Finding our purpose is only the beginning, since we don’t get called down roads already well paved, easy to travel.
Resilience is required for the journey.
I’ve become a modern-day troubadour of sorts, a one-person band on the road, traveling and singing an original mix of cautionary and inspirational folk tunes, and I’m weary of having to play yet again my most popular hit, detailing William’s decline and death, and how I’d crumbled, letting down my family and myself before getting back up.
On the road, alone, I subsist mostly on chicken—strips or nuggets—from an assortment of venues, depending on available time, stopping at a gas station if I must make haste, or Chick-fil-A if I have time to manage a line. Fried chicken keeps me satiated, meaning my liver is safe even if my cholesterol is soaring. I know I’ll have to dry out soon, cutting the crispy, learning to cope with a salad and grilled chicken the same way I’ve learned to manage my five o’clock shadow. That’s what we addicts do, pass off one overindulgence that’s not in our best interests for another, and if we’re successful in recovery, those we adopt going forward become less dangerous over time, a whittling down of sorts. Many of us settle eventually, if we’re lucky, on too much coffee.
I’m at six cups a day, if counting is necessary.
Beyond a craving for chicken strips, driving in the car alone is becoming a safe haven, where I think and process in the quiet for hours, ignoring my phone and making a space for thoughts, summoning William in one ear or Lloyd in the other, if needed. I’ve figured out the value of time spent in slow motion, where my mind can regenerate, tossing out what’s not needed, the ideas that are decent but don’t deserve time with so little, and rejuvenate, creating new concepts to consider or pursue. I’m learning our best work is done in quiet thinking. I’m learning such awakened rest and processing is critical to our health, mental health in particular. Combined with quality sleep, it’s this kind of refueling that makes us better on the job, at home—alone. Studies are clear on how we perform better with rested bodies, and rested minds, yet in the workplace and also at home, we are prone to focus on go, go, go so much in the name of performance that we overlook how quality of performance is what truly makes us, and our efforts, go.
When we are tired, and fatigued, we are less than what we can be. And we are at risk, potentially, for veering off course, ending up in a battle we don’t want, in the midst of fighting the war we have enthusiastically signed up for.
I’m there now, taking blows, wondering how I got into this, wondering if I’m in over what I can manage. That’s because my strategy of getting into schools is working—too well, perhaps. I’m a storyteller, not a counselor, but increasingly students want to talk, and I want to talk to them. But the more I do, the more I feel their pain.
I’m at an independent school in North Carolina, engaging throughout the day with students, faculty, staff, and parents later in the evening. I talked to the entire middle school and the fifth grade this morning, and trust me, before the pandemic, no head of school dared bring fifth graders to a serious mental-health and substance-misuse talk. But things have changed. School administrators and faculty say something has happened, something is happening, fast, that they can’t quite put a finger on except to say it’s all mental-health related.
That’s why I’m here, talking to students from fifth grade through graduating seniors.
I share about William’s decline, how he thought he could use alcohol and drugs to self-medicate and outsmart the risk, avoiding addiction, and how that resulted in his death. I talk about the near death of Hudson, who believed marijuana wasn’t addictive, that it was good for you, even, until he found himself selling it to friends to fund his habit and taking pills he didn’t have a prescription for, ending up in a coma, nearly dead, from an accidental overdose, how Mary Halley felt the stress of bullying and weight gain in high school and purged, thinking she’d try it once or twice, until it became a daily habit, multiple times a day, and how I crumbled under the weight of Adderall and alcohol, losing my career and my family.
It’s the right thing to do, exposing fifth graders, even though the subject matter is heavy, because most are already exposed. Studies show that puberty is occurring earlier, and with most having a smartphone and its associated apps anyway, we should believe it. They are exposed already, and some are involved already, in eating disorders or vaping to control or change how they feel. As for the middle and high school students, I’m probably too late for many, since research shows 32 percent of seniors nationally have already tried illicit drugs, and 16 percent of students grades nine through twelve have engaged in disordered eating behavior, but I know the research also shows that all education is valuable, and it’s never too late to either slow or stop unhealthy behavior. I give that message to students, in fact, reminding them that substance misuse is not as if a seal is broken that can’t be undone.
“Every day you have a clear mind as a teenager increases odds that you will not battle substance use disorder later in your life,” I say. “So don’t think that once you’ve tried something, Oh, well, there’s no going back. What you did yesterday is the past. Today is a new beginning, every day is a new beginning, and statistics show that you can have a profound impact on your future by what you do, or don’t do, today.”
