Tuesday, June 28, 2016

The Next Thing

Tuesday, June 28, 2016


"I would rather take my chance out there on the ocean than to stay here and die."

Lately my life seems to be an ongoing marathon of practicing an immense amount of patience. My distant past life is, well, quite distant from me in time and space now. What my future will be is not yet at all clear. I feel myself to be in this state of limbo where there is nothing more I can really do but wait. I have to wait for my current efforts to come to fruition. I must find a way to accept the reality that some amount of time must pass before what the next phase of my life will be becomes clear.

I am reminded of this one movie called Cast Away. The movie featured Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. Hanks played a FedEx engineer, Chuck Noland, whose life is irrevocably changed when he boarded a plane to attend to a work matter and then found himself instead crashing into the South Pacific and somehow miraculously surviving the plane crash. He washes ashore on an uninhabited island. No search and rescue operations ultimately find him. So he is assumed to have died. His circumstances are so disempowering that he doesn't even have the "proper" means to end his own life as he feels compelled to do at one point. And so he...exists. He lives completely cut off from human civilization for over four years. He prevents himself from going insane due to his isolation by talking to a volleyball named Wilson.

The movie flashes forward over that four year time span to show Hanks' character continuing to live an existence rather than a life. The look of resignation on his face in one particular scene conveys all the viewer needs to know about his state of mind. He could not kill himself but he cannot live the life he was intent on living either. He exists in a state of limbo foisted upon him by circumstances so much larger than himself.

One day something extraordinary happens. And yet interestingly enough it appears to be very mundane. A piece of trash washes ashore. The trash happens to be a piece of a port-a-potty. It seems fairly clear at that point in the movie that Chuck was a fairly intelligent engineer. So Chuck creates a sail out of this piece of garbage. He fashions a "boat" of his own and is finally able to escape...into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. He is finally able to escape the island that has been both his home and prison for over four years. But his escape is into something that makes no promise of rewarding him with being ultimately found.

For a time the viewer is left wondering what will become of him. His "boat" is badly damaged by storms he encounters out on the ocean. He loses his friend Wilson at another point. In a still later scene Noland is portrayed as giving up; he resigns himself to never being found. He expects to die at sea. And then he is found. Life grabs him out of his unintended exile and he is rescued.

But the life he finds when he returns home to Memphis is gone. His life could never be the same again because time did not wait for him. His girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) moved on with her life and is now married and has a child. They are unable to reunite because a chasm of time inserted itself between them and cast them in separate directions. I found it so painful to watch their reunion as they both struggled to reconcile themselves to the reality that what once was between them could never be again. Time had moved them both onwards...separately.

There are so many scenes in this movie that strike a deep chord in my heart. But one in particular rises above the rest. After his return to Memphis Noland is shown on the floor of his hotel room illuminating a watch that Kelly gave him before his fateful plane crash. He clung to his memory of Kelly as a way to inspire him to survive in complete isolation. But that picture of her was a snapshot in time. Time didn't wait for either of them. The memory he had of her helped him survive. But the beauty and nourishment he found in that relationship as symbolized in the photo ultimately perished. Their memories of each other were not enough to bridge the gap that time had placed between them.

I did a ritual this last weekend to honor the fact that my own life is at a crossroads. Like Noland at the very end of Cast Away I find myself not yet knowing where I am going next. I have been applying to a number of opportunities in very different places. I want to set roots down in a good place. I likely will not know where I will go next until approximately August 1st. What I do know now is that I have a bone deep feeling that I do not belong in Minnesota any more. This phase of my life has served its purpose. I have done what I was meant to do here. I feel I simply must move on - I just don't yet know where to.

I so identify with that portion of the movie between when Noland discovers what would be his sail washing ashore and when he is ultimately found drifting in the Pacific Ocean. He did everything he could to escape. Something outside of himself had to reach towards him and meet him. He was compelled to wait for something. Was it grace? Was it God? Was it luck? Whatever you call what ultimately happened the bottom line is he was compelled to wait and allow himself to be found and brought back into the fold of humanity.

...

