Category: Reflecting

A Closet Full of Grief

In the Looney Tunes cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, there was a recurring gag where there was too much stuff in the closet. Someone would open the closet and more things than should fit in a closet that size would fall out, burying the person who opened it.

Grief is like that, sometimes.

It’s overwhelming in the beginning. You give some of it away and learn to live with some of it and the rest you don’t actually deal with right now, but instead, in order to function, you put it in the closet and it won’t really fit so you stuff and punch and contort and finally, you get the door closed so you can keep going with your life because we live in a capitalist society and your mortgage doesn’t go away just because people you love died.

So it’s all stuffed in that closet. And because you stuffed it in there – I mean, it may have taken a few weeks or even months to get it in there, but it was in there, and you had to lean against the door to get it shut – but because it’s stuffed in there, it was hell to get it all to fit. But you did.

And life goes on and most days everything is fine and sometimes you are whistful and sometimes you miss them and sometimes you walk by the closet and see the door and remember what’s in there, but you know it’s going to be a mess if you open that door, so you keep on moving.

But the problem is that we don’t live in a vacuum. Other people are moving around in our life as well, and one day, with no ill intent at all, somebody or something is gonna open that door and it will all fall out, but instead of burying them, it buries you. And when that happens, you have no choice but to sit in the midst of it and pick it all up again, handling each piece, looking at it this way and that, as you put it all back in the closet.

This is why this afternoon I was driving down the Interstate, tears streaming down my face. An old song came on the radio about a child’s love for his father and, without warning, ripped that door off its hinges.

The Accent

The High School from where I graduated – one of 75 or so people so honored in 1990 – was literally in the middle of a cow pasture. Like, literally. The land for the school – 10 acres or so – was purchased from the farmer at some point in the distant past, and they built a school there. At lunch, you would see cows hanging their heads over the barbed wire fence, hoping you would give them your apple. Cows love apples, and since these were Red Delicious apples, we did not. We figured somebody ought to eat them.

In any event, this isn’t a story about the apples. Rather, I tell you about where my school was located to let you know that I am the educational product of rural, southern America. And the South is not monolithic. North Carolina is the South, and Central Mississippi is the South, and neither of them is like the other, and neither of them is like Virginia or Central Georgia.

But all of those places have produced educated people. People with an accent like the one I have.

Well, not exactly like the one I have. The Central Mississippi accent that I hear all the time here is not quite like the Northern Mississippi accent I heard in the hills growing up, and neither of them sounds quite like a Charleston, SC accent, and nobody sounds like New Orleans.

There was a teacher in my high school who prided himself on his academic rigor. For a while, he taught our AP English class, and when that happened, Holy Hell but he declared himself the arbiter of the English language – not only grammar, which could be argued was in his bucket, but also diction.

He routinely made fun of our accents. Humiliation was his primary pedagogical technique. There were students who liked him – but they were generally the popular students. He seized on social insecurities and would call you out publicly for an error with glee. He routinely called me Hugh Hollowhead in class because I once froze when he asked me a question because I had been daydreaming. This gave the bullies in my world a new, previously unthought-of nickname to call me.

But I can forgive him that. What I haven’t managed to forgive him for was making me ashamed of my accent. He had me stand up and say “Nice White Rice” to the class, and then he mocked my pronunciation.

”They aren’t all the same sound, Hollowhead!”

Everybody laughed. Well, everybody but me.

I could have killed him right there. There was not an ounce of Christian compassion in my body for him at that moment. None.

But he was an advisor for the Beta Club. Taught the AP English class. Had a Master’s Degree. And all I had was the ghosts of working-class people who had lived in one place for 170 years. Everybody I loved talked just like I did. The people who taught me about Jesus, who baptized me, who raised me, who taught me to fish and how to make a cane whistle and how to drive a tractor all talked just like I did.

And for the record, I would later learn that, when William Faulkner gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, he talked like I did, too. If you listen to the recording, the rhythms of North Mississippi pervade that speech.

But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that this community that had always been safe for me now felt less so.

