Growing up the way I did, I reached a point where I realized that patterning myself on the most obvious role models—my parents—was a dead end and would only lead to my downfall in one way or another. So I had to go back to square one and learn. I had to learn to walk again in a philosophical sense, because I hadn’t learned how to do it in a healthy way the first time around.
That was my struggle.
I don’t say that for sympathy. I say that because we all have challenges.
In my case, in addition to normal kid stuff, I faced the cruelty that comes with a physical difference and the ignorance back then about certain disabilities. Because I was deaf in one ear, I had trouble hearing in school; but instead of getting special help, I was simply dismissed as a bad student and sent to remedial classes. And through it all, my family failed to provide any sense of support. Well, to be honest, it was worse than that. Often my parents made me feel even less secure—to such an extent that I would sleepwalk and have constant nightmares, waking up screaming from dreams that I now recognize as symbolic: being alone in a speeding car with no steering wheel, being alone on a raft with no way to get to land.
My therapist would say I was abused. Not intentionally, but some of what my parents did was certainly not designed to build me up. I wasn’t chained to a chair or anything, but I’ve also heard that sometimes the less insidious and obvious kinds of abuse can be almost more damaging. So I’m kind of torn. I have to give a disclaimer, but at the same time, I’m aware that anyone can be negatively affected by things that are less overt. A lot of damage can be done in ways that are not so obvious.
I didn’t know it as a kid, but my parents weren’t happy people. To me, they were just my parents. I assumed that’s how adults were.
My way of thinking—ingrained in me at home as a child—was always: don’t show pain. Never let anybody know that they hurt you. And of course, because of what I was subjected to as a result of my facial difference, I hurt a lot. I’ve come to realize that when we pretend not to be hurt, we suffer. It feels better to say, “You hurt me.” That allows us to release the pain. It’s not a form of weakness, and it doesn’t put the person who hurt us in a position of power. It isn’t anything more than a statement of fact that we’ve been hurt. It means nothing more than somebody was cruel or misguided and said something hurtful.
Holding in our hurt, on the other hand, allows a kind of pressure to build up, like in a faucet. At some point the pipe bursts. The key is to keep ourselves open and let it out—keep everything flowing.
At this point in my life, I don’t keep things to myself. If somebody says something that hurts me, I tell that person. Nothing else is attached to it. Anything attached to it is either how they choose to see it or how I choose to see it.
If someone who is miserable or full of self-doubt or self-worth issues becomes successful and is still unhappy, that’s when they have a choice. Either they give up and give in to unhealthy or even deadly coping mechanisms or they roll up their sleeves and decide I’m not going to be a victim. I’m going to come through this. When we choose to be victims, life goes on for everybody else. Maybe early on I saw myself as a victim, but then I realized that I gained nothing by seeing myself that way. And even though the world of rock and roll was full of dangers and temptations, it also seemed obvious to me that burning a hole with cocaine through the cartilage of my septum wasn’t going to help anything.
Back then, I navigated life using a lot of preconceived ideas that formed a structure, which I needed. But over time, I found that some of those ideas were just too difficult. A lot of the rules I was living by were based on nothing. It’s okay to be tough on ourselves, but when we make rules for ourselves, they have to be based in experience, and my rules were not realistic. So over a long time I drew up a new set of rules—the ones in this book.
First I had to unlearn what I’d been taught as a kid. I’d been programmed to shove everything aside, not to accept anything that raised questions about what I was doing. If I didn’t talk about something, it didn’t exist.
When we’re children, in those formative years, we take our first steps, and not just physically. If our foundation was faulty when we were young, as it was in my case, we have to learn to walk again when we’re older. I had to build a new foundation. That was difficult. It was like deprogramming. We are, in essence, programmed by repeated responses or reactions to things. Only when we start to perceive those things differently, or add new components to how we react to them, can we deprogram ourselves—and defuse the emotional bomb.
For a long time I took my childhood and my life experiences as the norm. Kids model what they see at home and think it’s normal. And that’s how they initially define love, by what they receive at home and how their parents and siblings treat one another. Once I got enough perspective and different experience, I woke up to the fact that my childhood hadn’t been the norm. Before a revelation like that, we can’t acknowledge the pain. Supplementing with new life experiences and a new perspective, however, takes the charge out of painful things from our past. The memory that we were hurt doesn’t go away, but the pain does. And that’s an important distinction. I know how much I hurt for years, even decades, of my life—I know there was a palpable pain. But the pain is gone because I rectified and remedied my life.
I can acknowledge the hurt, but I no longer feel the pain.
The idea of throwing away what I had been taught, discarding the ways I’d been taught to reason and not to reason—to start again from scratch—was daunting. But I needed to do it. I was driven to cleanse because I felt like what I had seen and what I had emulated was poison and would not make me happy, and life wouldn’t end well for me. I was unhappy and unsettled, and I certainly felt despair, but this was part of the quest. Would I live with the decay, or would I get a root canal? Would I dig out the rot or just bear it?
First I had to realize it was okay to question my foundation. After all, my original foundation wasn’t making me happy. Second, I realized I could build another foundation—though I also understood this wasn’t going to happen overnight. That’s why I’ve always been leery of self-help books and other quick fixes. Going away for a weekend where you don’t pee for a couple of days is not going to change your life. You didn’t get the way you are in two days, and you’re not going to undo it over a weekend either. (Although I should probably also admit that part of what made the process bearable for me was not realizing how long it would take.)
Here’s the truth: Questioning ourselves is not a weakness. It’s a source of strength.
There’s great freedom in being able to acknowledge how little we know. There’s a cage and handcuffs in thinking we know more than we do. There are shackles in that. Freedom for me came when I admitted I had so much to learn and I knew much less than I’d thought. I’m much happier knowing that many of the things I had thought were, in truth, nonsense. I’d just made them up. I’d made them up because they made me feel secure. But when we’re truly secure, we don’t need to think we know everything. That’s the other part of it. When we feel secure, we don’t need all the rules or ideas about what we know, because we’re free. We don’t need that false sense of support and safety from truisms that aren’t true, and that’s a release.
I had to ask myself: “How the hell do you have life all sorted out and all worked out?”
I had to start to get healthy before I could realize how my past had affected me. When we think our behavior and how we deal with the world is normal, there’s nothing to fix. But when we step away from it, we can say, “Gee, look at all that I’m dealing with and why.”
It’s confining and suffocating to think we know everything. It’s freeing to realize we don’t. Maybe everything doesn’t need a label. We put “good” and “bad,” “true” and “untrue,” on things that don’t need those grades or categories. Some things just are.
We have to take control of our lives.
We don’t have to accept who we are today.
We can decide to be someone else tomorrow.
It’s not always easy, but we have to have that extra drive, that extra breath, that extra stride that someone else doesn’t, to get us where we want to go.
Reaching one goal gives us the opportunity to see another goal. And if we reach a goal and think it’s all over, then how sad. Goals reveal a road map to other goals. The most important thing is to keep moving forward. We don’t know where we’re going to wind up, and we plot a course that may not lead where we think. But if we’re going forward, we’ll find our destination—and then, if we’re lucky, we’ll find another one, and another one.
Obstacles are what we see when we lose sight of our goals. If we have to jump hurdles, we jump them. It’s about shedding and getting rid of all the baggage and the doubt and the voices in our heads from people around us, and if we’re relentless and tireless, we ultimately become a person we can love, a person we can embrace.
Only then do we become the person we were meant to be.