THE STRUGGLE ALWAYS comes before the happy ending. In fact, you could make the case that without struggle, there are no happy endings—or even happy middles or beginnings.
TRUTHBOMB: Just like the frog always comes before the prince, the wound comes before the healing.
So, let’s look at what has gone down for you so far. You’ve probably had some successes worth remembering, but there have probably also been some painful periods that you would just as soon forget.
But, if you don’t understand the hurt, if you don’t take the time to make sense of why you felt the way you did, you’re unlikely to heal going forward.
That’s how this chapter begins. You may want to cover your eyes at some points, but what 8-year-old Shaun Thompson went through was the necessary first step on a journey that led him to where he is today.
He’s the one who gave me the strength to choose the path that I’m on, rather than having a disastrous path chosen for me by the worst person in my life.
As you read my story, think about your own. Whatever went down, the more clear-eyed you are about your past, the sharper the vision you can bring to your future.
THERE WERE ANGRY FORCES PUSHING AND pulling at my house when I was growing up, and it felt like it all might come crashing down on me. From a very early age, I turned a hard shell against the world to protect myself. When I started day-care, I was the little kid who grabbed onto his momma’s leg at drop-off time, screaming like they were about to throw me into the fire instead of a classroom. I was like, “I hate these people. I’m not going to play with nobody. Take me home right now!”
In my confusion and vulnerability, I built defenses: I refused to speak with anybody but my brother Ennis and my mom, and I hid within the four walls of my closet, where I spent most of my time. That’s right, I was in the closet before I even knew what being in the closet was all about.
At least I had a friend in there.
In fact, to know about me as a little kid, you need to meet a toddler-size black doll with kinky hair and a hard, plastic head. He was My Black Buddy, and he was my only true friend for the first decade of my life. I’m lucky my mom bought him for me, because without him, I had nobody.
I’d spend hours in a make-believe world with him, cutting and combing his hair, telling him stories, and, when necessary, using his hard, plastic head as a weapon against intruders. Even my brother felt the blows. (Sorry for the bruises, Ennis!) I was desperate for somebody to protect me, somebody to stick by me, somebody to occupy my mind. It’s pathetic that I could only find it in a child-size doll, but at least I had that. My Black Buddy seemed like one of the only friends I could count on in a world where the people closest to me either did me harm or failed to protect me from it.
Can you imagine me as a world-hating, hostile little kid? The same guy who now hugs everybody, who works out with 20,000 people at a time during a Beachbody Summit? Sometimes, I have a hard time connecting those dots, too.
But as I look back, I can see how each step—backward or forward—was critical to my arrival where I am today. Life is relentless: You make one choice, gauge results, make another, and then a little piece of chaos knocks you sideways. But all of that adds to your experience, teaches you lessons, and maybe furnishes a new superpower or two. If you’re paying attention, and harvesting the fruits of your experience, you can move forward. I have done that, and I want nothing more than to help it happen for you, too.
If you feel stuck, maybe it’s because you have tools you’re not using or lessons you’re not applying. Transformation comes from correcting both of those things, but you have to will yourself into action. I did that after some serious blows that life dealt to me. But I learned to hit back. I know you can, too.
But change didn’t come quickly for me. In the early days, I needed My Black Buddy for defense, because there were others in my life who were an immediate danger.
I spent the first 7 years of my life in a one-room apartment on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia. My earliest memory is of my mom washing me in a yellow basin in the kitchen sink, which was in the living room, which was the hallway to the dark bathroom—a closet, more like—and the only bedroom as well.
Everything back then seemed huge to me—those high stairs up to the apartment, the park across the street, the crumbling porch wall my older brother Ennis fell off of one time. But, when I go back there now, the place looks tiny; our apartment was probably less than 400 square feet for two adults and two kids. And I see a struggling family trying to make it in an apartment where we could barely breathe.
It’s not that we lacked oxygen; the rattling window frames let in plenty of that. But we were suffocating from the lies we told about our lives together. My mom tried hard, wanting the best for us. Most of my very best traits come from her—my openness to change, my way of reaching out to people, my way of bouncing back from a tough blow. But she turned to the wrong men for comfort and companionship.
I never knew my biological father.
I’ve heard stories about how my mom moved to Louisiana to be with this guy. They had twin boys together—Ennis and Eric. My mom was awakened at 5:00 a.m. on July 18th, 1977, by my brother screaming in the crib. She jumped out of bed, from a deep sleep, to run to the crib. That’s when she discovered Eric, the brother I never met, cold and stiffening in the crib. The cause: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and his absence haunts all of us to this day.
My mom was 21 at the time.
Her grief, and the fear that went with it, might explain some of the questionable men she accepted into her life, and mine. She fought a lot with my biological father, but in the meantime, she got pregnant with me. During one of those fights, he pushed her out of a bathroom window.