I have some advantages over the character of Chuck Noland. I am not trapped on a deserted island. I have friends who love me and can help me with my transition. I can choose to leave Minnesota in search of what is next even if everything I am applying to produces no results to get me to move on. I have that relative freedom. But I will not stay here to witness another winter come to grip the state of Minnesota. My own growth necessitates I move on.

What I appreciate now is the limits of my own power. I can do everything in my power to produce a certain result and I still might not get what I want. This is the reality of life. I believe part of the process of developing what my therapist has called a "mature adult self" is learning to appreciate the truth that we have power and yet we have limits. We sometimes must wait for the next step of our lives to clearly unfold. And sometimes that waiting period can feel excruciating.

I pray for patience and good things to come to me. I pray that my efforts to create a new life be rewarded. I pray that I be led to live the life that will be my best possible life.








Saturday, June 25, 2016

That Life Changing Moment

Saturday, June 25, 2016


My life profoundly changed on this day three years ago. I was diagnosed with PTSD on June 25, 2013. It came as quite a shock. I have written about that time in my life extensively elsewhere in my blog. I am going to take some time today to remember the impact of that day on my life.

I have profoundly changed in the last three years. In some ways I have experienced the adolescence I never really felt I could have when I was a teenager. This is not an uncommon journey for those who had difficult journeys in their own childhoods. It can be very important, even essential, to revisit other developmental stages of our lives at a later point in life if we could not live as we would have preferred to at the time. This would explain why people who come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and so on sometimes exhibit behaviors typical of a teenager.

I now feel myself to be the healthiest version of myself I have ever been. And I think my capacity to weather some events in the last two weeks is compelling evidence that I am not only a very resilient person but know how to effectively reach out to find the resources and support I need when I need them. Adversity can be an amazing teacher - if we will let it be.

Perhaps it's fitting to have the anniversary of this dark day from my personal history fall on the weekend in which gay pride is celebrated here in the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  The LGBT community has historically experienced extensive trauma in how the broader societies we are members of have treated us. The United States is certainly not a unique country in that regard!

Though the United States of the year 2016 is indeed different than the day of the Stonewall riots (June 28, 1969) it's also quite clear that much work remains to be done to ensure people (not just the LGBT community) have equal access to opportunity. One need only follow current events in this country to appreciate this reality. For example, we are currently faced with "candidate" Trump (I have to use quotation marks because I personally cannot take this individual seriously) who is vying for the highest office of this country and who openly speaks of banning an entire group of people from our country based on their religion. We members of the LGBT community may have marriage equality but individual states continue to introduce a variety of measures to undermine the quality of life possible for the LGBT community. (And my apologies to anyone who finds the acronym LGBT not sufficiently inclusive enough; I did not google to see what the 'accepted' current string of letters is!)

I want to take this moment to honor all the people from the LGBT community whom I consider my family. Thank you for your strength and courage. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for transmitting your wisdom and knowledge. Thank you for your love. Thank you for being resilient!

I finally want to say that I feel as if I am ready to fully let go of my own sense of victimhood. When we are victimized we can feel deeply hurt, enraged, disgusted and demoralized by what we have experienced. We may develop a desire for revenge. Some may take a completely different approach and shut themselves off from society in the hope that such behavior will prevent more pain from finding them. But closing ourselves off ultimately makes our lives smaller rather than larger. We can be bigger and better together than we often are by ourselves.

Celebrate who you are by living the life you dare to dream of having!

I will finish this post by sharing a word that I have long associated with California:

Namaste!




Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Rudderless America: The American Value of Being Able to Easily Murder Each Other

Tuesday, June 21, 2016


I became a supporter of thoughtful regulation of guns when I was an eight year old boy and my father was nearly deliberately murdered...by a teenager.

The brightest and longest day of the year of 2016 just came and went here in the Northern Hemisphere. And yet here in the United States it is very dark. It is very dark indeed.

