2am. My eyes opened and all I saw was the dark. I mean, it was 2am! Of course it was dark. My mind started to race. This was during a particularly difficult time of my adult life. At least, that’s what my brain told me.
And there was evidence to support the claim. There were real-world failures and setbacks. There was relational loss. My brain could point to things I had tried and had stopped without completing—because of fear or my ADHD, or whatever!
Then there was the question of “what if?” that was running loudly. You might know that voice. What if this happens? What if this doesn’t happen? What if this doesn’t work out? What if you can’t do this important thing? What if you messed up your kids? What if that teacher in 8th grade was right and you are more or less destined to be a loser? What if that college professor who told your then girlfriend, now wife that you are never going to amount to anything was right? The question of what if can run endlessly in our minds.
Remember this is at 2am.
I shifted my position and tried to go back to sleep.
It didn’t work.
Have you been there? I know this wasn’t the only night where it happened in my life. It’s happened many nights in my adult life.
I’ve sat in my therapy room enough to know that I’m not alone in that reality.
I’ve debated how to start this post for what feels like a million times. Partly, because I truly believe that there are people that want me to fail. That they wouldn’t celebrate, but they would find some sort of satisfaction in my failure. Maybe that’s just my childhood trauma raising its voice inside my head but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t mention it. I’ve always strived to be honest with you in this space as I think that’s the best way to build a community.
I’ve also debated this opening because it is really uncomfortable being this vulnerable.
But I have two problems with refusing to be vulnerable. First of all, I think that because I often speak about how we respond to what happens to us is more important than what happens, people can think that bad things or hard things don’t happen to me. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Secondly, people assume that counselors, especially counselors that write or speak can be dishonest about how what actually goes on in their lives. They can think that what is presented is a curated life, one that is fashioned to only show the wins and the highlights. I want to dispel that myth. I strive to be open and honest with the people in my life. I have mostly looked at that as something needed for the people who are in my physical life. I want to invite those of you who only know me via my digital life into my real world too.
To that end, I have written about times there has been stress in life, arguments with my wife and children etc. I have been open about the trauma in my childhood and estrangement with some of my family members.
This post is a bit more raw. It’s about the wrestling of failure at my own hands. It’s about the disappointments in my life as an adult.
Those disappointments are many. And with those failures comes a fog that makes life seem impossible to navigate. They bring sleepless nights and tears that spring up while I’m driving for what feels like no reason.
On top of my own struggles, I have spent almost two decades of my adult life sitting with people struggling with their own despair. I have sat in a room while people worked through some of the deepest traumas. I have sat while people talked about abuse at the hands of people who should have protected them.
I’ve also sat with people who had abused others and now are trying to make a new life with a lot of guilt and shame.
A friend of mine says that my job is to swallow other people’s sins and still be healthy. It’s not an exact job description but it’s close. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that all of that takes a toll on a person’s desire to trust the world around them. Heck, it takes a toll on the desire to even engage the world around us.
Let’s go back to that night. It was during a time with mostly normal stress for a business owner. Stress around bills, payroll and life things.
I had a few nights where I woke up from physical pain or having to vacate my bladder, both of which are relatively common for men at my age. But waking up gave my mind the opportunity to start racing.
This night I had some physical pain and my brain started its race. Earlier that evening, my wife had played a song for me that she had written and had AI sing.
Her song recounted our story. It was moving to me in a way that I don’t think I could adequately explain to you through written word.
Here’s the chorus: “You were trouble, you were fire, You could make me laugh and make me cry. You fought against us almost as hard As you fought to keep me by your side. But through every wrong turn, every broken road, Every time we almost came undone, Somewhere deep inside my heart I always knew you were my one.”
She followed it with these lines: “Twenty-seven years, and you still get to me. There’s still mischief dancing in your eyes. You still fight with me, You still fight for me, And I still see that wild boy sometimes.
But now I see you loving our children, I see the man that boy became. The steady hand, the voice of reason, The one who still makes my heart race.”
That night, at what was now probably closer to 3:30, I didn’t have the lyrics. I didn’t even have a copy of the song. It was still on her phone. But those lines stuck in my brain: “Twenty-seven years and you still get to me…” Even now as I write, I find tears springing to my eyes in the coffee shop.
It was at that moment that I started to take my own advice. Words I have shared with countless people over the years. In that moment, I started talking to myself and stopped just listening to myself.
To paraphrase the famous comedian line, “I said to myself, ‘self,’ and I knew it was me because I was talking to me.”
“Joe, if someone told you when you were 19 that the life you have would be your life even with all of the stress, you would have laughed at them. You would have been willing to do almost anything for this life.”
I started to ask myself how much I meant some of the things I’ve said over the years. How much did I really believe the principles I shared with clients?
I’ve written in my journal that I would be content if I lived in a box with Erica. Did I really mean that?
I asked myself how much of the stuff I was worried about losing actually brought joy to my life.
I reminded myself that worrying if I screwed my kids up meant that I had kids, something I once worried would never happen.
I began to recount how many things I had worried about in the past and how many of them had worked out. Many had worked out differently than I thought they would. I started to think about how many of the failures I’ve experienced led to something better.
I had to remind myself that I had survived the failures that didn’t lead to something better. I learned things and realized how I could do things differently in the future.
I reminded myself that I knew there would be hard things in front of me when I chose to pursue the life I wanted to live.
A favorite question I have asked myself and others is “what would you do if it didn’t matter if you failed?”
The implied idea is that failure isn’t optional. Choosing what we’re willing to fail at is. We can engage in nothing and fail at life or we can engage life, try things and fail at those.
I can say that there is a difference between failing at things and failing at life, but what happens when I’m the one failing?
I realized something that night, not for the first time: I don’t have to believe everything that brain tells me at 2am. Truthfully, to be healthy, I should probably challenge everything my brain tells me at any time of the day. As an ancient writer put it, I should take every thought captive and examine it.
Because not everything that my brain tells me is accurate. And many of the implications my brain tells me need to be examined and processed for truth.
The next day I was telling my wife about this event while we were driving home. I told her how the life I actually had was evidence against the story my brain had been telling me at 2am. I realized I had been lying awake feeling like a failure while surrounded by things a younger version of me would have considered an unbelievable success.
I took some time to be thankful for what I had, because to lose something, you have to actually have it first. I also realized that I had bought into consumerism without realizing it.
I practiced some gratitude. Gratitude gets a bit of a bad rap in our day. People make fun of the idea of a gratitude journal. I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t because we have unintentionally sold a ruse. I wonder if we have peddled the idea that if you practice a gratitude journal it will somehow make all the stress go away.
It doesn’t make the bad go away. The darkness is still there.
Practicing gratitude just makes it so the dark and the potential dark doesn’t become the only thing we see.
4am came for me and I fell asleep. I slept deeply. My life was still complicated. There was still stress present. Failures still hung in the shadows behind me chirping their deprecating declarations. Potential failures and pain still called my name in the future.
There were still many things to grieve.
Not one of those things went away.
The room was still dark. It just wasn’t the only thing there with me, and those voices weren’t given the platform to be the loudest in my head anymore.
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