He wasn’t the last person to make fun of my accent. In college, it would happen. Eventually, I got something of a complex about it and began reading Time magazine into a tape recorder, over and over, trying to smooth out my diction. As Don Williams sang in Good Old Boys Like Me:

But I was smarter than most and I could choose

Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news

In the business world, this was rewarded. When I began preaching, this also was rewarded. People do make judgments about us, based on the diction we use.

Imagine you are telling a joke, where one of the characters is stupid. What does he sound like?

That’s right. You made him sound Southern.

They won. I no longer have my accent. It’s gone. I mean, I have an accent, but it’s not the one I grew up with. It’s not mine. It’s studied, and while there is some Mississippi Hills in there, and a mixture of formal and informal usage, there is also some Piedmont North Carolina and some Tidewater Virginia and a little bit of whatever the people on the news sounded like when I was learning how to talk the way they wanted me to.

When I’m very tired, or if I’ve been drinking, or talking to someone from home, it comes back – but I don’t know how to make it happen. It’s just gone, another casualty of the insistence on our being homogenized and any difference stamped out. In the end, I guess we will be assimilated. But the first thing they took from me was my accent.

The Flag

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I can’t write about Oxford, or even Mississippi, without talking about the flag. You know. That one.

Back in the winter, I found myself in the mountains of North Carolina, and near Morganton, on the edge of Interstate 40, I saw a giant 20×30 Confederate battle flag flapping furiously in the wind. As one who grew up in the Southland, a straight cisgender child of the white working poor, that flag has held many images and emotions for me over the years.

My earliest memories are of it being in the state of Mississippi flag – the flag that hung in my school classroom, the flag that hung at the city hall that also housed the library in my small town, the flag that meant home.

It was the large emblem on top of The General Lee, the car that was the real star in the Dukes of Hazard, my favorite show as a child. As a poor white child with an accent, seeing other poor white people with accents who routinely outsmarted the Powers that tried to hold us down was life-giving to me. I did not notice how white their world was on that show, and how little that lined up with my life in a county that was mostly Black.

That flag was most often used as a visible placeholder for The South – almost like it was our logo – and we were proud of it, the way Red Sox fans are proud of that pair of socks on their merch.

I was taught both implicitly and explicitly that the US had two teams, and our team was Southern, and this was our logo, our symbol. I think that is what the “Heritage, Not Hate” people are getting at. It was an easy visual placeholder for all the feelings that go into being Southern – or at least a certain kind of Southern, from a certain race, from a certain socio-economic class.

I grew up 50 miles from the University of Mississippi, where most of the educated people in my life had matriculated. They all loved Ole Miss football, and had the battle flag – the Rebel flag, we called it – on all their flag poles, their team merch, their ball caps, and their license plates because the battle flag WAS the team logo, their mascot at the time was a literal Confederate Colonel and they were (and are) the Ole Miss Rebels.

Pride of team and pride of region got conflated for me and people like me. Most of the respectable people – our bankers, ministers, lawyers – all were Ole Miss people, and they all waved the battle flag, hung it outside their offices, put it on the business cards, even. It was hard to not see it as a sign of respectability and something to aspire to be a part of.

As a Marine, I had a poster of the battle flag taped inside my wall locker in the barracks, a reminder of home when I was far away from home, in a land where people did not sound like me, or think like me, or eat like me. The feelings I had anchored to that visual cue were as real as the memories that waft back when I smell catfish frying.

The people who look like me and had my childhood – I get where they come from with their “Heritage Not Hate” comments. People like me – white children of the working class, born into families with few advantages, who knew the struggles of a Dollar General Christmas and the humiliations of government commodity cheese – had nothing to be proud of. But we were of this region, this marvelous place, where the flowers bloom year-round and the fish practically jump in your boat and the biscuits rise with hope every morning and the sweet tea is strong enough your back teeth hurt.

If our ancestors had failed to get rich here they had, against desperate odds, survived and left their mark on the future. And this logo, this flag, was our reminder of that fact. We existed. We mattered. We were here, by God, and you would notice us.

