“What a person did when they were in pain said a lot about them.” – Veronica Roth
My wife asks me questions about memories we’d made earlier in our relationship. If I remember visiting FAO Schwartz, for example, when we were dating. Visiting the ice skating rink in Rockefeller Center on the same trip. These are memories that most people can recall with pinpoint accuracy. Tell you what clothes they were wearing, and what they had for lunch that day.
I have black spots and black holes in my memories. When most of these things were happening, my parents were still alive, and not exactly having their #bestlives moments. There was tremendous trauma from about the age of thirteen to the age of twenty five for me, and the older I become and the farther I drift from those memory islands my brain has essentially censored those times and everything inside the beginning and ending brackets. I see photos of my daughter dressed like a princess with a wand and smiling and I know it’s her and I know it’s our first house but I can’t play the movie in my head that most people play for themselves. If there were no photo, I couldn’t tell you much about that day – which was a very special day.
Before I had the idea for Enlytened, I understood that most people had lives like me, or worse. We were watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ one part of the day, and living a Michael Meyers movie during the other. Looking back, Michael Landon’s character in “Little house on the prairie” and his TV wife Carolyn were as much my mother and father as my real life parents. I wanted that life. Years later when I found out Landon was cheating on his wife with one of the makeup artists on the show, I said to myself, “That makes more sense.”
I’ve been putting the pieces of my life together for a while now. Looking underneath the hood of it all of what’s me and listening to the knocks and clicks of it all. Making adjustments and asking hard questions about the cycles that drive and drove me (I wrote about a lot of them in my first book, “Cycles.”) Areas of my life I was overcompensating in. Other areas that were metaphorical scary basements with chainsaws hanging from the ceiling that got no attention. I stayed far away from them. Like my history with weight gain and weight loss.
I want this final third act of my life to be remembered for healing, and remembered memories. Documented and discussed frequently memories. I believe in my heart that there are thousands of other people who were and are broken like I was and am. I want to be a hand that reaches down and a light that shines across the dark root bound trail a voice that encourages and says, ‘you’ve got this.’ Not that I’m perfect or finally fixed and tuned. But I know in the moments of my life when everything was working correctly what was in balance and what was in focus and under scrutiny and on the dashboard. Faith, fun (adventure), family, fitness, and finances. Alliteration not intended – but a way to remember quickly for me (she sells sea shells by the sea shore.)
I hope you’ll join me in the scary basements. Climb with me up to the mountain peaks. Find balance together as we ask hard questions about what we really believe, and who we really are and want to be. Share these stories together and find we’re not so different after all.