Category: blog

On Branding

People who know me well know how much I love Jacques Pepin. If you do not know, he is a classically trained French chef, who began his apprenticeship in France at the age of 13, who worked in Paris and the was personal chef to three French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Eventually, he would move to the US in 1959, would work at La Pavilion in New York City, and was offered the job as chef to John F. Kennedy when he was President.

Pepin turned him down, and instead went to work designing menus for Howard Johnson’s. which was then the largest chain of sitdown restaurants in the country. Imagine turning down the opportunity to be the White House Chef to work at Applebee’s, say.

When asked in an interview why he turned it down, he said, “Be chef to a President? I had already done that. I wanted to do something new.”

I’ve always admired him for that. To not take himself so seriously. To be willing to put aside the accolades and to be so self-confident that the prestige doesn’t matter to you. To be content to have “done that” and to try something new, something that isn’t what people expect from you.

I have blogged, off and on, for 19 years, for myself and for organizations and companies I ran. Then since 2007 I have been active on Social Media, for the last 5 years or so most heavily on Facebook. And all of those forms of online expression benefit you most when you “brand” yourself. When I started blogging, I ran a small bookstore, and so I wrote mostly about that, and so I was branded as a “bookseller”.

When I moved to North Carolina to start a homeless ministry, I wrote about issues of homelessness and faith and issues like LGBT rights and racism that intersect with homelessness, and became branded as that guy. The last 3-4 years I did that work I had begun to be sought after as a trainer and speaker on those issues, and was pastoring a weekly worshipping community made up of people experiencing homelessness, and someone called me the “pastor of last resort” and I got branded as that.

But even normal people get branded these days. I have a friend that curses like a sailor in person, but she won’t use swear words on Facebook.

“People wouldn’t expect me to do that there”, she told me.

In other words, it would be off-brand.

An early influence on my understanding of ministry was a white Mississippi Baptist preacher named Will Campbell. He was one of those larger than life characters that thrive in the Deep South, a Baptist preacher who smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and cursed a blue streak. But he also did some of the most important behind the scenes work in the Civil Rights movement, and wrote a book that called out the mainline white church back in the early 1960’s.

In an article about Will in Rolling Stone back in 1990, there is this paragraph:

He does not like to be called the Reverend Campbell because “it sounds condescending and a bit imperialistic. Some people call me a counselor,” Campbell says, “but it’s such an arrogant concept—like I can do something better for you than you can do for yourself. I’m not a reverend, and I’m not a counselor. I’m just a preacher.” Even the word ministry gives him trouble. “I don’t really have a ministry,” he insists. “I have a life.”

Over the last month, I have blogged every day, without a theme. Some days I talked about my struggles with ADHD, and other days I shared a childhood memory or talked about Southern food traditions or shared something that happened to me that day or wrote something somebody found inspirational or just told a funny story.

If I were smart, I would only write 3 times a week about, say, Southern food, and have beautiful images and printable recipes and put together a collection and then a cookbook and start a podcast where I interview other white dudes (because aren’t most podcasts basically white dudes interviewing other white dudes?) about food, and before you know it, I would be a “brand”.

I watched a YouTube video the other day where some influencer was tending to his backyard chickens, and his 10-year-old daughter was with him, and he put the camera in her face and she knew exactly how to mug for the camera. She was being trained to be a brand at 10 years old.

But in a world where everyone is trying to put a label on you and put you in a box, to refuse to stay in their box is a political action. I keep a file open on my computer, and most days I jot things in it. Like a running journal. On January 1 of 2021, I wrote:

I wrote exactly 2 things on my blog last year. Just 2. Part of that is Facebook cannibalized my blog, part of it is that the newsletters took another part of it, but mostly it was that I was unsure what to write about. Branding and all. So to hell with branding. I will write about walks, and spoons, and woodworking, and gardening, and depression, and food, and sermons and all of it.  I don’t have a ministry – I have a life, as Will C said. Publish and be damned.

It took me a while to get there, but this blog is the result of that entry. This blog is intentionally unbrandable, because it is not a brand – it is my life. I am funny, and angry, and sentimental, and Southern, and opinionated about cornbread and beans and a sucker for Christmas and cynical of all of it. This blog is about all of those things, because it is the story of one guy who is trying to live a good life.

To paraphrase Will Campbell, I don’t have a brand. I have a life.