As a student, I would get engrossed in the history of the Civil War. I would walk the sacred ground at Shiloh, where nearly 4,000 people died in less than 48 hours. I would visit the quarters of enslaved people in old plantations. I would read slave narratives and learn of the horrors of slavery. I had always been taught that war was over the rights of states to determine their destinies, but I would learn that wars tended to be fought over money when all is said and done and that this one was no different. Those 4000 folks died at Shiloh because of what that flag represented – the right of white people to own, breed, and sell Black people.

And I do believe that for many of us, people like me, race played little conscious part in our displaying of that flag. In the same way that huge numbers of fans of the Atlanta Braves proudly wore a mascot that mocked and appropriated Native cultures with no conscious thought of native cultures, we were blissfully ignorant of the impact our actions carried. We knew the past but were caught up in the present.

As a child in Mississippi, I was surrounded by Black bodies, but I was an adult before I began to develop true relationships of mutuality and love with people who had Black skin and was trusted with their stories. I learned they had very different images attached to the memory of the battle flag – that they saw it the way a Jew viewed a swastika, say, and not the symbol of regional pride it was for someone like me.

That flag belongs in a history book – the same way we put other failed ideas and images in the history books so we remember to not do them again. The same way people tour memorials at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, to remind us of the horrors we are capable of.

I felt all of that and much more that morning as I drove west on Interstate 40. I thought how sad it was that a person could erect a symbol they knew would distress their neighbors. I thought about how shallow their lives must be that the only outward symbol of the regional pride they felt was one they knew would cause at best anger and at worst fear.

And, I must say, I felt tremendous pride that I got to play a small part in getting that emblem removed from Mississippi’s state flag through the organizing work I do in faith communities here. If I live to be a thousand, the day they took it down from the Capitol here in Jackson for the last time will always be one of my proudest days.

Whatever complicated stories exist in the backstory of people like me, these days the battle flag symbolizes not a region or a sports team but white supremacy and domestic terrorism. It is a symbol of terror, and it belongs in a museum, where it can be explained in its context, alongside other failed ideas we have tried and found wanting.

Oxford

I grew up 50 miles away from Oxford, MS – the home of William Faulkner and The University of MS, although not in that order. The university was there first. Oxford is the county seat of Lafayette County – named for the French military hero and American general Marquis de Lafayette. It is pronounced “La-FAY-et”.

Next door in Louisiana, they have a parish (what they call counties) called Lafayette Parish, named after the French military hero and American general Marquis de Lafayette. It is pronounced the way the Frech would – “La-fah-yet.” We ignore this contradiction, as there is no telling what someone from Louisiana is likely to do.

We lived north of Oxford, so we ended up in Holly Springs or even Memphis when we wanted to go to the doctor or a department store, but people south of us would have ended up in Oxford for those things. It always seemed like a magical place to me – a picturesque town square and a huge university. 17-year-old me would go there on my days off and drive around the campus, fascinated by co-eds and the campus library, in roughly equal amounts. In those days, I believed college was something only rich people would do – especially a college like Ole Miss.

Many of the educated men in my life had attended college here. Most of the women, too, but they were quieter about it. The men had the Confederate battle flags that were de rigueur in those days hung from their businesses, especially during football season, and on their bumpers always.

When I joined the Marines, my recruiter was based here. I would drive here many Saturdays during my senior year as a term of my delayed enlistment contract.

Neilson’s department store is on the Square, and was in those days, too. In fact, founded in 1839, it predates the university by 5 years. But it is crisp and clean inside, and wealthy men I knew shopped there. To be clear, I didn’t know any men who were truly what I would now consider wealthy. But the men in question were business owners, insurance agents, and attorneys. Men who wore ties to work, and who got their weekends off. Whose families bought new cars, and lived in two-story homes made of brick. You know – wealthy.

I always felt special when I walked in the door of Neilsons, which has been selling goods to dirt farmers for so long that they don’t automatically judge you for the way you are dressed the way the stores in Memphis did.

When Heather and I were dating while in the Marines, we took a day trip to Oxford, walked around The University of Mississippi, and talked about how cool it would be to live there when we got out of the Marines. For 28 years now, I can’t be in Oxford without thinking about walking across the grounds of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with her on that crisp fall day. She was filled with derision at the monument to the Confederate dead that was on the town square, on the lawn of the courthouse. As an aside, that monument finally came down in 2020, two years after her death. It took a while, but we got there.