Here in the United States Americans still cannot muster sufficient resources (energy, rage and money...among others) to enact some common sense gun control regulations that would stop this country from being an international laughingstock. Seriously, our citizenry throw more of a fit over transgendered people's access to certain bathrooms than it does over the fact that we continually set records for more and more deadly mass shootings. How is that for priorities?

It is easy for me to feel incensed by the callousness and cowardice of my fellow Americans as well as so many of our members of Congress. I haven't seen any hard data to substantiate the feeling I am about to share but I will divulge it anyway. I feel as if Americans' capacity to give a s*** about their fellow Americans is at a terrible nadir. The murder of little children in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 was apparently not sufficiently gruesome to galvanize this nation to pass some common sense reforms of our laws pertaining to the issue of gun violence. The slaughter of nearly fifty people in Orlando nine days ago was also apparently not enough to break Congress from its NRA induced waking dead trance.

Bearing unwitting witness to such horror leaves me wondering if something even more sinister is going on. Perhaps the NRA has secretly threatened members of our Congress. Maybe there is a deeper web of corruption and deceit that has not yet come to light here in America. It would be so nice if such corruption, if it does indeed exist, were exposed in the scorching light of our summer days. I think the United States may be one of the most short-sighted, self-absorbed nations in modern history. A hyperbolic assertion? Perhaps. But seriously, when the nation can move on and make no substantive change after innocent children are murdered you have to wonder what in the world is wrong with people??? 

As is not unusual for me to do I first wrote some of my sentiments on Facebook. Then, once my writing reached a certain length, I realized I needed to move on over to my blog. As I sit and ponder what happened in Orlando as well as reflect on all the gun related deaths of people across this nation I find myself mulling over these thoughts:

  • What exactly will it take for our nation to collectively decide that all Americans should have a certain measure of safety and security?
  • How many adult American citizens in this present day of June 21, 2016 were victimized by gun violence when they were children? How many of them developed PTSD? How many of them still have PTSD? What is the true cost of the public health crisis that is our nation's saga of gun violence?
  • What do people like Wayne LaPierre and Mitch McConnell eat for breakfast? Radon?
  • If you have no compassion in your heart can you still be correctly described as human?
  • What responsibility should we ascribe to "media" sources such as Fox News for the current state of affairs?
  • Would reforming the FCC (through reinstating the Fairness Doctrine for example) such that propaganda masquerading as news is eliminated or at least diminished help us step back from the brink?


These days I feel queasy at being an American.



Friday, June 17, 2016

Betrayal

Friday, June 17, 2016


Today was an eventful day.

I had a court hearing this morning. I learned that someone I had invested a significant amount of trust in betrayed my trust. A certain man lied to me. And in lying to me he helped set in motion a series of events that were entirely preventable had he not lied to me. I have no idea if he feels any remorse for his actions. At this moment, some eleven hours after the hearing, I am primarily aware of my feelings of disgust, anger and shock.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the legacy of the trauma I experienced as a child was my development of unhealthy boundaries. The way I learned to allow people to enter my life was distorted by unhealthy modeling of boundaries by those closest to me during the earliest years of my life. When children grow up in an environment with inappropriate boundaries it can be very difficult for them to learn how to create and live with healthy boundaries as adults. The healing journey I have undertaken these last three years has led me to develop some rich wisdom. One tidbit from that store of hard fought wisdom is my conviction that unhealthy boundaries are often (but not necessarily always) a sign of early abuse, neglect or some other dysfunction.

I am sitting at home as I compose my reflections for the day. It's going to take me a bit of time to process what I learned today. Despite my feelings of disgust and betrayal I will not allow how I feel now to stop me from going out and enjoying the world around me.

I will do more than survive. I will thrive. It is a vow I make to myself.



  

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

It's The Fear Stupid!

Wednesday, June 15, 2016


The media is quite lit up these days with all the horror of what happened in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. And then there is ISIS. And we also have the issue of Syrian refugees overwhelming the hospitality of European nations. We have ocean acidification occurring as we continue to pump more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. We have a real estate mogul running to become President of the United States. And somehow part of his appeal for some people is his practice of insulting basically everyone that can be insulted. There is also dandruff, litter in the streets (and strewn on our coastlines) and the lives of Hollywood celebrities to breathlessly follow. No wonder we are such a worried society. We have a 24 hour news cycle culture and somehow do not uniformly think it's unhealthy to constantly be barraging ourselves with the fearful shadowy forms of the latest thing the media tells us will kill us.

