Defining Moments

For those that have never had the feeling of coming home, it is a very hard to describe feeling. For me it was a warm feeling of belonging. This is something I had never really felt until one day in March 1995.

I had only been out of the wacko ward for a few days and still had feelings of depression, even though I was under medication. I had spent nearly all of my 44 years, to that point, looking for that feeling of belonging and here I was going to my third 12-step meeting in five days. To me this was the last time I would go to one of these. I had not seen or felt anything to change my mind about them and really didn't want to get clean of drugs or alcohol. I just wanted my life to change.

This meeting was different than the first two that I attended. The people here were laughing and joking and having fun. They hugged and accepted everyone, even me, with open arms. As I heard their stories and suggestions throughout the evening I began to feel different. I began to feel as though I had come home. These were people just like me. I felt as though I had come home. I got that warm fuzzy feeling deep down inside and I knew I wanted the kind of life that these people had. I knew that I belonged with these people.

They taught me, over time, how they got to be this way and told me that if I wanted what they had, then I had to do what they did. I have been following their way of life ever since and have never regretted doing it.

Instead of depression, I now have a purpose in life. I am happy with my life, even though things don't always go my way. I learned to live. After all these years I had finally come home.

Until now I have been writing about those things that affected me in childhood, and only the negative ones at that. Those were the things that shaped my life. Those feelings of hopelessness and self pity, fear, self loathing, hatred, everything self-centric would plague me and drive me for years.
 
I would spend 27 years in and out of therapy with many different diagnoses, have two failed marriages, several failed businesses, work at a job that I hated, live life as a drunk and a drug addict and finally end up living on the streets, but one day my life would come crashing down on me. It would be the best thing that ever happened to me and give me a chance to change my life.  It would lead me into a more fulfilled life and happiness.

One morning in February 1995 I would run out of drugs, money, and friends. I had spent that weekend scamming people out of money and robbed a drug dealer of his money, drugs, and car. I kew that I was a drunk and a crack addict, that I would die in the gutter somewhere and I thought that this was the day. If the drug dealer didn't kill me then I would take my own life.  The dealer showed up that day and took one look at me and just shook his head then left. I tried for nearly three days to kill myself and no matter what I tried it didn't work. I didn't know it yet, but I had one friend left that cared. He cared enough to find me and make sure that I got help.
 
I ended up In a "psych" ward that day.  After five days there they told me that they couldn't help me anymore and were going to set me loose. They had done all they could and I wouldn't do anything to help myself so I was faced with going back out on the streets. It scared the crap out of me to know that I was going to go back out into the world. I didn't want to be out there. I was safe where I was. I broke down and cried, something I hadn't done in years.
 
It was at that time that I came to the realization that if I didn't do something to help myself I would die that day. As soon as I would walk out the door of that hospital I would try to kill myself again and this time I would succeed. I really didn't want to die, I had just thought that the world didn't need another drunk and drug addict in it an  didn't know what else to do.
 
For once in my life I listened to another human being and from that day forward I worked to change my life. I have had a lot of help along the way and now I lead a relatively happy and productive life. Productive for me and those around me. I no longer believe that I will die a drunk in the gutter. My life has changed for the better.

Throughout my childhood we had always attended church regularly (usually with my paternal Grandmother). We were raised in the Methodist and E.U.B. (Evangelical United Brethren) churches and I enjoyed going to church and sunday school. My grandmother was one of those very few people I had known that actually lived what she believed. She made no exceptions. What the bible told her to do, she did. I have never met another person quite like her.

About the same time that we started moving around (1960-1966), because of my fathers job I started to look into other religions and belief systems. I started to question Christianity as a whole because of the people that I had come into contact with. I tried to measure others with my grandmother and they never measured up. I began to believe that she was an anomaly. For me God wasn't dead, he was just hiding. I could never relate God to war or world famine or to many other atrocities committed in the name of God.