And then there is Square Books – a legendary indie bookstore that will always be my platonic ideal of what a bookstore should be, with multiple levels, a lovely gallery overlooking the square, and books everywhere. The loving curation there is a sign of their respect for the reader, and the owners still, 40 years later, work the counter and will ring up your sale. I went there the first time with Heather in 1991, and have returned countless times with people I have loved – my sharing it with people is one of the ways I show I love them.

So this past weekend, when I knew I was going home for Easter, we made it a point to go up a day early and spend the afternoon in Oxford. I walked the square, peered in the door of Neilson’s, and drank a cafe au lait on the gallery at Square Books, looking over the rain-soaked square before spending money on yet more books.

It was a quick trip, so I didn’t get a chance to walk the grounds at Rowan Oak, to talk to Mr. Faulkner’s ghost, and to see his muscadine arbor which should be just leafing out about now, but I’m not worried. It’s not going anywhere. And even should it all fall down, should it burn to the ground and disappear, as long as I live there will be a small piece of my heart labeled Oxford.

The Man in Gray

When I was five, we built a new house, just 20 yards in front of the house in which my father was raised. Eventually, it would get torn down – some family friends tore it down in exchange for the wood, but for a few months, we lived sort of in both of them, as we slowly moved things from one house to the other.

I had watched them build it – we basically paid someone to dry it in, and then we completed the inside ourselves. I say we, like I played a part, but believe that 5-year-old me was always in the middle of whatever was going on. And Mom and I would walk around the house, being built, and she would tell me that this was the kitchen and that was the bathroom. And this one? This is your room.

And when we get moved in, we will paint it whatever color you want.

I told her I wanted it painted red. You see, red was my favorite color. But we ended up compromising. Instead of the whole room, my bed frame was painted red, Dad painted the door to my room red, and I had red pajamas and red sheets. If it stood still long enough, it ended up red.

But somewhere along the way, I shifted, and suddenly, my favorite color was now blue.

Blue is a good color – non-controversial and can be professional or fun, can be the color of swim trunks or a tuxedo, and, perhaps most importantly, somewhere around the age of 14 or so, a girl told me that blue accentuates my eyes. I had no idea what that meant, exactly, but she seemed to think it was a positive thing.

I wore blue almost exclusively through my twenties. Blue suits. Blue shirts. Blue accents in my ties and show hankies. I owned three different blue cars.

But increasingly, blue didn’t make sense. It felt way too festive, too bright, too colorful. The best way I can think of to describe it is that when I wore blue, my insides didn’t match my outsides. And in my mid 30’s, as I began to become more and more aware of the pain in the world, I started to wear more muted tones.

And one day, I woke up and realized that I was now the sort of person who not only didn’t wear bright colors – I was known as someone who wore gray.

This week I was at the courthouse, wearing a black polo shirt and khakis. A colleague said I looked dressed up, as he rarely ever saw me not wearing a gray t-shirt. I just checked, and I actually own 9 gray t-shirts, and three different shades of gray are represented in the drawer.

The people who bought our house in North Carolina are bright color people. When they walked through, they remarked that they had never lived in a gray house before. I informed them it was a bright gray, though. They laughed nervously.

It’s not that I don’t like bright colors – I do. They just don’t feel right when I’m wearing them. They are no longer me. In a world that’s gone crazy, it feels almost crass to wear bright colors. Like I’m not paying attention to the despair and pain around me. Like having Harlequin perform your funeral – it feels disrespectful, somehow.

Johnny Cash famously sang that he wore black because:

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything’s okay

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

‘Til things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

I still own some blue shirts – if I preach at your funeral or wedding, I will probably wear one, because it’s more muted than white, and there aren’t a lot of other good options. But it’s always brighter than I feel.

Until things are better, I guess I’ll be the man in gray.

Closed For Maintenance

Like I do most days, today I rode my bike to the gym. I don’t ride for exercise – I ride to get places. But the four miles of riding round trip do me no harm and help both the planet and our budget as gas continues to hover around $4 a gallon here.

