The toothache: postscript

My last post seemed to have struck a chord with some folks. Can’t say I’m surprised. Generally, when something is emotional for me to write, it seems to find an audience that can relate… and, with this being the internet, it also finds an audience that can’t.

On Twitter and elsewhere, no matter how personal a post was, I don’t read all of the comments. Doing so would be like playing Russian roulette. The more you read, the more certain it is that you are going to come across a reply that sucks or pushes your buttons or begs for a response.

Here, I read all of the replies… or try to at least. The universe here is self-selecting… for now, at least… the population is generally people who have opted into reading what I write so it is, by nature, a friendlier room than Twitter for example. Here, I don’t have to brace to read the replies.

However, anytime you get enough humans talking, there are going to be things said that just tweak you in a way you don’t like and don’t really want to let pass.

There were a few of those in the response to my last entry. To be honest, I can’t remember whether they were under my posting of the link to “The Toothache” on Twitter, Post, Instagram, etc. or were comments here and the comments themselves aren’t the issue. They weren’t mean or intended to be cutting, they just… begged for a postscript.

The first thing I wanted to note was that there was a reason why I talked about having had early career success and lots of time and exposure to successful business people. It wasn’t because I wanted to extol some virtue at having eschewed that world later or lament my fortune at having had and then lost a comfortable life.

I introduced it because, in my experience, a lot of people who grew up solidly middle class or better have no real firsthand experrience with real, extended hardship either in their own lives or in the lives of people close to them. Even if someone they know falls into hardship, more often than not, that doesn’t bring them closer to seeing it up close; it takes them farther away from seeing that friend at all.

The person falls out of the social circle and even longstanding events that cost money. It starts with them declining (with or without an excuse) and then reaches a point where them coming isn’t even discussed anymore.

They don’t ask and they aren’t asked. The assumption is that they’d probably say no… and the truth is, they absolutely would.

Within the group they fell out, the remaining members speak of them and whatever pulled them out of the circle as if it was a kind of death.

“Did you hear about…”

“Yeah, sounded like they weren’t doing great last I talked to them…”

It isn’t intentional. It just… is.

I have been on both sides of that.

Yesterday, I found out that someone who had been an attendee in my friends’ regular get-togethers had died. He was 62. It is unclear how he died and no one in the group was in close enough contact to have any idea how to even find out.

The deceased had fallen out of the group years ago. He hadn’t been all that connected to begin with, so his slipping away didn’t make huge ripples. In this years since, there were hushed “Did you hear abouts” among the group though… He had apparently spiraled down into serious alcoholism. As either a cause or effect of that, he had lost his marriage, his job - and then other jobs - and with them, his connections to the social friends he used to meet once a month for a nice dinner.

I was one of the founding members of that little group. Originally, there had been four of us. Once a month for two decades, we met without excuse or exception for dinner. Over time, we added others to the tradition until it was a fairly large crew with a handful of reliable regulars and others who appeared only sometimes.

Per all of the above and as a result of my own “Did you hear about…,” I slipped out of that tradition… and then out of many of the relationships that relied on it for the opportunity to see each other and talk.

My own spiraling down from a professional success to a single parent asphyxiated by stress and struggle did nothing to bring my friends closer to understanding what that was like… just like our fellow monthly attendee’s spiraling down into ruinous addiction did nothing to even inform us about how quickly and completely a life could devolve like that.

So, I offered the upfront stuff in “The Toothache” about having been at a comfortable Point A long before the eventual low of my Point B because, in my opinion, even when it is someone we know or work with or are friends with, we tend to see and hear little as one of the other boats is drifting out of the harbor and is then… gone.

I also thought it was important to lead with because, in my experience, we are conditioned to see plummeting into not getting by as something anomalous and avoidable that may not be all someone’s fault but was certainly not entirely out of their control…

…as if, that person you used to work with who you heard had been forced into bankruptcy or lost their house or had been forced to move away had made at least some set of causative errors or bad decisions.

