Certainty means rules and when someone violates those rules, violate the norms, they violate predictability and are treated like a threat.

One of the biggest problems we encounter in life comes from people putting rules of law, of religion, or of cultural norms above the lives and interests of other people, and sometimes above their own.

One of the best and most foundational examples comes from Luke 10:25-37.

In the parable of The Good Samaritan, Jesus tells the story of two Priests who pass and beaten, bloodied, and unconscious man laying in the road. But much of the original meaning that the original audience understood, we do not catch because we come from a different time and place than the one that that original audience came from.

The two most important things are that 1) the two Priests did not want to touch a man who might be dead because touching a corpse would make them unclean and require that they isolate for a period of time to become clean again, which means that they would be prevented from performing their priestly duties.

And 2) that the man who had been beaten within an inch of his life was a Jewish man and the man who took care of him and nursed him back to health was a Samaritan. The Jewish people and the Samaritans were enemies.

In a modern American context, the story would be called something like The Good Immigrant or The Good Muslim. It is a story that showcases that most people are good. Specifically, most of the people we think are lesser are often better than those we consider to be elite.

And often we elevate our rules and laws above the lives of our neighbors. We want to dictate who they marry, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they can’t read, and force them to read what we read. We make our lifestyles the only one legally permissible. And we jail those who live or even exist differently.

We are often more like the priests who walk over the beaten man and less like the one Jesus praised who, at great cost to himself, nursed the beaten man back to health saving his life.

We feel entitled to the same forgiveness that we so often deny our neighbors. We feel entitled to the understanding we so often deny our neighbors. We feel entitled to the resources we don’t just deny our neighbors, but that we steal from them.

Usually, we stop at nothing to fight external evil and cozy up to and excuse the evil within us.

Evil is real. Evil can end a life, a nation, and a people. It is a universal enemy that the first human to exist, the last human to exist, and all of us in between those two have and have yet to fight against.

An everyday evil I saw recently was at work. I work as a delivery driver and while we were loading our trucks in the morning last week, my coworkers, including a manager, started talking about how mentally ill people should all be institutionalized, but then they decided we should all just be euthanized because we are, to quote them directly, “mentally defective.”

These are the people I work and live with.

They mock the ill and infirmed. How Christlike.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

To pull from pop culture, the vampires in the movie Sinners have to steal the life force, the blood and the music, of the people at the juke joint because they cannot create what they need. They can only twist, distort, and make a mockery of the life they need to survive.

Artists like Van Gough, writers like Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, musicians like Kurt Cobain and Chapter Bennington, and other celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams were haunted by the specter of mental illness.

So, imagine if you could only engage with artists and celebrities that were or are neurotypical. How much beauty, insight, and imagination would you be losing out on?

There are those who say that mental illness is a recent advent of wokeism, and that in the past everyone was neurotypical, which is how we got an eight volume encyclopedia on ferns.

This famous 8-volume encyclopedia on ferns is Ferns: British and Exotic written by botanist Edward Joseph Lowe, which was published between 1856 and 1860.

Neurodivergence is not new and neither is being bullied.

Once as a 12-year-old, I was overthinking about a horrifying act of bullying I saw at school: a kid being mocked, thrown through a window, and the laughed at as he tried to pick himself up off the floor as he kept slipping in his own blood.

I came up with all sorts of theories on what motivates bullies like that.

My Stepdad said I was overthinking it. That the reason that bully did what he did was the same reason a dog licks his testicles: because he can. And because they lack empathy. They don’t care. And they think that lack of emotion is a strength, but it is not. It’s a weakness.

And there need not be some great super intelligent, malevolent person behind every evil act. It is usually not. Usually the answer is a lack of empathy.

Like Charles Blow once said, “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.”

In WWII, one soldier looked true evil in the eye and didn’t flinch, he saw through it to the horrifying truth, that the greatest evil was as mundane as a simple accountant doing paperwork.

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

—Captain G. M. Gilbert, the United States Army psychologist assigned to watch the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

In Tolkien’s writing, he focuses on the battle between light and dark, good against evil.

In one scene, Samwise fights a giant spider to protect his friend Frodo using an ancient source of light.

But Shelob is more than just another monster.

She’s the offspring of Ungoliant, the being who murdered the Two Trees (Telperion and Laurelin) as she drained them dry as she consumed their light. Meaning that when Shelob squares up against Sam, she’s fighting the same light that her mother once consumed.

But in the end, that night, that same light took her life.

But here’s the part that matters— that light ignited warfare, betrayals, and spilled oceans of blood because the most powerful in the land wanted to control who benefited from it and prevent it from benefiting those they felt were beneath the elite. Until that same light was freely given by Galadriel to Sam, not to dominate, but to protect.

It is a Chef’s kiss resolution. What once burned kingdoms to ash eventually empowered the most insignificant creature, a hobbit, to stand against the most sinister of evils. And allowed him to be victorious and save the same world that that same exact power was once used to try to destroy.

More than an episode about a great evil versus an insignificant creature, it’s the completion of the whole saga of Middle-Earth resolved in one moment.

And that’s what I love about The Parable of The Good Samaritan—It’s a story about how Earth shaking a simple act of kindness and mercy can be.

J.R.R. Tolkien has a common thread in his work best said by Gandalf, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

If Captain Gilbert saw that the greatest evil in recorded history was carried out by bankers, farmers, and humble landlords, then so too can the greatest good be done by the most insignificant people in the most seemingly mundane circumstances.

Remember that when it comes to being good or being evil, that if it’s humanly possible, that means you can do it, too.

You can be capable of the greatest evils humanly possible. But that means you are also every bit as capable of performing the greatest good humanly possible.

This should be both inspirational and cautionary.

Because this knowledge proves that the reason we should be more understanding of those who miss the mark and sin as much as it serves as a warning to not deify those who are deemed more righteous than most.

Most of us agree on that point once we realize it, but we disagree on how to achieve that.

DMV lady tells me to take off my beanie and glasses, look at the camera, and then she took my picture.

Then she said, “Here you go. Wait...” And I asked “What’s wrong?”

She said “Do you wanna retake your picture?” I said “No, why? What’s wrong?”

She said “Nothings wrong. You just look mad.”

I said “I am mad.”

She said “Yeah, but you don’t want to look mad for 5 years.”

I said “I will still be mad in 5 years.”

Emotional regulation is hard when you have emotional disregulation, but it’s not impossible.

And if it’s humanly possible, that means you can do it too according to Marcus Aurelius.

Emotional tears occur when a threshold is exceeded. And when you have a severe mental illness or neurodivergence, your emotions are more intense than what the normies experience.

And because that intensity is something they do not personally experience, the are more likely to underestimate your experience.

Stress hormones surge initially after an insult, a verbal or physical attack, or upon hearing bad news. But it only surges for 90 seconds.

After 90 seconds, you can better respond to a crisis or stressful situation. Take two deep breaths to switch the parasympathetic nervous system which allows you to control your emotions instead of allowing them to control you.

Life is full of problems. That cannot be avoided. But you can choose to see or to look for solutions instead of catastrophizing.

I catastrophized a lot, but strangely I was selective about it. The major crises I handled well. But the little things killed me.

Anton Chekhov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

My wife and I saw a marriage counselor in 2013 when we were seriously considering divorce. That counselor said that most couples can handle any crisis, but it’s what we consider the little things that are actually the biggest things.

People think that the little things are meaningless, but there is no such thing as a little thing. They are the most consequential things because they represent consistentcy.

And little things going wrong can lead to resentment in any type of relationship. And once resentment takes hold, it’s almost impossible to let that go. It is the death nail in any type of relationship. No matter how strong a relationship is, no relationship can survive resentment.

And some people resent life or God or the Fates. They settle into a misery that can never leave them.

It’s important to regulate all of your emotions because if you don’t, they will regulate you. And the longer you allow that, the harder it is to correct.

Only a few months after my wife and I got married, we were strapped for cash. So I took out a payday loan.

The terms were that I would pay it off $70 per paycheck until it was paid off. But my next payday they took $70 plus the full amount of the loan. It is illegal, but these companies just pay a fine and continue to break the law because it’s more profitable to pay the fines than follow the law. And they have better lawyers than I could afford.

So even though it was payday, I was flat broke. I couldn’t afford rent, my car payment, or my car insurance, or even the gas money I needed to get to work.

I was despondent. And in my emotional and mental turmoil, I blamed my wife. We fought. We yelled. We screamed.

And I yelled, “I never had these problems before I met you. This is all your fault.”

And I grabbed my jacket and stormed off. She didn’t think I just stormed off. She thought I left her for good because I didn’t say when I’d be back or where I was going.

Our marriage counselor said that as a ground rule, both of us had to tell the other where we were going and when we would be back. And that we couldn’t disappear for more than two hours.

We established a list of these ground rules in 2013. And from then until now we still abide by these ground rules. It is a big part of why our marriage has lasted for all these years.

It was incorrect to blame my wife for the financial problems we had then. It is more accurate to say that the reason I never had those problems was because I never had that level of responsibility before. Even if it had been true, blame avoids responsibility and may feel righteous but it is always harmful but is never helpful.

Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Through practices like meditation and stimulating the vangus nerve or activating the parasympathetic nervous system by using the psychological sigh.

To do that take a breath, and then as your lungs fill up, take another full breath and fill your lungs to capacity. Then exhale until your lungs empty and hold that emptiness for a few seconds. Repeat until you feel your body relax, your pulse slow, and your blood pressure fall.

There are a multitude of ways to stimulate your vangus nerve and turn on your parasympathetic nervous system. Try out all of them until you find the combination that works for you.

I learned to do that so that I can face a crisis without blaming and hurting those I love most. I kept surviving what I thought I couldn’t until I felt like I could find a solution even when I had no idea what that was.

I learned to look for solutions instead of falling into a victim mentality and wallowing in my fear and sorrow.

Whenever a crisis found me and I started to spiral, my wife will say, “Breathe. Get out of your head,” so often than I started telling myself that even when she wasn’t around me.

I would pause and breathe at work, while driving, and when any crisis arose.

I still do that.

I designed a tattoo. I got it done today. It is a schwa wrapped in a laurel leaf wreath. Because it is my goal to be like the schwa because it’s never stressed.

I still go through crises. Sometimes it’s external. Sometimes it’s internal. But I take two deep breaths and one long exhale. Then I look at my options. I look for solutions. I do not catastrophize as bad as I used to.

I have survived what I “knew” would end me. I have survived 100% of the crises I have ever faced. If I were a professional boxer with that many consecutive victories, I’d be a legend.

And if a thing is humanly possible, that means that you can do it too.

And thus far, you have survived everything that almost ended you.

That means you have done it too.

So, keep up that good work, the hard work, the work that seemed impossible until you actually accomplished what you “knew” was impossible.

And recognize that you are a legend too.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-right-mindset/202004/the-90-second-rule-builds-self-control

Print, Radio, and Televised media devoid of any real depth.

Avoidance of difficult subjects, topics that evaded discomfort and steered toward the light and fluffy and comforting like intellectual junk food.

As well as self-medicating with increasingly self-absorbed lifestyles. Alienation diminished empathy leading to increasingly horrific acts, speech, and behavior.

This divide we see in modern American society and politics demonstrates this same process unfolding before our eyes. It didn’t start with the last election cycle. It didn’t start in the last ten years. It started in the last century.

And it will continue unless and until we stop it ourselves.

The only way we can stop it in its tracks is to have difficult conversations. We have to face these issues head on. We have to square with ideas, emotions, and people we do not like.

We have to have the intelligence to entertain ideas without subscribing to them. We have to disagree, but talk it out until we see solutions instead of problems. Clear paths instead of obstacles.

The biggest lie I and my generation were sold was the idea that we should never discuss religion or politics.

That philosophy led to us avoiding unpleasant conversations. We did not learn to develop healthy conflict resolution. We left everything and everyone that didn’t serve us. Leading to isolation, alienation, and leaving us drowning in our own echo chambers.

It lead to us seeing people as walking billboards who we size up in an instant based on what their shirt or hat says. We divide parties like sports teams. We demonize the other side for what we celebrate our team for doing. We just want to win. We want to defeat the other side. But we are the other side.

If some Americans lose, all Americans lose. Depriving the voting rights, the medical rights, and the freedom to not be incarcerated for mediocre and mundane offenses cannot be done without those you love, those on your side, losing too.

Without nuance and depth, you cannot have empathy. Without empathy you can not have humane treatment for all. Like Dr. King said, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

All of the crimes against humanity over the last few years, few decades, or few centuries boils down to a refusal to see certain groups of people, certain races, certain nationalities, certain sexual orientations as being less human, less deserving of rights.

If you scratch below the surface of these crimes against humanity, these atrocities, you will see is the idea that some lives matter less. That idea has been the root of almost all human evils.

If we see a person or a child as less than human then we excuse them starving, dying of an easily preventable illness, losing their freedom, and ultimately losing their life.

The only antidote to hate or indifference is empathy.

As Dr. King said, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

And Lincoln said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

If we refuse to have these hard conversations, we allow this infection to spread. And without the antidote, the infection will be fatal to us all.

But a rededication of those ideals is coming.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha will save our society. They will not do so by destroying the current one. They will build a new one that makes the previous one obsolete.

They are hands down both the kindest and most well-informed generation in generations. They know our laws. They know our history.

And they are no longer accepting the things they cannot change. They are changing the things they cannot accept.

And what they build will reflect that. And it will not be one election cycle that bears this out. It will be a permanent departure from what we currently recognize as the norm.

In NYC, the Mayor has proven that the shortcomings of our system was never about our lack of money, but our lack of backbone. The problems we face are the result of misguided priorities.

We can provide access to healthcare. We can provide access to education at all levels from pre K to college. And society will benefit, all of society because as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

If we see each others humanity, then we cannot deny them the dignity that we all deserve. Even if they look different, pray different, sound different, and love in a way we can’t quite understand.

Dr. King said that, “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.”

We may sink. We may swim. But we will share the same fate. Whatever we do, we do together.

And when we share our stories, some want those books banned. Some want to prevent the spread of ideas that contradict their belief system. Some want to ban people whose very identity disproves their belief system.

