I was wide awake last night for far too long. Tossing and turning. Regrets. Panic about choices. Selfish groans. ‘What could have beens.’ My fortieth year will be upon me shortly, and I crashed straight forward through the giant door that says, “Never open, not even as a joke, ever,” in giant neon letters. In short, by the time I finally fell asleep, I woke up ten minutes later because it was time to get up. We’ve all been there. No rhyme. No reason. No amount of mindfulness and concentration on my breath could have pulled me from the doom spiral.
I spent a decent amount of time groaning with self-contempt over things long done. Tracing back to the beginning. I am struggling with my identity as a person who fundamentally wants to be special, even though I know how small we all are. Even Julius Caesar will be forgotten at some point. Raging against infinity. Impossibly searching for a purpose, and one that doesn’t suck.
And I have to say…categorically. I don’t want to be famous. I would have said that I wanted fame when I was a kid, a teen. But now I don’t want it. I want money, sure. Enough to live comfortably. To travel. To make sure the family is taken care of.
Other than that, my goals outside of being a good husband and father are simple. Can I make a living off of my creativity? And can I do so doing something that doesn’t make my eyes water with pain at the superficiality that I am forced to approach it? I’ve been a business leader for many years now and can’t seem to ever really care. Like REALLY care, beyond the desire to be really competent and reliable at whatever I do. And by the way, I am fundamentally very good at what I do.
Now, hold on a moment. I’m not trying to set my career ablaze. I do care about taking care of the people and doing well by my peers. It’s a social, communal responsibility. But outside of that, business is a vapid pursuit of material growth for its own sake. Don’t crucify me. And don’t be so naïve as to think that 99.9% of people who have a job don’t feel the same way. Or do you ACTUALLY feel a giant sense of pride about assembling, selling, shipping [widget ABC]. If you own the business, sure. I get it. If you’re a doctor or scientist making things better, I get it. If you’re working in a non-profit for a great cause, I get it. But everyone else is just making a living.
To the 0.01%, that don’t feel this way, I salute you. If you’re guffawing at my statement because you feel that you have a genuine sense of purpose as the social media manager of blahblah.com, then send me whatever you’re on, because I want it. In fact, let’s package it up, sell it, and make billions.
I’m a capitalist in a pure sense. I’d love to have a billion dollars. I think everyone should have the ability to seek their fortune in a free and fair market if they’re willing to innovate and work. I think it falls flat these days because the system is rigged so that only a few can win (I mean the top end. I make a very comfortable living). Don’t believe me? Look at the disappearing middle class.
The system has long ago pushed away from pure capitalism and into an oligarchical system where a few use resources to conserve their own hold on the system and hoard the majority of the spoils for its own sake (think of Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault of gold coins and spending a decent number of them so that the local government doesn’t tax his gold coin vault).
I also think that we could sensibly pay for education, forgive loans, and make sure that below a certain socio-economic line, we could feed, clothe, educate, and give healthcare(both mental and physical), for the good of all, while not impeding on anyone’s freedoms (okay, well maybe a few billionaires will have a little bit less). Yes, yes, I do think that we, the greatest nation, etc. can have our cake AND eat it too. Wouldn’t THAT be pro-life?
I was once in a society that did that (the Army). The military is a giant socialist society paid for by your taxes. It’s strange that so many of those within said society lean in the direction of being anti-socialist. They don’t complain about their military society in the same way. Nor do they complain about the public schools (their existence, not the specifics), the fact that there is a national highway system, any and all federal bureaus, state funded police, public transportation, public libraries (again their existence, not what’s in them, although if you complain about what’s in a library, go take a long walk off a short pier).
I digress. This isn’t actually supposed to be a political rant. Society’s woes are only part of why I tossed and turned. I’m older now. Based on family history, modern medical science, and barring getting hit by a bus, I may have forty years left.
Life gets weird when you can quantify the number of times you’ll experience something again. I love Christmas. I love putting up the tree. You only get that once a year. I drink tea every morning. I will see that thousands of times. But Christmas. I’ll only see another fortyish of them. It doesn’t seem like much. I’d like a thousand Christmases. But we only get an average of sixty to eighty, depending.
So now I’m halfway through them. I’m on the other side of it. I’ve made my choices about marriage, children, and career. I never moved to California to be an actor. I never tried a standup circuit. I never dropped everything to pursue music. I kept making pragmatic career moves (military, school, company grind).
I gotta say. While I accept the bed that I’ve made, I’m pretty bummed about that. I was originally going to go to film school. I’ve been trying and failing to make it at writing. If I could give any young person one piece of advice, it’s this: Pursue the thing that makes you curious. That makes you excited. Whatever it may be. Even if it’s unpragmatic. Even if the odds are long. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the journey. You’re only young once.
I don’t really regret the choices. I have my own unique story. And in the end, that’s all you have. I’m not really religious. If I had to pick something to make up for myself. Some kind of mythology to tell all the people who needed an answer I’d write something that’s loosely this:
We’re all part of some big experience we can never fully understand. Each person gets a shake at existence with a different set of variables rolled in a big random number generator. Some get really lucky. Some don’t. If that sounds too simple or nihilistic, it’s not meant to be. But it’s the only way I can process kids and innocent people dying. I think, hopefully, that either we all get a long restful nap after it’s over or (selfishly), we return to something bigger and give a more complete understanding of the whole (not unlike an algorithm going through an iteration in machine learning). Knowing me though, if there is something bigger, and I retained som element of myself, I’d likely ask it “Oh yeah, and where did you come from?”
