Opening Day

It is opening day at my new job, and so far so good. I had lunch on Friday with HR, my old boss, and while I guess you could not say we buried the hatchet, it went as well and any such thing could ever be expected to go, and I am proud of how it went and of how I chose to handle it.
Working up the courage to walk away from my engagement with HR had not been easy, but more important is how exactly I approached it. I felt that I handled it in a very mature way and in fact HR himself was left with nothing else to say other than "I don't blame you" when I dropped the bomb.

An Examined Life Worth Living

Tonight I examined the jewellery of my grandfather, which inexplicably ended up in my hands, by way of my mother, who despite being the oldest, was nonetheless one of only two girls among eight then seven children.

I do not not know my mother's father very well. I am impressed by how completely unlike my father he appears to have been. My grandfather, for whom I was named, left me an impressive collection of items, mostly tie clips and pins. A "Past President" tie clip from a valuable and forgotten group. A Legion of Honor pin for 50 Years of service to an organisation called AIME- The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers. Dog tags for his service in the armed forces. A beautiful and poetic reminder token from the First Presbyterian Church:

 Featuring perhaps a local Cathedral and a New Testament superfecta, the medallion

engraved in his name (and mine!) on the back side (not shown). 

I am humbled by the accomplishments of my mother's father, as evidenced by his modest jewellery collection.

One only need imagine a comparison with a typical and contemporary man's jewellery (and vanity) to recognise a discouraging contrast.

On again, Off Again

In the past, either to myself or in conversation with any of the various therapists or coaches I have worked with, I have often mentioned that my capacity to act as "me", the me I want to be, is a binary thing, distinctly tied to and essentially a manifestation of my mood, which is itself also a binary thing - essentially I am either on, or I am off, and that makes all the difference.

This summer I was off. The whole summer, unfortunately. It started in May, and ran until two weeks ago. I can even put my finger on it. I have struggled to put my finger on it in the past, but this time I can pinpoint it, the exact moment when it rolled over, like an automobile odometer going from 99,999 to 1,000,000 - all the columns in sync. Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday, after I met with a woman from the tax agency, it just turned around. Or I just turned around.

When I am off, I am off. I do not want to talk about it, I do not want to blog about it, I do not want to share it with my therapist, I do not want to share it with anyone or anything.

Ausweitung der Kampfzone

This morning I had an appointment with my therapist W. As is often the case, as I went in I found myself reflecting that I did not have a very clear idea what we were going to talk about, but as is always the case, we found plenty to fill the hour. My appreciation for the time I spend with him has not diminished even slightly from the first times, when I was in so much pain compared to now, to the later times when I was ebullient and felt as if I were walking on air, to the recent times when I am neither manic nor miserable but a steady somewhere in between.

I told him the story of going to the cottage with my father this past weekend and mentioned how I feel quite disconnected from him when I see him, and how I see him so infrequently as a result. I told him how lost he seems and how I felt frustrated and powerless to help him. Rather than dwell on that, instead he asked me to tell him about moments in which we had connected. I thought about it and told him the story of working on the cryptic crossword puzzle together and how we connected over the hour or two when we worked on that. He smiled as I related it to him and I am getting to know him well enough now that I am able to put words in his mouth almost - I illustrated for him for me with my hands the two verticals representing me and him and how I nonetheless stayed upright. He was effective at convincing me to look on the bright side as it were, and focus on the moments of connection. And I realised that the lesson for me was that I could safely attempt to extend the boundary a little bit the next time we are together, and see if I can carve out a little bit more connection at a time.

What makes it so hard to believe?

One of the ironies of the validation trap (and what makes it a trap essentially) is that the hungrier one is for validation, the more starved one feels for it (and vice versa). I feel this way recently, despite the fact that by all accounts it has been all around me. Today was more than a perfect example, yet somehow the inadequacy somehow shines through and I feel like an imposter.

