TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#96 -Being a Guy – Part 3 (The Last One)

#96 -Being a Guy - Part 3 (The Last One)

Driving home from work tonight, I could see that it was going to be a picture-perfect September evening.  All the seasons have particular charms but I always find myself fond of the days after Labor Day in September.  The air is dry and warm, the breeze from the south is almost hot.  Santa Ana winds signal the end of summer and the beginning of fire season in California.

The air is clear and dry – you could see the bay laid out like a map from my vantage point on the Dumbarton Bridge.  To the south was the ruins of the old Dumbo bridge – unless I’d seen Harold and Maude, I’d never have know what it was…thought it was the old train bridge.  To the north, I could see all the way to the city, Sutro Tower was a ghostly gray spider against the sky.  The air in the Bay is softer in September.  It isn’t full of heat like the stuffy-blanket days of July and August or clammy like the wet-sweater months of January through the middle of April.  It reminds me of the first days back in school, when you’re actually glad to be there (a feeling that lasts exactly 6 weeks and then it’s pure, unadulterated hate for the next 8.25 months).  It also reminds me of wine country trips that my family took – the cozy feeling that comes from the verisimilitude of fall and winter.

Having some time to pause and reflect, I wanted to go back and talk a bit more about growing up, about being a man.  I’ve been talking about this (and thinking seriously about it) since I wrote the “Defending the Cave Man’s Vagina Monologue” doses almost a year and a half ago.  I knew that I was going to have to come back to it eventually and in a Post-Titus world, I finally feel comfortable doing so.

I say up front that I realize I’m not making this a well-rounded Dose and talking about societal obligations upon the female species but would like to add that I have an X and a Y chromosome and therefore wouldn’t be able to speak as completely about that subject.  So there, got that out of the way.  Whereas I was using the Doses previously, not to define the answers but to frame the question, I want to come back with some of the answers that I’ve learned.  Specifically, where I had a lot of questions about being a man, a guy, a dude, a husband, a brother, a son, etc., I have learned quite a few things in the past 18 months and heretofore am presenting the fruit of that labor.

The Part That You Throw Away

Reading a number of male essayists do their take on maleness – I realized one major thing: nobody has a single answer for this.  Maybe that sounds basic, but when the majority of your experience has to do with how much different you are from the vast majority of your same-gender peers, you start to wonder if maybe there’s a vast universal playbook that everyone else besides you has seen.

But that’s not the case.  Reading from different sources, you see that every man goes through his own personal “what-does-it-all-mean” moment.  From that moment, they formulate their own answers.

Some ideas are roundly rejected: the concept of being that Ralph Kramden/Archie Bunker character is one of those.  Others are being the Frat Boy, the anti-intelligent Redneck or the snotty pseudointellectual. People know men like that, people hate men like that.  But how do you avoid becoming what you hate?

To say “I’ll never be like that” and do nothing more is the fastest way to ensure that you will.  You don’t know your enemy, how can you be sure you will avoid his mistakes?  You need to take an honest look at the things that person did wrong but also what they did right.  You need to see the positive components that they used in their daily lives (even Hitler knew how to paint) but also be able to strip out the things that made them into jerks.

The simple answer for every man is: use what you like and throw the rest away.  Life is a smorgasbord of ideas – not every one is right, not every one is right for you.  The goal is to construct a healthy, reasonable world view from the pile of available philosophies and mottos.  It’s kind of like making a running automobile from all the cars of a junk yard.  You can’t use every engine, every rear quarter-panel or driver’s seat.  You accept some things, reject others – you make a conscious decision use some things and then to let other things go because they are simply not worth holding on to.

What’s left is what you decided was worth holding onto, and that is makes you into you.  Maybe you’ve picked right the first time and will never need to exchange a part of that car for something that fits better, but chances are you’ll be visiting the yard from time to time.  That gets me to the next point:

The Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell released a book called “Hero with a Thousand Faces” that discussed the concept of monomyth.  Monomyth finds similarities all the myths of various civilizations throughout time.  Many persons associated with psychology have drawn parallels between Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” and the process of human maturation that we all go through in our lives.  It helps us break life down into stages of development and see the common traits each of us experience as one stage ends or another begins.

