Month: February 2020

I was stuck this morning by what I believe to be a weird thought.

I wish I could have a do over on high school.

Now, that might have popped into my head because this year marks 20 years since graduation.

But I’d somehow want to do it over with a lot of the knowledge and social skills that I’ve accrued to this point in my life.  Not necessarily know everything I know now, but mostly I wish I had treated some people better than I did, done more for people I cared about back then, and maybe even been a little braver when it came to things I was uncomfortable with.  (I’m looking at you drama club!)

Now, we all know that hindsight comes with 20/20 vision.  I’m not talking about Marty finding the sports almanac in Back to the Future 2. (Although maybe I’d like to have all the musical love I do now so I can catch my favorite bands from their inception).  I wish I could live high school again with the social skills I have now, the interests I have now, and the realizations and perspective I’ve developed to this point.  There are absolutely situations where I would’ve made some different choices, not necessarily to change the path that has brought me where I am, but maybe to save some time, appreciate some people more, and maybe even save my Mom and Dad a headache or two.

But think of how amazing that could be if you could go back with even just the social skills you’ve developed to this point in your life.  You’d be a walking therapist for so many people who were having trouble with life at that point!  I don’t mean saying things like “this is high school, it won’t even matter to you in five years” because that doesn’t actually help the guy who’s struggling with a break-up, or someone who has crippling social anxiety but just wants to be accepted, or the person who deep inside has the terrifying secret that they are gay, or trans, and there is no way in hell a high school in the late 90s is going to make shit like that easy for anyone.  I remember the words “faggot, retard, gay, queer, etc.” being tossed around left and right with zero thought to the actual pain they could cause.  You could legit save someone’s life.

You’d realize that when your math teacher said “yes, you’ll need the Pythagorean Theorem when you’re an adult” probably only applied to people who wanted to be scientists, engineers, or carpenters.  Maybe you’d save yourself some stress.  I know it would’ve been huge for me since Math was the bane of my existence.

Wanna know how dumb high school was?  Someone once spread the rumor that I was a “test tube baby”.  To this day I have no freaking clue what that was supposed to mean, (other than maybe in vitro fertilization was frowned upon by this one particular high school male?) but I know it came with a heavily negative connotation at the time.  But that’s what middle and high school was, and I am sure, still is.  You just say shit.  There is no filter.  So many of us didn’t have the brain capacity to intercept a thought before it turned into something we said.  I am absolutely sure that I was very guilty of this.  I am absolutely sure that I said things that gutted people and that made them feel tiny.  I regret that.  I would absolutely go back with the mindset and understanding I have now and rectify that bullshit.

Understandably so, our middle-school and high school years are where we really start to figure out the very beginnings of who we are.  But like I said above there are things I look back on that I did or said, cringe, and believe that couldn’t be farther from who I am.  I think it’s much harder to be a kid in our current age of social media, cell phones, and unrealistic expectations put on adolescents by the society that those first two things have created. Our middle and high school kids have so much more shit to deal with on a daily basis.  As my niece Ava and nephew Jack grow up, (she’s an 8th grader, he’s a 5th grader), I hope and pray that they can navigate these choppy seas that are adolescence in the 2020s.

This post isn’t about negativity, or regret though.  As I write it and as I think about it, I just want to express some gratitude for some people who had a big impact on my time back at Saranac, and had a hand in teaching me something about life, whether they were a teacher or classmate.  I think too often we don’t tell people how much they mean to us and then sometimes it’s too late.

I look back fondly on some truly indelible things that are forever etched in my memory and make me smile to this day.  It’s funny to know these people now by different last names, but we’ll go back in time a little for this sappy love letter to some of my high school friends.

-Brandi White, your sweater in Spanish class with those huge puff balls.  I have no idea why that came into my head, but I feel like it was such a personification of the bright and positive force that you were!  Thanks for being you!

-Cristi LeClair, I look back and realize you were truly one of my best friends.  We shared so much real talk on the phone, watching Braveheart, etc.  Going hard against each other in basketball on the playground.  So much fun.  Thank you for everything.