This morning I had an interview for a somewhat senior contract job at a major hospital in my city. I have been out of work now for several weeks (months) now and having already turned down at least one job, and having been offered another one earlier in the week, I found myself suited and tied on "casual Friday", and meeting with a likeable Irish recruiter in preparation for my time on the hot seat upstairs with the client. When the time came I found myself sitting through a committee-style interview with the department head, the team lead, and the "mobile" point-man (woman). Nonetheless I felt confident and I really knocked it out of the park, even while feeling like I had flubbed it.
This afternoon I met with a recruiter for another job, and once again I approached it with that confidence which really changes everything, and I managed to put myself out there for a job for which I might not otherwise have the qualifications.
This evening I attended an event at my club, which was sponsored for delegates to the national convention. I went with M., my friend and partner in crime, and as is our custom we made the best of the room. We ended up leaving with some other folks from the national council and stayed out for a bit at a bar around the corner from the club. I was delighted to have met a very interesting woman, C., and enjoyed the opportunity I had to connect with her.
And just when I thought the evening was over, as I drove home from downtown to my apartment in the west end, I bumped into my roommate, and between the two of us we actually managed to solve the problems of the world, in an hour, or two. In fact we shared a great deal more than that and  more than I ever imagined we would.
So why am I still so convinced that something is missing? What makes it so hard for me to believe that this is actually working, that life is good?

The greatest compliment

Last year I moved to the west end, to a neighbourhood with which I was already quite familiar. I had actually lived there once, over 20 years earlier, as a teenage high school dropout sharing a basement apartment with another misfit friend. Despite having lived mostly in the east end when I have been in the city since then, I had several strong connections to the area, including a circle of friends who had grown up and remained there, the members of my hockey team mostly drew from that area, and I had also worked at an office there for three years starting up until a couple of years previously.
The office was oddly situated: it was part of a mixed-use development of 1990s vintage which had repurposed a narrow strip of industrial land tucked up against a railway corridor as a set of subsidized-housing townhouses and the commercial building in which we worked. The surrounding neighbourhood was mostly residential, with a large scrap yard a couple of blocks away as a reminder of the area's industrial heritage.
The company had hired a woman, J., who lived in one of the run-down rental houses across the street as a sort of part-time cleaning lady who would take care of the office kitchen as well as help out whenever there was some kind of catered event,  such as little pep-rally type things they would have every quarter, or a barbequeue on the lawn in the summertime. She stood out as rather working class in contrast to what was otherwise a rather homogeneous professional culture in the office, and she mostly kept to herself as she went about her work. Nonetheless, I learned her name and would engage her when I ran into her as I would the other people whom I knew in the office, as well as when I saw her outside in front of her house with her family and elsewhere.
I enjoyed chatting with her and we would talk about our lives and relationships, or gossip about comings and goings in the office. I would help her when she had to move furniture or load cases of drinks or things like that for an event we were having. It was a pleasant and seemingly unremarkable friendship.
Fast forward to a few months ago, just before Christmas I think, and I, now living in the neighbourhood, bumped into J. at the grocery store. We had a brief but nice chat and caught up a bit, and before we parted she paid me a tremendous compliment by way of relating to me a conversation she had recently had at the office. She still worked (and still works) at the company where we had met, some three years since I had left. She had recently brought in someone, a friend or family member, to help her or fill in for her or something like that, and she had been showing the new woman around and the ropes. The woman was surprised and remarked to J. how impressed she was at how well she knew everyone and how comfortably she moved within what was for both of them a rather foreign space and culture.
Her response to her was that she had actually been very shy, uncomfortable, and intimidated in the office when she first started, but that then a certain man, and she said my name, started working there, and he, alone among the entire office, engaged her and treated her as a person worthy of attention and respect. And that consistent respect had given her the confidence to engage with others there to the point that long after I had left the company, she was comfortable there in a way she had never been before.
This is how I want to make a difference in the world.

