Day 30: Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself... The Upside of Catastrophe....

Today marks 30 days of this 90 Day Life Change Challenge… One third done… When I started this journey, it was my intention to do the first blog about why I named it “I Can Breathe Again…” but like all things that are based in creativity, a good creator follows what comes to heart and not what they want to say… That in and of itself explains a lot about the style, direction, and randomness of my sharing with you… Like Tony Horton tells everyone, "You’re welcome…"

This morning during exercise, whatever decides my path gave me the go ahead to explain the name of the blog but first, like Jay-Z said, “allow me to reintroduce myself…” How apropos…

I don’t think I have ever really introduced myself on this platform of mine… So here is a little about me on this  day of my journey towards the inevitable… 

I was born in the mid 1960’s in Charleston WV… My dad wasn’t there when I was born… Always on the road, he called and asked that my mom name me John Wayne, which, she didn’t… I remember my maternal grandmother taking acre of me growing up but not my parents… I think my grandfather was more annoyed by me than anything, but I think he loved me…

One of my first memories of my mom is her making me hide in the closet so my dad couldn’t have weekend visitation. It would have more of a visitation with my dad’s new wife more than him, but it was still a dick thing to do. One of my first memories of my dad was him reaching into the driver’s side window of a Ford Maverick and punching my mom in the face with me in the back seat… When I reconnected with him in my early twenties, he told me that immediately after that, he went and got a six pack and sat on the courthouse steps of our small town drinking it and waited to be arrested, which he wasn’t. 

In 1972, my mom got re-married and I was moved to Arizona at the ripe old age of 7. My mom forged my dad’s signature and I ended up being adopted at age 8. My step-father meant well and that’s all I will say about that. 

Insomnia let me listen in on those late night arguments where he called her names and the walls shook when she bounced off of them.

I met Evil Knievel when I was in the third grade at a Pro-Am Golf Tournament and when I asked him for his autograph, he pushed past me and I fell … I went home that day and threw my Evil Knievel toy in the trash.

In the fourth grade, Mrs. Allen noticed that I was far ahead of the other kids in my class and recommended that I be placed in a progressive new school with no curriculum. My IQ test said I should have been, but my parents said no. I always wondered what that freedom would have been like, but my parents were not progressive.

I was taught not to be a bully by a kid named Eric Gabbard I bullied in 8th grade and I ended up stealing my mom’s sunglasses to hide the black eye. 

I learned at a young age to work hard, even when the praise wasn’t there, the feeling you got from completing the job was enough…

I got my first kiss over the handlebars of my bike from Mary Ann Mertz on a hot summer night while visiting my grandparents.  

I lost virginity at age 15 to a 25 year old woman at 3:00 AM in a park in Phoenix, AZ. She got me drunk on Mickey’s “Big Mouth” beer and took advantage of me and dropped me off at the hotel we were staying in. Facing my parents drunk wasn’t great, but I had just gotten laid, so the trade-off balanced out. I sketched my first landscape on the drive back home the next day. I drew Picacho Peak, (the Arizona one not the New Mexico one…) and I remember wanting to show it to my mom, but the timing was bad…. 

I played high school football with Rodney Peete… He went on to become quarterback for the Detroit Lions and later in his career, the Dallas Cowboys. 

My parents sold me my first car at 15 that I paid for by working as a dishwasher in a five star restaurant in Tucson… Charles Bronson used to eat there, and I once sat with him, at his request while he got drunk at the bar and told me stories about Hollywood. My boss allowed it because he was Charles Bronson. I think my stepfather was more agitated that I succeeded in paying him back, I think he wanted to teach me a lesson about failing but he missed that he taught me to pay back what I owed.

Joined the Marine Corps, fell in love, moved back to West Virginia, had kids… Almost passed out in the operating room when my first child was born and then caught the fourth one in the dark hallway of an old farmhouse in a place called Alum Bridge on a cold, icy November night.

Got divorced and struggled like everyone does. Learned those hard lessons and like my dad, I did things I regret, but everything had its lessons to be learned.

In 1999, at the height of my second marriage, I moved to California. Almost 2 months to the day of my arrival, my 7 year old boy was killed by a teenager in an Audi doing stupid things. He killed his best friend, my boy and did irreparable damage to my oldest son, my wife and me. I broke 37 bones that day if you include me spitting out more than a few of my teeth and I now understand why Evil Knievel didn’t want to sign autographs, that many broken bones never stop hurting. They tell me that Jake was still breathing when they pulled him out of the car, and I like to think that the last thing he saw was that special color blue that the sky is in California on a late afternoon in early September.