The school has ninety-five students per grade on average, which means I had nearly four hundred young people between the ages of ten and fourteen filling the school auditorium for an hour of stories of personal heartbreak earlier this morning, hearing me explain how it felt finding William dead of an accidental substance overdose—“I wondered if I should start drinking again, to numb the pain”—and how “that smart-phone you begged your parents for at the age of eight, or before, is a stick of dynamite, strong enough to blow up your brain.”
An hour and a half on stage sharing details about you and your family’s implosion, including a son’s death and recovery to mental health, is a hard emotional workout, taxing, exhausting. And I’ve just finished my second talk of the day, delivering the same frank message to both middle school and high school students, experiencing the same taxing, exhausting result, which I wouldn’t trade anything for, but just because I’m called to do it doesn’t mean I should overschedule, overburden what I can comfortably manage.
I must do better for myself, better for my cause, than overextending what I can emotionally manage, because we can’t give everything away and have little to nothing left and expect to maintain the needed energy to deliver on a purpose, to fulfill a destiny. That’s why I should have limited my talks to forty minutes each, with no meetings with students after. When the school allocated an hour and a half for each talk, followed by optional meetings with some students after the high school presentation, I should have said, “No thank you, that’s too much.”
But I didn’t have that foresight early in the growing demand, so instead, I’d agreed to the engagement time with students because meeting with and learning from students about what they face is among my favorite, and most valuable, time. We can’t learn without listening, after all. But I’d thought “roundtable” when the offer came.
Not “me on a platter.”
A counselor is ushering me into the wellness room, typically staffed by a nurse. But the nurse is AWOL. I take a seat at the table, and the usher leaves the room: “I’ll be outside, managing the students as they come in.”
Uh-oh.
“Hello, Mr. Magee?” says a soft-spoken young man walking toward me, the first in line. “May I have a seat?”
He’s medium height, with a wiry frame. He’s wearing eyeglasses and baggy jeans cinched tightly above his hips. I’m guessing ninth grade or tenth grade, late bloomer.
“I’m sorry, yes, please have a seat. Tell me about yourself.”
He says his name is Jacob and that he’s a manager for the baseball team, “but they call me the mascot.”
I can’t resist. “If you were a mascot animal, what kind of mascot animal would you be?”
I’m assuming he’ll laugh. Instead, he has a quick answer. He’s thought of this before.
“A bear,” Jacob says, “so I can hibernate.”
I square my sit bones against the back of the chair and straighten my torso.
“I understand,” I say. I want to resist but can’t ignore the next obvious question. “What’s that about?”
“My father died by suicide two years ago,” he says.
I feel sick.
“I’m so, so sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s been hard. I’ve gotten lots of therapy, and my mom and I are close,” he says, voice falling off.
But?
“I tried it myself last year,” he says, tears running down his face.
I can’t move, I can’t respond.
Seconds tick, tick, tick. Jacob wipes a tear.
What do I do? I’m not a counselor. I can’t pretend to fill that void. But I opened this young man’s wound with my talk, and now he’s before me, in need.
Help me, I think in my mind.
Be with him, a voice says, firmly.
I’m startled.
Be with him, the voice repeats.
Dad?
My eyes water.
Lloyd, my late father, was the school superintendent known as the youth whisperer, able to deliver comfort in crisis with his presence, and words.
I’m listening, hoping the young man will listen to me. I look Jacob eye to eye, showing him the tears, showing him that I am here, with him. That I hear him. That I feel him.
“Well, Mr. Jacob, baseball team mascot, here’s what I can tell you. I see a strong young man, I see a young man who is doing the hard work, who is bold enough to walk in here and share, strong enough to keep taking the small steps to keep moving. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry for your pain. But I’m thankful for you, that the world has you, and I’m honored to have gotten to know you.”
He smiles.
“Thank you,” he says softly.
He stands up.
I stand up.
“Well, I’m gonna get back to class,” Jacob says.
“You, young man, will be fine,” I say, as he slowly walks away.
“Hello, Mr. Magee,” says a perky female voice. “I’m next.”
She’s blonde, tan, and a junior, she says. Vaping is her problem, she explains. It’s a secret, the nicotine, the marijuana she inhales. Nobody knows; well, some friends do, but most don’t, and neither do her parents. She’s a good girl, she explains. “Everybody else is a lot worse,” she claims.
“I’m embarrassed about it,” she says, unsure of what to do. I say she needs counseling, preferably one with substance expertise, and she’s nodding and agreeing and casually adding more.
“Last year a teacher sent me explicit messages,” she says.
“What?”
“Yeah, it happened last year. He’s gone now.”
I’m uncomfortable, because I understand the emotions of a young person who’s been gawked at, violated, by someone of trust. I shouldn’t be in this room alone with this young woman, not because I’m afraid something will go wrong, but because something already has, in her life, and mine, and the conversation must end.