-Jess Lashua, you were one of the few people who never hesitated to call me on my shit.  I was lucky enough to be one of the popular kids, and probably got a way with a lot because of it, but you were always there to keep me straight, even if I didn’t wanna hear it.  Thank you.

-Luke Sanger, much like Brandi above, I just remember you being this effervescently positive and energetic guy who you couldn’t help smile around.  You are still like that!  I loved the competitor you were in sports, and really felt like we had that sense of drive and duty when it came to a team in common.  Thanks for being you man, to this day.

-Kati Topel, you truly were a kindred spirit of mine.  I feel like we instantly clicked, and I had such an amazing time learning about you and your culture back in Germany, making fun of your attempts at difficult American phrases and pronunciations, and being on the cross-country team with you.  Thank you so much!

-Marta Tomas, in a similar vein as Kati, I will never ever forget you taking the time at lunch and study hall to help me try to figure out my math homework.  You were super patient, super kind, and an absolutely blessing that probably helped me pass the class!  Thank you!

-Mr. Jeff Ehrlich, you weren’t my guidance counselor officially, but I, like a million others I am sure, felt like you were EVERYONE’S guidance counselor.  When I flunked out of freshman year, you were the first person I thought of going to for help, and you went above and beyond for me to get me back on the correct path.  I will never, ever forget that.  You are a great, great, great man.  Thank you.

-Nikol (HA) Mattila, you were. and I am sure still are, one of the sweetest and most genuine people I have ever met.  I remember middle school study hall chats in the hallway about significant others and about crap we both went through in school.  You were such a big help.  Thank you.

-Katie Weinberg, where do I even start?  Much like Jess, you never hesitated to call me on my shit, so thank you for that.  We went through a lot of ups and downs, some silly feuds, some feuds that were in good fun (mostly about your Yankee fandom and the merits of soccer as a sport, which I’ve done a full 180 on, you’d be happy to know), and some really silly antics in art class.  I remember one of us pissing off Mr. Perry by pushing a pencil through the screen or something.  LOL.  I also remember excellent birthday parties at your camp on Chazy Lake.  Sitting on docks, laying in hammocks, and sleeping on floors.  I miss it for sure.  Thank you!

Cassie Alexander, I look back and cherish picking you up every morning for school.  I remember great conversations about running, relationships, and everything in between.  I was always inspired by your grit and determination as a competitor, and was truly in awe of your positive and fun-loving spirit.  Thank you.

-Aaron and Jessica Matoon.  I don’t think I can ever fully put into words how much I looked up to you both because of your boundless kindness, empathy, and athleticism.  There is so much of your mom’s amazing spirit in the both of you.  I greatly miss you guys.  Thank you both for being who you were and are.

-Matt Dashnaw, dude, having gym class with you as a freshman when you were a senior, Boy Scouts, I just remember every single interaction with you being one where I felt like I was talking with the kindest guy I’d ever met.  I remember you being super helpful with sports, in the Scouts, and overall just being a fantastic human being who I looked up to big-time.  Thank you so much.

-Sarah Paul, I remember “meeting” you on AOL (wow, how crazy does that sound at this point) because you had SCS cross-country in your profile and I was like “I don’t know this girl, who is she?”  Hahahaha.  Thank you (and your Mom!) so so so much for being so supportive over the years in XC and track.  You truly ended up being one of the sweetest people I knew, and one of my absolute favorites.  Thanks for everything.

-Bret Rock, thank you for being my rock throughout the awkwardest years anyone can go through.  Your house always felt like a second home, and I truly see you to this day as a brother.  I cherish the memories of football sims, all-nighters being GMs of whatever sport with Kyle, and then me going to do the paper route and coming back to continue. I cherish the goofiest of Ouija board sessions, swatting fucking bats with a broom in the basement of your unfinished house, Redford Bowls, and trampoline WWE matches. Thanks for everything, my brother.

