My Origins Part 2: Finding the Words

 Have you ever let a moment define you? Was it a word? Perhaps a sentence said by someone in passing? Or perhaps it was either your biggest triumph or your biggest blunder. Whatever it was, or rather if it was, you can perhaps relate to how I felt each and every day as those horribly wrong words that I read on the night of my diagnosis.

No job.

No friends.

No happiness.

When you let a moment define you, or in my case those words, you no longer are defined by who you are but rather what someone else suggests or thinks how you should be. A box is formed and any existence out of the box is akin to trying to exist outside our dimension. My relationship with my girlfriend ended (who could ever forget the story about how I broke up on Christmas via text message. Don't know the story? I'll have to tell you it sometime) and every lead I had in life I didn't take. What was the point? Being a logical thinker, albeit flawed logic in this regard, I couldn't get past the idea that any effort was irrelevant because the end result would be the same; myself, eventually homeless, and 100% alone in this world.

Here's the thing, and it's a big, gigantic thing, if you could've had a conversation with me back then you'd have known none of this. I had no ability to word or phrase how I was feeling, and no one knew my fears for the future. Think about that for a second; I was in a state of complete hopelessness with complete conviction that there would be no one that would ever understand who I was, and I was destined to be misunderstood until the end of my time on this Earth. Instead, you'd have probably thought I just a shy, quirky person that had some master plan on how everything would be just fine.

A year of this crushing depression went on and I wanted someone, anyone to understand that I wasn't okay. I didn't want pity, but I wanted someone to know what was going on behind the facade I was able to show. Eventually, the urge to shout my state of being at the top of my lungs for all to hear turned into a night at my computer with a word processor with a simple mission; to put my thoughts on paper and go from there.

That first night in February 2005 feels like it was mere moments ago and as I wrote two chapters that night and nervously hit CTRL-P and the sound of the printer putting the essence of my soul on paper made me freeze. What had I done? Was what I did okay? Remember from yesterday's blog; in first grade I was taught that it wasn't okay to say I wasn't okay. More importantly though I wondered who, if anyone, would read it? 

Printing those 40 pages (what can I say, I had ambition and a life story to tell) seemed like an eternity and as the sun was just about to break over the eastern horizon, I put those 40 pages on the stove for my dad to see fearing what type of reaction there would be. My dreams were vivid that night and I experienced every single possible reaction I could imagine as my dreams all revolved around the possible cardinal sin I committed by expressing myself. 

It wasn't a long sleep and when I awoke I went upstairs and saw my dad and he said, "About those things you wrote..." and before he could finish the sentence or question I stuttered this, "So, um, so, um. it wasn't bad?" That was it. That was all I wanted to know. I couldn't handle the processing of critique of thought or how I felt and my dad smiled greatly when he said, "It wasn't bad."

Being "not bad" became a trend over the next year. Wacky events kept popping up in my life and many events that I was blessed to survive (hostage situation in Kenya, MRSA staph infection at base of skull, and so on and so forth) and with each event I pushed myself harder to write. My first two chapters were primarily narrative but I started branching out to describe the why. I had no idea I was writing a book but when I wrote the chapter "The Fourth Wall" I thought to myself, "I may someday somewhere by some chance talk about this on a stage with an audience listening." That was the only time I allowed myself any glimmer as to what my work could possibly become.

In October of 2006 I went back to Kenya and I realized I had come full circle in my book which was becoming rather wordy so it was time to bring it to an end. I still had no idea this was going to be a book but I wrote a chapter that was a fitting end to all the previous chapters. When we got back stateside my dad reached out to some former classmates of his and it took a bit but in October of 2008 I held in my hands the words that were 25 years in the making. I was probably too young to appreciate the behemoth undertaking it was to make this happen, but I now had a book and... and what? What comes next? I had no idea. Was that website still correct? I still didn't have a job that was a career so I wasn't sure, but just around the corner was the next impossible occurrence to happen and that story will come tomorrow in part three.