I started to look into Catholicism because my other grandmother had been a Catholic and into Judaism because I had a crush on a Jewish girl and when those didn't fit in with my beliefs I started to look elsewhere. I tried Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucius, Lao Tsu, And different Pagan religions. While living in Arizona and living on Indian Reservations I began to learn the way of the Dine'.

In 1966 we moved back to our home town and I returned to my Methodist roots. I became active in my local church, the youth fellowship, laity, and choir. Within a year I was also starting seminary and working within the ecumenical movement, all while attending high school. It was my belief that if you called yourself a christian then you were christian and whatever church you attended you should be learning the same moral values and way of life. It didn't take me too long to realize that whatever people professed to be they didn't live up to my expectations.

I began to look at the people rather than the principles and I couldn't separate the two. I was becoming frustrated with other people and how they practiced their religion. I was beginning to believe that I was the chosen one who could change the world. I became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I thought that I was the only one who could do something and yet I felt so small. Then somewhere I had heard or read that when the true son of god would climb to the mountain top and shout "SHALOM", "PEACE", the world would change. A miracle would happen.

Since I believed that I was that person I took it upon myself to test it. I climbed a mountain and yelled Shalom. When I climbed back down and found that the world had not changed I lost my faith in God. The Vietnam war was still on. People were still dying and starving all over the world. Nothing had changed and so I blamed God. I thought that since nothing happened then there must be no God or that he had turned his back on me. Therefore I would turn my back on him. He was dead in my mond.

I began to live life as if there were no rules, no moral foundation, except what I beleived and I could make up my own rules as life went on. There was no God to me. I was my own God. The God that I had believed in and searched for had abandoned me. It never occured to me that I had already abandoned Him.

Thirty-seven years later I would ask for help, but for all that intervening time He was dead to me. I lived a godless life and abandoned all those principles that I had, for so many years, believed. For the first time in my life I was truly alone.

My father worked in construction and there were some years that he sorked out of town for extended periods of time. While most of the time he was able to make long drives home at night and then back to work the next day in 1959 he was working on the I-75 expressway that was being built. This required him to be away from home, sometimes for the whole month before returning home. He didn't like being away from his family for such long periods of time and driving back and forth would mean a four hour drive each way every day, so at the end of our school year we moved to Sydney, Ohio.

That summer was like one big adventure to us kids. We started out with my father hooking up this mobile home to that 1957 Ford and driving down to Sydney. I soon found out what living in a trailer park was like. Anyone living in a trailer in 1959 was considered trash, but we didn't care. We had great fun that summer building a downhill racer made out of old wood and some buggy wheels we found. We dreamt of being in Akron for the great soapbox derby. We never made it, but it was still great fun.

Then school started and if I didn't feel like trash before it only took one day to feel that way after school started. The nearest school in the area was Longfellow school and it was heavy on teaching the bible as well as regular school curriculum. I got off on the wrong foot with the teachers and the school principle that very first day.

Here in this town, when the first school bell rang it simply meant, time to head to our classroom and the second bell meant that we had to be seated and ready for work. There at Longfellow, we had to line up according to our class and teacher so that we could follow the teacher into the classroom. No-one bothered to tell me that and I earned the teachers wrath and a trip to the principles office first thing. Then when in the classroom we were told to open our bibles for study. I had the wrong kind of bible which REALLY set them off. So you can only guess what the rest of that school year was like.

After enduring knuckle rappings and trips to the principles office for seven months we headed back to our home in Whitehouse. My father had gotten hurt on the job and was laid off so we came home. I was elated, to say the least, to get out of there. We had been gone for ten months and I thought it would be great to get back home and tell of my experiences. I thought that once back at my old school, things would be different.

I had made only one friend, other than my cousin, in all the previous years there, but even he treated me as though I had the plague. No-one ackowledged me anymore. Not my cousin and not the boy whom I had thought of as my best friend. Again I was the pariah. I was a stranger to them all simply because I hadn't followed them through the last seven months of school. Not even the bullies who had taunted me in previous years acknowledged my existence. I was a ghost to them all.