This is hardly a comprehensive list.  I could go on, and on, and on, but I don’t think that’d be an entertaining read for any of you if it ended up being tens of thousands of words.  Let me just leave you all with this…

…be excellent to one another.  Remember that we have no idea what other people are going through just by looking at them.  Be a positive force of nature every single day.  Make someone smile.  Make someone laugh.  Tell someone you appreciate them.  You could be the difference.  I know everyone I listed above was for me.

There are no take backsies.  We are only guaranteed the moments we are in.

Make them count.

I cut my finger on a staple the other day as I was delivering some takeout for DoorDash. (I now have a side-hustle job).  As I searched frantically for a napkin in a napkinless car, I did the only thing I could think of and popped my finger in my mouth.

After a few minutes of that metallic taste on my tongue, the cut began to stop bleeding.  Eventually, over time, that little cut starts to scab over.  My skin breaks down and begins to build itself back up, scabbing over, as good as new.

Unless I pick at that scab.  If I pick it, it may fester or scar and take much longer to heal properly.

This made me think of the last few years of my life and fighting things like anxiety, depression, and negative thoughts.  I had a lot of things bubbling under the surface that were starting to manifest externally through a loss of patience with myself, students, athletes, etc., exasperation in the face of simple frustration, and a general listlessness in my daily routine.  You may be surprised to hear that.  I think a lot of us have gotten too good at hiding how they really feel day to day.

One thing became clear to me though.  I had to do something.  I couldn’t keep ignoring how I felt.  This wasn’t the life I wanted to live.  I wasn’t behaving like the person I wanted to be.

The first step, I think, was realizing that a lot of the reason I was feeling the way I was ended up being a direct result of choices I’d made in my life prior and also exacerbated by conscious and unconscious denial of some of my own negative behaviors, habits, and social skills.  Sure, some of the problems I was dealing with were external, but stress obviously all mixes into a big stew anyway, no matter where it comes from.  What helped was realizing that I couldn’t tackle everything at once.  I wasn’t prepared to attack the credit debt I’d accrued, didn’t have the time or motivation, or grit to organize the entire house, or able to really come to grips that I needed to change my entire outlook and possibly, more terrifyingly at the time, who I thought I was.

If you’ve gotten this far, and reading over this makes you think of something that maybe you are feeling, or someone close to you is feeling, let me simply say:

It’s gonna be ok.  It really is.  Take the first step…whatever it may be.

You know something has to change.  If I have to suggest starting with something, it’s to understand that you really need to let go of the idea of who you think you SHOULD be, where you think you SHOULD be, and all the other useless SHOULDS that social media and society impose on us.

I’m 38.  For a long time I beat myself up over the idea that I didn’t have kids, I was living paycheck to paycheck, and that I generally didn’t do enough with my life compared to a lot of other people I saw on Instagram or Facebook.  Do other people eat cereal for dinner?  Is that what adults should do?

It’s so easy to let our anxiety, depression, and negative thoughts to overwhelm us.  So easy to stay in bed all day mindlessly binge-watching Netflix and eat an entire bag of Doritos.

All too easy to keep picking at our emotional scabs.

My regeneration into the person I wanted to be started with (I think unconsciously at the time) seeking out professional development opportunities that involved mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and other stuff that for the vast majority of my life I wrote off as some sort of cross between hippee stuff/voodoo/delusion.  For whatever reason, likely my own lack of self-confidence/self-awareness, I’d attached a negative stigma to these things.  I perpetuated the idea that they couldn’t possibly help me.

I didn’t need a counselor, or therapy.  That’s for crazy people who can’t deal with their own problems, I thought.  I was the type of person who internalized every slight, every hurt, said yes to everyone else regardless of what I actually wanted because I felt some sort of obligation.  I was tough, I could cope.  Swallow it all down.  I set up defense mechanisms to continue avoiding conflict to a fault.  I’d order at a restaurant, and not say anything about any mistakes in the order when it arrived because of some stupid social anxiety.  I WOULD EAT A MEAL I DIDN’T ORDER!  I’d refuse to take responsibility for my own deficiencies.  Felt too embarrassed to speak about ongoing problems in my life and relationships.  I ignored the effect those behaviors were having on my life, my marriage, others around me and my emotional well-being.

