Life Mistakes

Sculpting Who You Are

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

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Honestly, I’ve made more mistakes in my life than is reasonable. By a long shot. I’m not angry at myself for this fact. It also isn’t surprising. There’s my genetics—alcoholism, clinical depression—and the environment I grew up in (privileged yet complicated, like everyone), but none of these truths are “responsible,” strictly speaking, for the mistakes I’ve made in my life.

And like I said; to reiterate: I’m not pissed at myself for these mistakes. It’s not as if I’m sitting here tallying up each screw-up, There was this in 2009, and then that in 2013, etc. No. What I mean is: I am, like all of us, human. Extremely human. Messy. Complex. With cognitive dissonance, biology, genetics, environment, maleness, desire, and conflicting, dueling incentives.

Nobody’s perfect, but I am far from the goal. I’ve done things I am very much not proud of, things I will not mention here—taboo things; don’t worry, not those taboo things—which are things that some people, but certainly most people, do not do and have not done. What can I say? For ten years I was a blackout drunk. And yet: I cannot blame that on my mistakes, on the grisly things I did, the bad choices I made, the people I hurt. The fact remains: There are millions, perhaps tens of millions, of alcoholics in the world (or more), yet not all of them are violent, not all of them do the things I did.

Now, to be fair to myself: The things I have done weren’t that bad, obviously, or else I’d be locked up in some dark, dank prison somewhere. And I personally have known men in AA who very much have gone all the way, done things far worse than me: Murder, rape, etc. Yet this doesn’t excuse my past behavior. I can blame no one for my past but myself. Most of it stems from my intrinsic interior core, my “nature.” To some degree the impulses I once acted on, the anger I once took action around, stemmed from something deep inside of myself. I “have that” in me. I’d be lying if I said I don’t still feel some of those angry impulses. Though of course the difference is I no longer act on them.

We live, let’s acknowledge it, in a “victim culture.” A man gets into a fist-fight with another man and says the other guy started it by looking at him weird. A woman gets arrested for drinking and driving and blames the cops. A young lefty on a college campus blames his/her/their “harm” on the free speech of someone they find reprehensible. Progressives blame our current polarization and societal ills on Republicans, and Republicans blame progressives. The non-religious blame religion for the world’s historical violence, war and terror; and vice versa.

The trend today is to avoid taking personal responsibility, or responsibility for one’s sacred tribe, whether social, psychological, political, etc.

When I was young—drinking—in my teens and twenties I blamed all my problems on God, my parents, “capitalism,” “the system,” rich people (of which my family was included), Republicans, the middle-class, convention, formal education, authority, police, etc. The truth was—in hindsight—I was pulsating with rage, mostly at my mother, partially at my father, definitely at my family in general, and plenty at myself. I felt weak in a powerful world. I was short for my age throughout high school. I was always the oldest kid in my class. I was so thin I remember ogling myself in the bathroom mirror, seeing my ribs poking taut against my torso, and thinking I looked “like a concentration camp victim.”

Things at home were a strange mix of warm and loving with confusing and detached. Things happened: I won’t get specific here. Needless to say there was some damage inflicted, which is incredibly common in most families to one degree or another. Point is I grew up angry. I felt powerless. Needy. Insecure. Around eight years old I distinctly recall thinking, I don’t need parents. I don’t need adults. Adults are not to be trusted. They’re out for themselves.

The emotional detachment from my parents probably started as early as five or six years old. I remember it, not so much as a cognitive process but as an emotional one. The psychological and spiritual puzzle seemed like it could never somehow be solved. By sixth, seventh grade it was punk rock and pot. By the time I reached high school, at the tail end of the nineties, it all exploded wonderfully. Punk rock, rebellious books (1984; The Catcher in the Rye; Brave New World; Please Kill Me; We Got the Neutron Bomb; etc), alcohol, fast cars, parties, girls.

And blacking out.

The anger showed its ugly face sophomore year for the first time. Car wrecks. Girls I treated like trash. Fist fights at school. Booze like madness. Waking up from a blackout to realize I was driving my car, brimming with punk buddies after going to some show in Ventura or Los Angeles. I remember staring at myself in a foggy mirror at home during this time, spitting at the mirror, flipping myself off, and punching the thing, glass exploding. It felt good. And right.

A line from my all-time favorite 1980s LA punk band Social Distortion comes to mind, from the song Telling Them:

“Well I love the sound when I smash the glass,
If I get caught they're gonna kick my ass.
My mommy's worried about the way I drink,
My daddy can't deal with the way I think.