At 29, I can see that I’ve obviously matured and learned things over the past couple of years. This doesn’t seem to happen in a continual process as much as it does in stages.  When I first heard of the Hero’s Journey concept in a psych class in college, I found it a reasonable way to explain how my life progressed from one period of time to another.  Sometimes you’re climbing and sometimes you’re standing on a plateau.  Sometimes you’re standing on a plateau when it is clear you should be climbing.  How you can tell that it is time to leave whatever plateau or stage you’re currently in varies from person to person but I want to tell you about how I finally got it.

In the past two years, I’ve been experiencing a low-key, yet very definite conflicts with just about everything and everyone.   Very simply, I kept banging into the brick walls that marked the limits of my relationships with people, jobs and things.  I had to give up the Camaro – one of the last links between me and my affection for all driving machines.  I had to give up on HDS as being The Best Place to Work Ever.  I had to accept that my family wasn’t going to be what I’d hoped and believed it could be.  A lot of beliefs and concepts I’d been holding onto in my life were circling the drain and finally experienced their last gurgle.

Life was gving me some subtle clues and then it gave me some more obvious ones that living my life like I was, was not making me happy.  I really fought against that for a long time because I still really believed that I could make my life whatever I wanted it to be.  If I worked hard enough, long enough, persevered enough and endured enough, my life could eventually be perfect.

I was wrong.  But why?

Because to create the perfect life with everything in order is to live in a constant state of conflict; the world is not perfect.  Life doesn’t travel along the simple road of “Do Your Best – Be Your Best – Make This Life a Wonderful Adventure for You and Everyone Around You.”  Life is not perfect and people are not perfect. Some of us are more comfortable with that idea than others.  Some of us use that as an excuse to be fantastically, artistically, imperfect; imperfect on an epoch level.  I’ve said it before, and see the truth of it every day, that people do not live according to a single motto or set of rules.  To paraphrase Orson Welles, people live life in the space between conflicting ideas.

Trying to make life perfect or even fair is a full-time job.  Some people, most people in fact, come to accept that life is neither perfect nor fair.  As such, they aren’t looking for the right (or fair) thing to do because they’ve come to understand that being right (or fair) won’t always save you.  There aren’t a lot of career options if you’re planning to be a Professional Martyr.  Your particular issue, while important to you, isn’t that important to everyone else.  Not important enough to inspire them to invest their time and energy.  Maybe it should be, maybe helping you would benefit other people and maybe they should think about getting involved but they won’t.  Before you start talking about how stupid that is, think about how many millions of fish had to die in the nets before they made such a thing as “Dolphin-safe Tuna”.

So, let’s review.  The solutions I was applying to problems weren’t working.  The relationships I was trying to maintain were making me unhappy.  The things I wanted to own or possess in life were becoming too expensive to maintain.  The job I had was becoming a major source of stress.  Put it all together and it meant one thing: the stage of life I had existed in for 8 or 10 years was no longer the right place for me.  All the conflict, the difficulty and stress, these were just clues that Tim-in-this-stage-of-life was no longer working. It was time to start thinking about moving on.

I spoke about this in another way earlier – when I was discussing that choking, unsettled feeling I get if I’m in a place that has obviously stayed too long at the party.  The feeling I get at Kmart or if I stayed late after school on the last day of the year.  I think I’ve had an innate sense of Time-to-Move-On when it came to other things, but it took me a long time to recognize it in my own self.  Now that I have, I can do something about it.

When you’re in a specific stage of life, it makes sense to care about the things you care about.  When you’re coming to the end of that stage, you realize that caring about those things doesn’t work for you any more.  I don’t have the same toys or clothes or books when I was 8 or 10.  I outgrew them.  I don’t have the same relationships or job or car that I had a year ago and it’s because I outgrew them, too.  Part of ending that stage of life is realizing that it wasn’t about right or wrong or bad or good – it was simply time for me to move on to something else.  I needed to be free of those things and to let them go without doing the usual “I let this go because it was bad and I hated it.”  That’s juvenile.  It served its purpose for the time and place.  Now it is time to let go.  Take the positive things with you; take the negative things as lessons learned.  Whatever you do, don’t try to stay in the same place because it isn’t the right place for you.

