A lesson learned the hard way.

View fullsize

Brakes don't work when a car is airborne.

It's a simple lesson in physics. It's the clearest memory of the crash. My foot on the brake pedal. That dependable, sturdy chunk of steel mashed all the way to the floor. The car gliding through the damp December air. The stereo playing 311 at an eardrum-rattling volume. Seventeen-year-old blood pumping through my veins.

The speedometer needle pointed somewhere north of 75 miles per hour before the car went Pegasus. My friend's Camaro, much to my delight, was a distant set of darting headlights in my rear-view mirror. Gene, my best friend and copilot, had queued up the track. We were immortal.

A small rise catapulted us through the air, sending my Honda across the center line on a diagonal. It was a 1999 Accord coupe with an all-leather interior and a V6 under the hood that churned out 200 horsepower. The dual overhead cams sang an intoxicating siren song when the forest-green dart bounded above 100 miles per hour. With slight hesitation, the automatic transmission would lurch into a lower gear when you stomped the accelerator. That pause was the car saying, in its own mechanized language, "OK, you want it? You've got it, asshole."

The Accord nosedived through a telephone pole at speed. Nearly all of the glass surfaces shattered on impact. The stereo cut out and left us gasping for the air that had been knocked out of our lungs in the silence. When I could breathe again, I asked Gene if he was OK. He said yes, and got out of the passenger door. To this day -- I don't know why -- I crawled through the safety glass, which littered the leather interior like a fresh snowfall, and out the passenger door.

The pole I had plowed down carried a transformer. I didn't know it then, but a quarter of the town had just lost power. Months later, Gene would point out that there were live wires draped across my car door, and a lake of flammable transformer fluid had fanned out below the car. Had I exited through the driver's side, I would have been electrocuted or burned alive.

Instead, I was fine. But Gene's sternum was broken -- an injury that plagues him to this day. A few days went by before I learned the severity of his injury and his pain. There was no justice to it. I was the one who deserved to be broken. And what if I had killed him, I asked myself then, and nearly every time I start a car to this day. What if I had killed my best friend?

Before I wrote this, I texted Gene to ask if he'd be comfortable with me sharing this experience. He wrote, "Of course you know my POV is that I was just as guilty; either of us would have been stupid enough to do exactly the same thing in the driver's seat at that point in time."

It's true, though it does little to assuage my guilt and remorse. I recall our car crash often. I remember my eyes darting from Gene, and back to the twisted steel, from Gene, and back to the splintered telephone pole, from Gene, and back to the snowfall of auto glass.

I remember that we are more like glass than steel.

Different hills.

View fullsize

There is seldom what most would consider a good reason for feeling this way. Depression is a burden that builds up over time, each minuscule weight that gets added to the load is undetectable to the undiscerning. These tiny burdens can be anything: an offhand remark, an emotionally indecipherable email or text, or a nagging worry. But eventually, the load reaches a tipping point.

I've always felt that my depression was unjustifiable. I haven't earned the right to be depressed. I haven't had it bad enough. That self-perceived flaw is the most depressing aspect of all. I have friends and acquaintances who experienced real childhood trauma, or who fought in wars and are contending with PTSD. I feel like my depression cheapens or lessens theirs. 

I have a good life. I had a good childhood. I am successful. On paper, my little, white, American, middle-class life and upbringing are desirable. My position is enviable to 99 percent of the world's population.

I see, acknowledge, and accept these facts with the cool logic of a dispassionate observer. And yet, my windows remain fogged over with the familiar gray haze of depression. It's an obstructed view that I've contended with since I was 8 years old. The first time I was old enough to understand the words of Side B of "Abbey Road," when I heard The Beatles sing in unison, "Boy, you're gonna carry that weight," I knew exactly what they were talking about on a bone-marrow level.

Outside of my immediate circle of friends, I've never spoken or written about my depression, mostly because to this day, I am ashamed of it. No amount of awareness campaigns or chain Facebook statuses will change that. 

I think it's common for human beings to think that their struggles and hardships are unique. But with 7 billion of us talking chimpanzees walking around this rock hurtling through space, the odds of uniqueness are not in our favor. We have more in common than we care to admit.

That means there are others out there like me. I am writing this for them, for those who carry the same weight, who are stultified by the same potent cocktail of guilt, shame, and, oh yeah, that omnipresent depression.

You, slogging up that hill with that heavy ruck. I'm out there slogging with you. Odds are, there are others. We're all just slogging up different hills.

Wrist-locked.

The pain seared through the tendons in my wrist. All I could do was cry out the verbal white flag of "Tap! Tap! Tap!" I was beaten. And I was glad. I smiled and wiped the sweat from my forehead, opening and closing my left hand, palpating my narrow wrist to make sure all was in order. It was. "What was that?" I asked.

It was a failure of the most glorious and epic proportions. Off the controlled environment of the jiu jitsu mats, minimally I would be looking at a broken wrist. I would have been defending myself with one arm from a bigger, stronger and more skilled opponent. 

Later on, I found myself mounted by a black belt, arms pinned overhead. On the street, they would have been able to tee off on my head, and I would have been able to do little about it but cover my face and try to buck them off. In the jiu jitsu laboratory, it became an exploration of angles and leverage, on using one escape to set up another. 

The only actual destruction on the mats is of the ego, and that is therapeutic. Two lessons, both of which could potentially save my life, both of which were born out of failure. On the mat and off the mat, failure is a cause for celebration. It is failure that brings us closer to where we want to be.

Book review: Tribe by Sebastian Junger

We have never been more connected and more isolated. That is the paradox of the modern world and the bedrock of Sebastian Junger's thesis in his latest work, Tribe. Modern living, its trappings and its priorities have taken us so far from the tribal nature ingrained in our DNA. In this well-researched, short volume, Junger postulates that it is the comfort and convenience of our lives that feeds this isolation and causes unparalleled rates of depression and mental illness.

Tribe is simultaneously an advocacy piece for the modern soldier returning to the home front. Based on his research, he concludes that the rise of PTSD can be linked to the isolating effect described above. Warfare and the soldiering life, he says, replicate this human need for communal, tribal existence. Take a soldier away from their brothers and sisters in arms, and there are bound to be consequences, especially if the soldier endured trauma.

As a society, we need to go beyond the platitudes of American flag lapel pins and "I support the troops" bumper stickers. Tribe is a blueprint for that work, and it's work that needs to be done throughout our culture.

Book review: The Obstacle is The Way, by Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle is The Way, by Ryan Holiday, is as practical is it is engaging. This is a road map for anyone who has struggled when dealt setbacks. It bills itself as a manual for turning trials into triumph, and it delivers on that promise with tactical information and examples from history. For anyone who encounters resistance in the creative process, I put this book in the company of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield in terms of its effectiveness.

Using the history-hardened tenants of stoicism, Holiday presents his strategy in three parts: perception, action, and will. An example of each:

1. PERCEPTION: "Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation." Here, he's talking about the stoic retreat to the "temple of reason" that is the logical mind -- seeing things for what they are, free of emotional baggage.
2. ACTION: "The one way to guarantee we don't benefit from failure--to ensure it is a bad thing--is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same thing over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason)." This is the need to iterate, to go out and fail faster so that we might improve quicker. 
3. WILL: " ... loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do." Requires no explanation. I found this to be the most helpful section.

Do not mistake this book for a collection of platitudes and quotes. It is a battle plan. Putting that plan into action, however, is entirely up to the reader. But the work pays off.