Yep. These lines nail my experience back then. I just wanted to be FREE!!! I’ll never forget the first time I drove my mom’s hand-me-down sparkling green 1993 Jeep Cherokee alone. I rolled the windows down—all four—and screamed into the wind: I’m free motherfucker!!!!!!

Anyway: The point is: This was who I was, and who I still am now in many ways. I’ve just learned coping techniques as an adult. Gone to a lot of therapy. Stuck with AA, even if doing it my own way. I have “tools.” And even with all of this, even now, at 40, 12.5 years off the bottle, I still fail often and make mistakes constantly. The beauty is: The mistakes I make now are far, far less toxic and nasty than in my past. They are much more internal than external, and to the extent that they are external, they don’t screw people up (especially women) the way they used to. This, as Bill Maher said recently, referring to Democrats over the long arc of history, is called “progress.” Often progress is slow, and you never really “get there.” There’s no “place,” in fact, to arrive to. It’s all just a cycle, a circle, a process of life. Seasons. Maturity (slow for me). Chopping wood and carrying water, as the Buddhists say. Or like they say in AA: “We claim spiritual progress, rather than spiritual perfection.”

Life is about choices. If there’s anything along the way that I’ve learned, it’s that. Ironically, I feel wizened quite a bit beyond my 40 years. I feel uniquely qualified to make the statement above, about choices. Why? Because I’ve made so many bad choices, this means that I grasp, intuitively and experientially, the heavy cruciality of making good choices. And of taking full responsibility for my actions. Look: I didn’t say it was easy. Ask my girlfriend, Britney. Even now, I have, of course, like all of us, an ego. Not just an ego but a BIG ego. Sometimes Britney calls me out on my bullshit, and she’s right, and I HATE it. Sometimes I reject it, deny it, push back. She in fact makes fun of me for this sometimes. Yet I almost always come back a little later and own my part, often admitting she was right. Again: We’re not perfect. We’re human.

I believe in Free Will. It’s a tough topic, because between genetics and the way you were raised in say the first five years of life, the truth is that so much about who you are is already settled. This means that the majority of your actions, behavior and choices will be largely (but not entirely) dictated by these two powerful factors. (There’s plenty of scientific debate on this topic, of course. I’m speaking broadly.) Yet I can’t fully settle on the notion that we’re all simply automatons with no agency and we are like fatalistic puppets being pulled by the Nature and Nurture gods within and without.

What I’m getting to is: Life is challenging. Things happen. We collide with ourselves and with other human beings constantly. It’s ultimately up to each one of us as individuals how we react to circumstances, how we think about something, what choices we end up making or not making. Paths diverge ahead of us: We can walk any of those paths available. This means, essentially, that we’re “free.” But can we truly handle freedom? Ask Sartre or Camus or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky. I think humans crave—need—authority figures, constraints (legal, cultural, taboo, etc) and social/societal boundaries. Children need them from parents. Men and women need them from society. Imagine a society with no police, no legal system, no social constraints. Gen Z leftists might think this would be fantastic, but they’d be the first ones to be burned at the stake. Women especially, and trans people even more: trust me: You WANT protection. The only thing holding civilization back from total anarchy is a system.

This is why AA changed my life: I was forced—in steps four and five—to look at a list of every person I’d harmed and then to acknowledge what “my part” was in that suffering. In other words: What role did I have in my own resentment, pain, failure? Imagine if everyone in the globe did this process. Imagine if politicians did this process. Imagine if all young adults did this process. We’d live in a very different world.

Martin Luther King and Gandhi sought a more honest, more respectful, more fair world. They wanted to expand, not limit, freedom. And they were right, of course. And they did change the world, in ways we’re still enjoying.

Whatever age you are, whatever views you hold politically, whatever gender you identify as, whatever genetics and nurture you contain within you, whatever abuse you may have suffered through: I hope you hear me when I say: You are a loved, worthy human being. We all are. There is nothing to fear, as FDR famously said, except fear itself. Owning your role in something painful or harmful is an extremely freeing proposition; it frees your heart, your soul, and your mind. I don’t have to cling to regret for the things I’ve done in the past because I’ve understood myself and why I did those things; I’ve made amends with the people I’ve harmed; and I’ve made progress in who I am today.

That’s really all that matters. I have so many conflicting emotions, feelings, desires, fears, ad infinitum. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. Life is short. Love is long, wide and deep. Choose love. Choose self-respect. Choose ownership of your choices. As Obama once said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

It starts with you.