surviving 2 thriving

“Experience: That most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”

C. S. Lewis

[Note: This post has more personal information than I'm really comfortable with. So will some future posts. Believe it or not, I am an extremely private person and this entire project is awkward for me. I don't intend for this site to read like a daily journal or my memoirs. However, the idea for this blog was born out of my grappling with things that I have experienced, so I think it's important that you get at least a few glimpses into my life.]

My experience with The Fortress began when I was very young. But my understanding of life was in its embryonic stages, and I hadn’t yet perfected the fine art of building walls. However, as a young adult, I entered Survival 101.

Unlike most of my friends, I started working when I was in high school. It wasn’t long before I entered the swinging, swirling world of radio as a teenage disk jockey. I was counting on a great future. My life was still ahead of me, and I had some big plans for it.

I eventually got married and dropped out of college, primarily because I hated it and was doing poorly. But I convinced myself that the reason was that I needed to concentrate on my radio career. (Many years later I returned to school and graduated with honors. One of the best things I ever did. Then I went on to obtain a Master’s degree.)

After a few years as a radio legend in my own mind, my best friend and I quit the radio business and started building a reasonably successful business. We had our ups and downs, but for the most part, we were doing pretty well.

One day, he walks into my office, plops down on a chair, and proceeds to tell me that he no longer needed me and wanted to go it alone. Now this might not seem like a really big deal, and I suppose compared to experiences later in my life, it isn’t. But, at the time it was devastating.

The protective emotional walls that I had started to put up a few years earlier due to some significant survival events  now started to take on the characteristics of The Fortress. It wasn’t long before I didn’t care about him, the business, my friends, or anything else. My family, of course, was affected. The walls I built were high and deep, and they stayed up for very long time.

Some walls never come all the way down

When those walls go up, some of them never come down all the way, or at least they haven’t in my case. When life deals you enough blows, you learn to live with the walls. Unfortunately, other people in your life have to live with them, too.

And here is another unpleasant side effect of wall building, at least for me. I have developed the very undesirable trait of blocking out memories that disturb me. I mean really blocking them, and not just avoiding them. Sadly, there are so many of those that I have only sketchy memories of some periods of my life. It’s a bit scary, actually.

That’s why many of the details of the partnership failure elude me to this day. I remember, however, going on the typical job hunt. I probably should have formulated some plan to open my own business, but since I was now in survival mode, I went on an “anything will do, get me out of here” search for a new job. You gotta love that Fortress!

Eventually, I landed a job with a vendor of our company. So, I packed up my family and moved to another state, my first venture beyond the Texas border, and a move I would later regret.

Moving was something I did quite often. I hate to admit that I typically choose “flight” over “fight.” So when the going got tough, I moved! There, a long way from home, I encountered wave after wave of disasters. Good thing I now knew about The Fortress.

It’s no surprise that the new job turned out to be a huge mistake. It was nothing like the “picture in the brochure” so-to-speak, and was a monumental struggle for a naïve twenty-something. To give you just a little insight into just how bad it was there, that company was raided by the Feds and shut down about a year after I left. The CEO was put in jail.

I was really learning to survive. But there’s more! In the midst of the horrible job situation I was in, I started getting calls from creditors of the business now run by my friend that “didn’t need me anymore.” Turns out, my partner who wanted to go it alone ended up going down alone, and all the people he owed money to started coming after me. After futile efforts to settle, I learned about bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy is something you have to functionally survive for a minimum of 10 years. In some ways, you survive it for the rest of your life.

So, instead of a rewarding future as a radio star, or a business executive, I became a wall builder. I had the trowel in one hand, bricks in the other, and an ocean of mortar. I would need it, too.

A Survivor’s Guide Points…

• Be aware of The Fortress. As long as you know you are in survival mode and realize what is going on, you are well ahead of the game. So I say, go for it! Build those walls! In the midst of great pain, don’t even try to care. But let me say emphatically, that you can’t stay there. You must, absolutely must, start trying to take down those walls even before you have them completely up.

• Know that your core person is still there, no matter what is going on around you. If you are a person of faith, trust me, your faith is in tact even though it might not seem so at times. In fact, your faith could even grow through it all, a topic I’ll deal with another day. It is very possible, however, that your faith and your core personality could very well be usurped for a season by strong emotions followed by the numbness of The Fortress.

• Don’t allow yourself to get lost within your own walls. Find a way to start caring again—for yourself and for those around you. It sounds like a cliché, but love is key. Don’t let it disappear into the dungeon of your soul.

“There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.”

Florence Nightingale

Survival mode is, essentially, survival. It is an instinctive reaction for most of us, like a porcupine raising its quills when danger is near.

You’ve probably heard the term, “fight or flight.” Survival mode includes both along with the host of emotions that go with them. Whether you are fighting back or just acting like the pain doesn’t exist, it’s the emotional fortress we put up that allows us to deal with it.

Here’s the interesting thing about survival mode. Most of us have to have it. But, we don’t want to live there indefinitely. Although it provides some measure of protection from emotional pain, it can keep us away from the good things in life.

For example, it may drive a person who lost a well paying job to suck it up and work any job necessary to pay some bills. That can be a good thing. On the other hand, it can blind that same person to pulling it together and moving on to a better job and life. And here’s the reason. One of the main characteristics of survival mode is the “I don’t give a damn anymore” syndrome. This is particularly true after life has dealt us multiple blows.

The Fortress comes with a nicely numbing “couldn’t-care-less” attitude. After all, if you don’t care, then you can’t be hurt and you don’t have to deal with the issues trying to get at you. Only people who care can be hurt. And when the pain starts to creep in, to gnaw at our soul, we just muster up more resolve not to care. That’s how we survive.

Here’s an illustration of how this works. Let’s say you are a single person who, like many others, has struggled to find “the one.” After dating someone for a time, you realize that you care a great deal for this person and then, suddenly, Mr. or Ms. Right dumps you. Perhaps, you had planned in your mind a blissful lifetime together. And, for the sake of this illustration, let’s say it isn’t the first time this has happened to you. What is your response? Initially, you go through the stages of hurt and anger, throwing out the stuff that reminds you of your lost love, writing angry texts and emails, etc. But your emotions can’t stay there 24/7. Don’t misunderstand. It’s true that you might carry around some anger for a very long time, maybe even the rest of your life, but it is way too draining of an emotion to stay that way.

So, up goes The Fortress. Now, you don’t give a damn. Ahhh… the bliss of emotional numbness!

Now let’s take this illustration to another level. We’ll add some additional pain. (“When it rains, it pours,” right?) Not only do you lose “the one,” you lose your job, too! What happens next? Well, you’ve got those walls already up, so you don’t really give a damn. Yes, you spent years in school, followed by years on the job all for an employer who you thought would take care of you and help you be a success. But instead, you get the pink slip. So what? The walls will protect you!

When we repeatedly experience the reality that life’s not fair, it’s nice to have The Fortress. However, as I indicated, it might be a nice place to visit, but we sure don’t want to live there.