“I hope you got counseling,” I reply, trying to wrap up the conversation.
“A few times,” she says, “and I take medication—Adderall to keep up with schoolwork and Lexapro for anxiety.”
End it, Lloyd says, and I’m thankful for the nudge, delivered just when I need it.
Get up, get out, he says.
“Well,” I say, standing up, “keep up the work. It will pay off.”
The next hour passes similarly, with me repeatedly vowing internally never to let unsupervised, one-on-one meetings with students happen again after a talk, when I’ve pulled back their crusty outer layer, exposing their vulnerable insides, and I have pulled back my own crusty outer layer, exposing my vulnerable insides. Their stories combined with mine, all within the hours between breakfast and midafternoon coffee, have my heart racing, my breathing audible. I wonder if I’m done, and I don’t mean for the day.
“That’s it,” I’m told. The line, like me, has exhausted.
I look at my watch. There’s an hour and a half before my meeting with faculty and staff. I walk through the parking lot, the sun bouncing off the blacktop in waves of heat. It’s early spring, but the temperature is near a record high, in the low nineties. I’m back at my car, overwhelmed, with my story, with their stories.
The school has a room for me at the nearby Embassy Suites, and I’d like to go stretch out, gather my thoughts. But my fatigue feels like I’ve made it to the end of a long race, greeted at the finish with a bat swing to the head. I’m hurting, and want nothing more than to shift the feeling away from my William, away from the boy whose father died by suicide and who tried it himself, away from the girl who received inappropriate messages from a teacher.
I know better than to go to the hotel room for the night. I stop by instead for a quick change of clothes, putting on shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. I search for a nearby park, finding one with a lake and a walking path around it.
The late-afternoon sun radiates on my head as I take one step after another, hungrily searching for thoughts beyond the afternoon of storytelling. I pass a man with tanned skin who’s wearing a hat and orange vest and driving a John Deere tractor with a Bush Hog attachment. He’s mowing the lake’s perimeter, kicking up a cloud of dust, and I breathe in deeply the smell and particles of the cut grass. Soon, I’m bathing in sweat and sunshine, and it takes me back to that eleven-year-old summer of baseball, before everything got so complicated, when I was a boy who wanted but a hit in baseball and a gentle kiss on the lips, and freedom. All of us deserve that. Freedom—to act, to think, to change, to create change. And all of us have a responsibility to use that freedom respectably, so that others may find in their freedom lives of joy, and of well-being.
Salty sweat drips from my brow into my eyes as I pick up my pace in the sun, moving around the track at a walk that’s nearly become a run, in a near panic because I know the stories students shared were only part of the deeper issue. What someone says is the problem is typically only the tip of what they face, far removed from the deeper causes. That’s how it was with me, growing up in a family that wasn’t mine, where most everything, including my last name, was a lie. Some moments I remember clearly, like awakening to my father’s hand over a nipple, or him begging me to pull down my underpants to examine my pubic hair. Others are vague in the specifics of time and cause—Eunice calling Mom to her room, keeping her there for hours, as I’d try to drown out the articulate anger permeating the wall as if projected by a loudspeaker, her saying she wished he was dead and gone, and I didn’t know why, but also, neither was I compelled to call the police or run into the room, begging silence. Instead, I’d roll over and silence the noise with escape, thinking about girls in class or the weather, changing my queasy feeling until I’d fall asleep.
I see a bench and stop, taking a seat. I take off my sunglasses and wipe my eyes; the pressure behind them pounds, like someone is locked in, desperate to get out.
I want to help every student who hurts, even if that means uncomfortable moments, as I faced today. I can’t expect to walk into a school and unlock pain without some of it spilling back onto me. But neither can I expect to ignore that pain, allowing it to build, without escape, and be okay.
I look down, putting my face into my hands, the pressure about to blow.
I cough a dry cry. Another.
Oh, God.
It’s here, it’s erupting, a tearful wail bubbling under the protective noise of the Bush Hog humming nearby. It’s rising from the bottom of my gut, uttering out into tears and sounds like I’m birthing a calf from my throat, decades of grief and pain I’ve kept down for too long.
I cough, I gag. I cry, chest heaving.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I shout slowly, into the cloud of dust, muffled by the machinery’s hum, drawing out the angst.
I close my eyes, put my head into my hands, and breathe deeply, and again, and it feels as if I’m sipping warm tea, and it’s running through my body.
The mower lifts the Bush Hog, quieting the park, and the dust settles, sharpening the hot sun. I wipe tears from my face, taking in slow, deep breaths.
I don’t know when I’ve cried like this. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried like this. But I have a feeling I’ll sleep well and easy tonight, and in the nights to come.