Aujourd'hui

Today did not begin all that well. I awoke early and while I had pleasant and plentiful dreams, I was initially unable to get back to sleep, and instead gave up and read for a time.
And most of what I read and whither my thoughts was negative and destructive.
Nonetheless at around 7:30 I clawed myself out of my bed and into the shower.

Destiny

I stopped this morning at a telecommunications store, looking for a local SIM card to use with my phone from "back home". I am not at home, you see. Despite being unemployed, rather deep in a confidence crisis, and crippled with indecision, I managed to pull the trigger on what is perhaps a long-overdue getaway. Unfortunately, I am alone, almost painfully so at times. But I was lonely at home as well. And, this being a pattern I recognise, I am getting better at dealing with it. But I have a long way to go.

The woman at the store told me that she did not sell SIM cards, and instructed me to go to the main office of the actual telecom company in town. I had to buy something else so I was lingering for a bit and then I overheard another woman who was in the store mention that she was "going there". She said it more to the first woman than to me, as if she was not quite so bold as to ask me directly, but wanted the woman with whom I had already spoken to ask me the favour. Fortunately for her, and for me, I was listening, and I turned around on my way out the door and directly offered her a ride.

Her name was Destiny. She was friendly and from a (not-so) neighbouring island and mentioned that she had plans to emigrate to my country someday. She rather proudly assured me that she was "a security officer", presumably as I should therefore have nothing to worry about admitting a stranger to my car. In fact she not only directed me to a place I would probably otherwise have had trouble finding, but she used her connections to wrangle me a prime and gratis parking spot behind a closed gate at a bank in the centre of town. Following that, she escorted me to the door of the telecom office and bid me enter with a smile. There we traded thank yous, and argued briefly over whose greater pleasure it was to have met the other. It does not get any better than that folks. That is the zenith.

New horizon

I quit my job today. I had been working there for a bit more than three years.

For some reason I usually use 72 as my go-to denominator when considering lifetime ratios. It may be a bit miserly but it is not far off. And if you consider that eighty is a more realistic life expectancy, 72 nicely allows for a few years at the beginning and/or the end to be hors concours. Perhaps more appropriately, it has a convenient set of prime factors.

So according to my reasoned reckoning, the three years I spent engaged in the pursuit from which I walk away today essentially empty-handed represents one twenty-fourth of my life. Which itself is more or less four percent. And there it goes.

It would be shortsighted to consider that squandered time. Lessons were learned, and if they were not always learned quickly then in most cases it is likely that the pupil was not adequately prepared. Until now, my career has remained in my mind the glaring exception to the otherwise almost universal transformation which I have undergone in the recent past - whether I consider that time frame to be the past year, the past 17 months, the past two years, or the past 27 months, my dissatisfying career and the attendant dysfunctional employment situation in which I found myself is the constant unresolved and unbroken bitter and unpalatable thread weaving through that time.

27 months ago I met LB and my planet shuddered, the reverberations from which would take some time but would eventually shatter the foundations of my entire existence.

2 years ago I stubbornly and courageously took a leap of faith and put an end to a toxic and hypoxic relationship with SO, and blindly charted a solo course, with little other than momentum to propel me forward, and plenty of obstacles.

17 months ago I handed over my home to its new owner and set out on an odyssey of which persists to this day of establishing and/or failing to establish and moving on chasing my comfort zone.

One year ago I embarked on the greatest wave of growth I have ever experienced, a tsunami which sustained me and helped me to build and to grow, which endured for months, and which destroyed all doubt which lay in its path. And while it has seemingly relented, it has yet to exhaust itself, and I feel its effects to this day. This impulse reoriented my perspective on everything.

And this evening, I finally pulled the trigger on a long-overdue execution, banishing a myth which had long since degenerated into rainbow-chasing, if indeed it had ever been anything but that.