I never got that feeling of coming home until I was forty-four years old and it never came from coming home to my hometown. I felt as though I had come from another planet.

No, you can never go home again. I would learn that lesson again later. As far as this small town is concerned, once you leave, you are abandoning them and to try to return is next to impossible. You are a stranger to them after only a short time gone, and they don't trust strangers.

So, for another 36 years I never felt as though I had a home to come home to. Nothing ever was the same for me after that.

Yesterday I mentioned real pain.

When I was six my mother discovered a large hard lump on the shin of my right leg and took me to a doctor. He then sent us to a specialist.

That specialist said I had a bone tumor. That didn't scare me because I had no idea what a tumor was and besides, there were two other boys in my school that had bone problems (one with bone cancer and the other with some disease that I can't even remember at the moment). He said he could get rid of it so my mother agreed and I was to start treatments that day.

He explained that he would burn the tumor using dry ice. I figured the word ice meant that it would just be cold. I had no idea that it was so cold that it would actually burn. He brought out this syringe like device, about the size of his index finger, and explained that it contained this dry ice stuff. He would press it onto the lump and continue to hold it there pressing on the plunger until all the dry ice was gone.

Next he held my leg so that I couldn't move it and pressed that syringe onto the lump. I had never felt pain like that before. Not even when I got 2nd and 3rd degree burns on my feet the summer before. I screamed like I had never screamed before. And what did the doctor do? He told me to shut up and take it like a man. I was six years old for crying out loud. He kept telling me to shut up, be quiet, it'll be over in a minute. After it was over and I had stopped crying he told me that if I wanted to keep coming back and be helped there could be no more screaming and crying. He then told my mother that if it happened again I couldn't come back. I knew that my mother was afraid for me. I could feel it.

Over the next week my mother drilled it into me not to scream again or cry. The next week when we went back it was even worse for the pain. The doctor ripped off the scab from the first treatment and laid that dry ice on the same area as before. I never screamed. I never cried. And what did I get for my silence? A sucker. A god damned sucker. I endured those treatments for six more months and never again did I scream or cry.

What did I learn from all of that? Never trust a doctor and no matter how much something hurt, I could block it out. Ignore it. It wouldn't go away but I didn't have to acknowledge it.

The problem with that was, it worked so well with physical pain that I began to apply it to any pain, even emotional pain. I never allowed anyone, after that day, to see my pain. The entire time that I was growing up I was told that real men don't show pain and so I didn't. Besides, no pain that I ever encountered after that day, with the dry ice, could come close to what I had experienced then.

The defining moment in that experience came when I realized that my mother wasn't just afraid for me, but terrified. I didn't want to let her down. Her pain was deep enough that I would do anything to not show mine. Most kids know when their mother or father is hurting. No matter how much they push their parents to their limits they know when the parent is in pain. The love that a child has for the parent will somehow transform itself into a caring for them as they have cared for the child. If it takes hiding our own pain so that the parent doesn't feel guilty or in pain themselves some how makes it all worth while.

In my case, although I was protecting my mother on some plane, I was creating a monster within myself. As long as that pain stayed within me. As long as I never let it show, it grew bigger and deeper within me until It overwhelmed me and I began to self-destruct.

There would come a day, thirty-eight years later, when that self-destruction would end. Thirty-eight years of holding it in and finally, one day, it would all come out.

Probably the worst year or the year in which I had the most defining moments was in the first grade. That year was by far the most life changing for me.

I was a very sickly child. Every child illness that one could get I got. I even had the mumps and measles at the same time. I had my tonsils out that year and even had a bone tumor burned off my leg using dry ice. I learned what real physical pain was.