This happens when a person confuses their ideas, their beliefs, as their identity. Then they feel persecuted when contradicted. They feel a very real and visceral attack.

Raging against a person whose existence you disagree with is like going out into your front yard and yelling at the clouds. The cloud exists with or without your approval. You sound foolish.

But Gen Z can access every book ever written. You can try to control what they see, hear, and read. But in the age of information, ignorance is a choice. And Gen Z is not making that choice.

That is how they are building their own belief system, building a society out, and taking to the voting booths, and finding themselves on the ballot, and in office.

There was an article from a cable news website awhile back and the headline was, “Should There Be More Gen Z Candidates?”

But based on my understanding of linear time, I’d be fascinated to hear what the alternative is.

This generation is having the hard conversations. They fact check each other in real time. The know how to research.

They have more knowledge because they have better access than any generation in history has had.

They value uncomfortable truths over comforting lies.

And since knowledge is power, they are, and will continue to be, the most powerful and consequential generation since the founding of our democracy.

The “Greatest Generation” that won World War II and created the largest middle class in history saved our democracy in the mid 20th Century.

And Gen Z is poised, and equipped, to accomplish as much or more.

The sexiest thing a man can do is exactly what he says he’s gonna do. Nice guys are often wishy-washy where assholes deliver on the promises they do make.

And when men accuse women of being hypocrites for falling for assholes who aren’t as nice as women say they want a man to be, it’s not hypocritical. It’s that with an asshole you know exactly where you stand and they deliver exactly what they say they will.

And that is what being a “real man” is really all about. It is not about dominance and posturing. It is about protection and delivering exactly what you promise. It means keeping your word even at, and especially at, severe cost to you.

It’s about doing right because right is right. It is not because you are chasing reward or fleeing punishment.

There is definitely comfort and security in predictability.

But there is also an opposite thing that men do, which is lie to women to get what they want and then the asshole, and often the monster, comes out after they’re hooked.

This is one reason women may prefer to find a random bear in the woods rather than a random man.

Most men will say that we don’t know another man that, in someway, has abused women. But every woman, every single one, has been abused or harassed by a man. Just because you haven’t seen that side of a man does not mean some woman at some point hasn’t.

I say that to point out that being a real man means being selfless, even at great cost. While being a poser of a man means being selfish.

I may have fallen for the hypermasculine caracature because I am flawed. I may have fallen for it because society immersed me in it all my life. It is hard to pinpoint every bit as much as it is to change. But change I must. Change it must.

Tyler Durden was not then, and is not now, the hero. He is not the villain per say, he is a warning of what we become, and what happens to us all, when each would be man succumbs to that caracature.

Tyler Durden is a cult leader. And so are the influencers of the manosphere. They are selling you a snake oil cure for a world that no longer exists if it ever even did.

If you pack on 30 lbs of muscle over the course of a year, do you know what kind of people will talk to you about your body the most?

Other supposedly straight men. They will want to know about your work routine and your diet.

A big part of that is because this is how so many men are used to socializing with other men. They don’t talk about things honestly.

The are used to preening and posing. They claim they don’t give a fuck about anything because they have the emotional bandwidth of a gnat.

They cannot handle the responsibility of managing grown up emotions and so they numb themselves. But you can selectively numb themselves. It is all or nothing.

But emotions never die. They are buried alive. They will comeback again and again in increasingly uglier and unhealthy ways until they are addressed adequately.

One reason the manoshpere types are homophobic is because they feel romantic or sexual intimacy with another man is a threat to their masculinity. They feel that it’s a matter of weakness to be intimate romantically or sexually with another man.

Which is wild to me because the way I understand it, taking every inch of a nine and a half inch penis ain’t for the faint of heart. OK? That shit hurts. Especially in the ass.

And all I’m just saying is that it takes a whole lot more strength, pain endurance emotionally and physically, and the self-respect and self-understanding to make peace with being a part of an internationally marginalized people.

It takes a herculean feat of strength to love a person who so many people hate, mock, and misrepresent, especially when that person is you. To understand yourself instead of internalizing that hate, misrepresentation, and mockery is the battle for your soul and psyche.

The views of these manosphere influencers are common. Their views are also lies. And lies are all the cult leaders in the manosphere have at their disposal. The truth is seldom clickbaity enough for them.

And the manosphere caricature of masculinity recoils in horror at the nuts and bolts of therapy. They jeer and mock those who seek professional help with their mental health. They mock those of us who have a severe mental illness or really any type of neurodivergence as being the reason we must “thin the herd.”

Cable News Pundits say we all should be rounded up an institutionalized, lobotomized, or euthanized. Because spending less money to provide humane treatment that results in better health outcomes is apparently asking for too much.

But anxiety, depression, and PTSD are the most common mental illnesses in America. And no one, no race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is immune. Some groups suffer more. Some suffer less. But all groups suffer because we are all human.

If you deny your own suffering, you can only deny for so long until reality forces you to deal with it. The antidote to a lie is the truth. And the key to truth is acceptance. Until you accept, you cannot act. And nothing changes without action.

The main lie of the manosphere is that young men should not have to change. They should only become a more extreme and dominating version of themselves.

They don’t want to be adults, they don’t want to be responsible, they want to be eternally teenage boys living in Never Never Land.

Not responsible to anyone else. Providing no protection for anything other than their wallet, their ego, and their sex lives.

They don’t really want to be real men. They want to be a cartoon version of what they think an “alpha male” is.

And the idea of an alpha male came to us from David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

He later retracted his view when he and other scientists realized there are no alpha males competing for rank in wild wolf packs. There are only a mother and father leading their families.

So even the scientist responsible for the term “alpha male” said the concept is horseshit.

And the “alpha’s” online who believe in a debunked theory because it is the balm they need for their bruised ego have to have shit for brains to believe in that debunked theory.

Respect is earned. If you want respect from someone, you have to earn their respect. You are not entitled to it because you bench more than they do or your salary is higher.

If you want to be a real man, keep your word. Do what you say you will. Don’t do what you say you won’t. Your word is your currency. Spend it wisely.

No cell in your body is older than about 7 years. Your body is in a constant state of regeneration. So, if you haven’t seen someone for 7 years or more, when you do meet them again, the body you are seeing is, at the cellular level, a completely different body.

The memories you have of them are not original. They are copied from cells that have died.

It is our memory, not our bodies or even our brains that make us, us. But our memories are malleable, they are ever changing. Sometimes the change is subtle. Sometimes the change is dramatic. But it always changes.

Maybe that is what allows us to change our minds, and our personalities, too.

Change is inevitable. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is catastrophic.

Even when we have something recorded, written down in 500 BCE, when we read it in 2026, we interpret it differently than the people who wrote it down to begin with.

And yet the written version of language is the single greatest invention, technology, we as a species have created. It is what allows us to learn from the past, from our predecessors, from our ancestors.

Carl Sagan spoke about this idea saying, “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.”

One day getting to say I’m a professional writer is gonna be cool and all, but getting to say I am a sorcerer of the ancient arts sounds way cooler.

Writing is a lot of things, but fundamentally it is the first way we came up with to record our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and ultimately our memories.

Writing allows us to pass on our memories and our accumulated information to others.

But if you think of Stephen King’s first novel Carrie versus one of his more recent novels like Holly, his style changed. His sensibilities changed.

Those things changed because he changed over the course of his long life. His life experience changed him as a person, which changed him as a writer.

That is why, if you read Carrie, and then you read Holly, the writing may feel like they were written by two completely different people. Because, in a sense, they were.

And if you were to read anything I wrote in 2006 and then this very essay, the writing would feel like it came from two different people. Because, in a sense, they did.

That is about the only thing my writing shares with Stephen King’s, clearly.

The events of my life since 2006 have changed me. Like Heraclitus once wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

And since hindsight is 20/20, I look back and fondly remember some of the things I said, wrote, and did while also cringing and hating the memories of other things I said, wrote, and did.

My mind plays a highlight reel in my mind every night as I lay down to sleep. Like the time I was out with friends and the waiter asked if I wanted more parmesan and I said, “Sure, I’m not driving.” And no one laughed but me.

And as another example, I feel stupid for believing some of the delusions I fell for.

Thinking the government was monitoring me or believing that the voices I heard were actually other people’s thoughts.

Falling for biased journalism or deferring my own critical thinking to an authority figure or just those I thought were smarter than I was.

Some of my beliefs were laughably inaccurate. Some were charitable. Others were ugly. Most all of it I discarded. My detractors call it flip-flopping. And at times it was. But it was also a form of growth.

I love researching and reading philosophy, theology, and history. Reading widely has allowed me to try on different world views like a stack of clothes in the dressing room of a clothing store. I like to try them on and see how they feel, how they fit, and what the cost/benefit of them is.

I have a friend I’ve known since our freshman year of high school in 1994 named Prudence. She says she has always loved my sense of humor. She says I’ve always had a witty sense of humor and appreciates my back and forth banter. She says I’m hilarious.

Of all the personality traits I have held to into middle-age, that is one of my favorites, and one of my friends favorite things about me.

Most of my life I have been known as the funny one in all of my friend groups. Once in high school, Prudence talked about how her coworker was the funniest person she ever met. I was so mad I didn’t talk to her for 3 whole days. Which in teenage time is, like, 10 years.

I have always prided myself on my sense of humor. But even my sense of humor has changed. What I found to be funny at 27 seems stupid, reprehensible, or just unhinged to me at 47.

Looking back at my life, I see different versions of me that were all, in some sense, me and in some sense completely different people.

I wish I could sit down with 12 year old me, or 23 year old me, or 31 year old me and talk some sense into them.

Tell them that the dumb shit they were doing and saying was not stupid, because they were not stupid, they were smart, which means that stupid shit was not stupid, it was reckless, which is worse.

And that with a few minor tweaks or a few major adjustments, they could have better lives and be better versions of me.

Those versions of me no longer exist. But my mind is haunted by the ghosts of them. I still hear their footsteps. I still catch a glimpse of them here and there. I see them in old photos from time to time.

Those things sometimes make me proud. Sometimes they make me ashamed. Other times they are just fucking confusing. I made a lot of reckless decisions. I also made plenty of baffling decisions. Much of the time I was indecisive. My indecision resulted in some of the most harsh and typically preventable consequences.

The things I am most ashamed of, the things I am most mad at younger self over, were the myriad of incidents of indecision.

That and a million more gripes I have about younger self is why if 47 year old me were to meet 27 year old me, I would kick my own ass.

On a Friday at the beginning of September in 1986, my 2nd Grade teacher wheeled in a TV and VCR on an AV cart into our classroom. She said we would be watching an educational TV Show about reading every Friday for the rest of the year.

The show was Reading Rainbow. The host was LaVar Burton. I was too young to remember his role as Kunta Kinte in the TV Miniseries Roots. But once he was onscreen, he told us a story. But he stopped before he got to the end of it and told us we should read it ourselves.

I ran straight to the one bookstore in town on my way home from school and I found the book. I don’t remember the price, but I remember asking my mom for it when I got home. She told me she couldn’t afford it until she got paid the following week.

But by that time, I wanted the book featured in that Friday’s episode. My mom said that I should go to the library and check these books out. She said they were free, but that I would have to return them in a couple of weeks. I could only read them. I couldn’t keep them. I said, “I don’t need to keep them because once I read them, they’ll be with me forever!” My mom laughed pretty hard at that.

I walked for what felt like forever to the library. I asked the librarian if I could check out books. She said I could, but that I need a library card. She gave me a form that I had to have my mom sign. I ran back home, my mom signed it, I ran back and got my card. But the library didn’t have the book I wanted. The librarian said they could request it, but that they may not get it and if they did it could still take weeks to get.

I felt defeated. But the librarian recommended three books that were similar. So, I got those.

My mom read to me as a kid. My grandma did too. I liked reading, but now I loved reading.

But I was still frustrated with never knowing how these stories LaVar read me ended. I could never find those books at the library and I couldn’t afford to buy them every week at the bookstore.

I sat at my desk one week before Halloween watching that Friday’s episode and then got an idea. I would write out the story as LaVar read it as best I could. Then, because I have always had a pathological need for closure, I would just make up my down ending. By the end of the school year, I had a composition notebook full of stories that were half copied with an original ending.

Then, in the summer of 1987, I wrote my first original story from start to finish. And something changed for me. I could write whatever I wanted. I could rewrite bad things that happened to me with the ending I wanted instead of the real ending I got. I could right wrongs. I could create stories that I could live in, stories I wanted to live in instead of the story I was living in.

I had control. But more than that, I had total freedom. Anything I could think I could write. I could write about sailing around the world. I could write about going to all the places I wanted to visit, all the places I wished I could go back to. I could visit friends who had moved away or friends who had passed away. Mostly, I started writing the kinds of stories I wanted to read, but so rarely found.

Being a regular at the library, I discovered books by Stephen King. I discovered the series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Those were my favorites.

Then as the new school year started, I found myself in another state. I was in a new school. I didn’t know anyone. I was bullied. I retreated into books and my own stories in my ever growing stack of composition notebooks.

And then I tuned into a new Star Trek Series. Star Trek: The Next Generation. And LaVar Burton was in it! He had something over his eyes that I didn’t recognize. In the show they explained that he was born blind and his visor helped him see. And in that first season, he was the helmsman. My dad told me that meant he was piloting the Starship. I thought a blindman piloting The Enterprise was beautiful.

Over the course of the show Lavar’s character, Geordi La Forge, saved the day by being able to see things no one else could, not despite his disability, but because of it. His character turned his disability into a superpower.

And LaVar continued to Host Reading Rainbow. He even showed up on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

Mr. Rogers show was mostly in his house. But there was a separate area that was The Land of Make Believe. There were characters, puppets, that could only be found there. Having a place where anything could happen was intriguing to me. In books anything could happen. In my stories anything could happen. I was stuck in my neighborhood, but with books, I could go anywhere.

I couldn’t watch TV and movies late at night, but I could still read. And from LaVar Burton, Mr. Rogers, and Bob Ross I learned that being a man was about more than force, violence, and domination. It was also about creation and leadership.