I am being a bit hyperbolic. But as I have read some of the coverage of the worst things happening in the world lately I can't help but feel that the media, well at least the American media, is something akin to a vast echo chamber where horrifying stories get repeatedly recycled for consumption. We hear a story and then we hear it retold by numerous commentators, talking heads, pundits and others. We have people as patently creepy as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter telling us what to think about any number of issues. And I always wonder to myself "Who are these people?" Who are these people whose sense of morality is so adrift or completely absent that they will whore themselves out and spread all manner of disinformation with the intent of misleading the American public. They are like those creepy flying monkeys the wicked witch had at her beck and call. Those monkeys essentially had no minds - they served without thought or reflection.

Put more concisely - it's the fear, stupid! Fear is such a big seller in America. We fear growing old. We fear disability. We fear isolation and alienation. We fear any number of things. And we have a whole complex network of industries in this nation designed to fill us up and assuage those fears. And I certainly think this pervasive fear is part of what drives the immense machine of the gun culture in this nation. People want to be and feel safe. They watch upsetting news and decide to gird themselves against the possibility of being harmed by arming themselves as much as possible. Combine this paranoia with deeply warped conceptions of manhood and you see all manner of bizarre spectacles in this country. You see a culture like what is found in Texas: paranoia, mindless worship of weaponry, a deep need to provide evidence of prowess through public display of said weaponry (even if doing so leads children who witness such 'manly' men to wet their pants in fear!) and immense fear of that evil Other.

Wow, I am so grateful I escaped that state when I finished college.

The basic point I am trying to make in what might be construed to be a stream of rambling thoughts is that victimization, and the fear of being victimized, seems to drive so much of human behavior...and especially American behavior. And I cannot help but wonder what all the roots of this deep seated feeling of victimization are.

I have reflected elsewhere in my blog on issues such as gun violence and victimization. It's a topic that provides a lot of material for consideration in this nation.

I'll leave you with these thoughtful questions tonight:

  • Who would you be without a personal victim story? 
  • What could our nation be without buying into Donald Trump's contention that America is in decay (as evidenced by his slogan of "Make America Great Again")? 
  • What could we as a society be if we didn't look to others to be our own personal messiahs?



Monday, June 13, 2016

Some Thoughts After Orlando

Monday, June 13, 2016


So you would have to be living under a rock here in the United States to not have heard about what happened in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. We Americans just set a new record for the worst mass shooting in United States history. You can find details about our sorry history of mass shootings here at NPR. We exceeded the body count of what was previously the worst mass shooting ever (the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007) by approximately 150%. Grisly, huh? And no, I am not trying to be flippant by using phrases such as 'body count'. People are very sensitive about gun violence...and rightly so. I certainly fit in such a category. But then again I think anyone traumatized by gun violence will, even if that person fully heals, never be able to fully erase the memory from his or her mind.

I have a few thoughts I want to share about this issue. And whoever happens to read this I will start by saying thank you for taking the time to do so. Not everyone cares as much as you do. When we educate ourselves we show passion for something...we show that we care. So here we go...


1) What does America wish to be known for in the world?

Right now the United States continues to set the sort of records that nobody should find compelling in a positive way. We now have a higher watershed mark regarding gun violence in this nation. Are we simply going to become a more and more progressively desensitized culture? What is the endpoint of that road? I will tell you what I imagine is at the end of that road. It's a road to oblivion. It's a road to darkness, pain, alienation, rage and separation. It's the antithesis of love, kindness, charity, patience, generosity and all the qualities of humanity that I believe make us an incredible species...rather than a base one.


