You Are Loved

I had originally planned to write on a completely different topic today. Something, though, came over me this week as I was reflecting on a few conversations I’ve had recently. Amongst a group of friends, I heard a statement in passing that rang very true to me in my not too distant past. The statement came out so nonchalantly, that it hardly made the impact that I think it deserved. My friend very succinctly said, “even when I’m with my friends and those I love, I’m lonely”. Have you ever felt this? I have. I’ve battled depression of different sorts for much of my life. I apologize ahead of time if you hope that I will have a solution for you, if this is something that you also endure. I don’t. Instead, I want to share with you some perspectives I’ve gained through my separate bouts with both loneliness and depression, and to simply express that you aren’t alone. There have been three distinct moments in my life, where I have failed so epically that I couldn’t stand the sight of myself. When I doubted if I was half the man I pretended to be, and when I felt like I completely lost the thing that I had always dreamt I would achieve.

My primary schooling was very difficult for me. When I first enrolled in elementary school after having moved to San Antonio, I struggled with my English and spent many a sleepless night studying just to pass. I had never really learned English when I lived in Norway. Outside of a few lessons I received in the Norwegian kindergarten I attended and through listening to my parents speaking at home, this was all the English I had absorbed. I can specifically remember one of my early days in the first grade, when each student was instructed to read a paragraph aloud in class from some random textbook. I dreaded my turn, and would count the students before me, and skip ahead just so I could rehearse my paragraph, while still trying to follow along with the class. I quickly lost the place in the paragraph that one student was reading because he happened to pronounce the word “the” as “tha”. I frantically searched the paragraph for “tha” and couldn’t find it, and was certain that I had completely misunderstood a word in the reading. I couldn’t let it go, I was completely lost. After a few paragraphs went by, I had to raise my hand to ask, in what would end up being, the dumbest question any of my peers had ever heard. “Mrs. Evans, I can’t find the word tha anywhere.” Raucous laughter ensued, which only reinforced for me the isolation I already felt. After the first grade I gained a better handle on the American vernacular and continued on like most kids. By the time I entered middle school, excelling academically was no longer my issue…puberty was. Or, at least, my body’s unwillingness to keep pace with the rest of the boys. I was a short kid, with ridiculous curls that presented more like cowlicks. I only exasperated my poor choice of hairstyle by opting to split my hair down the middle and gel the ever loving hell out of it. This was the style at that school, so don’t judge me too harshly, but I looked more like I was trying to grow wings out of the side of my head than I did the slick gangster I idolized at the time. This didn’t lend me to being the popular kid at school, probably not hard to guess. I withstood the “bullying” as best I could, and save from a few friends, I was relatively ostracized. When it came to transitioning to high school, I had the choice of following my tormentors to the school that my district would have funneled me into or attend a magnet program on a completely separate campus. I opted for the latter. Luckily, I finally hit my growth spurt. Save from some terrible growing pains in my legs, I finally was as everyone else. No longer the short kid, and through some great help from a mother of my little brother’s friend, I finally had a hair cut that didn’t make me look completely ridiculous. For the first time in my life, girls were taking notice of me and I was part of the “in” crowd. Scholastically, I wasn’t terrible either. High school, as I remember it, was a dream. When I graduated, I received multiple superlatives, had scholarship offers, and truly felt like the world was my oyster. Don’t be confused though, my high school popularity had definitely gotten to my head. As I was deciding which University to attend, I judged them by the most important criteria I could think of. Which school was the biggest party school? The end result of this is relatively obvious. After a serious case of Bronchitis, where my left lung was completely filled with fluid, a loss of 30 pounds, and a gran maul seizure resulting in biting off both sides of my tongue, my career at university ended. I left the University of Colorado at Boulder with a whopping .25 GPA. Everyone, especially my parents, had such high expectations for me. Even as I write this, my eyes are welling up with the disappointment that I apparently still feel today. I was supposed to be somebody that mattered. I had potential, and like many, I had squandered it before I could ever have it realized. My sense of being was downgraded, and I felt as though I had reaped what I had sown.