I learned that being kind was more important than winning a contest or an argument. Being smart was about more than being right, it was about being curious. Like Voltaire saying that one should not judge a man’s intelligence by his answers, but by his questions.

I learned that no matter how much smarter you think you are than someone else, they still know something you don’t. And if you learn what they know, you will become smarter than you were before. I learned how to listen, really listen, to others. Instead of listening and just waiting to respond, listening allowed me to learn what I didn’t know before. And that if I just talk, then I am just repeating, rehearsing, what I already know.

It’s amazing what you can learn when you assume what others know has value instead of assuming others have nothing of value. Listening and responding to understand instead of talking to win a debate or argument is better, it can be life changing if you allow it to be.

I learned that learning through nonfiction is learning through information. And learning through fiction is learning through imagination. And the value of what you learn depends on what you are applying it to. If you are taking a science test or a history test, what you learned through information is what will have value. If you are taking a language arts class, an art class, then what you learned through imagination will have more value.

I also discovered that the mind works better when it is challenged.

Because of the influence of educators in my life like my grandma, my mom, and even actors or the characters they played, I learned to love reading.

And when I learned to love reading, I learned to love writing. I only became good at writing because I kept writing even when what I wrote was no good, when it was trash.

After enough time doing it, it got better. I got better. But knowing what advice to take and what advice to disregard is crucial.

I took advice on being an artist from actors like LaVar Burton.

Some of the best advice came from musicians like David Bowie when he said, “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

So, in all areas of life, when I feel I am out of my depth, I know something exciting is about to happen.

My great-grandfather was an addict and alcoholic. My great-grandmother had to show up at his work at the exact time he got paid at the end of every week to get enough money to pay rent, buy food, and just to live. Because if she didn’t, he would spend every last cent on booze and drugs.

My grandpa was a teetotaller. He never drank. He never smoked. He was never involved with any woman other than my grandma. He served in the Marine Corps in World War II. He worked the same job until he retired. He was the most dependable person I have ever known. He was the polar opposite of his father.

My dad got into drugs and drinking in his teens. He was a lot like his grandpa in that regard. But despite his short comings and failures, he kept trying to be more like his dad than his grandpa.

Part of the reason he succeeded is that by his late 20s, he was getting treatment, therapy, and meds. It’s never not amazing how well a person can do when they get their needs met.

Maybe my great-grandfather would have been healthier, a better dad, and a better husband if his needs were met. But in the 1920s he had no other options than to self-medicate. Back then medications were in short supply, but lobotomies were plentiful.

I grew up around drugs and alcohol. It was so prevalent that I thought everyone used them. And then everyone in my neighborhood, in my school, and at church knew my dad smoked, drank, and did drugs. He was ostracized by many in our neighborhood. I was ostracized for doing nothing more wrong than simply being his son.

Their was a hierarchy and we were at the bottom.

I started drinking in high school. I started smoking cigarettes then too and by the end of high school I was smoking daily.

These were bad habits, but the worst of it was not drinking and smoking, it was not having enough healthy examples of healthy relationships. Not just romantic or sexual, but platonic, familial, or parental.

I didn’t learn how to display emotion in a healthy way. I had to swallow every negative emotion or reaction to avoid upsetting the adults in my life growing up.

Because when I would display and emotion or reaction these adults couldn’t handle, like telling them I was upset about something or someone, even if it wasn’t to do with them, I would have to manage their emotions for them and my own emotions on top of that.

So I got no relief with the added burden of managing their emotions for them because they couldn’t manage them on their own.

They taught me how to manage my emotions on my own yet never learned how to do the same themselves.

Still don’t all these years later.

They taught me to swallow these emotions rather than process and address them in a healthy way.

And I kept swallowing these emotions my whole childhood until adulthood when I swallowed 112 sleeping pills and drank a bottle of spiced rum.

In 2005, when I was 25, I was diagnosed and because I had a diagnosis I got meds and some therapy, but not much because I couldn’t afford it.

In 2016, I got better, and more frequent, therapy and meds. I got through school while working a full-time job. Once my needs were met, I did more than most of the people I knew thought I could and a hell of a lot more than I thought I could.

For my step kids, I broke a lot of the cycles of abuse and addiction that were passed on to me as a kid. But not enough for my part. But my step kids are more intelligent than I was then, or am now. They broke more of these cycles themselves than I was able to for them.

Kids, as every parent knows, do not listen to what you say. They pay attention to what you do. And the first few years of my marriage, I was a mess. I couldn’t hold a job. I couldn’t manage my emotions in a healthy way. I couldn’t model healthy emotions or relationships for my step kids.

But when I got therapy and better meds, I started to.

The best thing I did to show my step kids what treatment and behavior to accept from men, the way a man should act, was by being a better husband.

Through monthly therapy sessions, I learned that if I want a better marriage, I need to be a better husband. If I wanted a better friendship, I needed to be a better friend.

And there were those I just couldn’t win with. I had friends who made me feel alone when in their company. They mocked my writing, what I wrote about, and how I wrote it. Them seeing or finding my writing was dangerous.

Sigmund Freud said, “Before you diagnose yourself, first make sure you are not surrounded by assholes.”

I had a diagnosis and had several assholes in my life. Once treatment began to produce healthy results, I cut those assholes out of my life like the precancerous polyps they were.

Because if left unchecked, relationships like that will kill you.

They nearly did me.

Once my mental health improved, I was a better husband, a better friend, and a better example for my step kids.

I had been so used to trying to manage my mental and emotional health that I lost sight of the crucial importance of community.

I moved all over the country growing up. From Kindergarten through my senior year of high school I went to 8 different schools.

I either lost track of my old friends and never saw them again or I did meet up with them again, but they moved on with their lives and they didn’t really have a place for me in them anymore.

But a friend I had in the 5th and 6th grade named Clive. I lost track of him after that due to my incessant moves, but in 2010 when I got on Facebook, I found his profile and sent him a message.

He didn’t respond.

It sucked. I felt like maybe I made more of our friendship than there really was. It was hard, but I just kept living my life and found community in the congregation of a new church my wife and I found in 2015.

These people were great, still are. I didn’t have to mask or incessantly apologize for being weird. They didn’t just tolerate me being weird, they celebrated me for it, still do.

We always stayed longer after the official service talking than we spent going through the actual service. We talked daily. I had great friends and a whole social life that I had never experienced in my entire life, or at least outside of my time in the Army.

And this social life is still going strong 11 years later.

But by the summer of 2015, I had a smart phone. So now Facebook was an app that sent me notifications and messages instantly instead of not being aware of all that until I logged in on my laptop.

To my great joy, one of the greatest in my life, one fine summer’s day in 2015, as I was outside smoking and walking because I can’t sit still unless I’m sleeping, I got a message.

I opened it to find that Clive had messaged me back. He had lost his marriage, his career, his house and so much more and had not checked his Facebook in years. Once he did, he found my message and responded.

I took my time and wrote him back. Then he gave me his number. I called immediately. We talked for hours. He visited my apartment. We got food. We got drinks. We fell right back in to being best friends all over again.

Then a few years later, Clive invited my wife and I to a party. I met a couple dozen new friends. Also a group that celebrates my particular brand of weird rather than merely tolerating it.

With my church friends, with Clive’s group, I have a large community of people I don’t have to mask with. That’s important because masking is the most exhausting thing I have to do. Maybe the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done.

Many hands make light work. It takes a village to manage my mental health. The scariest thing I have ever done is the strongest thing I’ve ever done, which is ask for help. We need others. We are social creatures. We need companionship and community every bit as much as we need food and water. Going without is as adverse to your healthy as smoking is.

But in order to find my community, I had to be brave enough to drop the mask. It didn’t always work out. But when it did it has made a life changing positive difference.

John Lennon said, “Being yourself won’t get you a lot of friends, but it’ll get you the right ones.”

And he was right. I got rid of the wrong friends and now I have the right ones. Dozens of them.

See, I learned that when people didn’t like me, it wasn’t really me they disliked. It was my mask they didn’t like. Sometimes when they did like me, it wasn’t really me. It was my mask they liked. The only way I can possibly know if someone likes me is if I let them see me instead of my mask.

Everyone has their critics, their detractors, but not everyone has their cheerleaders. And when I do a nerdrant, infodump about writing, Clive will simply say, “Your expertise is showing.”

He says that to remind me that I am good at something. I am better than most. He is biased. But if people can be biased against you and have a point, why can’t someone be biased in your favor and be just as accurate?

There is a proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.”

And my people have taken me further than I have ever gone during all my travels from one coast to the other and to Hawaii and to Japan.

And I don’t know how much further we can go.

But it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.

In the meeting, my doctor gave me the diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. I was 25 years old and felt like my life was already over. I was put on medications I couldn’t remember or pronounce.

I am 6’3 and at the time I weighed 122 lbs. I was as unhealthy physically as I was mentally.

My doctor told me that it is perfectly normal, healthy even, to go through the five stages of grief.

She said getting a diagnosis can cause me to grieve losing the life I thought I would have.

And said it is natural to fight against my illness as if it were an external enemy rather than just the way my brain was wired.

Wired in terms of my mind’s nature or the way it was nurtured, the way I was abused.

I thought I knew what mental illness was like, how it worked, how it affects people, how it debilitates people who have one, and how medication and therapy worked.

I thought I knew, really knew all of that, all there was to know. I was certain of my knowledge. Right up until mental illness happened to me. And I realized that I knew next to nothing.

I knew a lot of facts, but I had no idea what was happening to me. Everything I experienced was so alien to me that I was terrified of what my life, my mind, would become.

But this grief over losing the life I had imagined passed quickly. When I woke up the next morning, I decided that I wasn’t really mentally ill.

I was certain that it was just a plot by the government to certify me as mentally ill so that no one would believe anything I had to say.

I even went so far as to deny my family history by telling my doctor that my dad was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but that since he was the only ill person in my family that it was just a coincidence that I was diagnosed myself.

It sounds stupid to everyone who hears this, but it’s not stupid, it’s achingly human. I was on stage one of the five stages of grief.

The next step was anger.

I use fire as a metaphor for mental illness because I burned bright and hot for years, but my mind was the fuel source.

When a person goes through a manic episode, the brain burns through its natural fuel and when that is depleted, it starts feeding on itself. It can cause permanent cognitive deficits. I seem to have mostly avoided that.

Mostly.

I didn’t take out my anger verbally. I didn’t break things or destroy property. I didn’t get into arguments or fistfights.

I wrote instead.

I unloaded vicious and vile attacks on anyone or anything that my frayed mind focused on. Some were for petty reasons. All were inconsequential. Because they were just words rather than actions.

It was all just me trying to purge the anger and hate. The demon was in me. The demon was me.

I rolled through various targets and the more I raged, the more raged there was to purge.

Because the more I gave into the rage, the more rage I created.

At a certain point, I stopped watching and reading all news. I read books instead. History, medical, fantasy, sci fi, and philosophy especially. And my rage dissipated, slowly but steadily.

I learned that Stoic philosophy and Viktor Frankl’s Logos therapy were huge influences on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And I found CBT to be one of the only therapies I found beneficial.

The anger phase lasted for several years. And even as I started getting past it around 2009, as soon as things didn’t go my way, in ways big or small, it returned with a vengeance.

These five stages weren’t linear for me. I went from stage one to two to three, back to two, and then to four, it felt a lot like one step forward and two steps back.

By 2010 I was in the hospital again.

And I received a new diagnosis: Schizoaffective disorder.

At this point, I was in the bargaining stage.

My doctor told me I was a talented writer and that I was too smart not to go to college to pursue writing.

I thought OK, even if this is all I’m good at, I am still good at something. But I was too broke to afford school and didn’t qualify for VA benefits or enough student loans to pay for a full four year degree.

And my doctor told me not to go to a trade school, but get a Bachelor’s degree from an actual University.

I kept working dead end jobs, settling for less, and trying to play it safe. I was trying to just live as close to a normal life as I could manage.

I got married in 2011.

Somehow I managed one of the few, but one of the best, relationships I have ever had in my life.

So naturally, I fell into a depression that lasted around four years. This was the worst it ever got for me.

I cycled through suicidal ideation. I never attempted, but I was in a depression so bad that I barely had the energy to go to the bathroom or feed myself.

I slept around 19 hours a day, sometimes all in a row. I couldn’t work. I wasn’t qualified for disability.

And all of that just kept me in a downward spiral. I wrote incessantly. Some of it was good. Some was not. It was also super inconsistent.

Eventually the stormy seas went still. The clouds parted. And the sun cleared out the morning fog of my depression.

I got and maintained full-time work starting in May of 2016.

In May of 2021, I enrolled in a Creative Writing and English program at a University. I maintained an A average graduating Summa Cum Laude in May of 2023.

I used several of my various coping skills, leaned on my therapist, my doctor, my friends, my family, my found family, and my wife.

I knew that I could live a healthy life even with an illness. My moods went up and down. My symptoms got better. My symptoms got worse again. And then my symptoms got better, also again.

I accepted that I had an illness. I finally realized that my illness was not the end of my life. I thought and talked about it like some people talk about an old high school football injury.

I accepted that I have an illness. I refused to accept that I am my illness. I started to look at my moods like the weather.

A storm may roll into the sky. It may stretch from horizon to horizon, but the storm is in the sky. The sky is not the storm. But the weather is different everyday.

And if it ain’t one thing, it’s another. It’s always something.

But eventually it passes. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

After I graduated, I got a job as a reporter. I never won awards. I did make a lot of money, but I really tightened the screws on my writing. And I got to write for a living.

I made more progress on becoming a better writer as a reporter than I ever did in University.

But however slow or however fast, the point is that I kept working on my writing, my relationships, and my symptoms and my moods.

Some days I’m happy. Some days I’m sad. Some days I’m angry. But I am in control of my moods. My moods are no longer in control of me.

It took over 20 years to manage it, but I managed it.

And most people think that the highest achievement is to just be happy. But moods change. They change because emotions operate as a feedback loop. Something you want to happen, happens and you are happy. Something you don’t want to happen, happens and you are upset.

Happiness is no longer my goal.

What I have is better. I am content. Peace is sustainable. Happiness is more or less fleeting. Feeling content is now my emotional and mental baseline.

