“Fighty, we’re all on the long road back to who we were in high school.”
I’ve been sixteen, a football player that blasted rap music from his truck with twenty-inch rims.
I’ve been twenty-four, a health teacher and vegan evangelist that ran 5Ks every weekend.
I’ve been twenty-seven, a medical student that survived on his mountain bike.
I’ve been thirty-two, a psychiatrist in training that adopted an alter-surfer ego.
Today, a month from turning thirty-five, I do still love a tofu sandwich. I still love to surf. And given the opportunity, I will psychoanalyze anything. Yet, in the way I am, I feel most like my sixteen-year-old self, the guy who was just who he was, waiting patiently for me to return from my travels.
I’ve heard Morgan Hausel, author of The Psychology of Money, say that when we experience a financial recession or depression, we always learn from it. But we often learn the wrong lesson.
At the end of high school, a season where I loved playing football and baseball and hanging with my friends, I was cheated on. I’d had an awesome high school experience. My girlfriend and I had had a loving relationship, one where she’d told she wanted a break but I wouldn’t listen. Ultimately though, what I learned upon graduating was that everything I was in high school should be destroyed.
In college, I partied relentlessly, something I never did in high school, and found the bottom of that glass was hollow. So, I applied to a non-profit, learning that partying wasn’t who I was either.
In the non-profit, I taught for two years, living the virtues of meaningful work while embracing a vegan diet, yoga, and meditation. I was truly happy; it was an awesome time of self-exploration. And if I could just keep those new embodiments, maybe I’d be happy as a physician, something I never wanted to be.
I graduated from medical school, a four-year period where I was most passionate about mountain biking. Then, I began residency with the hope that I’d find happiness in a beautiful location, California, through living my new hobby: surfing.
And I became utterly lost to who I was.
Lost in a faraway land, doing a job that sanded away my pseudo-identities, I had one option left: be who I really was.
When depressed, trying to remember what it felt like to feel alive, I didn’t remember surfing sessions, meditation retreats, or board scores. What evoked was the feeling I had in my truck during high school, listening to country music, driving through the prairie backroads. I didn’t yet realize how much I needed to change myself or how many things I needed to become. I was only ready for the next wiffle ball game with my cousins, the next bass on the hook, and the next time my parents wouldn’t be home so that I could jump from the roof into the pool.
That, when everything else was lost, was what I felt. And that’s what helped me rebuild my life.
My friend from college was right. I was on the road back to who I was in high school.
I’m back to driving a truck, but it doesn’t have twenty-inch rims. And when I’m driving, it’s no longer in the prairie but in Appalachia. I’m usually thinking about a piece of writing or what my wife and I are planning next, those motivations replacing the wiffle ball and fishing hole. Yet, the feeling is the same and still just as simple, because I learned all the wrong lessons, now with nowhere else to be but who I am.
Along with the wrong lessons, I lived out a few of the right ones too. My first book is a summary of all 32 of those lessons, available now on Amazon.