It was a lovely day – the sort of beautiful spring day one gets in Central Mississippi that makes one temporarily forget the swamp-like August that will come. Early April is a lovely time here – the daffodils are still in bloom in places, the azaleas are a riotous mass of color and the wisteria runs along the fence rows, and red buckeyes and white dogwoods and spiderwort punctuate every thicket.

Today was a yoga day, and leaving after the 45-minute class, I heard a classmate – a woman in her early 70’s – say that she felt “noodley” and I thought that sounded about right: Supple, loose, and flexible. The tension had left my body and I felt wrung out like I had left all my frustrations on the mat.

And frustrations have been frequent of late. I’ve had tech problems galore over on the newsletter side of my writing business, costing me both weeks of time and hundreds of dollars, only to have it all dissolve in a vat of sunk costs that forced me to reconfigure and end up not far from where I started.

And after months and months of relative solitude, I have been thrust into the public eye again, with a steady stream of public meetings and actions and presentations. I feel like The Bride in that scene in Kill Bill when she wakes up after being in a coma and has lost the use of her legs to atrophy. My people muscles have atrophied, and while still there, they are not what they once were, and I leave most meetings exhausted.

And in multiple areas of my life, I am engaged in projects that are taking much longer than I anticipated, that are costing more than budgeted for, and that involve parts of my brain that are not best suited for that work.

My work has a lot of moving pieces, and pieces that should be moving and are not, and as I rode my bike to the gym this morning, my back was a mass of knots. I think I left them on the mat as well.

And as I rode home, passing under the fragrant wisteria and waving to my neighbor getting her mail and coasting down the hill like I am nine and carefree again and not 49 and full of responsibilities, I uttered a small prayer of thanks for the rejuvenation I can find in movement and in nature, for the clear skies and the beautiful flowers, and even the schedule flexibility that allows me to enjoy it all.

I’m taking a few days off from both social media and the blog. I’ll be back on both on Tuesday the 12th (both newsletters will publish as planned).

I need a little time away for both sanity and perspective. I’ve been publishing each weekday for more than five months now, and while I derive a lot of pleasure and benefit from the daily practice of releasing more than 700 words into the wild each day and have a very loyal readership, the reality is that readership isn’t really growing. It seems I like to write the sort of things people like but do not share, and rarely tell their friends about. Is this the best use of my time? Would I be better served to write one story a week, but make it amazing? Do I have the patience for that? Are there other options?

I just don’t know. But right now I’m too busy publishing every day to think about it. As a buddy once said, when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget your job was to drain the swamp.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back. But I don’t have to know – at least, not right now. I just know that I will be back, in some way, next Tuesday, and I hope you will be here when I come back. I appreciate you, and your readership, and I hope you have an amazing weekend.

The Arrival

My mother’s father lived in Cooke County Texas, 50 miles or so from Dallas. He had retired there after he left the Navy, and bought some land just up the road from his own parents. He lived in a doublewide trailer, with a lean-to addition tacked on the back that was a combination TV room and guest room, as that was where the foldout couch lived, and so thus where I lived when I stayed with them.

There were times the dual roles of this addition – TV room and guest room – were at odds with each other. God help you if you were tired and wanted to go to bed while Walker, Texas Ranger was on. You might as well just settle in because you were going to be there a while.

The annual visit there was our default vacation plan – every summer of my childhood we would load up whatever car we were driving that year with sandwiches and thermoses of coffee and bags of snacks and we would hit the road to visit PaPaw and Granny Pat. Dad would work all day the day we would leave, and then come home and pack and load up the car. They planned our departure to be somewhere around 8 PM, and in those days of 55 MPH speed limits, we would roll into PaPaw’s around 6 AM.

Dad liked to drive at night when there were three kids in the car because we would rapidly fall asleep and he and mom would take turns driving in relative silence, with the windows down and the cool night and the radio fading in and out of range as you drove west into the night. 

I loved those trips. You would sit in the backseat of the station wagon – the passenger side was my favorite because that let me watch the scenery better – from where you could see the landscape change from urban lights to Delta fields, clothed in utter darkness pierced only by lights twinkling in the distance, signifying a lone farmer’s home on the far edge of the rice field. You cross the Mississippi River in Memphis, and since the AC never worked on our cars, the windows were down and the bridge framework combined with the doppler effect to make its own sort of music.