Expectation, Management, Interdependence and Control

There’s this really weird little doo-dad shop in Old Town Sacramento that’s buried down a dusty hallway at the bottom of one of those 4-story brick buildings they remodeled a while back.  Inside there’s all manner of interesting junk: vintage LP’s, old signs, antique jukeboxes and pinball machines.  I could spend an hour in there easy.  Nicole and I bought a metal sign to add to the collection a while back, or maybe we were negotiating the price of one that we deemed too expensive.  The point is, as I was standing at the register I noticed that, apparently, Christie Brinkley had visited the store at one point and signed the wall.  I forget exactly how she put it but said something along the lines of “Just remember that things don’t have to be perfect to be perfect.”

Something like that.

I understood what she meant to be: life doesn’t have to be 100% in order for you to be happy.  There’s a certain joy and comfort that comes with the chaos.  I’ve had to come to terms with this as I grew up watching all my friends live in more or less tranquil optimism, while I dealt with the angst and demons that came with my life between ages 12-15.  Every time I got my life close to the kind of order I felt I would be happy with, something would come out of nowhere and knock me back down again.

Eventually, I grew comfortable with that type of uncertainty.  It took a while to do so, for a long time I was so used to being in control of myself and surroundings that anything else coming along that suggested otherwise would really piss me off.  So – around the time that I accepted Titus was coming along, I realized that I was going to well and truly let go of the idea that I could or should be in control.  Take for example, when we were building the deck in February, we weren’t sure exactly how that was going to work out.  Grandpa was coming over, maybe Ryan and Janine – there were a lot of things that could happen and some of them were bad.  I was really stressed out trying to make sure that things were going to happen the right way.  Going to Lowes to pick up some extra supplies, I was calling people to vent my frustration and stress lest I blow up at someone in the house (that I did not need).

It was somewhere between the call to Lynn and the other to Pawan that I realized the truth: there was no way I could really be in control of the situation.  Too many things were happening too quickly.  I also realized, on the tail end of that thought, that the only person who was worried about me not being in control was me.  No one was going to come back later on and say “You should have done more” because the idea that I could rein in what was going on was ludicrous.

So I let go.

As a result – we got the deck in (I should say, Ryan got it in while I ran for pizza) and now it looks great.  Since then, when I’m in situations that are too thick and too fast for me to get a handle on, I learn to shut down the part of me that says, “Stay on top of it all – you might have to do this by yourself.”

I’ve learned a lot more since then about expectations and obligations; most of them for me are self-imposed.  I’ve also learned about interdependence, namely, that I’m not that good at it yet.  Some people pick it up instinctively but I’ve been waffling in this netherworld between independence and dependence.  I’ve been so long doing things on my own that it’s hard to figure out how to fit in with other peoples’ lives.  I’m still trying to figure it out but at least I’m on my way.  Control…same thing.  Learning how to ask for help rather than saying, “screw it” and do it all by myself (and taking on all the additional stress of feeling like I gotta do it all on my own and nobody cares and blahblahblahwhaaawhaaahwhaaa).  Learning that control is more than getting pissed and screaming at people.  It’s also about learning to manage the situation and your own emotions.  About learning to say, “You know…you’re really making me angry” rather than saying nothing until I explode and say “You should have known that you were making me angry!”

Managing – it’s not just for white guys in Dockers.

The concept of managing myself or a situation is also not instinctive or taught at a young age.  I wasn’t even aware that I needed to manage myself, but it was apparent to everyone who watched me bounce off of the walls like a kernel in a corn popper.  Learning to focus the energy toward solving a single problem, learning to give yourself space when several problems appear simultaneously.  It’s like playing the game Tetris, except it’s with your life and you end up with blank spots a lot more often than you’d like.  You keep your head up and your eyes out, looking to see what is coming along.  You think three or four steps ahead of what is happening to see what landmines you might be about to tread on.  It’s not easy to do at the start, but once you get in the habit of it you find the amount of “oh-gee-where-‘d-that-explosion-come-from” moments dropping down to a very low level.