Contentment is sustainable because I am contentment.

I have some things I want, but I have everything I never knew I needed.

I will never be a billionaire. I will never have that much money. Billionaires have something I will never have.

But I have something they will never have: enough.

My friend and I called this process Blitzkrieg job hunting. We almost always got a job out of it.

It was the summer of 1999.

And applications were not yet web or app based. After hours of job hunting, we sat a hundred feet from a bus stop waiting on a bus to take us to a mall to get hot food and cold drinks.

We sat that far back so we didn’t bother anyone while we smoked. We were in the hot sun sitting on hot concrete and leaning against a glass building.

As we waited, a woman got off one of the latest busses to stop. I didn’t pay much attention to her until she started screaming. She threw her drink into the street.

It was almost immediately clear that she was yelling, throwing trash, and throwing punches at someone only she could see and hear.

My friend got somber and said she was afraid of ending up like that woman in the not too distant future.

As I listened to the screaming woman hurl junk and obscenities at someone only she could see and hear, I remembered growing up with my dad who is schizophrenic. I initially felt sympathy for her.

Then I realized something. If I were seeing what she was seeing and hearing what she was hearing, I would understand why she was reacting as she was. Her behavior would not just make sense, it would seem perfectly rational and logical. I would be throwing punches, trash, and insults at the empty air just like she was.

Then I realized that if I only knew what she knew, if I had only ever heard what she heard, if I only ever saw what she saw, knew who she knew, was faced with her choices in the circumstances she was in when she faced them, if I only had the information she had at the time then I would have made the same choices.

I would be saying what she was saying and doing what she was doing.

All of which is true, but that’s not all that is true.

In that moment, I thought I understood a million things about mental illness and mental health. I thought that right up until the moment mental illness happened to me.

Then I realized that I only understood two things about mental illness—jack and shit.

And, from where I stood after being diagnosed, Jack left town.

The thing is, you can read about the history surrounding Mount Fuji in Japan. You can see it depicted in hundreds of centuries old paintings. You can see sculptures that capture its beauty. You can look at thousands of photos across the years taken in the summer, fall, winter, and spring.

But those art works can’t capture the smell of the cherry blossoms in the air as you stare up at it from its summit. They can’t capture the feeling of looking down at the surrounding towns, cities, and military bases from its peak. They can’t tell you how it feels to have a snowball fight at that altitude.

They can give you some information, but information is not experience. And information is useful, beautiful even, but it is not the same as wisdom.

Wisdom comes from experience and judgement. And good judgment and experience usually comes from bad judgment and experience.

So, let me tell you about some of my bad judgement.

Full transparency: If I were to walk you through every wildly horrific bad decision I ever made, that text would dwarf the Norse epics hundreds of times over. So, I’ll stick to only a few.

Luckily, bad decisions make for good stories. So, you’re in for a treat.

My initial diagnosis came in 2005. My rediagnosis came in 2010.

Between those two hospital stays, I worked jobs that barely covered the cost of my medications. By September of 2008, I could no longer afford them. I had been getting free samples to keep me on my meds.

I went to school to learn massage and bodywork. I was earning college credits. And I tapered off of my meds under a doctor’s supervision. My meds cost $900 a month. I was uninsurable because, before the Affordable Care Act, I had a preexisting condition.

I made it through the program off my meds graduating in June of 2009. I made a large group of friends. I was dating for the first time in years. I felt like my life was great. I felt mentally clear without the med induced brain fog.

I was writing stories, writing poetry, writing song lyrics, and writing music at a frantic pace because I was going manic.

I felt like I could survive without meds. I felt like I could thrive without meds. I felt like I was on top of the world.

Until I didn’t.

In March of 2010, I had an episode that lasted the whole month of March. I checked myself into a psych ward because I was suicidal.

The nurse in the ER asked if I had a plan and I said no. They went to go get a prescription from a doctor and then get me discharged. The nurse said they didn’t have a bed for me. No room at the inn.

When they returned, I said that in 2005, I improvised an attempt, took 112 OTC sleeping pills and washed it down with a 5th of Puerto Rican Spiced Rum and were it not for quick thinking first responders, nurses, and doctors, I would have sealed my fate.

So I told the nurse just because I didn’t have a plan right then didn’t mean I wouldn’t have a plan by the time I got to my car in the parking lot.

The nurse suddenly found a bed for me.

I was in the hospital for around six weeks. I wrote, played the guitar on the ward, and adjusted to the new meds. I ate a lot and gained back some of the weight I lost. I was as unhealthy physically as I was mentally.

But slowly I became healthier. I got a job within a week of being discharged. It paid well enough that I could afford my meds.

I stayed on my meds. I ate well. In October of that year, I met my future wife. I moved in with her quickly. We got engaged within a few months.

My wife had to block her stepsister on social media because she sent hundreds of messages to my wife saying that she was going to destroy her children’s lives. She said we were rushing things so fast that it was reckless and our marriage was doomed to fail.

I had a friend who said the same thing.

My wife’s stepsister got divorced soon after her and I married. My friend who predicted that my marriage would crash and burn is currently on her fourth marriage since her prediction.

Like Lao Tzu said, “Those who know don’t speak. Those who speak do not know.”

I hadn’t really kept up with writing since my discharge in May of 2010. But I did keep a notebook that I wrote in. I wrote poetry, essays, and short stories or even just stand alone scenes.

I showed it to no one, not even my wife, because I had been mocked so relentlessly by the supposed friends I had back before we met.

These friends weaponized and mocked whatever writing of mine they read. Writing around them was dangerous.

So, I still wrote on occasion, but made sure not to make the mistake of sharing it.

About a month after my wife and I got married, I woke up and made coffee, went outside, and smoked until I was actually awake.

I came back in to get another cup of coffee in my brand new Mr. Coffee that was a wedding gift.

While I was out smoking, my wife started cleaning our bedroom starting with her side of the bed and then moving to my side. When she did she found my notebook.

She read through it to see if she should toss it or keep it.

When I opened the front door, she came out of our bedroom holding my notebook over her head like it was exhibit A in a murder trial.

She asked, “What the hell is this?”

I said, “That’s just my notebook.”

She said, “You never told me that you’re a writer!”

I said, “I’m really not. I’ve never been published. I’ve submitted and it was never good enough. Probably never will be either.”

She said, “But this is good. Really good. You should write more, submit more, and pursue this seriously. This is seriously good.”

So I started writing more. I had a blog for a few years. I learned SEO and marketing, mainly using social media.

Not many people said my writing was good. Few did. But a few did. Like my two doctors who gave me my initial diagnosis in 2005. I didn’t take it seriously. I thought they were just being nice.

In 2005 and in 2010, my doctors said they were impressed by how well spoken I was and how well I wrote. I thought they was just being nice.

So, when my wife heaped on praise for my writing, I thought she was just being nice because she was biased.

After years of therapy, I’ve learned that when I have a thought, I need to catch is so I can evaluate it. If the thought is I don’t write well, then I need to look for evidence for and against the idea.

When my doctors said I write well, my evidence for is my writing. The evidence against is that thinking my doctors were being nice, which is like thinking a lawyer is being honest or that the stripper really likes you.

Possible, but unlikely.

They don’t need to be nice to be helpful. They just need to be accurate.

I cannot reliably prove to myself that I am a good writer. Whether writing is good or bad is mostly subjective.

But I agree that good writing consists of three components: Clarity, Precision, and Polish.

You can be at mediocre levels of all three and yet still have something truly good. And if you are doing all three well, then what you have could be truly great.

And many people feel that what qualifies as good depends, in part, on the type and genre of writing. But genre does not belong in the mind of any writer. Genre is just a marketing ploy. It only exists to tell a bookstore which shelf to put your work on. It serves no other purpose.

There are only two types of writing: Effective writing and Ineffective writing, that’s it.

As a result, writing anything over time improves every other type of writing you want to do whether it be poetry, articles, short stories, or novels.

Good writing is good writing.

Good writing is really just effective writing.

So I don’t need to believe I am as good a writer as my doctors and my wife have said. I just need to believe that trying to get better is worth the effort, that getting better is even possible.

Getting to be a better writer is possible. And using problem solving skills to figure out how to get the effect I want are the same problem solving skills that I can apply to managing my mental health.

So I started writing and sharing my insights as a patient. I started sharing what has and has not worked in managing my mental health.

I can’t fall back on medical knowledge since I am no expert. I have no medical license. I have no medical expertise.

But I do have 24 years of experience with my illness. I have insights I have gained. I have hard won wisdom I have earned.

I can’t tell you the specifics of what the brain is doing when you have delusions, hallucinations, mania, or depression.

But I can tell you what it’s like to live through them. I can tell you what it’s like to live with them. And so I do.

I can shine those insights like a lighthouse in a storm. I can’t run up and down the shore to save everyone in danger. I can only shine my light and guide people in to safe harbor from the storm.

That’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.

Improving my writing and improving my mental health comes from believing that I can improve. What they have in common in the belief that being good, being great, and just better is even possible.

I believe that.

And I believe that you are never so bad that you can’t get better.

You are never so bad that you can’t become good.

When my head hits the pillow at the end of my day, I ask myself if I earned the extra years. And every night the answer is the same: No.

And the feeling that follows that answer like the chaser after a shot is grief coated in shame.

Shame because I got sent home and they were sent to war. I was supposed to be there beside them, but I wasn’t.

When you serve in the Armed Forces, those you serve with are closer to you than anyone else you will ever know. I know more about the guys I served with than their family or friends back home. I sure as hell know more about them than their wives.

My grief comes not just from losing my friends. It comes from seeing as many years pass by since their death as the number of years they spent living. And realizing that they were middle-aged at 11 years old.

At night I think about how skilled, talented, and intelligent they were. I think about what they would have done had they had the extra 23 years of life that I got.

And I do not think for even a second that what I have done with my extra 23 years could ever equal what I am certain they would have accomplished had they been given those extra years instead.

I do not think that I have earned those extra 23 years. These extra years don’t feel earned. They feel stolen.

The guys in my platoon had a weekend out planned at one point and they invited me along. I declined because I was going out on the town with my girlfriend.

They took a lot of pictures. They filled a roll of film from a disposable camera because this was 2003, they had around 34 pictures.

One photo was of a dozen of them striking poses, holding drinks, holding lit cigarettes, and flashing obscene hand gestures.

I have it in my I Love Me Book, which is a book of pictures of people I love from my past and present, evidence of accomplishments, and any reminders of why people love me, the book is full of reminders of what I love about me, my life, and everyone who has been in it.

Only two of the people in that photo are still alive. Most died in combat, some took their own lives.

Some days I have a hard time flipping the pages in my I Love Me Book. Some days I can’t bring myself to open it at all.

One of the first thoughts I have when I look at that picture is how unfair it is that my friend John didn’t survive his suicide attempt.

But I survived mine. Mostly because of quick thinking and action on the part of Police, EMTs, Nurses, and Doctors.

That unfair feeling has followed me for decades. I felt it when I got married. I felt it when I graduated college. I feel it every time I look at the ever increasing number on my birthday cake.

I don’t know that survivor’s guilt is the correct term, but I do feel guilty for surviving. Because I don’t feel like I deserve to. But I do feel that they did.

That feeling is not as strong as it used to be. If it were like sound then I’d say ten years ago it was as loud as being 5 feet from the stage at a concert.

So close you have to yell in the ear of whoever you’re with to barely be heard. Now it’s like the music at a grocery store.

Loud enough to notice, but not loud enough to understand every word. But it’s always there playing in the background.

I don’t know if I will ever live long enough to overcome this grief, guilt, and shame. In my good moments I can manage it.

The only realistic outcome I can see is having more moments where I manage it rather than letting it manage me.

All of us carry weight unseen by most. So some will think that your weight is light. They think that because you or I carry it well that it’s not heavy.

But that isn’t accurate. It’s just that over time we adapted and got stronger. The weight is still heavy.

And I hate when people say that time heals all wounds. Because that’s so untrue.

And because the weight gets heavier with each passing year, with the next birthday, the next Thanksgiving, the next Christmas, and the next New Year’s.

It’s hard to carry this weight.

And I have done a lot of healing. It’s work that I may never finish. But I owe it to those I love and those I’ve lost along the way to keep doing the work.

My doctor, my therapist, can help illuminate my path. They can help guide me into safe harbor. But the work can only be done by me.

And I am self-aware enough to know that if I feel like I am not enough, I will never, can never, feel that what I do is ever enough.

Nothing I do can bring my brother in arms back. I am not good enough at necromancy to do that, yet.

But I’ve been told by my therapists, my doctors, and my wife that what I can do is make the most of the time I have been given.

Because deserving or not I have been given these extra years. And the greatest dishonor I can bring to myself and those who passed before me is to squander those extra years.

I can learn to cook and use that knowledge to feed my family. I can learn to use my professional camera and add photos of that shared meal to my I Love Me Book.

I can learn to play piano and learn duets with my wife on a rainy day while the meal I learned to make cooks in the oven.

I can take dance lessons and then take my wife out and surprise her with what I learned.

I can keep writing essays, novels, flash fiction, short stories, poetry and song lyrics. Not because I plan on being rich or famous.

Most of the writers whose books fill the shelves at all the bookstores you have ever been to wrote or write part-time. They don’t support their families by writing.

But I don’t write to support myself. I am not a professional. I am an amateur. Amateur in the original French meant, “One who loves.”

It meant someone who does something for the love of the doing. One who creates for the love of creating.

I can’t look forward to anything if I spend too much time looking back. So I try to make time to create moments worth looking forward to, moments worth preserving in my I Love Me Book.

The way I try to honor my fallen brothers is by approaching life like it’s an opportunity to create memories. Develop skills, not to monetize, but to enjoy.

I want to live life like an amateur. Living life for the love of living it. Make the people that I love look back fondly at the good times and look forward to our next time.

I spent years mourning not just my fallen brothers, but mourning being alive.

I have a lot of scars. But all that means is I lived. And I have a story to tell that only I can tell. Readers get a sinking feeling when they realize the will never live long enough to read all the books they want.

With writers, we get a sinking feeling when we think of how we will never live long enough to write all our stories out.