On Goals

It’s a strange time of year.

Not a bad time, just… strange. It’s a sort of liminal space, where pretty much everyone that can be is done with 2021, and yet 2022 hasn’t started yet.

I try to hold this week as free of commitments as I can, so I can do reflecting on the year that was, and set some intentions for the year to come. But one thing I don’t do is set goals – for New Year’s, or ever.

There are several reasons for this. One is that I spent some time working in a toxic sales environment, and goals were super manipulative ways to get us to produce more. And I hate being manipulated. So when I finally quit that job, I decided I could quit goals, too.

But they weren’t hard to give up, because the reality is, my brain doesn’t work that way. As someone with ADHD, I have an interest-based nervous system. If I’m not interested in the project, no amount of external goals will get me there. And if I am interested, then you can’t make me ignore it. This is both my superpower and my kryptonite – I am not externally motivated.

Goals prey on your dissatisfaction. But I’m not dissatisfied.

Don’t get me wrong – I have things I would like to do. For example, I want to go to both Europe, and Puerto Rico. But if I end up not being able to do that, I will be OK. I work hard to make sure we have enough income to maintain our quality of life, but I am old enough to know that if I made 50% more, I would not be 50% more happy than I am now. Our car is 10 years old, and it makes me just as happy as the 3-month old car I rented a few weeks ago to go on a road trip.

In 2022, I want to be a good husband, want to learn skills I do not currently have, want to have enough income to maintain our quality of life, want to meet interesting people, want to make the world better than I found it. I don’t know what any of that will look like. In fact, there are dozens of ways any of that could look that I would be happy with. But that’s what I want.

A concrete example: Right now, we are looking into renovating our kitchen in the next 18 months or so – like, a down to the studs, new appliances, new cabinets, new floor renovation. I’m interested in it, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it can happen. I read articles, watch videos, research appliances, make lists and budgets, and try to figure out ways to make more money to pay for it all. So I guess you could say that is a goal. But I would never say, “By April 15th of 2023, we will renovate our kitchen.” It will happen when it happens, which is fine, because I enjoy this process. And should our priorities change, and we decide to keep the existing kitchen, that’s fine too. And in the meantime, I’m learning things I did not know, doing work I enjoy, and keeping busy with something that interests me.

As I look back over a career of counseling people who were dissatisfied with their life, their dissatisfaction could often be traced back to their having picked a goal they wanted to accomplish, rather than asking if the work was worth doing.

In the last chapter of The Great Gatsby, Nick says that Gatsby paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. For Gatsby, success could only look one way. The big house, the public acclaim, and crucially, the girl. If any of that did not happen (and, it didn’t), then he processed that as failure. Never mind the fact that he was rich, was acclaimed, was living in a literal mansion and had rose from nothing to prominence. Because he didn’t meet his goal, he wasn’t, to his mind, a success.

So, goals. I don’t set them. Instead, I commit to pay attention, to find out what I’m interested in, and do more of that. I try new things. I give myself permission to fail. And above all, I ask myself if this work is worth doing.

Because for most of us, life isn’t victory or defeat, but the slog of the daily routine. Most of life is process. And if you hate the process, if you don’t think the work is valuable in and of itself, then no amount of success will make up for it.

Leaving Exile

A few days ago, I was talking on the phone to someone who had moved to a new city, after living a long time in the old one.

“It feels different, somehow, living here. Like, I know I intend to stay here. I want to invest here. I want to own a home here, and maybe raise a family here. [The last place] wasn’t like that at all. It was just a place to live because work had moved me there.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“Ahhh?”

“Yes. You just described the difference between being an exile and being an immigrant.”

I went on to explain that when you are in exile, you leave one place for another, but there is always the hope you will be able to return. Your heart, if you will, belongs someplace else. Immigrants, however, plan on building a life in, and committing to, the new place. There is, if nothing else, a hope that the new place will be where they will write the rest of their story.

It’s like the difference between renting a home and owning one. The owned home will always be cared for more by its occupant than the rented one because they have committed to it for the long haul. They are not just sleeping in a home but investing in it, caring for it with the hope that it will take care of them, too. The renter does the minimum because it does not make sense to invest in a place you will not be staying or profiting from long-term.

I know this because it was my story, too. When I moved to North Carolina 15 years ago, there was never any intention that I would be gone forever. I knew that one day, I would be back. And 12 years later, I was. While in Raleigh, I was in exile.

