The Wrong Way to Catch a Bus

What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgements about these things. - Epictetus

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. -  Seneca

You have power over your mind not outside events, realize this and you will find strength. - Seneca

Warning: 

This post contains disturbing content regarding suicide. The content may not be suitable for all readers. 

My personal mental health journey begins .... 

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I have lived a Blessed Life! A healthy family. A dream-career filled with accolades and awards. Amazing friends whom I would die for. Overcoming a terminal illness in March of 1996, walking away from airplane "incidents" that could have killed me and a number of other things that have caused many people to tell me how "lucky" or "God-blessed" I am.

My career has led me from a small town in Newfoundland to a Wall St. career, a company IPO plus other business successes, and hunting bad guys for various government entities in multiple countries.

I've been blessed to be able to entertain side gigs like paying for the court costs for battered women and supporting them in other ways.

Yes - I have it all.

Sure, there were some personal relationships that had run aground recently; surprisingly, abruptly and painfully. But this is Life, isn't it?

And yes, there were some concerns that my elevated white blood cell count was taking me down the same place where I was in March of 1996 when, at the time, I was told that I had three months to live.

But again, that's Life. We take the good and the bad in stride. We suck it up.

Especially if you're a man.

From the outside looking in, you would see a successful, confident, educated, businessman and community advocate.

Catching the Bus My Way

On Tuesday of this week, I was walking down the street in Calgary and I decided to catch a bus.

No - not the usual way at the bus stop like most of you. I wanted to step in front of it. 

But at least I had the wherewithal to pause and wonder how I could make it look like an accident. 

For some reason, that was really important to me.

I also had the wherewithal to wonder what the impact of this would have on the driver, scarring him for Life. I also took a moment to think about my family, my friends and colleagues. And after this "processing", which happened in seconds, I contemplated "catching" the bus anyway. 

I stepped to the side of the street, paused and then waved to the driver as he drove by and he waved back.

And then I reached out to the Calgary Mental Health Help Line, saving both myself and the driver from a more complicated ending that would have tied us together for the rest of his Life.

I realized at that moment that I didn't remember any of my day nor could I remember anything I was supposed to be working on. I had run to the end of my journey, a journey that was not a marathon or two but rather, thousands of 100-meter dashes and I was too tired to continue. 

I never slowed down until the day I decided those sprints would stop by my hand.

I was afraid. I had never thought anything like this in my Life and here I was in tears, shamefully admitting that I couldn't go forward. While chatting with Luke, the person on the other end of the help line, I notified some family and close friends that I was safe but was on the phone with someone who was saving my Life.

Luke was amazing. He was calm and guided me through a conversation that I never thought I would have with anybody. I have saved a number of people from suicide and yet here I was using "that shameful word to describe me". We talked about my career, especially in recent years with lots of photos of mutilated bodies, and he expressed empathy and concern for someone who could endure such punishment for so long. I felt love from Luke, a stranger, which is what I needed at that moment. 

Meanwhile, my friends and family whom I scared the bejesus out of were all reaching out like crazy.

Luke gave me a lot of resources to explore, assured himself that I was ok and that I would be with other people and then made a promise to reconnect with me this week.

And so the moment passed ..... or so I thought.

I've Done All the Right Things

My Life has always been high-pressured. To compensate, I released the energy through service to others. I am an avid Stoic philosophy fan. I study Buddhism and the Tao and practice breathing and meditation techniques. I try to exercise regularly although I haven't been behaving in recent weeks. I have my faith in a Higher Authority and pray regularly.

So I'm doing everything properly.

Right?

Not really.

My clever mind had found ways to hide a growing problem in my psyche from all of these helpful tools and techniques. It was like a computer virus that was designed to hide itself from various anti-virus technology.

I discovered that I was an imposter to myself and had been for decades despite my success in the outside world.

I realized that the persona (or facade) that I had projected to others for decades was in fact not the way I saw myself at all and every time I executed something towards another success, the schism in my brain that fought to see myself as successful grew wider.

On Tuesday of this week, my brain tore itself in half under the strain.

Thinking Through my History

As I explored the resources that I had been provided with by Luke and continued my own personal Tao exploration (including the excellent and Life-changing book, The Tao of Inner Peace, by Diane Dreher), something else horrific came up.

Where to start ... My father was (and still is) a loving and hard-working man who raised 4 kids who themselves went on to meaningful careers. He was magic. Everything he touched was always the highest quality and every problem he solved seemed to be amazing to everyone. He also solved problems on his own, never needing the help of anyone. He didn't push his level of perfectionism on us kids but we absorbed it through observation. 

The lesson: We solve our own problems and persevere as long as it takes to get things done. No matter what.

My mother was (and still is) a loving and nurturing woman who, in her younger years, had an occasional outburst of anger that could pierce the heart of a young child. I don't blame her at all. How she and my father kept things moving for all of us on the small salary he earned in the 1970s still escapes me.

My childhood was complicated. I was bullied from Grade 1 right up through my Senior Year in High School. 

In elementary school, it was Cliff, someone who finally some years ago got his Life together but was killed in a tragic highway accident. Barry replaced him in Junior High, hunting me ruthlessly and relentlessly before and after school and during recess and lunch. In High School, I had an ever-capable group of damaged young men who would hold me on the floor and mock rape me every week in the locker room before gym class. 