There are two ways you can be a writer: 1) Write a story worth reading 2) Live a life worth writing about.

But in falling in love with being alive, I have done both.

That’s how I choose to honor those I served with.

I have no idea what happens from here, but I love that and so I know that it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.

I don’t know what will happen from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

Hired as a technical advisor for the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, a former Marine Corps Drill Instructor and Vietnam Veteran believed he could play the role of the Drill Instructor in the film better than the actor they cast.

So, this Marine Corps Veteran asked the director’s assistant to film him insulting and hurling verbal abuse at several extras. When the movie’s Director, Stanley Kubrick, saw the footage he hired the veteran and fired the originally cast actor.

Kubrick was notorious for making his actors do hundreds of takes before accepting and printing the take. He was also notorious for never allowing his actors to write or improvise their own lines.

But he allowed this Veteran to improvise nearly 150 pages of his own dialogue including nearly all of the dialogue in the final cut. And nearly every take with this former Drill Instructor was captured on the first take.

But for anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket, you understand immediately what Stanley Kubrick saw in former Drill Instructor and Vietnam Veteran R. Lee Ermey.

Ermey had a long and successful career as an actor and military advisor. His authenticity bled into every frame he was in and through every word he spoke.

I was in the Army, briefly, and I regard very few movies depiction of the military as accurate. But R. Lee Ermey’s performance ranks as the most accurate as well as my personal favorite.

Ermey decided after his service who he wanted to be the rest of his career and throughout the rest of his life.

Another man chose to spend the rest of his life moving in the opposite direction. Like Ermey he also chose another career once he left the U. S. Military.

This Veteran joined the Air Force in 1961. He served most of that time stationed in Alaska. There he met a German born artist named Bill Alexander who showed him a wet on wet technique of painting that allowed him to paint in minutes instead of hours.

And the Alaskan landscapes featured heavily in every canvas he painted through the remainder of his life.

This wet on wet technique allowed this Airman to get more practice in during the little free time he had. Because of that, he was able to learn and the hone the craft of painting quickly.

In his role in the Air Force, he had to act, and speak to those who served under him, in a nearly identical fashion as R. Lee Ermey did in the movie Full Metal Jacket.

Once he retired from his 20 year service in the Air Force, he vowed to never act or speak to others as he had while in service. He made himself a solem promise to never raise his voice again, for any reason.

So, when he turned to painting in retirement, he got a job showing others his wet on wet speed painting technique in a TV show called The Joy of Painting.

Bob Ross never raised his voice again and used a voice so soothing many folks play his videos to lull themselves to sleep some nights. His voice is almost as magnificent as Morgan Freeman’s, almost.

Two men, two veterans, left the service and embarked on a career in the limelight. One chose to continue to be as hardcore a veteran as he was a Marine.

The other chose the opposite path: to never raise his voice or hurl insults and abuse for however long he should live.

One taught others to become tough, to live tough. The other told us to be kind to ourselves and to be kind to others. He told us that there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.

I served with a man named John. He was gifted when it came to every task and ability required to be a soldier. He was so good at it that it was comical. He was good at everything else in life, too. It was annoying.

He sailed through special forces training. I was the opposite. I wasn’t good at anything military related. I wasn’t much better at anything else in this life either.

John would correct me without hurling abuses at me. He never raised a hand to me. And he was also one of the kindest men I’ve ever known.

He never lost his patience with me even when everyone else did.

He could give me shit without treating me like it.

He never sought to dominate any situation. He never sought to dominate any other person even when we all knew he could, as much as we knew that if he did, he would win.

He taught me through example that truly intelligent men don’t shame those who are less intelligent than they are, they don’t make others feel stupid. They raise the IQ of everyone in the room.

They don’t throw their weight around to show off their advanced level of skill. They teach others so that they improve their own skills.

People frame this as an issue of you are either hardcore or you are soft and weak.

But I know you can be kind and you can be strong. You can elevate the intelligence of others rather than shame them for not already being an expert.

John taught me that it might not be a lack of aptitude for a given skill. You might only need to be effectively taught that skill. Ignorance can be solved by information. But for a fool there is no hope.

The most meaningful lesson John taught me was that I lacked skill, not intelligence. And in the process he gave me hope. Hope that I could succeed in my goals, heal myself mentally and emotionally, and continually improve as long as I remained a perpetual student.

The world you live in is outside your control. Don’t waste energy trying to change it. You cannot change who the people in your life are, what they say, or what they do. Don’t waste time on trying to change them.

You can’t change who anyone else is. But who you are is 100% in your control and no one else’s.

You are not, however, responsible for the emotions that you feel. But you are completely responsible for how you act and react to those feelings.

You can be like R. Lee Ermey. You can be like Bob Ross. You can even be like John if you want. The options are not binary. If you want to reach a goal, you can, but only if you want it bad enough. Because you can do anything you set your mind to.

If you could become anyone, who do you want to be? Once you can answer that, start doing what they would do. Start saying what they would say. Soon enough habit becomes instinct.

This quote is often misattributed to Aristotle. But it was actually from historian Will Durant from his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy where he only summarized Aristotle.

True greatness results from consistent, daily work rather than moments of fleeting inspiration. Brilliant results come from a brilliant process, which means it can be learned.

As Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

Everyone has their own process. Some get results, some don’t. Those who are considered the greatest in their field have a great process. They don’t always have credentials, degrees, or many if any advantages.

What they do all have in common is the ability to teach themselves what they need to know to get their brilliant results.

Any mentor, professor, peer, or teacher serves only to further enhance their ability to teach themselves.

The highest form of learning is not academic. It is not in taking instruction well. All truly great learners are self-taught.

But part of the process for many is their self-critic. Some romanticize the pain inflicted by the inner critic of a truly great artist, writer, or musician. They think that making great art requires enduring great pain.

The only way to know for sure is to find a person who has never suffered pain. And no person that ever has or ever will live can do so without pain and suffering.

I am not a great writer. I may be good, talented even, but not truly great. But my inner critic is harsher than most. And self-loathing makes the inner critic’s voice louder, clearer, and stronger.

When I talk about my inner critic’s voice I mean that both literally and figuratively.

Sometimes I can hear it as an external voice. Sometimes it’s in my inner monologue. Sometimes it is only a thought. And it often crops up not as a singular voice, but as the voices of people I know, people I love—friends, family, and found family.

Sometimes it fires off a string of obscenity laden insults like R. Lee Ermy. Sometimes it cracks scorching jokes at my expense. Often it is both. Because my normal way of speaking is like if Samuel L. Jackson had tourettes. And so my inner critic speaks to me in the language I understand best.

But that is not the only fuel that strengthens that voice. The quest for greatness adds gas to that fire, too.

Knowing I am capable of more drives me to push myself hard enough and far enough to reach my goals. The problem is that the goal posts keep moving and are always just out of reach.

So, I never stop pushing myself. My inner critic never lets up, never stops, and never sleeps. In fact, he is with me even in my dreams.

Sometimes in those dreams he shows me what my life, my work, my life’s work could be if I lived up to my truest potential.

Sometimes he shows me what hell my life could be if I waste my potential, get complacent, and settle for less instead of striving for more.

He advises me to apologize to the trees in my yard for not being worth the air they work so hard to make.

My inner critic has jokes. And they’re funny. But since they violate community standards, I regret to report that I cannot share those gems. It’s a fight to prove him wrong. At best he falls silent. But only temporarily.

Fighting and striving are essential and unavoidable.

Achieving something great, living up to your truest potential, is great, but the biggest problem you will find along the way is if nothing is ever good enough.

If you or your inner critic are always moving the goal posts, then that relentless pursuit is unsustainable. Possible, definitely, but not sustainable and therefore not healthy.

Knowing I’m not living up to my truest potential means that my inner critic tells me that I have failed everyone, in my entire life, who was ever misguided enough to love me.

Philip K. Dick wrote prolifically. He wrote groundbreaking sci fi. His work has been adapted into countless films and TV shows, many of which won awards or are regarded as classics like Blade Runner, Total Recall, or Minority Report.

But in order to write and publish at the pace he wanted, and financially needed to, he resorted to using amphetamines. His work’s most common themes were paranoia, conspiracies, and not knowing what is and isn’t real.

These are also symptoms of the amphetamines he used. It reads as though the thing that gave his work its undeniable genius was also the thing that destroyed him. His grip on reality vanished and soon his body gave out. He died not long before Blade Runner was released.

He never lived to see his work finally break through. He pushed himself so far beyond his artistic limits that his mind gave out, and then his body did, too. His relentless drive drove him to his grave.

The pursuit of perfection can be poisonous. It can be corrosive. It will seep into every corner of your life, every corner of your mind.

Some artists use drugs and alcohol to get the effect they want from their art.

But many have used substances as a balm to sooth the burn of the inner critic’s words. But, as with Philip K. Dick, they played with a fire that consumed them in the end.

Back issues of Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, and the bookshelves of every bookstore ever are littered with the work of artists who made the Faustian bargain of selling their soul in exchange for the timeless and Earth shattering talent they sought.

And the spouses, children, friends, family, and found family of those artists would sell their own souls in exchange for one more day with them.

Because even though the artist in pursuit of perfection paid a steep price to get as close as they could to it, those who loved them paid a steep price too.

So, having received intensive therapy for over a decade, my inner critic, who berates me like R. Lee Ermy, is not quiet and has yet to be silenced permanently, I have other inner voices and perspectives.

I have an inner R. Lee Ermy. But now I also have an inner Bob Ross.

My inner critic tells me I’m a failure when I use a preposition to end a sentence with. But my inner Bob Ross tells him that there are no such things as mistakes, only happy accidents.

My inner critic says that there is a treatment for the Bubonic Plague—Yersinia pestis. There is a treatment for HIV. There are treatments for cancer, but the only treatment for my stupidity is death and that the only reason I was even born was because my mom couldn’t afford an abortion.

And my inner Bob Ross responds by saying that is a lie and that my mom worked herself beyond exhaustion just to provide for me growing up. She didn’t spend money on me, she invested in me my whole life. And she wouldn’t have spent days crying on the hospital phone with me after I nearly died if she didn’t love me.

This back and forth is a classic example of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Because what is going on is my inner critic criticizes me and my inner cheerleader counters each emotionally charged claim with objective facts.

My inner cheerleader doesn’t react emotionally. He reacts with cold, clinical logic and supports his claims with evidence.

I have never been able to rid myself of my inner critic. But I have him out manned, out gunned, and out flanked because I don’t just have an inner Bob Ross. I have an inner Mr. Rogers, an inner LaVar Burton, and my wife’s voice living in my mind, too.

Having the ability to counter lies with facts is not just essential to good mental health, if I do want to get better at writing or to get better at anything it requires that I have an accurate view of how I am doing, the quality of work that I’m producing.

Because without a firm understanding of where I’m actually at, I have no way of knowing which path to take to get me to where I want to go.

I absolutely believe that it is true that allowing my inner critic to berate me is no more productive than acting on my delusions of grandeur that tell me I am the best writer in the history of the world.

Also, just now my inner critic kindly informed me that I do not, in fact, have delusions of grandeur. I have delusions of adequacy.

Being truly great at something is hard. But being a shitty person is easy. And berating someone for not being perfect, something unattainable, is a dick move. Even if that someone is you.

The best antidote to the poisonous words of my inner critic has been in believing that I am enough. A strong, but balanced sense of self worth is essential in maintaining a stable and healthy emotional state.

I have finally learned to counter my inner critic. I have learned to turn the volume on his voice down.

And if you ever learn how to silence your inner critic, if you ever achieve that, tell me how.

The study has followed two cohorts: A group of Harvard graduates and a group of impoverished men from one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.

It would be academically irresponsible to condense the findings into a short, punchy essay.

But luckily for you, and as attested by everyone who’s ever known me, I am nothing if not irresponsible. Absolutely irresponsible enough to try, at any rate.

I mean, I see a shot and I’m takin’ it.

And true to form I’ll go over the most intriguing finding, but without reviewing the study, and without the scientific rigor needed to make sense of nearly a century of findings of this ongoing study.

So, I’ll dive right in.

There are things most people associate with happiness like money, and that is “a” factor, fame or influence is also “a” factor, but though those factors may make the list, the factor that sits at the top of the list is one that surprises everyone.

Enough that everyone that first hears it will instinctively disregard it because it sounds so ridiculous that one instantly rejects it outright without so much as a second thought.

The factor that sits at the top of the list of the best predictors of happiness, according to nearly a century of Harvard research is—quality personal relationships.

You read that right. Despite my scientific incompetence, I actually have that correct.

Now, what I do with this knowledge, like most of my life decisions, may be baffling, and incomprehensible, but since no time traveler has come back in time to stop me, how bad can it be, really?

So, get ready, buckle up, because here I go:

In 2013, following a short hospitalization, I came across this study on Facebook. While everyone else I knew was using the internet, which allows us access to the entirety of human knowledge and history, were using the most comprehensive research tool ever invented to get into arguments with strangers and look at pictures of cats.

And I was too.

But one day, while doomscrolling, I came across an article about it and about the surprise finding that happiness can be predicted by the quality of a person’s personal relationships.

Two of the best friendships I had had were falling apart. We barely kept in touch. They never called, texted, or reached out first. Then they stopped answering or responding. When we did meet, their gaze and their embrace was cold. So, this study stood out because at the time I was unhealthy enough that I had to be involuntarily hospitalized.

I was miserable. It wasn’t just about how I felt. It was about how I brought that misery to every interaction I had with anyone who was unfortunate enough to cross my path.

My wife and I were in marriage counseling. We nearly divorced. It is true that the first few years are always the hardest. And we survived it. But at the time I was sure we wouldn’t.

What was happening was, like a rotten peach in a pile in a bucket, the rot spread to everything else.

This rot of these two failing friendships spread to every relationship in my life. It spread to every corner of my mind. It spread to every corner of my life. It spread to my entire field of vision that I could see with my naked eye.

And a few months later these two friendships collapsed into themselves like the core of a dying star. And the two friends who meant more to me than any others were gone.

Memories of the good times felt like a blade in my stomach twisting and turning as every moment replayed in my mind’s eye.