On either side of the bridge, the river rolled under you but from where you sat, it was just darkness – endless darkness on either side. Around Little Rock I would fall asleep, my resolution to stay awake the whole trip forgotten and my eyes would surrender. I would wake up when we stopped at the truck stop in Texarkana, where Dad would refill his thermos and I would go to the bathroom. That was the first place I ever saw condom machines in the bathroom, and that led 9-year-old me to look up the words French Tickler in the dictionary as a result.

But after Texarkana, I was out again and would stay out until usually not far from their house. We would be on a lonely road, with horse farms on either side of the road, and scrub oaks punctuating the fields to give the livestock shade to rest under on the hot days. And it was that liminal time, neither dark nor dawn, where the brightness can be perceived but it’s not yet sunrise, giving everything a honeyed glow.

And we would pull into the driveway and all of us would pile out and Dad would stretch like a cat and Mom would make sure the kids were all up and PaPaw would come out onto the patio by the driveway and ask how our trip was and Dad would remark how many hours and minutes it took as if we were in a race, and PaPaw would call Mom “Tadpole” and give her a hug and we kids would be swamped with hugs and the attention of his Border Collies and we would take our bags inside.

Granny Pat was already up as well, and they had coffee going, and she would make breakfast – always sausage patties and scrambled eggs and whop-um biscuits – and we would eat our fill, and then Dad would lay down for a nap.

The rest of the trip would vary, but the arrival was always special. They must have set the alarm for enough time to prepare for our showing up, in those days before ubiquitous cell phones, back when you just told someone when you would show up and that was it.

And the knowledge that people love you and have missed you and have prepared for your arrival and are waiting for you to show up? There is no feeling like that in the world. 

All the Confidence in the World

It was sometime in the first week of August of 1990, and I was a guest of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina for what they euphemistically called “Recruit Training”, and what the rest of the world called Boot Camp.

It was a hot and muggy day and the combination of the physical exertion and the extreme heat and the overwhelming humidity left your uniform soaking wet all the time. Then you would get chaffing on your inner thighs from the wet uniform always rubbing, and if you were not careful, you could end up with an, um, inner-thigh infection. I went through baby powder like it was water in the desert.

After a long day of classes and physical activities and then marching hither and yon and the evening meal, we came back to the barracks and took a super-fast shower, and then enjoyed our daily hour of “free time”. The name “free time” might conjure up images of playing poker and telling jokes, but alas, we were not the Air Force. Instead, we were to speak in low tones, write letters home, study our sacred texts, or polish our boots. And during the midst of all of this, we got mail call.

Mail call was the best. Dad had been in the service, and he knew. So my parents took it as their mission to write to me every day and to get as many people as they could to write to me. Dad used his new (remember, this is 1990) PC to make labels with my address that he blanketed our hometown with. I got a lot of kidding because I always had so many letters at mail call, but that was just jealousy.

It turns out there’s a little bit of jealousy in the best of us.

Anyway, I know it was 1990 because that is when I was at Boot Camp. And I know it was the first week of August because that was the week before we went to the rifle range, and I remember this happened right before we went. And I remember it was hot and muggy because it was always hot and muggy.

Always.

And so, this particular day, I am sitting on my footlocker at the end of my bed, in my underwear and t-shirt, polishing my boots when my name is called out and I run “with a sense of purpose” in my flip flops to the front of the squad bay and get my four letters. One of them was from Dad.

Mom would always handwrite her letters, but Dad’s were always written on his dot matrix printer. And on that night, I read the words he had never said out loud:

“I have all the confidence in the world in you. I know you can handle it. Sometimes I have not told you how proud of you I am of you. I really am. I know that sounds mushy, especially in a letter, but take it any way you want.”

I quietly got up and walked to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall and cried and cried. Because in 18 years I had never been the sort of person anyone had confidence in, and he had never told me he was proud of me.