Year-end List

Earlier this year, we opened my father's cottage a week earlier than usual, and I posted that 2012 was the year that Victoria Day came early. But it is not so much that it came early, more that it came in abundance, and in that respect it was like much else this year. I have experienced an abundance of love and a wealth of warmth this year like nothing I have ever felt before. Pretty good year, indeed.

I search for the words to describe it, and find words like landmark and monumental, but even with such grandiose adjectives I fall short. It has been a transformational year, the year I finally achieved emotional stability, the year I finally achieved emotional maturity. The year I finally grew up. The year I finally trusted myself and embraced myself. The year I finally learned how to treat other people. The year I finally recognised what truly makes me great, and the year I finally recognised the greatness in everyone.

I am eternally thankful and indebted to those who have helped me along the way. Before I identify them however, first of all I must thank myself -- for  better or worse I am the captain of this ship, and only I could have charted a new course the way I did. It was a monumental step for me to recognise that the biggest obstacle to me getting on track to being the man I wanted to be was me, and it was at least as big a challenge to act on that insight and set about making the changes I needed to make.
But after that there is a whole crew whose contributions need to be recognised and acknowledged, and in the tradition of the end-of-the-year list, I do that here:

To my dearest LB, I thank you for lighting the spark within me and helping me realise that there was another path. I thank you for showing me how beautiful the world looks from four floors up, for assuring me of the greatness I am capable of, and how pointless it is to sell myself short, for setting an example for me of how to set my sights high and for holding my hand and leading me there.

To my dearest LD, I thank you for reaching out and guiding me when I was going through some of the roughest periods I have ever experienced: last year at Christmastime, when I felt like  I was in no shape to be anyone's friend, you were my friend, you had faith in me and in the fact that I could and would rise above the darkness, which I did, with your help. You were and continue to be an example to me and of course to everyone around you. You taught me the value of living authentically, which turned out to be easier than I realised, and more important than I ever imagined. It matters. You introduced me to FSM, and assured me of what a fantastic man he was - and is - and helped me to discover him and introduce him to the world. And you reminded me that I am and always have been him.

To my beloved J, you never gave up on me when it felt like everyone else had, and when I certainly had given up on myself. You were there, to lift me out of the mire when I most needed lifting, you are my hero and my inspiration. You taught me to value myself and the value of treating myself with respect and refinement. You taught me what it meant to receive unconditional love, and I learned how to give it to you. And this year I shared those lessons with the rest of my family, and the results speak for themselves.

To WC, you taught me the value of always having capacity, and how to monitor my own. You taught me how to live forthright and upright: with my feet planted on the ground,  and my head up and oriented to the heavens and to the stars. You showed me where home was, and how it was closer than I ever realised. You taught me that there is only one M., that he is and was and always will be the loveable man that I am. You taught me the beauty of innocence and took me back to look through the eyes of myself as a child, and through the eyes of some of the people who knew me then and have known me since, and what a delightful view I had.

To my beloved sister K., your faith in me never wavered, no matter how desperate or despondent I became, you were there, to help in every possible way and at every conceivable hour. You assured me that I was not my brain, and that it would pass, and despite how difficult it was for me to believe it at the time, you were right - as you are about pretty much everything. My thoughts were just thoughts, and it did pass, and here I am congratulating and embracing you with the love that I never even knew I had in me.

To OW, my coach, you taught me to look within myself and trust myself to know what is the right thing to do. You taught me that what frustrates me about others is what frustrates me about myself.
You showed me that my relationship with woman I date reflects my relationship with the the women in my family. You inspired me to embrace my love for the women and the people in my life in the loving way of which I am capable.  You showed me how I can change my world by changing myself.

Paying it forward

This summer I, along with my friend and mentor LB, attended a the annual golf tournament with my club. Incredibly, and despite what I could only describe as the obvious disparity between our ability and that of the majority of the members, we found ourselves prize winners. LB's prize, which I collected on her behalf, was two tickets for very good seats to a professional baseball game featuring the once-world champion but now also-ran team in our home town. LB had taken a new job after Labour Day, and as I suspected and soon confrimed was neither available nor particularly interested in attending when I contacted her yesterday to remind her and offer her a final chance.