I started replaying decades of memories trying to spot the red flags I dismissed in the moment.

I tried to pinpoint the signs that marked the point of no return, where friendship turned into indifference and then to resentment. I doubted if they were ever really my friends.

I doubted if I was really ever their friend. I looked for evidence. It was everywhere. But at the time nothing felt cohesive. Nothing made sense.

So, when I read that the best thing I can do to make myself happy was to make or find quality personal relationships, I did my best to build a new group of friends. I recommitted to the other friends I had to invest in them and by extension invest in me and my happiness.

Slowly and over years I built a new social network from scratch. I made these friendships my priority. I made my marriage my priority. I made my family my priority. And the emotional storms I weathered eventually cleared.

By making the relationships in my life my priorty, I made my mental well-being my priority.

It worked. It paid off.

One of the things I would do when I started to spiral was to isolate. I did it in late 2012 as those two friendships ran cold. Historically, as my mental health started to slide, I cut off every relationship I logistically could. Where I couldn’t, I kept people at arms length. I’d either sleeping all day or I wasn’t sleeping for days at a time.

But in 2012 and 2013, my wife wouldn’t let me isolate. My other friends wouldn’t let me isolate. So when I went to the hospital, I was only there for a week instead of a month or two. I was in a bad way, but because I didn’t

Isolate, I didn’t burn my life to the ground scorched Earth style like I usually did when my instincts had usually convinced me that that was the only solution.

It is my instinct to apply permanent solutions to temporary problems. But there is no situation that a permanent solution applies to because all situations are temporary. We are all temporary.

I have kept my personal relationships as my top priority. And I went through college with honors. I stayed employed. I did things, managed things, I couldn’t before because before I did not have healthy personal relationships.

Mark Twain said that, “A self-made man is as likely as a self-laid egg.”

I don’t think that that’s true of everyone, but I know it’s true of me. Everything I’ve done since 2013, maybe everything I’ve ever done, has been the product of a lot of love.

My health, mental and physical, is the product of a lot of love.

I am the product of a lot of love.

But when my mental health starts taking on water and sinking, my mind tells me to isolate.

Because when it’s me and those that love me surounding me, my darkness can’t overpower my people. It can’t overpower all of us.

So, it has to peel me off my herd and chase me alone.

We feel the need to isolate. That’s what our gut tells us. But it lies to us. All that does is cut us off from the people we need when we need them most. None of us can learn to manage this on our own. That’s why our gut tells us to be alone and isolate. Because that’s the only way that the darkness can win.

One on one none of us can hold our own in a fight against our personal demons. That is why our demons tell us to hide from those who make us strong. That’s how it makes us weak enough to be beaten.

I can’t beat my demons by myself. You can’t beat your demons by yourself.

I can’t. You can’t. But together we absolutely can.

Odysseus is a soldier who fights a ten year war. He helps win that war. The journey home to Ithaca should have only taken two weeks. But it took him ten years.

And out of the several hundred men on his ship, he was the only survivor.

When he finally got home, no one recognized him. No one but his dog Argos. After finally reuniting with Odysseus, Argos dies at peace.

When I read the story, or epic poem, at 12 years of age, it felt like the original Clash of the Titans movie. It was an epic adventure story full of action and monsters. It was exhilarating. My life was boring. But this story was exciting.

When I was in my mid 20s, I had to read The Illiad. At that point, what stayed with me was that Thetis, Achilles mother, was given a prophecy about her son. The prophecy said that if Achilles went to war, he would be the most powerful and famous soldier in history and would earn the favor of the gods.

But if he never went to war, he would live a long and boring life. So, Thetis dipped him in the river Styx making him invulnerable. All of him except his heels where the water could not reach because that is where Thetis’s hands held him as she dunked him in the river.

I know The Illiad and The Odyssey are two different epic poems, but they are the only part of an eight poem series that survives.

And being the proud recipient of an English degree, I also happen to know that the Greek name for the city of Troy was Illium. The suffix “Ad” in Greek meant “story.”

So, if you were to translate the word “Illiad” into modern English, it would be “Troy Story.”

But during my time in University earning that degree, I read The Odyssey a few times for a couple different classes. And in my 40s I saw it in new ways. The story didn’t change, but since I did, the story did too. Such is the beauty of rereading stories as you get older.

Now I see a man who spent ten years fighting a war and then taking another ten getting home. But that journey home wasn’t just about the journey to a physical place. It was about the journey of getting back to the version of himself that he was before the war, before he saw unspeakable horrors, before he had to commit unspeakable horrors just to survive that war much less win it.

He hid in a wooden horse. The Trojan Horse was a vessel of war. But so was his mind, body, and soul. It took a decade at sea to cleanse himself, to return to himself, so he could return to his wife and son.

And his travels changed him so much that when he walked through the streets of the city he was once King of, no one recognized him. No one but his dog, Argos.

We all fight figurative wars. We all fight to return to the version of us we were before we had to change that version to one that could survive what we had to survive. But only if we are lucky enough to survive those battles.

We may return to who we were before our wars, but we are fundamentally changed. That was the purpose of the war.

In 1923, a year before he died, Franz Kafka was sitting all by his lonesome in a Berlin park when a little girl came to him crying because she lost her favorite doll. She begged him to help her find it. They looked and looked, but the doll was never found.

The next day Kafka returned to that park with a letter. The letter was from the little girl’s doll. The doll wrote to the girl that she had gone traveling. Over the next few weeks the doll kept writing letters to the girl telling her about her journey.

Then, one day, Kafka brought the doll to this little girl. The girl looked at the doll and didn’t recognize it. But the doll had written one last letter that said that she looked different because her journey had changed her. The little girl smiled, hugged her doll, and kissed Kafka on the cheek as she ran back home.

This is an unconfirmed story from Kafka’s last partner. The little girl never talked or wrote about this story. The letters were never recovered. But much like The Odyssey, insisting on it being historically accurate misses the whole entire point of the story.

But like Odysseus not being recognized when he returned to Ithaca, and the little girl’s doll saying that she looked like a different doll because her journey changed her, when I returned home after Basic Training, I met my friend Keith for coffee and I walked right up to him and he didn’t recognize me until he heard my voice.

He said I looked completely different. He said my smile was different. Different how I’m not sure, but different enough to be unrecognizable to one of my closest friends.

I saw him a few more times while I was on leave, but I was stationed in Hawai’i. And I stayed on Island after I got out. I didn’t return until October of 2006 when he had joined the Army himself. I didn’t see him again until the summer of 2009. He drove from the east coast to see his family in Iowa and then all the way to SLC, Utah to stay with me. That is a true and genuine friend.

And every cell in your body dies and gets replaced every 7 years. So every memory you have that is older than seven years is not an original memory, it’s a copy. If it’s older than 14 years, it’s a copy of a copy.

So, after the seven years that passed from our coffee shop meeting where my friend did not recognize me to seeing him pull up in his truck in front of my house, after he returned from his 15 month deployment to Iraq, I knew it was him, but I didn’t recognize him. His journey had changed him, too.

We talk where we can. It may be a ten minute conversation or it may be four hours that we talk. My wife has talked to him about cooking, one of his favorite things in life is to cook. He keeps a kit under his seat in his tank so that when he has the time, space, and food he can feed his guys. He loves cooking but he only likes eating.

I went to the hospital around Easter of 2010. He called me while I was in. He answered when I called him. And I was released after about a month. By October, I had met my wife. And though I had been to Japan, Hawai’i, Southern California, San Francisco, four psych wards, on meds, off meds, dozens of job per year, plus several years without a job, I graduated college summa cum laude in May of 2023.

As it was live streamed, Keith was laying on the carpet of his living room floor with his 6 month old baby girl pumping his fist and screaming obscenities in celebration as I walked across the stage to receive my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and English.

I had been through multiple hospitalizations, traveled thousands of miles, worked jobs and lived in homes in every corner of the country, but the journey by my wife’s side had changed me the most.

When we met, I felt unworthy of love. My wife loved me anyway. I felt stupid. She helped me see that I could also be smart. I felt like a coward because of my suicide attempt and daily battles with suicidal ideation. She showed me I could also be brave. I listened to soundtracks of her favorite musicals and even though I never listened to musicals before I met her, I listened to them and actually enjoyed them.

I haven’t been hospitalized since 2013. I went to and graduated college. Got a job in my field. Went from being unemployed the first couple years we were married to being the breadwinner and supporting us on my income alone.

I have a different look. I listen to different music. I read different books. I am in some ways very different. But my sense of humor, my energy, my mental clarity is more like the version of me I was in high school.

I don’t see friends much outside of weddings and funerals these days. But when I went to my friend Milo’s funeral in September of 2023, our mutual friend Prudence was there. I met Prudence and Milo’s older sister Mikaela in May of 1994.

And for two years Mikaela and Prudence were two of the best friends I had then, now, and maybe ever.

When I got back from having spent the summer with my mom in California in 1995, Mikaela and Prudence said they went into withdrawals not having me around.

And during Milo’s service, I left our table to go get a drink. Prudence turned to my wife and said, “That’s the Sterling I remember.” She told my wife that she didn’t just make me happy, she helped make me the best version of me that I could be. She said my wife made me the real version of me.

After the onset of my journey, I was unrecognizable even to my closest friends. I didn’t recognize myself for a lot of years. Now my closest friends see me as the version of me that they remember, the version they recognize.

My battles aren’t over, but my wars are. I survived what I thought would end me. I’ve survived me wanting to end me. I kept surviving what I thought was impossible to survive. Because of that I forged resilience in the fires of the hells I walked through barefoot.

My journey changed me. But now I am recognizable to those who have known me the longest. For a long time I wasn’t. But now I am because now I’m home.

My journey isn’t over yet, I hope.

And now that I got that weight off my chest, I can rest.

Now I’m at peace. That was the whole point of my journey. Maybe that’s the point of your journey too.

Knowing how to read a room, genuinely understanding the person you are talking with or writing to, and having enough empathy to put yourself in their shoes, and to derive the meaning for yourself that they derive for themselves are useful skills to have as a person.

But they’re an essential skill to have in any art, especially in writing.

For understanding the written or spoken word, hermeneutics functions much as it originated—as essential to the detective work of uncovering meaning as the scientific method is for uncovering the truth of the physical world.

And it is the written word that allows us to circumvent death. We can pass our knowledge, ideas, and expertise on to the generations that we will never live to meet. It is, more than any human invention, the instrument that allows us to progress technologically.

But where the scientific method allows us, or at least some of us, to live better, the written word shows us why we should even bother to begin with.

When we are going through a break up, when someone we love dies, when we lose a job, when we have a falling out with someone we love, we feel like no one understands our pain. We feel that our pain, like us, is unique. We feel that way for ages. And then we read.

Because when we read, we step into the shoes of someone else. We see what they see. We hear what they hear. We think what they think. And then the most magical thing that can happen, happens—we feel what they feel. At that point, we realize that they felt what we felt.

And what we feel next is belonging, comradery, community, because we feel understood. We do not feel alone anymore.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche makes the point that great thinkers fear being completely understood more than they fear being completely misunderstood.

But I think the average person strives and longs for being understood and to understand the world, those in it, and themselves.

I think what gives Nietzsche’s argument punch is that most people intuitively understand that the average person’s goal is understanding. And Nietzsche flips that view.

Nietzsche thought of himself a super massive extra evolved big brain who us plebeians could never possibly hope to understand.

There are those who hoard their experiences, their joys, their pain because they feel it makes them unique. They hoard because they intuitively understand that if they were to share those things, that they would come to the unavoidable truth that their ideas, their joys, their pain, their beliefs, their experiences, and even their identities are not as unique as they, for whatever reasons, need to think they are.

Sharing ideas, joys, and pain creates connections. Hoarding them creates separation. The nuance in ideas creates insight. And oversimplifying them using strawman arguments, creates division.

People read less than they used to. Most alarmingly, people read shorter written works than they used to losing the ability to understand nuance and complexity in the process. The ability to think critically, logically, and to better grasp cause and effect, atrophies.

Slogans on social media replaces discourse and debate. Slogans circumvent thinking and tap straight into emotion.

So, when drawn into a debate, reason doesn’t move the needle anymore. People actually dig their heels in even further when confronted with facts that disprove their beliefs.

And these folks will react aggressively when contradicted because their beliefs are their identity.

It’s more than connection that is enhanced through writing. It is being at peace with being proven wrong.

It is knowing that there is no shame in being proven wrong, only in persisting in that wrong.

Reading helps up remain humble. It plants the seeds of curiosity. The more you learn, the more you want to learn. Reading keeps you on the course to be a perpetual student, a lifelong learner.

Historically, I have been wrong about so many things over the course of my life. So, I know that, logically, I am wrong about a number of things now. But if I keep learning, I will be less wrong less often in the future.

Being 100% right about everything is impossible. But being less wrong is well within our reach, provided we keep the mindset of a student and continue learning.

You can’t learn about a thing if you think you already know all about it. In that case, you are incurious.

A narcissist can’t grow because they don’t see any reason to change. For that reason, growth is impossible for them.

A classic symptom of narcissism is them thinking that they have nothing to learn, but everything to teach. A student knows they will never live long enough to learn everything. A student knows they have more to learn than they have to teach.

Voltaire said we should not judge a person’s intelligence based on their answers, but based on their questions. Because questions reveal how a person thinks. Answers are statements and statements are often based on repeating ideas through a good memory.

The secret to a healthy life is in developing a good sense of humor and a bad memory. The secret to having a healthy mind is in traveling inward to better understand yourself. You can never understand another soul better than you can your own.

Understanding another person is never easy, but just as some people can never understand you, you will be unable to understand certain people. Sometimes an agenda gets in the way of two people understanding each other. Sometimes people don’t lack the intelligence to understand, they lack the temperament to.

But every once in a while you meet a person who is your people. They understand you amazingly well. And you understand them amazingly well. The gap of understanding is so small that communication feels effortless. That gap being so slim means that your are more strongly connected with them.

Every few weeks I write my wife a love letter. I don’t just tell her that I love her, I tell her what I love about her, and I tell her why I love her. I write letters to friends, family, and found family.