Some of what I’ve written above comes from moments where I had an almost full ‘Tetris screen’ of problems with all kinds of blank spaces.  I’d keep dropping bricks down, hoping to get it pared down to a manageable level and then the blank spaces would shift or the wrong block would appear.  It got to a point where I had to make a conscious decision to stop playing that game and focus more on the parts of my life that I had a hope of solving.  I hit the reset button and started again; the calm version of me that you see is part of the result.  Sort of.

Yeah, I'm Weird...So?

Whether it was a function of my upbringing or pure genetics, I don't know.  But I do know that my personal world view is rather different than the average person.  It's a common refrain from people who I've just met - they stare at me with these looks that vary from confusion to amusement to fear and go, "You're weird!"

This used to bother me.

It still does, now that I think about it...just not as much as it used to.  I've spent a lot of my life agonizing over the fact that some parts of me just lend themselves to conflict with the status quo.  To put it bluntly: yeah, I get it, I am weird.  Weird in the sense that I didn't instinctively pick up on the parts of human interaction that, at my age, should be almost reflexive.  Because I didn't learn them, I've been trying to explain them as rational concepts and you and I both know by now that human beings are anything but rational.  But none of this is a bad thing; that is one thing I've started to realize at this stage of the game.  It's not constructive to refer to things only in terms of bad or good.  Sometimes, they just are.  It is what it is.  What will be will be.  Que sera sera.  Sorry...I get carried away.  So, what it is, is this: I'm on a different track than 99% of the rest of the world.  That ain't a bad thing.  Sometimes, it won't be convenient because it's a lonely road you're traveling.  But other times, things will work out for you so much better than your peers and you'll go, Yes...this is why I am glad to be different.

Nicole paid me one of the highest compliments anyone ever has the other day.  We were discussing our relationship (coming up on the 6th anniversary of our union) and she says, "You know, I've never met anyone else like you."  She meant it in a positive sense, she explained, and I told her that I understood.  It's something of an accomplishment if she can't find someone to take my place after 8 years together.  I'm guessing that other people might have the same experience, I get the offhand references to Eminem nowadays...it used to be "Screech" from Saved by the Bell or "Bill" from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure".  I think people only saw my curly hair.

In any case - I am different.  This reality is something that has been the source of great conflict in my life and it's one of my goals to shepherd Titus through that process (if he goes through it) because it can be a powerful, positive thing if used in the right way.  People recognize it, too.  You might have seen the poem "Kids Who Are Different" by Digby Wolfe, it illustrates what I'm talking about far better than trying to paraphrase Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled".  It opens doors to you that otherwise you might not even know were there.  It's also a more involved process because you have to commit to creating a solution where most people would just follow the same well-worn path.  Maybe it leads to stardom, maybe it leads over a cliff.  By and large, people develop their own comfort levels with change versus stability and for the most part, trying to do everything different all the time just plain wears you out.  It's like growing all your own food in the backyard versus going to the store.  After a while, you realize that the effort isn't worth the benefit.  It's a sticky trap - you can easily get into a rut by accepting too many things or by trying to change things that don't need to be.  It's a balancing act that you only really learn by doing.  But suffice to say, I've accomplished many things in my life simply by being open to the right change at the right time.

So yeah, I'm weird.  I'm different.  I'm strange.  I'm just the guy who's there when no one else is.  I'm the guy who visits you in the hospital, or jail or at work or home or wherever you are and, oh yeah, very few other people will do that.   I don't think it's a really big thing, but it seemed to mean a lot to the people who I was doing it for at the time.  Make of that what you will.  I've gotten past the fact that my differences create conflict with people; they are strengths and I'm really more concerned about using them in the right way.

In conclusion – I have learned a lot about myself and about life.  It started by working to find the right question to ask and after that, the answers pretty much presented themselves.  As I’m sure you guessed it, they were in front of me the entire time.  If you find yourself in a similar situation, looking to find an answer to some particularly vexing problems, going through Robin Hood’s barn and then finding them right where you started…don’t worry.

I did the same thing.

-         Tim Woolery, 09/27/2006