I spent so much time in hospitals or at home recooperating that when I DID attend school most of the other kids didn't want much to do with me so I became an even bigger bookworm. I was small and one year younger than the other kids so they didn't want me playing games with them on the playground and too make matters worse, the teachers tried to force them to accept me into their games. All that accomplished was to set the other children against me. Whenever the teachers weren't looking I was shoved around, punched and kicked. When I tried to fight back I was punished.

Then came the revelation. I was never going to fit in. I was going to spend my life alone, few or no friends. Even the girls teased me so I knew that I would never have a girlfriend either. I became distrustful of the other kids and of people in general. I knew that I would have to make it in my life alone. This was one of those defining moments in my life that continues to affect me today.

I became selfish and self centered, why not, no-one cared about me except me. I quit developing people skills and concentrated only on those skills I needed for survival. I made my own rules because the rules that had been set up by others didn't seem to be working. If the rules set down by others were meant to be broken by them then I would just have to set my own rules. Rules that came out of resentment and hurt and pain. Rules that would hurt others and leave me with a feeling of superiority. A feeling of superiority that I came to believe was the truth. One that I held for nearly forty years.

This was also the beginning of my slide into depression that no-one recognized. Not me. Not my parents. Not the schools nor the teachers. I still battle that feeling of depression, though not every day any more, but for years I was depressed. Always lonely, always alone.

The second major defining moment of my life was one that left me feeling like I would never see my eighteenth birthday. That came one day when we were practicing our monthly "duck and cover" drill in school. The cold war was on and there was a constant feeling that one day some one would drop a nuclear bomb and start World War 3. Everyone it seemed was talking about war. World War II, Korea, Russia, they were the topics of the day. Then I heard someone say, "there will always be wars and rumors of wars" so I thought, what the hell, I'm going to be dead anyway before I hit eighteen so I might as well live life MY way.

Here I was five and six years old and already thinking about dying. What really drove it home was the accidental drowning and the accidental hanging of two of my school acquaintences that year. Now I KNEW I would never live to see eighteen. Thus began my long, slow spiral into the hell of depression. It also marked the beginning of my alcohol and drug addictions.

I didn't like living in this world and the only way I could escape it, if only for a little while, was to get drunk or high. Imagine, a six year old and already a drunk and a drug addict.

Yes that was a life altering year.

Those moments in our lives that tell us who we are or where we're going. They are those moments where we come to some very sudden realizations. They are those times when we either react suddenly or cause us to take some course of action that will define us for ourselves or in the eyes of others.

For myself, every time I react to some defining moment I seem to end up in trouble. When I react to one of those moments I am running on pure emotion. Every time I take my time and allow that moment to sink in and take planned steps as a course of action I seem to do better. Early in my life I reacted most of the time and it has caused a great deal of pain to myself and sometimes others, further defining myself. I didn't always like what was happening, but I didn't have the tools to stop it. Emotion ran me like a runaway train. It took years before I developed a discipline and by then I had already defined my path in life.

The very first defining moment in my life (that I can remember) came when I was five years old and was at the end of my kindergarten year. I was already reading and doing some arithmetic. I loved numbers and I loved to learn. I was a sponge for learning everything I could, especially in science. And yet they were thinking of NOT promoting me to first grade. I wanted to learn more, I had to learn more. I was passionate about it.

I remember my mother and teacher having a meeting about whether or not I would go on to first grade and I remember that teacher saying "he can't go to first grade because he can't tie his shoes". I remember thinking "what does she know", I hate tieing my shoes. That's why I always slipped them on or went barefoot. And besides she always made us practice with some stupid plastic shoe that I really did not think look like a real shoe. To me it was a toy.

So while my mom and teacher were arguing I went over to the shelves, where that plastic shoe sat, and brought it over to them, sat it down and tied it right in front of the two of them. From that moment on I wouldn't let anyone else tell me what I could or could not do.

These moments came quite often in my early years and have stayed with me for a lifetime. They have defined me whether I wanted them to or not.