It doesn’t mean I didn’t invest in Raleigh – I did. I did good work there, helped a lot of people there, and made good friends – lifelong friends – there. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart was in Mississippi, a place that has nurtured and held my people for 200 years. In the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah, the people in exile are told by God that even though they find themselves far from their homeland, they should plant gardens, build houses, and to work for the good of the land in which they find themselves, because whatever hope they have of prospering will come from that place prospering.

That was my experience in Raleigh. I worked hard there. I built things there. They prospered. I prospered. But it wasn’t home.

You can argue that it’s semantics, but I think it’s more like a mindset, or a framing story.

Because life is different when you intend to stay.

State Your Needs

While in Raleigh last week, a friend asked me to join Marco Polo, so we could send each other video messages. And because this friend is important to me, I did.

And since then, she has sent me three messages, and I had sent her one that basically said, “I am trying this thing out”. So this morning she sent me a message that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I read all your blog posts, and I do that because you are important to me and that is how you prefer to share what’s going on. This is how I prefer to share what’s going on with me, and I hope that matters to you.”

Typing it out, that sounds harsh. But it’s true. This matters to her – to me, not so much. But it’s how she feels loved, and she matters to me, so I will do it, and find ways to make it a habit.

This is the same friend that revolutionized my life one day years ago, when I was complaining about a work relationship that wasn’t working out, and she told me that it was my fault my needs were not being met, because I wasn’t communicating them to the other person – I just sort of expected them to understand what I needed from them.

“State your needs, Hugh!”.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I often find it really hard. And that is what my friend was doing this morning – stating her needs. The honesty was refreshing. I have come to love it when people tell me how to love them, even if I sometimes struggle to do it myself.

Ever since Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages came into prominence years ago, the idea of love languages has been in the popular vernacular. The idea behind the book is that different people have different ways that they feel love and express love, and if you don’t understand that, then your partner may not feel loved, despite your trying really hard.

Chapman’s model is primarily based in romantic love, and has five “languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. So, if you show love by physical touch, and your partner feels loved by acts of service, she is pissed you don’t do anything around the house but want to cuddle all the time. Meanwhile, you are feeling like she is nagging you and distant.

I want to say up front that Chapman comes from an Evangelical Christian background, and while he is a pretty easy read, you should probably know that if you engage his work. But this isn’t really about his book, but rather the concept behind it: That different people feel and show love in different ways.

I believe this to be true, and would extend the concept beyond romantic love. Today, in response to one of my Facebook posts, a friend said that cooking for people was her love language. It’s one of mine, too. I feel loved when people read and engage things I write, or when someone really listens to me and I feel like they are paying attention to me. I show love by giving you books, cooking you a meal, and fixing your dishwasher.

I have another friend who loves to send text messages. I really don’t. But because he is important to me, we text regularly. And he is far away, and so I can’t fix his dishwasher. But even if I can’t show him love in a way that moves me right now, I can do things in a way that move him.

So I don’t know what your love language is, but I know you have one. Maybe it’s, “Share TikTok videos” or “Make me spaghetti”. Or maybe it’s “Help me do chores” or “Listen to me nonjudgmentally when I’m down”.

I know this all may seem somewhat self-evident, but as a pastor, I cannot tell you how many relationships I have seen fall apart because the people involved don’t know how to love each other. Let the people you are in relationship with know how to love you.

And state your needs.

Solstice

It was cold.

The sort of damp cold you only get in the American South – the sort that penetrates your defenses and goes down deep into your joints, and hurts.

The small crowd was a ragtag bunch – men who had no homes to go to, social workers, shelter employees, pastors and church volunteers, and some people who had lost people they loved that year. And most of us were in more than one category.

And we held candles, and we stood in silence as someone called off a list of names – names of people we all knew, and missed, and loved.

It was the annual memorial I went to every winter solstice when I lived in NC, a night where we honored the memories of those who had died while experiencing homelessness; done each year on the longest night, a night when one who was sleeping outside had to endure the most darkness, and had to wait the longest before the hope and safety that comes with the dawn.

For most of my career, winter meant death. Every year, I would bury people I knew and cared about who had died outside, alone, in the cold. But now I do different work, and while it doesn’t stop, it does slow up in the dead of winter, and there isn’t the frantic rush, the life and death struggle to get the blankets in time, the urgency to have hot coffee when you open the doors, the critical work of begging for dollars to buy hand warmers and sleeping bags to keep people alive.