I don’t believe in heaven or hell. There are some people that I think deserve heaven. And some that I think deserve hell. But I think they’re bullshit. The notion of an eternal existence of burning or bliss is foolish to me. An ETERNITY based on a small blip of existence on an infinite timeline when whoever is in charge is supposed to be “benevolent and all-knowing” and knows the choices you were going to make in advance despite “free-will.”
Yeah, whatever. It’s just not a store I’m shopping at. Pass.
Why am I being so fatalistic and considering all things? I’ve lived a comfortable life. I’m very lucky. I’ve traveled to more places than 90% of people in the world. I’ve seen a lot of stuff. People are all generally the same in terms of what they’re seeking if you take whatever random mystical sky person they choose to yell at out of the equation.
If I were to nail down a mission statement for people who have kids (as I do). Your end-of-life goal should be to live so that your family is secure and loved and that they are hopefully set up for success after you pass.
I’ve talked to my mom about this. She’s happy. She’s got four kids who are all smart, on their way in good careers, have good spouses, and children that are doing well. Mom’s got lots of years left, but if that bus hits her (morbid, I know). She’d go into the next phase knowing she didn’t have to worry about us.
Now I’ll get to the crux of it.
I do not have the same luxury and it weighs on me from time to time. I tossed and turned because I worry about society and I do not have the warm cozy feeling that my children will be okay after I pass. I’m not talking about whether or not conservatives or liberals hold office (although both are scary when pressed to either extreme). I’m not talking about environmental disaster.
I’m talking about being the father of a special needs child. My oldest is nine. And he is autistic. Noticeably autistic. Can’t blend in autistic. Get you in trouble reading social cues wrong, autistic. And ADHD (but hey, who isn’t ADHD these days, thanks to technology for rewiring our brains prior to our biological ability to adapt to it). And he’s got sensory disorders.
He’s very sweet and very smart. And by many standards, we’re lucky. He’s verbal. He can read. He’s made marked improvements after many years of occupational therapy, speech therapy, equine therapy, [insert therapy type here]. So much so that he is now, outside of a self-contained classroom (one where there are many specialist adults and a very small number of children). He’s switched to an inclusion classroom where he is on the normal curriculum, with accommodations and people helping him.
He’s a huge part of the reason I switched from being a corporate overlord to a more flexible remote marketing position. And I love him. I don’t want to take away or sound pessimistic about any potential opportunity or career path for him. But I am also realistic at this point. I know that there will always be some limitations physically, socially, perhaps mentally (by mentally, I do not mean a lack of capacity to learn I mean a difference in the way he takes in, processes, and uses information being a limitation compared to how neurotypical people get on with each other). He’ll never be in a regular sports league. He might not be able to do every kind of job. And selfishly, I hurt because of that. I’m sure he does, too.
I’m a cliche man in many ways. A protector (at least that’s how I’d like to view myself; go ahead, roll your eyes). One of the hardest things I ever experienced was the feeling of helplessness on the day that my son got off of the bus (after being given the opportunity to ride the regular bus instead of the special needs bus), ran up to me, and exclaimed that he was beaten up.
And it’s true. He was. I can process the things separately now with a few years between the event and now. He was in another, older kid’s space. He was playing. But the kid wanted his personal space. My son missed the cues and got beat up. Hit repeatedly.
But it goes deeper. He was supposed to be sitting with a girl that was “the good one.” Let’s call her “Lisa”. Lisa’s mom lived in our neighborhood. She came up to me and explained how her daughter was in my son’s class (he had just started going to an inclusion classroom for a few minutes out of the day). It was decided that Tom would be assigned seating next to the girl on the bus. It was a short ride. FIve minutes tops.
But Lisa was still just a little over-privileged girl whose parents put her on a pedestal. She was just a child. And my son one day, wet himself in class at the end of the day. He was changed into clean clothes (we always had backups just in case), and he was then put on the bus.
Lisa would not let him sit with her. Shouting “ew” and other things. And so the kids in that section forced my son further back in the bus where bigger kids were.
At this point, I should say, that I’m not mad at Lisa. I’m not mad at the kid that beat up my son. All were wrong. All were being kids. Kids can be infinitely compassionate and infinitely cruel. I understand, without excusing specific actions, exactly what happened to get to the point of my kid being beaten up. I even acknowledge my son’s fault in the matter and personal space. But it was still traumatic to experience something that I had no control over. No ability to protect my son.
The same thing has happened this year in a different form. Children masquerading as my son’s friend, getting him to do things that they think are funny. My son thinks they are being friendly, but he is being taken advantage of. It’s hard. I think in many ways for me than for him. Though I don’t dare make that an official claim. A lot is going on beneath the surface with him that I can never understand. I’ve wished to be a fly on the wall of his mind. There is no simple solution.
But we have to be brave and give him all the opportunities that the other kids have. We can’t shelter him too much despite any perceived limitation (within the boundaries of his physical safety).
And on top of that, I think about society. I think about the world at large. And as I get older, I panic, and I think, oh no, I’m not allowed to die. I have to make sure my kids are alright.
I have two other kids, also. They are neurotypical. And I feel bad because an unfair responsibility has likely been shouldered on them. They may have to care for their older brother one day. It’s a burden that I would gladly bear forever if I could live long enough.
People grow and evolve and accept their lot. But they’re kids now. And a lot of attention gets placed on their brother. I feel guilty. I’m learning to deal with not placing my ideas of what a successful life looks like on my kids’ shoulders. As long as they are happy, safe, loved, and satisfied by their own standards, that should be enough, shouldn’t it?
We’ll keep going and growing because we have no choice. Time only moves in one direction. Again, I’m not pessimistic. I figure it’s all going to work out. But every once in a while, I’m going to have a night where I can’t sleep. I’m not looking for anything by writing this. I’m just putting out to the world that sometimes you’re going to toss and turn.
And that’s okay.