2) The familiar trope about "guns don't kill people, people kill people"

I personally am bone tired of this silly saying. Excuse me but who invented guns? Humans did. And what can humans do with guns? Well, they can do many things. One thing they can do is kill other humans. Could humans kill other humans without guns. Of course....there are many ways people can do that. But what is the advantage of using a gun? It's efficient. It can be quick. And the person shooting others has a distinct strategic advantage. Tell me again, Geraldo, how are people supposed to fight back against someone standing some distance away who is spraying a room with an assault rifle? Shall they use plastic knives? Or would plastic forks be better? Or maybe if they simply run really fast and in a coordinated way a barroom full of people can take out such a person with minimal damage to their own persons. Pray tell, how realistic is it to expect that to happen?

Ask the parents of children who found their guns and then accidentally shot themselves to death if the guns magically animated themselves and then acted to slaughter their children. Does that make sense? Are you living in a fantasyland?


3) Fear is killing us.

Fear is a great adaptation of the human species...except when it isn't. Our capacity to feel fear and then heed the warning signals when we feel something fundamentally off in our gut allows us to survive any number of potentially life threatening events. But fear can also choke the very life force out of our bodies. When we live in a fearful state of mind everything can take on a menacing quality. Having not seen deep data on the demographic backgrounds of people like those who virulently support the NRA I cannot help but wonder about their histories. I suspect there must be some deep trauma in the histories of such individuals. It would explain the phenomena of grown men parading around with a gun in most any public setting for the purpose of demonstrating their manhood.

If we want to stop being such a paranoid society we need to change our diets. And I don't mean what we eat. I mean the media we consume. Turn off the portrayals of people plotting and scheming to hurt one another (also known as soap operas). Do not watch scenes of tragedies over and over again. I can still remember how the mental health community in this country advised parents against allowing their children to repeatedly watch the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. It's not healthy to repeatedly relive a tragic event.


4) We all have a responsibility 

I always liked the idea of the United Nations. I liked the idea of an organization committed to improving the lives of the people throughout the world. Am I a secular humanist? I am not sure what the proper term is to describe someone with my philosophical and spiritual beliefs.

What I do believe is that if you are walking around on the planet and depending on this Earth for your very sustenance then you have a responsibility to think about how your actions impact not just yourself but others as well. Isn't that part of being human - actually caring about others outside of yourself?


5) Oh, but it couldn't be me!

I think it can be easy to abdicate any sense of being responsible for the world we are co-creating when we ourselves have been deeply victimized. I get that. I know the feeling of victimization from very personal, scary experience. By all measure of statistical odds I myself probably should not be alive today.

And I can empathize with those who are apathetic. Afterall, it's easier to give up and succumb than it is to get up every morning and confront the dark recesses of our own lives as well as the world beyond our homes. But I think abdication doesn't fit us as a species. I want to believe we are grander than that. I do believe we are grander than that.

I believe we are here to love one another - nothing more and nothing less.




Sunday, June 12, 2016

Compassion For My Father

Sunday, June 12, 2016


I was away in Washington, DC this past week. I made the trip to attend Capitol Hill Ocean Week. I am glad I went. I made some meaningful connections and have since decided to think in a more broad-minded way about the possibilities of my own professional future. I returned Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, before going to work, I went to the gym. And there I experienced something that melted my heart a bit in regards to my father. I saw a man speaking gently and encouragingly to a little boy. I assume it was a father and son pair.

This beautiful image of a man being nurturing to a boy seemed to trigger a memory from my own childhood. I remember this short sequence of German words my father would say to me when I was a boy. They evoked the image of riding on a horse. Of all the good memories I have of my father this one is particularly warm and playful. Despite my father's immense personal shadow he could also be kind and loving. The stark contrast between the light and darkness within him occasionally made for a very scary childhood though. The chaos in the lives of those closest to me was difficult to bear witness to. And this was especially true because I was a child as I witnessed these difficulties.

I wrote to my father earlier this year and expressed the truth that I have loved him in the past. To this day my feelings about him are still quite complex. And I feel very convinced it may remain as such for the duration of his life...and my own.

This beautiful memory came to me yesterday without me even realizing that Father's Day is just next Sunday. I might take the risk of reaching out to him again.