I moved back to Texas and managed to right the ship a bit. Lowering my expectations for myself, I found a lane that suited me for a time. I toiled through some odds and ends jobs, fulfilling what I believed would result in the mundane blue collar life I felt I deserved. I was content with this. Landscaping was the field I found myself most suited. Working with my hands gave a certain amount of satisfaction I hadn’t found elsewhere. My parents wanted more for me than the ditch digging life they saw me seeking. It was my father’s company where I worked and one day my parents’ aspirations for me and my own came to a head. My father fired me, with the best of intentions, and gave me the two options of either military service or returning to school. Thus, I found myself in the United States Air Force. My technical description was an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist, specializing in Arabic, which later transitioned to being a Tactical Support Operator (sounds way more tactical than it actually was). After I became qualified in my field I volunteered to augment the Army and supported special operations forces in finding and excising, either through capture or kinetic strike, high valued individuals in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was damn good at my job. I remember viscerally my first kinetic strike. For my non military folks, this simply means dropping bombs on people. My job specifically, was to find and correlate with a camera operator these high valued targets and, if fidelity was confirmed, the command would either authorize a night raid or a strike. On this particular day, I correlated multiple individuals in a remote area. The men were surrounding a truck, and command authorized an F-16 to prosecute the targets. When the ordnance detonated and scattered these men, or at least what remained of them, in every direction, my reaction surprised me. Like a jubilant child I leapt out of my seat on the plane and let out a shriek of glee that I can’t even begin to describe nor repeat. I had finally executed my job to perfection from beginning to end. I still have remorse for how joyful I felt about an act that resulted in so many men dying. I participated in hundreds of actions like these in my last few years in the Air Force. When I decided to forgo my reenlistment and went home to San Antonio, a new type of loneliness and despair came over me. Having attended many a memorial service, during my times overseas, when we had lost operators and soldiers, I never felt I had the right to use the VA. Those men had seen real combat, suffered real trauma, and who was I to take from a pot that I felt belonged to them? It took years, and the love of my ex wife, before I ever had any kind of handle on what I went through and how to healthily express it. To the day I cry during Disney movies. Any type of hero archetype film will bring me to tears. I always wanted to be a hero. With the handling of those conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, over multiple administrations, I still wrestle with what we did. Was I the hero or was I the villain?

The family I grew up in was large. I have a younger brother and many cousins. Kids have always been a big mainstay in my family, so it’s not hard to imagine that I’ve always wanted to be a father. Due to a multitude of influences on me when I was younger, I never matured enough to be a good partner. I have not dated seriously more than a handful of women, and even that may be overestimation. When I married my ex wife, though, I thought I had finally figured it out. I may have been in my thirties, but I was finally on the path to becoming the father and husband I always wanted to be. For the sake of the privacy of my ex wife I won’t discuss the things that happened during my marriage, but in 2022 we divorced childless. This is an event that I struggle to put into words. The loss of my honor based on the promise that I would love and honor her through sickness and in health until death do us part, and the opportunity for the family I always wanted to have, still leaves me questioning myself today. This has rocked me to the core of who I am. It destroyed every incentive structure I had ever developed in my life. I had, even at times poorly, strived toward the goal of family and everything I did, I did with that purpose in mind. Now, as I’m about to crest forty years of age I recognize that the percentage chance of me realizing that dream is greatly diminished. If I’m not to be a father, then who am I supposed to be? What is my purpose? These are questions I still wrestle with today and, to be honest, I don’t have solid answers. I believe that I have something to contribute, and perhaps that’s why I write this blog every week. Some kind of archive of my thoughts, that if at all helpful for even one person, then perhaps I’ve done something good. I don’t know, I suppose it’s just my hope.

I tell you these stories so that I can arrive here, at this point in this blog. These events have successively destroyed who I believed I was at each of their times. Rebuilding myself has been difficult. As I wrote in the beginning, I have no solutions for you, rather some remedies that have helped me. The first remedy I have, is love. I am loved. My family loves me and supports me mercilessly. I have vetted my friends rigorously, and love them as much as they love me. They have been the friends, that without remorse have told me when I’m failing. Unapologetically telling me, “Phil, you’re fucking up”. If you don’t have friends like these, I hope you find some and become that friend in return. Tell those close to you that you love them, they’ll respond in kind and the joy in hearing those words is healing in and of themselves. Numbing the pain away with alcohol, or your substance of choice, only prolongs the anguish. Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m as guilty of that as anyone. It takes courage to face the worst about ourselves, but if you can muster it you will crawl out of that hole faster. The final remedy that has helped me is sunshine and some physical exertion. It’s surprising to me the amount of energy I’ve wasted over analyzing my issues and explaining away my problems. Being outside and getting a good sweat clears the mind of the cob webs, and brings into focus the things that are most important. In closing, all I want to say is this. To my family, to my friends, and to any of you on the opposite side of this screen from me, I love you and you are not alone.