I mean, I knew he was. He told other people he was proud of me, and they would tell me how proud of me he was. But he never told me. In later years, that changed. He told adult me any number of times, and not in a letter, but face to face.

But that was the first time. The first week of August 1990, when I was 18 years old, far from home and sent to learn how to kill people in the Marine Corps Approved Manner.

I don’t take praise well, and sometimes I wonder if it’s because it was so rare growing up. I was always the kid who had amazing grades except for the C or D in math class or the kid who read a lot but had terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Any accomplishment I had came with a caveat – always.

And so last night when my friend Amy complimented me on my writing in front of other people, my first instinct was to minimize it. To downplay it. All my old fears about imposter syndrome kick in, and I feel like any praise I am getting will inevitably come with a caveat, with an asterisk beside it, will somehow be less than genuine, or at least not the whole story.

I don’t hold it against my Dad that he didn’t know to tell me he was proud of me. He had been left fatherless in a man’s world at 7 years old, and when I was born he was but 20 himself, and children raising children is never a good recipe. They did the best they could with what they had, and again, to his credit, he worked hard to make up for it late in life.

When he knew better, he did better.

But there are some cycles it is up to us to break, so I try hard to accept praise when it’s handed out to me, hard as it is for me to believe.

But more than that, I hand out praise like it’s cotton candy at the carnival. Yes, I want to see your poems and artwork. Yes, I want to hear your dreams. Yes, I want to know what you’re working on. Yes, I want to know what your big scary plans are, how you want to change the world, or at least how you want to change your world. Even if I barely know you, I want to be your biggest fan. I see you doing hard things, and I’m damned proud of you for making it this far.

I have all the confidence in the world in you.

The Happiness of Lower Standards

A gift that ADHD brings is that, if it interests you (and granted, that is a huge precondition), you can bring near super-human powers of research to the table. And if it interests you, you can fall deep into a hole where you want to know everything about a subject.

Everything.

I currently own at least 200 books on gardening and horticulture. More than 150 on woodcraft. Perhaps 800 theology texts. Yes, I have read all of them. Many of them multiple times. Because it’s hard for me to explain to you how much more I want to know when I’m really interested in something.

It doesn’t always look like books – that’s just my particular poison. I know kids who will watch literally every TikTok on a given subject. A niece went through a Japanese phase and watched Japanese movies, ate sushi, learned to eat with chopsticks, and even ordered Japanese socks and pencils off eBay. I will say that socks take up much less space than books do.

But my point is that there is the desire – an overwhelming desire, to know literally everything you can on a subject in which you are interested. The list of subjects I can have an intelligent conversation with an enthusiast is large and unwieldy: Knights, dinosaurs, electricity, carpentry, horticulture, permaculture, aquaculture, southern culture, native plants. Asian plants, the military, pacifism, religious cults, religious orthodoxy, brick making, bricklaying, martial arts, and climate change have all grabbed my attention at various times, and that was a list generated by not even trying.

If you ever eat a piece of wagyu beef, it will forever ruin your beef eating experience, because what you previously thought was an excellent piece of meat is now just ordinary. Your standard for “good beef ” is now much higher because you know better. And if you compare every piece of beef to the wagyu beef, you will forever be unhappy.

Likewise, when you spend a deep dive into, say, karate, and you learn that much of modern karate is less than 110 years old and owes its origins to a man named Gichin Funakoshi who founded and systematized Shotokan Karate, but he was actually trained in Shorin-Ryu karate, which is much older but less formatted, and thus less easily teachable, and that much of what passes for karate today is really just people ripping off Funakoshi, then you don’t want to go take karate at the Y, or in the storefront school. You want to take Shorin-Ryu karate, where the modern karate movement started.

But if you didn’t know any of that, you would most likely be happy at Uncle George’s Karate Dojo and Storm Door Company. Which you might as well be because nobody in your state teaches Shorin-Ryu anyway. Instead, 19-year-old Hugh searches for the real true karate instead of, actually, you know, studying any karate at all.

Or in my 20’s when I was weightlifting, I didn’t just want to lift weights – I wanted to do it the “best” way. I read at least 100 books. Got countless magazines. Tried literally hundreds of workout routines. Totally wrecked my shoulders along the way.