I put it out to my hockey team, and a gentleman whom I knew, but only barely, answered the call and mentioned that he would like to grab the tickets and attend the game with his two-year-old son. I was glad to hear that someone was able to use them and arranged for him to collect the tickets from me as I was at that point having dinner with my friend CB and getting ready to play my trivia league match.

My teammate, and his young son, came by and collected the tickets, and while I was at trivia attended the game, and warmed my heart in a way I had never anticipated. A gentleman nearby caught a ball and gave it to his son, much to his and everyone's delight, and my teammate shared some adorable photographs with me commemorating the moment.

In sharing those photos, he shared with me another noble sentiment:

"If I can repay the favor some day I will do it gladly."

To which I replied:

"Nothing to repay - pay it forward"

I suppose in the simplest sense that paying it forward is essentially a retelling of the Golden Rule. Paying it forward is the simplest manifestation of altruism.

I have heard many people discussing paying it forward as if it were karmic insurance against accusations of selfishness. That sounds more to me like paying it backward.

Felicity is not an end in and of itself

I am a man with a plan. My plan, thus far, is to have a plan. A plan is that which has eluded me thus far in my life, and thus far in this, 2012, the year of my rejuvenation, the plan has been to achieve happiness. And I achieved that, I had an incredible spring and summer, six months of building bridges in my family, meeting new friends, solidifying old friendships, undoing years of neglect and undergoing an unprecedented personal transformation.

Imagine my surprise when I realised that felicity is not an end in and of itself.

Labour Day

As the summer has worn on, despite a lingering and increasing sense of dissatisfaction with my career and with my life, I allowed to myself that August is no time for pondering such things and summarily deflected that task and those woeful thoughts until Labour Day. And now that day has arrived and I sit (lay, actually, in my hammock on the verandah at my father's cottage) and try to force myself to confront that which I have, through a combination of denial and procrastination, thus far avoided.

The fact is, that despite the terrific progress I have made this year in many aspects of my life, I have definitely slowed or stalled. The summer, which started out so terrifically and exciting - new apartment, new car, new foundation with my family, and a spectacular trip to the west coast - is over, limping to the finish line following a second, less animated west coast journey.

While I suppose I am not surprised that I no longer feel like King Midas, it is nonetheless disappointing. Thankfully I am now blessed with a much-improved set of tools for minimising the potential damage of mood de-elevation. My experience in the past year has taught me some important things, particularly that the only thing which stands between where I am and where I want to be is me.

Adaptation to Life

A few years ago, I read a magazine article about a remarkable study by an interesting psychiatrist. The doctor in question had in fact not initiated but inherited the so-called "longitudinal" study, which closely followed a cohort of men from a particular generation and Ivy League university from their freshmen years until the present day, and attempted to chart their success, and their satisfaction with their lives.
At that time I was in weekly therapy sessions with WL, a young and softspoken psychiatric resident, whose lasting impact on me would be difficult to understate, despite the years we spent together, crammed into his impossibly small office.
Although I forget what exactly was revealed in the article, it was enough to inspire me to track down the book, which I special-ordered, as it was not in stock at the psychology-specialised book store on the main university campus in my city. I remember the clerk telling me that it was kind of old (12-15 years perhaps at the time), and I remember telling him that he was bound to get a bunch of orders for it because of the fresh new light shone thereon by the article I had read, in a widely-read magazine.
It took a month or more for the book to arrive, and I remember how excited I was when it did. And I remember reading it enthusiastically and voraciously, and I remember sharing with S., who was by that time living with me, and with WL, whom I had actually known marginally longer, that this book was going to change my life. And I remember the similar indifference of them both to my confident enthusiasm.
The premise of the book is that happiness and success are essentially contingent on how well one learns to handle adversity. The author, in studying his subjects, identifies, classifies and stratifies the adaptive mechanisms which they employ to handle the situations in which they find themselves. He sorts the techniques into four groups, which he numbers Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4, namely psychotic, immature, neurotic, and mature. His conclusion: the more prominent the role of the mature adaptive defence mechanisms in a subject's repertoire, the happier and more successful they tended to be.
I have given a great deal of credit in these pages to some of the people close to me who have made enormous contributions to help and inspire me: my mentor LB, my neighbour and coach LD, my friend LH, my Goddaughter and inspiration J, my sister K, my friend PH, my coach OW, my therapist WC. I have neglected to credit GV, the author of that book, for the initial inspiration.
The seeds of the remarkable transformation which I have undergone were planted upon reading that book. The roots of FSM, the Class Act, are found within the pages and the premise of that book. The power which I have been able to harness and channel into such remarkable feats this year for myself and for my friends and my family stems from the fundamentals laid down in that book.