We were both lucky to survive that fall.
She left him with me still in utero, and Ennis just a year old, and moved closer to her family. She was alone when I was born in Camden, New Jersey, across the river.
She brought me home to an inner-city apartment, grieving the loss of a child, reeling from an abusive relationship, and with a 1-year-old and a new baby. She needed warmth and support. And the man she chose was even worse for our little family than the last guy. He joined our family when I was 2 years old—the only father I ever knew. So, I was part of a two-parent household, but I put that in huge air quotes.
He wasn’t a stepfather.
A stepmonster is more like it.
Before the people in my family understood who this guy really was, they kind of looked up to him. Okay, he was a violent alcoholic, but at least he hung in there with my mom. He could keep a job, and his money helped the family move up the ladder and out of Philly.
Maybe I saw him a little more clearly than most. Even from early on.
I can remember kneeling on the couch in our living room, which was backed up against the windows in the front of our apartment building. From that lookout, I could see our neighborhood and find out what my neighbors were up to.
One time, I saw him doing a West Philly version of Fight Club, trading punches with another man across the street. Who knows what that was about? Maybe a manhood contest, marking territory, or just the fun of a random head whomping. There was blood, and bone cracking, and an animal fury unlike I’ve ever seen anywhere outside of an MMA cage fight.
After a while, the fight broke up, the winner and loser (or two big losers) disengaged. Soon after, I heard footsteps on the stairs. The stepmonster appeared in the door, beaten and bloody, and stepped over to the kitchen sink to wash up, fouling the same place my mom washed me as a baby. Then, he went back into the street for round two. Something seriously wrong with that.
His battlefield wasn’t confined to the street outside my window, either.
Another early memory is of riding in the backseat of our battered car, and my mom and the stepmonster yelling at each other up front. Ennis and I were taking it all in, wide-eyed, scared silent for once. We stopped at a red light, and the stepmonster bolted from the car. Naturally, in our crazy world, my mom went after him.
So, there’s Ennis and me, alone on the street in a car with no adults, winter wind blowing through open doors, my mom and this guy laying into each other on the sidewalk, horns honking all around us.
Two-parent household, my ass. More like a three-ring circus, with an evil clown for a ringmaster.
I remember thinking, at the time: This is crazy. I’m cold, and I might die. Why are Ennis and me in this car all alone? What’s going to happen to us?
The stepmonster was good for one thing, at least: dealing with rodents.
He used to set traps—snap!—and toss the dead carcasses. Perfect job for him, in fact.
Except one time, he decided to have a little fun with Shauny, instead.
I remember I was in the bath, enjoying the warm water and bubbles and that clean soapy smell, when the stepmonster entered the bathroom. He was holding something in his hand, and I didn’t realize what it was immediately. He walked over, crouched next to the tub, extended his hand, and thrust a dead, squashed mouse toward my penis.
He must have enjoyed my shrieking and the geyser of bath-water that erupted.
Painful memories for me, yes. Maybe you have some like that. I couldn’t blame you if you are reluctant to pull them out and examine them. It has taken me years to reach peace with the feelings that that scared little boy in the backseat had. But I promise you: Unless you are able to look your former self in the eye, comfort your younger self, and once and for all accept that chapter in the past, you will keep living the pain every day. The deeper it’s buried, the more urgently it needs to rise up to the surface and be acknowledged and understood. Only then can you convert it into a superpower that you can apply to similar circumstances in the future.
Yes, I was alone and frightened in the car that day. But it helped me learn to seek the right kinds of relationships, and make sure I could grab the steering wheel when I needed to. So, my current life wouldn’t be possible if it hadn’t happened to me.
IF ANY LITTLE KID EVER HAD a reason to believe that it was a mean world, that people weren’t to be trusted, it was little Shauny. At least I was in the craziness with Ennis, who wasn’t crazy at all.
As I grew up, I followed my big brother Ennis around like a little baby duck. We would dress alike; both of us had big old Afros even as little tiny kids; and I signed up for every activity he did. I wasn’t avoiding the shadow of my older brother, I was his shadow.
For all the weird stuff that went down during my childhood, my brother Ennis was my only normal relationship. Okay, yes, we had our disagreements. We competed at everything, but we were so close, and he felt like home to me, at least for my first 14 years.
It’s sad and funny now for me to think about my two pillars of support, back then: One real, one imaginary. I was desperate, of course, but at least I could sort out the friends—Ennis and My Black Buddy—from the enemy stepmonster. A little later in the book, I’ll take you through an exercise that will help you divide your home team from the opposition, but for now, ask yourself a few questions:
Who are my true pillars of support, and who is ready to tear me down if I step out of line?
Whose path should I follow, and who is ready to lead me someplace that I don’t want to go?
Who’s a positive example, and who’s a negative one?