So now, the days are short and the nights are cold and I sometimes feel stressed because my body knows I should be busy, my adrenaline surges because of the weather reports, my nervous system is geared up. Cold weather and short days are a legit anxiety trigger for me.

And then last year I spent the whole winter in a deep depression. And as I have come, slowly, out of it, I am trying to reboot myself, to feel things but also to look at what lies beneath he feelings, and to learn how to embrace the seasonality of it all.

This year I have sort of looked forward to winter, and have, more than any other year, tried to build a plan for it. I have a workshop now, a place I can go and do creative things in comfort, even when it is dark and damp outside. And my garden and yard got away from me this past year because of the depression, and so I look forward to the weeds dying and giving me a fresh start in a few months. And having a strong routine in place and a gym membership, where I can move my body independent of the weather has been crucial, too.

But mostly, I’m trying to live into this time of darkness being not a symbol of death but a symbol of dormancy, a time to rest and build up our inner resources, to embrace and own the hard work of survival we did this year, and to dream of the longer, brighter days to come.

Happy solstice, friends. It only gets brighter from here.

Habits Are Things You Get for Free

Yesterday, my friend Don told me that he admired my output since I began daily blogging. What he didn’t know is that if I don’t do it daily, it pretty much won’t happen at all. I write every day, because if I only write when I get in the mood, I will write never. In the first 9 months of 2021, I wrote 9 blog posts. Since October 1st, I’ve written 72, and since November 1st, I’ve written one every day.

Today I have written more than 2500 words, between two very rough draft blog posts, a newsletter, and this blog post. I have written about 25,000 words in the last 30 days, which is about half the number of words in The Great Gatsby, by writing every day. That is 25,000 more words that I would have written had I written when I felt like writing.

I publish newsletters on Monday and Friday, every week. As a result, I have sent hundreds of newsletters to my lists in the last 5 years. When I had a newsletter that I sent when I had something to say, I sent perhaps 3 in two years.

I was talking to a friend this morning as I was on the way to the gym to swim.

“I really admire your regularity. It’s impressive,” she said.

I told her that regularity was sort of my super power. Regularity can make you unstoppable. My ADHD brain thrives on structure, but has a really difficult time creating structure. Like many ADHD folks though, I thrive in structured environments, because it drastically reduces my choices, and choices are paralyzing for me.

That is why, for example, I wear the same clothes day after day. I don’t wear shirts with letters or graphics. I tend to wear earth tones, and literally I grab whatever shirt is on top of the pile.  When I wore suits for a living I did the same thing, only with blue and white shirts, red ties, and blue suits. I don’t have to worry about what I will wear, or if it matches or is appropriate. I have casual clothes and work clothes and dress clothes and there are rules for all of them, and I only own clothes that follow those rules. As a result, I bet I spend less than two hours a year thinking about clothes.

Some people exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would exercise Monday, Wednesday, and the forget and it would be Saturday and I would get mad and then forget Monday and say to hell with it.

Doing it every day means you don’t have to remember. How much time do you spend thinking about brushing your teeth? None, because it’s a habit. And as the writer and activist Corey Doctorow said, “Habits are things you get for free”.

I have a habit of exercising, whether that is a walk or a swim, every day. A habit of working in the shop after supper. A habit of reading before bed. A habit of writing. All things I get for free.

In fact, it’s the parts of my life I haven’t figured out how to create structure around that give me fits.

But I’m trying.

The Lemonade Stand

There is a neighborhood not far from me that is the “old, nice” neighborhood. For example, Eudora Welty once lived there. They film movies there sometimes. Think large houses, large lots, lots of trees.

I look for their curb alerts on the local listserve because these people throw away better stuff than I can afford to buy. For instance, not long ago, I got a Webber gas grill for free off someone’s curb in this neighborhood because it needed a $6 part.

A while back, I knew I would be going through this neighborhood, so I checked to see if anyone had recently put anything out, and fortune had shined upon me: Someone had posted a picture of some concrete yard art – cherubs, mostly – that would have worked perfectly in the crazy cottage garden I am building. So I set my course on Google maps and headed that way.