The subtext is that the bottom is populated by only people who are, at least partially, reaping what they had sowed for themselves.

And that was one of the themes in a couple of the comments related to my post.

The gist was that I could have merely opted to take a job like the one I had mentioned leaving and then I have never been 52-years old with an abscessed molar and a friend coming in on a Sunday to pull it.

While I owe no one - and I mean no one - not my friends, not people who follow me online - a full and sordid accounting of my full life, its events, and my decisions along the way, I will offer this:

After I separated, every single day, my choice was career or custody.

That was what I had available to choose between. I maintained my share of custody by being available for it. Had I not been, I would have lost it.

Single fathers don’t see their kids seven days a week because the court system just likes them and thinks they are nice. They see them that often only if there is some vital and important reason why they should and if they are available to have them.

For my first five years of separation, I worked 70-80 hours a week. All of them came in the window when my son was in daycare or was asleep. I would put him to bed at 7 or 8 or 9 and then work until 2.

That is how I kept custody. By doing whatever I had to do to be available for it.

My former job had me on the road to the tune of 100 flights a year some years. The very first person to know I was separating was the bartender in the little bar in a hotel in Seattle. I had been practically living their five days a week on business for months. One night, I came in without my ring on. They noticed. They knew before my friends, before my mother.

There was no job in my former industry that would not have cost me custody.

And having now offered a bit more that was neither owed nor is complete even now, here is the point of this:

When someone tells you that their life got hard or unmanageable or impossible, your choice is to either believe them or not. You are entitled to no transcript and are owed no access to the details.

If you need to review the full details of someone else’s life before you believe they had it as hard as they said they did, you are telegraphing that you think they might be either lying, deserving, or just weak.

And I can say with absolute and complete certainty, there isn’t a single person who thinks that way who hasn’t lived a life more privileged by good fortune than they realize. Invariably, they have had some discomforts and setbacks which they categorize as hardships and they will absolutely list them off for you as if they are equivalent and are proof that “everyone goes through things” and they too “have a story”.

But when you peel back the curtain and look closer at their “I didn’t have it easy either’s” their hardship was transient. It was a moment or short period when life sucked (or maybe even sucked a whole lot) but wasn’t fundamentally changed in a lasting way that endured or worsened beyond their control or even ability to foresee.

They hadn’t gotten a phone call that changed their life for the worse forever. They had been a young parent who had to walk to the store because they couldn’t fix their car or something. And in their mind, since that is “struggle” and they got through it and then past it, surely, all struggle must be the same and work that way… unless someone just isn’t smart enough or good enough or strong enough to soldier on as they did.

And that is one of most fundamental outages in how we subconsciously think about hardship, struggle, poverty that I wanted to open up for people to maybe see in a different way.

When, in your own lived experience, the worst things you’ve ever gone through or seen someone close to you go through are episodic, transient, passing, it is easy to see all hardship as just short-term problems afflicting people who is, for some reason, failing to solve them.

The irony… and it is one heck of an irony… is that while that perspective comes from someone truly thinking they know what it means to struggle, the things they list off as their own hardships are things the people they judge could have done standing on their heads… and probably did somewhere in the midst of even worse.

I went through a lot of shit. Some things were downstream consequences of my own choices. Some were unrelated to me. Some were predictable. Most were not.

My list is not the worst in the world. Worse than some. Not as bad as others.

But misery is not an Olympic event. No one needs to earn a gold medal in hardship to prove they have been sufficiently “hard done by” (as my late British mother-in-law would say) to have bottomed out.

We are all one phone call away from our lives coming apart at the seams. We are all - every one of us - just one single domino away from a cascade over months or years that pulls all of the gravel from under our feet.

When someone says that happened to them, you can believe them or not.

If your impulse is to assume they could have just managed through it better or made better choices, I congratulate you on a life lived without that having ever been you.

That is something to celebrate.

Celebrate it with humility.