What a f*cking moron I was.

Okay, that’s probably a little harsh.  I regret it getting to the point and extent it did.  It was a lack of self-reflection that lead me to where I was.

It took reading some great books on the subjects (Dan Harris’ 10% Happier being required reading) and working with some amazing mentors living their own examples of mindfulness (thank you so much Danielle Seem and Jenifer Guay), in some professional development classes focused on yoga, meditation, mindfulness, etc., for me to realize:

Holy shit, I need this stuff.

I realized the first thing I had to let go of were those preconceived stigmas I had developed about mindfulness and meditation (it’s not at all about finding enlightenment for us normal everyday folk) and really starting to look honestly at my own behaviors and habits.

Hindsight is 20/20.  I think had I adopted these things into my life much sooner, I would not be dealing with a lot of the stuff that made me need it in the first place.  Much stress, pain, and anxiety could’ve been avoided.

Here’s the thing though, like three years later….I don’t think the point of life is avoiding negativity, feelings of anxiousness, and stress.  There’s a space for noticing those negative feelings that pop into my head, and instead of perseverating on them, letting them overwhelm me, I’d try to analyze them.  Asking myself “why?” actually took a lot of the sting out of them and lead me to some profound discoveries about my own role in creating them or the situations that caused them.  It also let me detach myself from them emotionally and helped me make some logical choices and changes to the way I did things in order to repair whatever breakdown had caused them in the first place.  It’s a process that sometimes I need to actively force myself to do, but it works.

A lot of the wounds I’ve suffered in my life are figuratively self-inflicted.  Again, think of the scab analogy from earlier.  If I pick and pick and pick, it gets worse.

The goal isn’t to be wounded and move on though.  I think anything that makes us suffer physically, mentally, emotionally, should teach us something…should improve us in some way.  We can’t ignore the damage caused.

Enter Kintsugi.

No, not the 2014 Death Cab for Cutie album, but in retrospect maybe more of that would’ve helped things too.  Ben Gibbard’s voice and lyrics do have healing powers.

Kintsugi, or “golden joinery”, is the Japanese art of of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

The philosophy behind it is profoundly simple: the breakage and repair are part of the object’s history, not something to be disguised.

The damage is part of who we are.  It doesn’t define us, but ignoring it or trying to hide it only leads to more damage.

It’s ok to fail, ok to mess up, ok to make mistakes.  The idea though, is to come through the pain, the fire, the anxiety, the depression as a stronger, truer, wiser version of yourself.  We make the mistakes part of our story, instead of feeling like they are the end of it.

I’ve only scratched the surface of my own existential regeneration.  I’ve taken some long, long looks at myself and started cutting out the bits that don’t mesh with things I’m passionate about.  I’ve gotten better at saying no, and not feeling guilty about doing so.  I’ve owned my shit, so to speak.  I go to counseling every two weeks with an absolutely amazing therapist.  Talking with Sarah at North Country Behavioral Medicine in Peru has been absolutely incredible.  I take meds to help me curb those bouts of anxiety.  I’m no longer crippled by those negative thought vortexes that would keep me up at night or wake me up at 4AM.

I don’t pick the emotional scabs.

Do I still have a lot of work ahead of me to dig out of some of the cavernous holes I’ve dug for myself?  You betcha.  But I can tell you without a doubt I am 10,000x more prepared for that project than I would’ve been before getting the help.  I can’t recommend talking to a therapist enough.  Seriously.  Holding onto pain, anxiety, and depressive thoughts is like forcing yourself to go through mental cancer.

You aren’t alone in this.

You are not the one person that deals with these awful thoughts, you aren’t the only one bothered by something that someone said to you, you aren’t the only one overwhelmed by the repercussions of your choices, and aren’t the only one in pain.

The first step to healing what is broken is realizing it’s broken.  The second step is realizing that you aren’t alone.  The third is realizing that help is out there and getting it.

If you’d have told me I’d be saying all this and offering it up to everyone I knew via FB, I’d have probably had some sort of panic attack, vomited, and/or tried to de-invent the internet.