In these letters I tell the people I love everything I would want them to know if I died after sending it. I make it weird. I make it awkward. But I make it known. Because I know how quickly we can lose those we love.

Were it not for language and the written word, all the things I was to show these folks would remain unspoken and those words would weigh me down.

Carl Sagan said, “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.”

I owe it to the written word for keeping me alive and for allowing me to make it weird and awkward. Writing is how I make it known.

Buddha said in the Damapada that, “The trouble is you think you have the time.”

You should be best friends with your significant other and a little in love with your friends. So write your friends letters. Write your significant other a love letter. Write your mom and write your dad. Once they are gone those unwritten letters, those unwritten or unspoken words will weigh on you. And that weight will get heavier with each passing year.

They say that time heals all wounds, but that’s bullshit. You just get better at carrying that extra weight.

So, make it weird. Make it awkward. But, for the love of god make it known.

Emotional crying happens when your emotional state pushes past your brain’s sensory-affective threshold. When any emotion pushes past that threshold, your autonomic nervous system restores your emotional equilibrium by crying.

Because crying activates your parasympathetic nervous system, it lowers your heart rate, your breathing, and brings you back to your emotional baseline.

Emotional tears contain oxcytocin, endorphins like Leucine-Enkephalin it is a natural painkiller. And the brain doesn’t differentiate between physical and emotional pain, it just registers pain.

And cortisol, adrenaline, manganese, and potassium are purged through emotional tears, which helps regulate your moods and causes the calm you feel after you cry. I know I usually sleep better after I cry. Crying is a way of reversing the fight or flight response.

As an example, I was in the passenger seat of a coworker’s car on my way to work a couple years ago at 6am on Halloween. I was checking Facebook just doomscrolling when I saw a post from a lifelong friend I had had since my freshman year of high school, which was the 1993-1994 school year.

The post was about her youngest brother Milo.

In June of 1994, Milo turned 4. I turned 15. I had known him most of his life. He got me and my wife jobs at the call center he worked at a few years before this particular Halloween. And just after we hired on, my wife was suicidal and checked into a hospital. She was in for 3 weeks.

She was admitted at 10pm. I didn’t sleep that night. When I logged onto my systems and clocked in, Milo messaged me and just asked how I was doing. As I was taking calls and masking, my voice flat and steady, I unloaded on the poor man. I told him where my wife was why she was there. He asked where I was sitting that day. So I told him.

5 minutes later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. Milo stood behind me with a hot cup of coffee (We had these Starbucks machines that ground fresh beans per cup of coffee) made using these fancy syrups, and a giant chocolate bar. He set them on my desk and then he leaned down and hugged me. I put my caller on hold while I “Looked something up” and cried so hard I was shaking for a moment.

This scene did not last long. No one else checked in on me. I told no one else at work. No one else at work mentioned it or asked me about it.

Milo checked in on me as the days went on. He checked in at work. He texted me after work. He came to my desk bearing gifts of coffee and chocolate. He scheduled his breaks and lunches to match mine so we could hang out while eating and smoking outside. He bought me lunch and made sure I actually ate it.

I don’t eat much, never have. But when I’m upset, I don’t eat at all, which is why my weight is the first thing to go before I wind up spiraling and getting hospitalized.

Milo checking in on me, giving me treats like coffee, chocolate, and buying me lunch is the biggest reason I did not wind up hospitalized myself.

This situation knocked the wind out of me. He gave me time and heard me out as I processed what I was going through. I don’t just think out loud. Talking and writing is part of how I do my thinking. So I am every bit as surprised by what comes out of my mouth as anybody within earshot.

He never shamed me for crying. More than that he taught me about how crying helps to reduce stress and regulate moods. Most of what he told me then is where I got the details I put in this essay now. I only verified this info with my doctors and therapists. I know what I know now because Milo knew it first.

Grief, depression, anxiety—these things come in waves. And Milo didn’t, couldn’t, stop the waves I was getting hit with. But he did give me enough space between the waves so I could catch my breath. Without him, the waves would have come so fast and hit so hard, I never would have had the chance to catch my breath.

And I would have sunk beneath those waves.

When my wife came back to work weeks later, Milo just asked her how she was holding up. He never pried or outed her. He hugged her. We all arranged our breaks and lunches so we could spend time together. He did more than help me, he helped her too.

And when the first Covid lockdowns happened and we were all cut off from work, church, going out to eat, Milo asked me to drive to his apartment complex so we could stand six feet apart, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and hang out. We kept doing that even after the lockdowns.

He moved out of state around then. By the time I saw his sister’s post on Facebook on Halloween, it had been years since I had see him, heard his voice, or hugged him.

For his birthday that last year, I got him a book bag that was a Dark Academia book satchel bag. He loved that it was a gift that was a pun because it was a book bag in the shape of a book. He had a sharp, witty, and versatile sense of humor. But puns he loved. His favorite was, “What do you call a line of rabbits walking backwards? A receding hare line!”

So when I saw his sister’s post, I had hoped he was coming home. And I was half right. Milo had a widow-maker heart attack that morning. He didn’t survive it. He was Wiccan. And he died on one of the most spiritual days of his faith.

I don’t have much of any faith myself. I remain perpetually uncertain. But I am certain that I will never do anything as utterly metal as passing through to the other side on Samhain.

I have Schizoaffective disorder. Part of it is a mood disorder, that’s the affective part of Schizoaffective, so I have more intense emotions than the normies. I stopped trying to always hold it in and just let it out where I can. And I let it out wherever I am when I need to.

When I arrived at work that Halloween, I called my wife. She had a hard time understanding me. I was crying hysterically. I was on the far side of the building I worked at. I walked in between two work trucks when I felt the tears coming.

After I hung up, I went to work. When I went to break or to lunch, I wandered off where I could be alone and cried until I had a headache. Then I wiped my cheeks, dried my eyes, put my glasses back on and went back to work. But I made surge to purge the stress and emotion where I could. Because I learned from Milo that holding it in and choking it back is unhealthy.

He and I had a theory that not managing your emotions in an effective and healthy manner is a factor in why women statistically live longer than men.

I have a lot of intense emotions. I have a lot to manage. And crying is part of how I do that. It is an effective and healthy way to manage emotions.

Emotional regulation is to mental, emotional, and physical health as vital as diet and exercise is.

I thought I understood that. But it’s one thing for a doctor or therapist to tell you. It’s another for a found family member to show you and guide you through that lesson.

I learned a lot from Milo. Maybe you can, too.

And another says that success isn’t permanent and failure isn’t fatal, which is only half right. Success is never permanent. However, failure can be fatal, but only ever once.

And there are situations in life that will feel impossible to overcome. Situations you know cannot be altered to your favor. Situations you know can and likely will destroy your dreams, end your career, end the relationships that give your life purpose and meaning, or that will do all of the above with the added bonus of ending your life.

As you get older, you will arrive at situations that result in you having to rebuild your life. Because like a fire burning through a forest and razing it to the ground leaving nothing bust ash in its path, eventually there will be new growth. Animals will return and rebuild the ecosystem.

You will have to rebuild your life at some point. Maybe you already have. But, in all likelihood, you may have to again. Life moves in cycles and in seasons.

I have had to rebuild my life, my relationships, my belief system, and after several hospitalizations, I have had to rebuild my mind. It took me years in some cases and decades in others.

There are storms we will not survive. But after having to rebuild so much so many times, when I look out and see a storm on the horizon, and I find myself alone and afraid on a tiny sailboat, I used to say that everything will be alright no matter how bad things look.

These days, I look out at that oncoming storm and I know, in my bones, that I will be okay no matter how bad things get.

And when the winds pick up and the rains fall, I do the best thing I can do: I tack my sails and ride that bitch out.

Around Easter of 2010, after a year and a half spent off all of my meds, I checked myself into the hospital. The nurse who did my intake said, “We don’t have a bed for you.”

I told him I was suicidal. He asked if I had a plan. I said no. He said he was going to get a doctor to write a prescription for medication that might help.

When he came back, I told him that the plan I acted on during my suicide attempt in 2002 was a plan I improvised and due to my best efforts would have worked were it not for quick thinking on the part of EMTs, nurses, and doctors.

I added, “So, just because I don’t have a plan now, doesn’t mean I won’t come up with one be the time I get to my car in the parking lot.”

And suddenly they found me a bed.

I had a falling out with a few close friends and had gone through a bad break up on top of it all.

I lost the relationships that meant the most to me. Part of what inspired me in 2002 to take 112 over-the-counter sleeping pills and downing a fifth of Puerto Rican Spiced Rum was the idea that I would keep losing everything and everyone I loved for as long as I kept living. I felt like the only way I could stop my catastrophic mistakes and loses was to stop being alive.

Those mistakes were all created or exacerbated by me being off meds. It was more than me thinking I could manage my illness without them. It was largely due to me not having the money to buy them out of pocket, which I had to do because I was uninsureable. I had a “preexisting condition.”

Before the ACA, that meant no insurance would cover me. I was priced out of the care I needed. And so, my mental and emotional health cratered because I couldn’t afford the care managing my illness required.

And in 2010, a little over 7 years after my suicide attempt, I found myself in the same emotional place of not wanting to exist, which just further reinforced my feeling that I should die. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be alive. And I felt like an unfair burden on the people I loved.

But I had enough wherewithal to check myself into the hospital before I improvised another plan that likely would have worked.

But during my intake to the psych ward, I changed out of my dirty clothes and into fresh scrubs, they ran my vitals, took blood, and had me stand on a scale to weigh me. I weighed in at 119 lbs. I am 6’3. For reference, Matthew McConaughey is about my height. In Dallas Buyer’s Club, he weighed 135 lbs. I weighed 16 pounds less that he did in that movie. I was skeletal.

And looking in the mirror and seeing my heart beating between my ribs with so much force I felt like it was going to burst out of my chest like the chestburster in the Aliens movies. I realized that if I didn’t get control over my mental state, my mental health, that my body would give up my ghost before I had a chance to follow through with any of my hair-brained plans.

I still wanted to be dead. And every morning I woke up was enraging and upsetting once I realized I was still alive. I had the best dreams I ever had in my life in that hospital. I dreamt I patched up my relationships with my friends, family, and my ex girlfriend. I had a high paying job I loved.

Then I’d wake up in the psych ward and realized it was a dream and the reality I had to live with was that those bridges were still burned to ash and I would have to live with the thousands of dollars in medical debt that no job was ever going to pay me enough for long enough to pay off.

I would relive my loses every single morning. So, I wanted to just lay in bed all day. I could barely find the energy to use the bathroom or feed myself during meal times.

I would have stayed in bed and wasted away had the hospital staff left me alone long enough. But they didn’t.

My mental and emotional state started to change once the medications reached therapeutic levels. They improved once I started writing on the legal pad they gave me using the sharpie they gave me. Because my eyes couldn’t focus and I couldn’t read anything. So I decided to write instead.

I was mentally, emotionally, and physically drained. I wanted to just throw in the towel and fall flat on my face. But I had a tiny pilot light that served as a lighthouse in my storm. It didn’t go out. It was just strong enough to give me hope that I could change the behaviors and mindset I needed to change to make my life better. To make myself better.

And, thanks to the Stoics, (who are a large influence on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) thinking of death so much and so often helped me make my life a better one.

I struggled with every fiber of my being to find the strength to carry on. But as Napoleon once said, “Courage isn’t having the strength to carry on - it is carrying on when you don’t have strength.”

And, like any type of success I’ve ever had, I got it for only one reason: I refused to quit. No matter how hard I got hit, I picked myself back up. I kept moving forward even if I was limping, even when I was crawling, even if all I was doing was breathing.

When I get pushed, I push back. Even when I’m the one pushing me back or pushing me down. It’s not strength of character. It is reflexive—on both counts.

Bob Marley said, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”

Being strong isn’t the only choice you can make, but it is the only choice worth making. It pays dividends. To be strong is to win in the end. And it pays to be a winner.

People often compare their talents, strengths, and abilities to gold. But gold is found in a mine before it is for sale above ground. And if you haven’t found yours yet, it is not a matter of you not having any. What it means is that you need to dig deeper. You will find it if you keep digging. Some artist, musicians, and writers dig for a lifetime and only find it in stolen moments here and there. But they do find it.

And so can you.

When the storm moves in, you can look out on the horizon and imagine the myriad of ways you can die.

But when you look out on the horizon and see the storm, you can think to yourself, “I will be OK no matter how bad things get.”

You can tack your sails and ride it out. It’s the only thing that will work. It’s the only thing that ever has. Because it’s the only thing that ever can.

There was a large, plain, bright white room lined with bookshelves that reeked of bleach and isophoric alcohol. There were a half dozen folks wandering around in hospital gowns that weren’t tied up properly in the back.

My dad asked a nurse for some sowing thread. When the nurse came back with it, he tied the thread around my first loose tooth. He tied the other end to a doorknob. He slammed the door and out came my tooth. It bled for only a moment and then stopped.

My dad told me if I put the tooth under my pillow the tooth fairy would take it and leave me money.

As my mom and I walked out of the hospital and into the parking lot, I asked her, “When I grow up, will I get sick like dad?”

She got weepy. She said no. She hugged me.

But she was wrong.

In the summer of 1999, I was waiting at a bus stop with a friend. We were smoking a hundred feet from the bus stop because we didn’t want to drench the crowd waiting in cigarette smoke.

This was a main bus line and there were dozens of busses that stopped there. As we waited for the one we needed, a woman got off her bus and started screaming. She was throwing garbage and yelling insults at someone it was clear only she could see and hear.

My friend got somber and said she felt like she would end up like that woman. That such is the fate of most artists like her.

Growing up seeing my dad do and say similar things as this woman was, I felt for her. And seeing the crowd at the bus stop point, laugh, and mock her boiled my blood.

What I understood in that moment was that if I could see and hear what she did, I not only would be saying and doing what she was, it would seem perfectly rational and logical. I would have made every single choice she did in life had I been faced with the same choices she’d been.

At that moment, that realization, and growing up watching my dad live with a severe mental illness made me think that I understood a million things about mental illness.