Faisant le Bilan

In an entry from October of last year, I outlined the projects I was working on to improve myself and finally take charge of my life. Little did I know at the time just how far I was going to fall before I rose up to the challenges of all of those projects. And now I find myself approaching Labour Day, and soon afterward the anniversary of that post, and I think it is time for a reckoning of how far I have come and how far I have to go.

1. I am not my brain. This project has been an almost unqualified success. While it took a couple of months to get to where I needed to be, I got there. The reason I say almost, however, is that I have experienced a bit of a mood setback in the past couple of weeks, which is of course the real test of this technique. While I have been experiencing persistent negative thoughts, I have been using the techniques I learned successfully, I think, to arrest the potential descent into actual depression. Grade: B+
2. Kicking the Validation Habit. It has been an incredible year for my self-esteem. I have been able, through conscious effort, to approach people and situations with energy and confidence. I have learned to not take ownership of other people's shame, embarrassment, and discomfort. I have recognised, acknowledged and remedied (although certainly not eliminated) many of my habitual indulgences. I have identified a model - the Class Act - which I strive to follow and I have become adroit at instinctively and reflexively governing myself accordingly. I have made dramatic improvements in some key areas of my life (living arrangements, wardrobe, vehicle, social life, sex life), while failing to make any progress or even losing ground in others (career, health). While I have had tremendous success in engaging new people, I have not yet been able to extend it to a permanently elevated network of friends and colleagues. I have had some success with small projects such as at my father's cottage, and with some trips such as attending a conference on the west coast in the spring, and more recently my nephew's wedding. I have tried but not managed to become "a man with a plan", as advised by my life coach OW. Grade: B
3. FSM. I am confident, I am grounded, and I am emotionally connected. I am a superior man, who lives a life of integrity, authenticity and freedom. I know the kind of man I want to be, and I am become that man. I do not yet know the legacy I want to have, the real purpose of my life. Grade: B+
4. Rear-view Mirror. As I have pointed out in previous posts, I escaped the Freudian therapist and was fortunate enough to find a therapist who, after listening for perhaps a quarter of an hour or maybe only ten minutes, was convincing in his dismissal of the rear-view mirror approach. We looked backed, interestingly enough, but not to the miserable past but rather the joyful one, and spent some time reviewing life as a child, in celebration but not lamentation, with an eye the whole time to the future and not the past. If I look back now, it is for inspiration, not nostalgia. Grade: A+
5. Rock Star. This one is still only beginning. There have been some encouraging and exciting developments along this path, and there are miles to go. I continue to work with LB and with others and the authenticity I have discovered I can live by enables me to continue to develop in this direction. It is somewhat hampered in the same way as #2 and #3 are hampered, in that I still lack a coherent vision and purpose for my life. But it has nonetheless been several great strides forward with no appreciable decay. Grade: B