So, those are examples of how ADHD makes you unhappy. Because you know too much. And because you do, your standards are impossibly high. The inverse is also true, of course – there are huge sections of human endeavors about which you know nothing because they did not interest you at all. But that’s another story, for another time.

One thing I’m trying to do these days is to lower my standards as a source of happiness. Or try to care less about doing it the “right” way or the “pure” way, and just do it at all. Like when I began walking regularly last year, I literally bought books on walking – a thing I have been doing most of my life, quite well. But I only began to get real enjoyment out of it when I gave up trying to do it well and just focused on doing it.

And recently, my back and shoulders seem a bit stiff, and I have considered going to Yoga classes. Of course, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and learned about the various lineages, but this time I just bit the bullet and went to the free “yoga” class my gym has on Monday during lunch.

Other than the teacher, I was the youngest person there by a good 10 years. The moves were slow and graceful, and only one pose was recognizable. I think there is a 50/50 chance that the soft background music was Kenny G. Really, it was more of a stretching class than anything else. It would have met no purity test at all. And I had a blast.

The little old ladies ooohed and ahhed over my being there. An older gentleman advised me to take an aspirin before I went to bed tonight. The lady to my right said she hopes I come back because they need “younger people” (I’ll be 50 in about six weeks). But still. It was great.

And most important is that I did it. I stretched. And Thursday, I’ll do it again. Not because it’s pure, or because it’s the best, or because from it I can learn to be the best. But when the choice was to do nothing or to do something, I did something.

 

The Movies I Can’t Watch

The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s a small example:

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but if I had to guess, it was probably in 2016 or so, when the worst of the burnout was coming on. It was probably inevitable, spending as much of my time as I did cleaning up messes other people had made because of their bad choices. But somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to watch people engage in self-destructive behavior. Even if they are only actors, pretending to do it.

For example, last year, we watched the movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday. It was a masterful movie, brilliantly shot. And I got up and walked out of the room at least five times. If you don’t know, a central theme of the movie (as well as a central theme of Holiday’s life) was her recurring bad choices around drug use.

It’s not the drug use itself that bothers me, really – it is seeing her have a way out, and making a choice you will end poorly. It’s like the opposite of empathy, or perhaps more like negative empathy – I understand what she is feeling, I just reject it. And I can’t watch it. I literally feel anxiety at watching people make self-destructive choices. And sometimes, it’s so bad I have to leave the room.

Or another example: I recently discovered the British crime drama Unforgotten, which has five seasons of back issues on Amazon Prime. Each season follows one storyline, and the idea is that we are following a police unit that deals with murders that happened 20+ years ago. Now that the murders are being investigated, all the people who were involved and haven’t heard anything about this case in forever and went on with their lives now have this all dredged up again. It’s fascinating and very well done.

But in season two, a character makes recurring bad decisions that are self-destructive, and the choices could impact a child. I had to stop in episode 4, and just skip on to the next season. I couldn’t watch someone make self-destructive decisions.

Unfortunately, people making self-destructive choices is a major plot device in TV and movies.

Take people who cheat on their partners, for example. I can watch a movie where that happens, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously make the decision to do it. I’m Ok with people who live a life of crime, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously violate someone’s trust, like stealing from Grandma to fund their addiction. If there is a scene where they appear to be making a choice, and they choose a self-destructive option when they had a healing one available to them, I will probably get up and leave – at least for a while.

These things are legitimately triggering for me. And there isn’t an easy shorthand explanation for the specific trigger. So, I get caught by surprise a lot, which makes watching anything other than kids cartoons pretty hard.

It is similar to the way I can’t handle being around people who are drunk, but it’s actually worse. I feel dread and a sense of doom for the people engaged in self-destructive behavior. I feel – literally feel, in my gut, in my bones, even – what I imagine they should feel, but don’t.

Brains are strange, though. Because I saw two violent murders happen in front of me in the years I did that work, and while I don’t particularly enjoy realistic violent movies, they don’t bother me in the same way that movies about drug use or self-destruction do.

That’s the thing about trauma – you don’t know where it will show up until it does.