When you sort out the Ennises from the evildoers, the Buddies from the bad blood, you’ll begin to build a support network that can catch you when you’re falling, and launch you when you’re ready to fly.
I WAS AN EXTRAORDINARILY SENSITIVE LITTLE boy. Everything I felt, I felt 100 percent. I was that kid that, if we went to the Jersey Shore, I would be walking 30 feet behind my family because … the lights! The ocean! The clothes! It was sensory overload. My mom bought one of those kid leashes to link onto 4-year-old me, or else I may have wandered off permanently.
The stepmonster interpreted “slow walker” as “mentally slow,” so he called me Turtle. I was so far behind everybody else that I was more reptile than human, you see. But even then, I knew: I was slow because the world was awesome. If I sped up, I might miss something great. I wanted to take it all in. Especially before I learned to reach out to people, I had to keep a lot going on inside to fill up my time, my life, and my overactive brain. I was good company for me, and I had to be!
I may not have been sharing much with the outside world, but I had an active inner life. I know now that I was taking it all in: the bad and the good. It’s one of the reasons I so appreciate little Shauny when I look back at him now. He was biding his time, observing the world, preparing to advance with the best people and activities, and leave behind the worst.
I hope you’ll give yourself a break with this, as well: Just because you haven’t taken steps yet toward that new job, or away from that old relationship, doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t. You may just be in your own “slow walking” phase, watching carefully in anticipation of the moment when you have learned enough to succeed brilliantly.
At least the stepmonster got one part of it right with my nickname: I needed a hard shell to protect me, and growing up, I doubted it would ever be safe to poke my head out of it.
When it was time for us to enroll in school, my mom pulled a fast one, and shifted us into a stronger district. She informed the school board of Deptford, New Jersey—about 8 miles away, where my grandparents lived—that we were residents, and enrolled us.
Every school day, she would roust Ennis and me out of bed at 5:00 a.m. We would stagger down to her beat-up black car, with a brown door and a faulty starter. I remember thinking: Why doesn’t anybody else drive a car like this? It was the first sign I had that we were barely scraping by.
But I give my mom credit: She was trying to work it out for us.
She’d crank that dead engine until it coughed and wheezed to life, and rev the engine to warm the car up beyond icebox level. Then, we’d make the trek over to my grandparents’ house via the Walt Whitman bridge. And then, we’d stand in front of Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop’s house to catch the school bus to Lake Tract Elementary School.
Our school commute ended when my mom got a better-paying job, and we were able to upgrade to a neighborhood about a mile from where Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop lived. After the move, we had a whole house to ourselves, and school was a quick bus ride away. I was so happy: Oh, my God, I thought. I got my own room! We actually have stairs and a driveway! And a basement!
On the surface, things were looking good. Of course, that’s the problem with the surface. It’s like a frozen pond. With a glossy layer of ice, you don’t see the dark layer of muck down below.
IS IT ANY WONDER I WENT looking for escape routes? In school, we had a reading program called The Super Kids. The main characters drove around having adventures in a school bus; it was designed to teach us how far reading could take us in life. I loved to read, and I loved those kids, and maybe I was looking for magical transportation that would take me anywhere beyond the closet. My stepmonster wasn’t going to do that for me, and my mom was just too exhausted from work and dealing with Ennis and me. So, naturally, I turned to my grandparents, the Reverend Charles Dawson, and his wife, Effie, aka Pop-Pop and Mom-Mom.
If my home life was all dysfunction and chaos, theirs was calm and harmony. They loved me, and I knew it. So, when I said, “Pop-Pop, would you make a bus out of cardboard and bring it to school?” he didn’t hesitate.
Okay, I’m sure they had to call my teacher and say, “Shaun needs a what, made out of what ?”
But, here’s everything you need to know about my Pop-Pop: He did it.
I can still remember him dragging the big boxes into my classroom, helping us decorate it like the Super Kids school bus, all my kindergarten classmates playing in it, and me as proud as I could be that my grandfather made it, and knowing that he did it for me.
THE STORY OF MY CHILDHOOD GETS a lot darker than it was in that closet with My Black Buddy, but still I say: I love that little kid, and I credit him for all he did to launch me into a life I love.
Life is unfair. People can be cruel. Each of us has been hurt, and each of us has suffered things that we did nothing to bring about. None of that changes for any of us, no matter how we choose to look at our lives. What changes is how we react to it.
Every one of us is hiding in some kind of closet, whether it’s an abusive person in our past or present, a memory of past failures, or a struggle to get the resources that we need. But by packing that mess away into some dark secret place, you are limiting your access to the best part of your life ahead.
We’re gonna break out together, if you’ll just give it a try.
If you built a closet, know that the four high walls aren’t real. You’ve imagined them into existence, and you can tear them down just as easily as you built them, by deciding they’re flimsier than you imagined, or that they don’t exist at all.
Your mind is a sledgehammer. Swing it!