When I pulled up, I saw the cherubs sitting on the curb as promised, and across the street were two small children with an honest to God lemonade stand, complete with a homemade sign listing their hours of operation (1PM to 5:30PM) and everything.

I have a rule: I support motivated kids. Kids who cut grass. Kids who want to rake your leaves. Kids who sell things that benefit them (I do hate school fundraisers though). A kid who starts a business or has an interest in a hobby? I am a soft touch for all of that.

So, walking by the yard art on the curb, I walk over to the lemonade stand. The girl (age 6, I would learn) was already pouring me a cup.

We start talking. The little boy (age 4, but he turns 5 next June and so we talked about both having June birthdays) asked me how old I was. I told him 49, and he looked me up and down and then said, “Wooooow”. I resisted asking if he was concerned or impressed, as I feared I did not want to know the answer.

He had lots of questions. Where did I work? Did I have any little boys? Did I like my lemonade? I finished my cup while he was asking the questions, so his sister poured me another, and as she handed it to me reminded me that would be another 50 cents. Apparently, there are no free refills on this block.

I told them I had to leave, and the girl told me I should buy another to take home to my wife. I had a long day ahead of me before I would get home, though, so I bought another lemonade but asked them if I could come back and get it later. They readily agreed to this plan.

As we are talking and these kids are plotting how to ensure I am leaving them both broke and diabetic, a large, nice car pulls up and stops in the middle of the road. The little boy says, “Yay! Another customer!”, but it was not to be. This lady with improbably large hair got out of her car, walked over to the yard art, and put it all in her trunk while I am just standing there, holding my second lemonade and reconsidering my life choices.

“I guess she doesn’t like lemonade”, the girl said, as the land yacht pulled away with my yard art in its trunk.

I guess not.

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny!  I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.

The day I did not die

Content Warning: Descriptive narrative of a suicide attempt. Discussion about suicide and mental illness and depression.

I was 16 years old, and my parents were not home. I don’t know how to describe it – it was just a wave that came over me, and when it did, I was ready.

I was a smarter than average kid who looked differently than his classmates – I was scrawny, pimply, socially awkward and most of all, afraid. I was always afraid. These days you would say I was bullied. In those days, I would have said I was in hell. But that wasn’t the reason it came over me. But had I been successful, it would have been the reason ascribed to my actions.

I had read countless accounts of suicide – no mean feat in that pre-internet age. I had read all the dictionary entries, all the encyclopedia accounts. Then I researched famous suicides – Socrates, Hemingway, anyone at all who had made their way into the Britannica. I had a morbid fascination with death, and with suicide.

So when the dark wave came, I was ready.

I had received a shotgun for Christmas when I was 14. There were strict rules around its use, but it was unlocked. I sat on my bed and loaded it with buckshot. I took off my shoes, because I had figured out I could pull the trigger with my toe – a “trick” I had learned in a book I read about famous deaths. I put the barrel in my mouth – right now I can taste the bitter, acrid taste of the oil and the metal on my tongue – and placed my toe on the trigger.

And I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 30 seconds or so.

And then I took the barrel out of my mouth, unloaded the gun and put it away. I don’t know why. The darkness receded, just like it came. I was horrified to find myself there. And it would be more than 10 years before I would tell anyone that it had happened.

I was on no list of people who would have been watched. I had a neurologist, but no therapist. No guidance counselor ever approached me. No teacher was concerned about me. I should NOT have had a shotgun, but in my world, people my age often did, and so nobody could have known. I was active in youth group, had been baptized, and would have strongly identified as Christian.

It wasn’t the last time I thought about self-harm, however. Once since then since then, I was as close as that day, and have been contemplative multiple times, although not for several years now. The darkness just comes on sometimes, and it seems an incredibly rational solution to end the pain. It is always late at night (more accurately early morning). I hate waking up at 3 or 4am – not because I am afraid I won’t go back to sleep, but because I am afraid of where my brain will take me if I stay awake.

Don’t mishear me – I have a good support structure in place. I have tools and strategies should things get scary, and I learned to recognize triggers, and avoid them. I have people who know my history, who love me, who I feel safe calling should I need them. There are people Renee knows to call if I scare her with my moods. Mentally, I am in pretty good shape these days. Or as good as one can expect given everything that has happened the last two years.

When all is said and done, most suicide is a symptom of mental illness.  And mental illness is just illness, like pneumonia is illness, or cancer is illness.