But I’ve come to understand through my own journey that communication and honesty are what destroys stigmas.  Honest self-inspection is necessary to a healthy life.  Don’t like this part of your life, cut it out, and regenerate.

Start simple.

I got sick of looking at clothes and shoes piled on the floor on my side of the bed.  I had the epiphany that if I bought a yoga mat, oil diffuser, and set myself up a dedicated mindfulness space on the side of my bed, I’d do it every morning, therefore connecting with myself, breathing, and be better at working through my shit.

I did it once.  🙂

My yoga mat sat there, unused other than to cushion my feet as I stepped on it, and occasionally had both clean and dirty laundry on it.

In the past, I probably would’ve viewed this as a failure.  But mindfulness helped me realize that the space didn’t have to be hard-wired for one particular idea I had for it.  That through being fluid with what I thought the space “should” be, (we need to be careful with that word in our lives), I could make it something functional and mentally pleasing.

So I bought a couple six foot bookshelves.  That was the logical progression of all those thoughts above, right?

The bookshelves were actually a manifestation of something on my pre-2020 bucket-list of things I did towards the end of last year.  Having a more mindful introspective view into what I wanted my life to be led me to making a list of things I wanted to do, or do more of, in the coming year.

The list is as follows:

• Paint
• Skydive
• Hike
• Bake
• Photography
• Learn to sew
• READ MORE
• Travel
• Visit Mike and Erin more!
• Blog (added about two hours ago when I started this post)

The bookshelves purchase came out of this, basically:

Books are my vice.  Yard sale books, used book store books, thrift store books…I am a glutton.  The problem with this, is that for a long time I really only read before going to bed.  Getting through five pages and then zonking is not a recipe for churning through novels.  I literally own hundreds of books.  After putting together the bookshelves, I began the process of shifting books from the small bookshelf that was previous over-stacked with them to the new ones.  The painstaking process of extricating the rest of my boxed up books from the attic was and epic undertaking and one that had me dealing with sore muscles for a few days.  However, after a few days of sweat and organization, and some purging that fell disastrously short of Ms. Kondo’s recommendations, I had ALL the books I owned shelved.

I’ve been reading so much more because of these beautiful things staring me in the face every day.

See?  Small, simple changes can make all the difference.  Can I still have my yoga mat there and try to spend some moments in meditation?  Absolutely.  Do I need to beat myself up if I don’t?  Not at all.

I made the list above with things I wanted to experience more of.  Things that I didn’t make time for prior.  Do I expect to become a painter who sells his works?  Not in the least.  I just wrote it down one day when I had an idea for a painting pop into my head when I was feeling a certain way, and mindful thinking allowed me to say “hey, that’s interesting, I should do something with that”.

Even if I only sky dive once, or bake some cupcakes a couple of times, I can at least say I tried it if it ends up being something that doesn’t stick on as something I want to keep doing.  Learning to sew came about through me wanting to be able to repair holes and rips in my own jeans.  Can’t be that hard, right?  I don’t think I’d have thought of this if I hadn’t tried to actively slow myself down mentally.

Our very best friends, Mike Hollis and Erin Cashman have moved from Boston to Addison, VT, a mere hour away instead of like 4.5.  Their old stone farmhouse has literally become one of my happy places.  Mike is gonna be my skydiving buddy this summer, since there’s a place that offers it like five minutes from said farmhouse!

Ok, I have to wrap things up, you have things to do today.

I tend to spin off on tangents easily.  I’m working on it.

TLDR: I was a skeptic about things that could’ve helped me a more well-rounded a better person…a stronger person.  I didn’t think the logic applied to me.  I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.  I probably wouldn’t have made the big mistakes that lead me here.

I messed up, but I’ve owned it.  Little by little, I’ve started making things better for myself and others around me.

The path I’ve traveled isn’t littered with the pieces of myself that I’ve managed to break along the way, but I’m proud of the golden scars I have now that I’ve begun the process of repairing/renovating who I am and want to be.

You can too.  Let’s talk.