment, I went back.
This time things actually did improve on the surface. John kept his appointments with his psychologist, “Dr. Z.,” who is brilliant at what she does. I started to see her as well in 2012.
Dr. Z. is a literal lifesaver in every sense of the word, and she has helped me with both my professional and personal journey perhaps more than any other individual. While I started seeing her to work through the emotional pain John had inflicted, the ground we covered in session stretched well beyond. The scars that man left on my soul were fresh and raw, and they needed immediate attention. But, like most of us, I had older, well-hidden scars that needed attention as well.
Therapy is a journey of revelation, and it is also a journey of change. Often, we seek therapy as a result of some current crisis, as I did, and it is easy to point to that crisis, or sometimes another individual, as the cause of our turmoil. While this may be partially true, there is always more to it; there are always monsters in the deep, monsters that turn out to be our own reflection, a reflection of our fears, our past hurts.
Facing that reflection and coming to understand that it is in fact not a monster but an important part of who we are is therapy’s holy grail: becoming the best version of yourself. Dr. Z. and I are still in touch today; she is one of my heroes.
On the surface, John seemed to be himself again, much as he was when he and I met in 2008; not quite, but close enough that I started to remember what happiness felt like.
When I decided to open the store, I knew I was naive about business, but I wasn’t naive about the challenges that the decision would bring. I didn’t think it would be easy, and I knew that I’d have plenty of obstacles to overcome. However, I had not bargained for having to tackle all the challenges that go with business ownership in parallel with incredible personal upheaval.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is precisely that: That life happens in the middle of trying to run a business. Nothing happens in a silo. A million little distractions will worm their way into your landscape and disrupt your plan. Your job is to roll with it, to find refuge and solace in things that you love, and to stay the course. The undertaking of managing and running your own business is about managing your life as a whole. Your business and your life are interconnected—intertwined in a way that a mere “job” never is—and that is the very essence of what it means to be an entrepreneur.