I’m not saying nobody ever rationally decides to end their own life. The enslaved Africans who threw themselves into the waters of the Atlantic rather than be enslaved made a rational choice. Those who fell from the burning building rather than burn – I get that. People facing months and months of excruciating pain before their inevitable deaths – totally understandable. But we are not talking about those people right now.

People who appear happy can be mentally ill, and people who are bullied can be mentally ill, and people who have families that love them can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

Likewise, people who love Jesus can be mentally ill. People who go to church can be mentally ill. People who are clergy can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

And when people die of illness, it’s horrible, but we don’t blame them for it. We wish it could have been prevented, and we seek to prevent other people from dying from it.

So, this is why we don’t have shotguns in my house – ever. And why every chance I get, I tell people that they need to take care of themselves, and be honest with the people who love them, and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Because the world is a much better place with you in it.

If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. The National Suicide Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. And if you don’t want to call them, please call someone. 

The world is listening.

When I read old novels from the turn of the last century, it’s a kick to see that they didn’t really have protocols in place on how to answer the phone yet.

Some of them answered with the name of the family that lived there: “Smith Residence”.

Some answered with their phone number: “4286”.

Some said, “What?”

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, favored “Ahoy” as his preferred answer.

When I was little, almost 50 years ago, our small town phone book had instructions in the front of the book for how to use the telephone, and it recommended you answer the phone with “Hello”. Which, I recently learned, was the protocol recommended by Thomas Alva Edison.

Anyway. My point is, it takes time to learn how to best use a new technology. And so when I get frustrated with the ways some people use Social Media, I try to remind myself that the medium didn’t really go mainstream until after the smartphone went mainstream – about 12 years ago. It’s a very young medium, and many people still don’t have intuitive ways on how to act there. I mean, my mom signs her text messages, for crying out loud.

Historically, most of us only had one on one relationships. I would talk to Bill, and then I would talk to Mary. I may, at a party or something, talk to both Bill and Mary. But mostly we talked one on one. We didn’t have many other options.

Some people had public relationships. Pastors come to mind, as well as teachers and of course celebrities – people who were watched, who had a platform and the capability of being heard by many people at once, and who were known by many more people than they knew.

But now many of us have these public relationships. And we are like the nouveau riche child stars who don’t know how to handle the sudden attention and so we act out and end up with the equivalent of a heroin addiction and a neck tattoo.

Because of the algorithms, despite the fact that I have more than 2400 Facebook friends and more than 1400 additional people follow me there, I really only interact with about 150 of them regularly. And so it’s easy to think that when I post something there, I only imagine I am only talking to those 150 people. But I’m not.

Instead, I have found it useful to imagine I am having a conversation on a live radio show, and I am broadcasting for all the world to hear. If you were having a conversation on a live radio talk show, you would comport yourself differently.

In any event, we are all still figuring this out, this mixture of public and private, and we all have different boundaries and lines. But it’s important to think about these things because right now, there is no “standard”, and the medium thus requires a level of intentionality that most of us are unused to.

Here is a concrete example that may be helpful:

It is not uncommon when someone dies for their friends or family to post it on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to let people who you are not in regular contact with know what has happened.

Sometimes it is simple, like, “My aunt Mary died last night, the funeral is Friday.” And other times someone writes a formal obituary, such as you might have put in the paper in the past.

But the key is, and a good general rule on social media is, people get to decide how much they share. So when somebody posts that someone has died, please don’t ask how they died. If it’s important to the conversation, they will tell you. And if it isn’t, then that isn’t information they want to share.

When Dad died last year at the height of the pandemic and I saw lots of people acting like this virus was not serious, it was important to me that you know he died from COVID. That he was a First Responder and caught this virus while caring for people who were dying from this virus was important to me. So I made sure you knew, in everything I wrote, that he died from COVID.

But I, the author, get to decide.

If we were on a live radio show, and I told you my 17-year-old daughter died*, would you say, “How did it happen?”. I hope not. But some people have no problem asking that question on Facebook, while not seeing it’s just rude and inappropriate. Do you really want me to say, on a live radio program, “She killed herself, Karen”?

No, Karen imagines it is just us, one on one, chatting away in the living room, eating tea cakes and coffee. But it isn’t. We are on the air. And the whole world is listening.

*For the record, I do not have a 17 year old daughter.