My body is full of metal from my neck to my ankles… I feel that if Humpty Dumpty were a real person, I could relate to him…

I stumbled onto philosophy after a couple of years of struggling to understand why that happened to me… I took an elective class on basic philosophy and the first thing I ever heard on the subject was the professor walking in and simply stated, “everything is fucked up until it’s not…” I felt like I got punched in that moment. I realized that the accident didn’t happen “to me” but it occurred, and I just happened to be there… I switched majors…

It took me twenty years to get through college between raising my kids, surgeries and dropping out to help people get through their messes… 

Back and forth to West Virginia a few times…

I think that’s a good place to place a bookmark on my autobiography because I wanted to talk about the name of my blog and how that came to be and this is a natural break in the story to explain that... 

Not everyone knows they are sick… I didn’t know I had PTSD… I was raised to believe that if you experience trauma, get the fuck up and get on with it… After the accident, I became addicted to painkillers and instead of feeling those emotions and dealing with them, I drank, smoked pot and took painkillers. Now listen, my addictions arose out of real trauma and while I am not excusing myself, I am telling everyone who judges people addicted to pills that many if not most of them got started because a doctor handed them their first relief… The addiction lead to anxiety which lead to more pills and then the realization that I had to stop… 

When I stopped the parade of pills, my symptoms of anxiety and depression reared their ugly heads like a cobra out of a wicker basket… Then the gasping for air started… I was one of those people who would silently sit and gasp for breath like a goldfish lying on the carpet after it jumps out of the bowl… I would tell myself to suck it up, be a man, be a fucking U.S. Marine… 

I would like to tell you that I operated like this for a short period of time but that would be a lie… My life was a roller coaster of alcohol, drugs, sex, constant maneuvering to adjust to the anxiety, switching sides of the country, broken relationships, and a 15 year struggle to catch my breath… The pressure would build, and I would move, only to find the pressure start to build again… Excuses, one after the other… Switch jobs, switch relationships, switch states… I found solace in truck driving and drove hundreds of thousands of miles trying to escape the feelings of panic, overwhelming meaninglessness, and depression… 

Then came that Saturday morning almost two years ago now… I was sitting in the chair gasping for breath, in a panic trying to find some thought, some philosophy, some “thing” that would stop this insanity in my head… 

I told my wife I needed help and burst into tears and suddenly the years of not asking for help looked ridiculous and the dam of stubbornness and stupidity broke and I realized that I needed help that by myself, I couldn’t find.

LOOOOOOOOOONG story short, I went to a crisis counselor, then found a counselor and spent nearly a year with her and she gave me peace… 15 years ago, meditation, counseling, forgiveness, and acceptance of myself sounded like something for the weak… Today all those things are the way I operate…

Now a lot of you might find the next sentence peculiar, but listen… Breathing easily is the single most wonderful feeling a human being can have… If I were forced to choose between orgasm and easily taking a deep, full breath, I wouldn’t hesitate… I can breathe again after not having had that ability for one and a half decades. Yes, I would miss the orgasms, knowing me I would just fetishize something else anyway… You can’t replace breathing but you can dress up like a giant bunny rabbit and on a person dressed like a giant beaver and get off if you are so inclined… I have learned that my thoughts don’t have to negatively affect my body and now, out of therapy for 8 months, I can have an anxious thought and breathe at the same time… 

Now you know... The blog "I Can Breathe Again..." is a celebratory experience...  

I still had issues and my therapist let me have them. When she asked about my drinking and drug use, I was truthful, and she said I should consider what I was doing may not be healthy. She didn’t berate me, or demand anything except that I think about it…

She was right…

My alcohol and drugs were coping mechanisms and I knew it, but I wasn’t ready to put them down… 

It has been 21 years since the accident… 21 years of loss, compounded PTSD starting in childhood, denial that led to nightmares, addiction, anxiety, dysfunction, and a titanic struggle to accept my growing dissociative mental illness and cope with and control my addictions… Yes, I am one tough old man, in fact I may be the toughest old bastard you might ever meet, but no one is hard-hitting enough to deal with such catastrophic damage…

I’m better now, not healed, nor do I have the hope that I will ever wake up and say “well, that was hard, but I’m all better, let’s go for a walk…”

Sorry to get so personal today but this is 30 days of a clear head that is still awakening to the fact that  the years I spent denying drugs and alcohol were actually just compounding the problem. I was caught in a loop of “my pain, my insomnia, my anxiety all need this drug or this alcohol to manage them…” When in fact all of them were just being fed and even magnified by my usage of them… 

30 days clean and 60 days to go in the Life Change Challenge… I am overwhelmingly curious as to just where all this goes and I am excitedly making a list for the next 90 day challenge…

Well, fuck, I already know where this all ends...Inevitably it ends in my eventual demise… I know that but you know what I meant…

Challenge update… Killing it…  14 out of 14 yesterday and on track for the same today… Feel good, look good and discovering that a sober life has advantages I could never have imagined… I have quit before, plenty of times to get clean for drug testing but never have I quit with the intention to stay clean… Intention is a powerful thing… Maybe one of the most powerful forces on the planet... You can go to jail under the right circumstances with intent... Think about that one for a minute or two... 

Love you all… Mean it…

See you tomorrow…