Hearts and Stone
I was standing in my physics teacher's office in the winter of my senior year at Valley High. He wanted the progress report on the “Ping-Pong Ball Slingshot/Mousetrap Car” my friend Nicholas and I were working on for the Iowa High School Physics Olympics. I told him we were about to classicly screw it up. He just laughed like, “That's why you were the chosen ones.”
He was giving me the official map, itinerary, and criteria for our exhibition (there was no way he was going to show up and associate himself with us, or our contraption), but all I was thinking about was how did I get into, and how do I now get out of this humiliation? And then it got better.
As Mr. Drish was mumbling out some joke only attempting to be physics related, the morning announcements began to come through the PA system. I wasn't really paying attention to either one. I just wanted out of that office, and the Olympics all together. Then the female voice from above began to list off the names for our senior year King of Hearts Court nominees. I caught the first few names and was just nodding along with the obvious suspects, and then about halfway through the list, I heard my goddamn name.
I became very weak and shaky. I didn't faint, but with the tsunami of anxiety that just hit, everything went dark. What just happened? How did this happen? I missed the vote. I didn't even know there had been one. I kept asking myself, this isn't that big of a deal, why am I so scared? Am I shocked, or just freaking out?…or wait… Am I caught? Do they know something? Am I being set up?
Looking back now, I see it as one of the first times I realized, I didn't know, or want to know, the kind of person I was projecting into the world. But, I also felt I must somehow believe, or at least act like I believed, I liked it.
The process of self-reflection I have received through a recovery program has given me the opportunity to go back to that moment in Drish's office. I now have the tools to help that scared 18 year-old understand what was happening, so I can help this scared 43 year-old span the 25 year gap in psychological and emotional maturity.
If I was to disect the how/why I constructed my high school and beyond personality, it would be a long, sad train wreck of throwing people (including myself) under buses filled with dirty laundry and cans of worms, so not gonna do it. But I came up with a cast of characters seemingly based off movie stars I admired to help me draw all the attention I didn't want, as much as crave. My go to's were spin off's from Tom Cruise's performance in “Cocktail” mixed with Robin Williams in “Dead Poets”, and in college I added a little Lebowski and Kyle from “South Park”, or something to the effect…
What matters about all this is that I didn't know how to be myself. It caused me to be resentful of not only myself, but I also resented you for my belief that you expected it. Honestly, even though I was trying my best to be that person, it felt like I was lying. Being true to who I was, the me that wanted something different, felt like I could be committing social suicide. The internal conflict that had been going on for awhile started to show-out at this time in my life. One voice was quiet, and the other was screaming, so I decided to let the scream wear itself out. It took 25 years. This made drinking, using people and getting used, and blaming anything for all of it along the way as natural as breathing. Eventually, I didn't want to breath anymore.
Just over two years now without drinking has been an overwhelming relief from the damage my style of consumption did to my mind and body. The other parts of the process are coming along with the spiritual healing and growth necessary to bind the whole package together. Hard lessons and experiences arrive almost daily as I confront life from a more authentic perspective, not always a better one.
Being true to myself and others came up recently in one of those spiritual moments in sobriety that prove this is not my show.
I had been carrying around a weight on my mind for months too long. It was around me like parasitic, schizo-octopus arms attaching to several areas in my life. I didn't know what to do with or how to handle it any longer, so I used the recovery program suggestion and went into a daily meditative regimen until the answer arrived. After 5 months, no answer, and I was getting impatient.
One day, it got to the point where I had decided I was just going to cut off the head of the octo-monster and be done with it. I was set to journal all about it that night over and over until I had convinced myself it was a dead thing, but I didn't. Then, the very next day, I woke up.
That morning, on my way to a stoneyard to pick up a 750 pound slab of flagstone I had custom ordered for a job, I realized I might run into a guy connected to the octopus problem. Well, I was right, because it turns out he works at that particular yard. We had a talk, I vented my frustration, I listened to what he had to say, I vented some more, and then I got the hell out of there. Son of a bitch, I just couldn't get away from this monster problem. You go to deal with another problem, and whammo, there it is right there back in your face. That's how octo-monsters operate, am I right?
Well, about a mile away from leaving the stoneyard, something happened. I looked in the bed of my truck through the rear view mirror and realized that my friend had, somehow in the transfer from that forklift, taken that weight off my back and put it in my truck. I could no longer feel it. It was gone. I thought it might be something he said, or how he said it, maybe it was, but it didn't matter. I no longer felt like I was holding up a mountain. I no longer had to figure out who or what I had to be to “fix” or “get even” with this or any problem. The stone I ordered didn't belong to my friend at the yard. It came from a quarry. It wasn't mine either. Eventually, it will be part of someone else's path. It didn't need to be on our minds, or backs, any longer than necessary to move it along the path to its next place. In the end, the weight will always end up in the hands of The Spirit, and at that moment, those hands were a forklift, a Toyota Tacoma, and two guys being as honest as they knew how to be.