But when mental illness happened to me, when I got a clinical diagnosis, I realized I only understood two things about mental illness:

Jack and shit.

And Jack left town.

I have schizoaffective disorder. And I never tell anyone wherever I work, but socially I am upfront about it. If it’s gonna be a problem, I want to know right away instead of after I invest in someone because then it’ll be too late.

I remember telling a new group of friends the first night we met. I practically introduced myself as being schizophrenic.

One new friend, Julia, asked me when the last time I was on a psych ward. At the time it had been 7 years. She asked how many times I had been hospitalized. I told her I had been in 4 times.

Then she told me that if I start having issues, symptoms flaring, to find her and we would go outside, smoke, and ride it out.

From that I gathered that I made a strong impression on her. And she was from then on one of my best friends.

Thankfully, I never needed to take her up on her offer.

But I sat with that til it settled. And when I got an invite to a Bible Study from my wife who said it would be good because it is inclusive in ways most aren’t. It’s for Queer Christians. But I have no faith. Some of us do. Some of us don’t.

Some are Queer. Some aren’t. It is a space held for people who are on the margins. It is for the addicts, the neurodivergent, the poor, those who Jesus spent his limited time with.

The whole group has cracked plenty of jokes about my mental illness, but I am never the butt of those jokes. The humor is situational rather than at my expense. I am grateful for the spaces I am welcomed into where I don’t have to mask. Places that don’t just passively tolerate my weirdness, but who actively celebrate it.

The Pastor who leads it started it as a project for one of the classes he took in Seminary as he was earning his Master’s in Divinity.

We’ll call him Dylan.

Week after week I got to know him well. He made sense to me. I made sense to him. I learn from him. I am good at making him laugh.

But a couple years after we met, he told me that he had been recently diagnosed with D.I.D. (Dissociative Identity Disorder). I was one of the first people he told because he knew I wouldn’t judge and because he knew I could help him make peace with his diagnosis, his permanently altered life, the changed expectations he was left with, and the trauma of knowing that even at his healthiest, he will still be ill.

And we talked. A lot. And he found his way to a better life. A well managed one. Not without pain, but a life led with gratitude and joy. He leads a congregation, a Bible Study, relationships, and ever advancing theological degrees. He has much to offer as a Pastor, but also as a friend.

And not long after Dylan shared his diagnosis with me Julia shared her diagnosis with me. She also has D.I.D. (Dissociative Identity Disorder).

We talked about the overlap of symptoms we live with. A fun fact most don’t seem to know is that it is not just Schizophrenics who experience psychosis, hallucinations, or delusions.

Dylan and Julia’s diagnoses are not the same as mine, but we all three know that we will always have infinitely more in common with each other than we ever will with the normies.

And, no, all of us aren’t all the same. There is a massive difference between neurodivergent people and neurotypical people. Saying that we all go through something is fucking horseshit and I can prove it.

It’s called the DSM V.

I am grateful for the bond I have with Julia and Dylan. We understand each other in ways we never could if we weren’t saddled with the mental illnesses we have. That bond goes deeper than simple friendship. They are found family. They are among my best friends. Not just now, but over my whole entire life.

So, even though if I were given a choice where if I push a big red button and I could be magically neurotypical, be magically sane, I would slam that button so hard I would break my wrist, I am still grateful that my diagnosis, my illness, has allowed me to have deeper bonds with people I care about.

I am grateful that I can help those I love and help guide those I don’t though writing.

Amori Fati is a Stoic idea of loving your fate. For me it is a matter of not just making peace with, but actively choosing every event, person, and symptom, every crisis, every loss, every win exactly as they happened in my life because it made me better. It made me—me. And I finally like me now.

Despite my disdain for his goose-stepping sister, I am grateful to Nietzsche for popularizing the idea of Amori Fati.

Life is like driving on the freeway in a snowstorm and starting to slide. Because when you start to slide the best thing you can do is to turn into the skid.

Choosing to not fight against it, but to turn into the skid, is Amori Fati.

These things cannot be objectively measured. They are subjective. The therapist that leads me to a breakthrough may lead you into the hospital. The meds that were life changing for me could put you into a psychotic break.

Back in 2013, after my last stint on a psychward, my APRN put me on a name brand drug that was supposed to be a miracle drug. There were round the clock commercials for it. It was supposed to be a game changer.

And it was.

It made the voices so loud they were all I could hear. Song lyrics to songs I’d heard my whole life changed. They were dragging me like I was Ann Coulter at a Comedy Central Roast.

My visual hallucinations were as constant and unavoidable as the voices. This caused my affective disorder, my mood disorder, to reach peak levels.

I didn’t want to go back to grippy sock jail mere weeks after I got out. So I told my APRN I needed to stop taking it and why. She put me on different meds and tapered me off the problem medication.

After a few weeks, my symptoms returned to normal, baseline levels.

I’ve had side effects before. Ranging anywhere from sexual dysfunction to feeling hungover to feeling drunk. Not sleeping at all to doing nothing but sleep. Having to run to the bathroom every ten minutes to having to take laxatives to function normally.

Once, I had a supervisor try to fire me for falling asleep at work. I said sleepiness is a literal symptom of my medications. And he said I would have to get on different medications to keep my job, which is illegal for an employer to say or demand.

But I didn’t have $5k to hire a lawyer, so I just quit.

But sleepiness is a symptom that, as I experience it, is a better side effect than most of the alternatives I have experienced.

I am hesitant and reticent to spin the roulette wheel of medicine. I, like so many of us, have to decide what side effects are negotiable and which are nonnegotiable. And I want to, where possible, avoid trying out new meds like I’m taking clothes in the clearance section into a changing room to see what I like and what actually fits me.

I am hesitant to experience the hellish side effects that I have when I have had to spin that roulette wheel and try out new meds.

But it is often unavoidable.

In 2020, night terrors terrorized me to the point that I stopped sleeping. So, after telling my APRN, she put me on a PTSD drug that usually helps patients with night terrors. And it worked. The night terrors vanished like mental cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light.

On top of my symptom disappearing, my mind was clearer than it had been in so long I hadn’t noticed I had felt chemically lobotomized by the effects of my illness and my meds.

My mind improved. So my life improved. And yet I do not want to keep playing musical chairs with my meds.

I am more likely to try out different therapists to see if I can find someone who works better with me.

I did not like my current therapist—at first. She seemed odd. She didn’t seem to understand me. It felt like a square peg, round hole situation at first. Until it didn’t. Now it’s not just that things seem to work between us in ways they didn’t seem to initially. They work better than with any other therapist I have had in the 24 years since my symptoms first presented.

I have made more progress in months with her than I ever have in years with any other therapist.

So I know that taking a chance to see if things can get better can be worth it. But thankfully I have a say in whether or not I make that gamble or take that bet.

My therapist doesn’t just shower me with praise. She challenges me if I am making questionable choices, not thinking things through, or if my thought process seems muddled and unclear. She tells me not just where I go wrong, but where I go right, and how to get closer to reaching my goals.

We all need a guide, which is what a good therapist can be. We each have dietary needs that are a bit different from each other. So it is with meds. Those of us with a mental illness, or any neurodivergence, have specific needs as much as we have different needs.

And only when our needs are met, can we turn our potential into reality. Only when our needs are met can we achieve the things in our dreams.

Life is a long trip without GPS. Sometimes we don’t know where we’re going til we get there. But a better life is possible. An ideal one is not. Life is always full of problems. Those who are lucky have a life full of problems they are good at solving.

In life much needs fixing, but if you keep moving toward your goals, you can fix it on the way.

You can do anything you set your mind to. Change is possible. Therefore growth is too. Anything possible you can do if you just want it bad enough. The only limits that you will ever, or have ever faced, are self-imposed.

It won’t be easy. It never is. It never will be. But it will always be worth it.

You will have to dig deeper than you ever have. You will have to push past exhaustion and pain into your second wind again and again until all this eventually ends. You will have to do what you think you can’t. You will have to run your tank empty and keep going.

You have to develop courage. And courage is not finding the strength to carry on. It is carrying on when you don’t have the strength. The difference between pro athletes and amateurs is that the pro’s play hurt.

It’s mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter. The difference between the master and the student is that the master has failed more times than the student has attempted.

Failures aren’t set backs, they are lessons. You can see the lesson if you look for it. You have to learn from losing before you can learn how to win.

You can learn how to be healthier even with a severe mental illness. Just give yourself the understanding you have so often been denied.

Be kind to yourself. Health comes with time. Be patient with yourself and give yourself the time you need to become healthier.

You can do it.

So do it.

Every building, every make and model of vehicle, every book, every movie, every song, these things only exist because someone, somewhere, decided that they needed them to exist.

Creativity is, more than anything else, a passion project. The creative process is a matter of you becoming an artist. It is magical or supernatural, but it is also a hassle. It’s a hassle because the process and the outcome require constant upkeep.

Like a house needing drywall to be replaced after heavy rains cause a leak. Or having a pipe freeze in the winter. A bird flying into your window and dying right after it cracks that window, which now needs replacing. Oh, and it’s not a standard size, and customizing the size costs extra.

If you’re handy, you can fix some of it yourself. You can maybe bribe a guy you know with a few beers to fix it instead and save a few bucks. But whether you fix it, have a friend or relative fix it, it must be fixed. It may be a huge fix or it may be a quick fix but there is always something that needs fixing.

A house is in a constant state of disrepair that requires upkeep to keep it in good working order.

Your body has different needs, but it too needs constant work. But the two best things you can do to address the work that needs doing are to get a good diet and exercise routine going.

And you can gain muscle. You can drop enough off your body fat percentage that the muscle you have is easier to see. But if you do a great workout and run to a mirror as soon as you finish your routine, you will not see any difference between what you saw before that workout. Not in a day. Not it a week. But day by day, with consistent and proper work, one day you will.

And that payoff requires constant upkeep to maintain much less to build on.

And your mental and emotional well-being also exist in a permanent state of disrepair that requires constant attention to stay in a healthy equilibrium.

Maybe you have a traumatic memory. Maybe you have multiple traumatic memories. Maybe you have unhealthy coping mechanisms. Maybe you have generational trauma you are trying to make sure you don’t pass along to your children.

If you have a literal brain, then you need literal therapy. Everyone needs therapy for the same reason everyone needs a primary care doctor. Now, maybe you need less therapy than me. Maybe you need more than me. My point is that we all need it to one degree or another.

The lengths people go through to avoid therapy is both crushingly depressing and also, in some ways, absolute comedic gold.

For example, I knew a guy I worked with who drove a massive truck. His Ford F-450 had a starting cost of $94,655. For reference, the penile implant surgery that would treat the disease instead of the jacked truck that only treats the symptom costs between $16k-$19k.

And I am confident that for $50k, he could save just over $40k and still leave the surgery clinic with a penis he could use to medal in Olympic pole vaulting.

But even if that surgery did adequately address his issues, there would still be maintenance that would be needed on a regular basis. Follow up surgeries, blood work, scans or Xrays still need to happen to track progress.

Mark Twain said, “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.”

There was a fascinating show from the UK I grew up watching called Connections with James Burke. The premise was that in the first scene of the show, Burke would talk about technology, like radar for example, and then the rest of the episode covered all the seemingly irrelevant inventions that had to exist for radar to exist to begin with.

Another example comes from a high school history class I had. We were doing a section on the Civil War. The teacher talked about Lincoln approving use of the gatling gun. This led to him asking us what single technology changed warfare the most. I answered stirrups. He said I was the only student who got that question right in the 32 years he had been teaching. In that time he taught my parents and uncles.

Then he asked where I learned that fact. And I had to admit I learned it in a Star Trek novel.

But stirrups changed military tactics more than firearms did. No single technology had the impact on warfare or history than the Chinese invention of stirrups in the 4th Century of the Common Era.

Stirrups kept riders secure in their saddles, which allowed riders to wear heavier armor, carry larger and heavier shields, carry larger weapons, allow archers to stand up in their stirrups while riding, which meant that archers could shoot with deadly accuracy while moving faster than soldiers could, and it allowed riders to use the horse to cushion impacts made into other riders or soldiers on foot turning a mode of transport into a shock weapon.

It led to calvary. It permanently altered military tactics the world over. We are seeing a similar impact with drone technology.

Stirrups changed history. But it took a saddle to be invented first. And it took domesticating horses before that to allow stirrups to be an option. Every technology that we use everyday depends on a host of other seemingly insignificant products, techniques, and technologies to make a new invention possible.

Necessity is the mother of invention. And most groundbreaking technology, be it stirrups or personal computers, bear that out. Mostly, people get creative in their need to solve a problem. And every technology solves some problems while creating others.

But new technology comes from the passion of the inventor to solve a given set of problems. Maintaining a nice house, a nice car, and a nice body requires passion and creativity. Every project is a passion project.

And every passion project requires creativity to make an idea a reality. None of what we recognize as a human invention was ever created in a vacuum. Isolation, perhaps, but not in a vacuum because word spread and the invention was either shared, bought, or stolen, but it eventually would spread and be tweaked and refined and honed until it was as close to perfection as our inherently flawed species is capable of.

And just because your contribution doesn’t change the entire course of human history, just because it doesn’t explode and disrupt an industry, doesn’t mean that your contribution won’t be what lights the fuse that does.

Creativity gets its power from passion. Maintaining relationships, a healthy body, a healthy mind, a healthy living space, all are in a sense passion projects.

Writing is mine. I was advised when I was young to imagine what I would do for free and pursue that as a vocation. Well, even though I have tens of readers, I am not making money enough to support myself and my family. But I write because it is how I process things. I always have a conversation going on in my mind, sometimes a few simultaneously. It is only when I write that the wave function collapses into a single line of thought. I write because I need it. And I share it in the hope that others may benefit.

My question after seeing a play about a man who wrote a brilliant play that no one ever saw was, “If no one ever reads a word I write, if I never am able to support my family financially, would I still write?” And my answer is “yes.”

And for decades I have been doing just that, writing into the void while screaming into the abyss. And yet, I put a lot of energy into never-ending attempts to make a living writing.

Writing is my passion project. Being a husband is a passion project. Being a good stepdad is a passion project. Love of every sort is a passion project.