I have spoken to a number of them over the years since High School but none of them have ever brought it up or apologized for it. Paul, Randy, Stewart, Steve, Tony and others likely forgot or never cared to know the impact on me. While I thought I had moved past it, the fact that it came up so strongly this week told me that I hadn't moved passed it. The upside was that I often hid from them in the library, greatly expanding my reading repertoire.

I never told anyone back then. As the smallest kid in the class, I was terrified of my bullies and I was ashamed of what they were doing to me. 

Speaking to some of my friends in the years since, I have discovered that I wasn't the only victim of these miscreants.

And not to leave anyone out, Jeff M. who, while asking me to deliver newspapers with him when I was 7, took me a LONG way from the paper route and offered me a nickel if I would let him show me what a "screw" was. He was insistent. I fled.

And then there was the stranger who thought it was a clever idea to share his stiff penis with me on the day of my First Holy Communion while inviting me to touch and kiss it. I fled again, much to his disappointment. So much for God.

The Stage Was Set

So, as I left High School, the stage had been set. My sense of self had been pummeled to zero as I set off to launch a career.

In my early Computer Science years, I was blessed. I had a natural gift for technology and mathematics in the 1980s and I had a strong memory that was later tested and identified to be near-hyperthymesiac.  This means that I have a VERY strong autobiographical recall of events including the senses associated with the memories, a gift that continues to this day. It is a mixed blessing.

These blessings gave me a fast track to success. I architected the first PC-based insurance system in Canada in the early 80s at the age of 17. Success in the technology industry came quickly and easily and soon my career took me from Newfoundland to New York City via Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

But I had a problem. I had a ticking time bomb inside me.

I had been convinced through my early years that I wasn't worthy of anything and that anything I did did not measure up to anyone's standards.

And yet, here I am, generating success easily and without effort, oftentimes generating many multiples of quality over my peers because it seemed the right thing to do. Meanwhile, half of my brain kept yelling, "It is impossible to be creating this success."

But I was running 100-meter dashes and not marathons and so I never took the time to slow down to listen to the argument going on inside my brain.

This was my modus operandi through my years of building companies, helping other people build companies and serving others.

The schism in my brain from imposter syndrome, what I was producing vs. what I thought I should have been capable of producing (extraordinarily little), grew. 

But my resilience, taught to me by my parents and strengthened (I thought) by surviving the events of my childhood, never allowed me to feel that anything was wrong and I continued to be productive for decades.

But We Have Limits

Fast forward to this week.

I had noticed that my performance had started to lag in recent weeks. 

My concentration for solving problems wasn't as sharp. 

I'm an avid reader and suddenly I couldn't read at all. 

I was experiencing some chronic fatigue but just assumed it was the workload. 

I was having trouble getting through my routine of the day but I blamed it on the fatigue. 

Everything had a good reason as far as I was concerned and I somehow knew it would pass.

And then came the concern over my white blood cell count and I was nervous about it, reflecting on my last dance with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I played it down with people I knew but I was afraid. 

I'm a man - I can deal with it if I need to.

I moved closer to the edge but didn't know it.

The hematuria didn't help (blood in the urine).

Coughing up blood was also a little problematic but I was sure it had an explanation.

And then came a few personal relationship explosions.

And I teetered on the edge of a precipice but didn't realize how close I was.

Again, I'm a man. Pre-GPS, we men rarely asked for driving directions until we were forced to. 

When I was sick in March of 1996, I had had symptoms for over a year before finally going to a doctor and being scolded, "if only you had come in earlier". I only went in because my lymph nodes were so swollen that I couldn't walk properly.

The powder keg sat, primed for ignition. I had some routine stuff to take care of for my family. Small, innocuous things. Routine things that were so passé that they didn't even appear on my calendar. 

Suddenly, the fuse of the powder keg was lit. I don't even know what the specific trigger was that lit it.

When it detonated, my brain, long the gift that I thanked God for, shredded. And minutes later, I was speaking to Luke. 

The man I was, who had carried or served thousands of people over the years and who had always put everyone else first had unplugged and I couldn't have jump started my brain if I had run 10 million volts through my head.

And equally alarming to me, I didn't care.

And Now the Real Journey Begins

As a man, I thought I was doing all the right things:

• Leading stoically.
• Pushing through adversity because that's what men do.
• Absorbing difficulty in silence because only weak men signal that they are in trouble.
• Solving my own problems since real men believe that if you want it done right, you do it yourself.
• Never checking in with myself because I didn't have time.
• Serving others before taking care of myself, forgetting that there is NEVER an end to the list of people who need help or who will use me for their own needs.
• Ignoring warning signs since they can always be addressed later.
• Defining Life success using my career and results as the gauge, in defiance of what I should have been learning from the copious texts that I was reading.
• Never asking for help because real men don't do that anyway.

In fact, I wasn't doing anything properly and not only did I suffer, I inadvertently created suffering in others around me. Some would be kind and say that's not the case. Some wouldn't be so kind. My only ask is to be gentle with me. Even we big, tough, successful (by someone's definition) guys who have it all together may not have it all together.

According to my great friend, Leonard (an amazing therapist and author - I mention one of his books further down), I had accumulated a lot of difficult thoughts (especially from work) without processing them. With the right trigger, my brain reacted as if a dam had burst (hence the term 'emotional flooding') and my brain was overloaded trying to process years of difficult things all at once, mentally and emotionally paralyzing me.

Sure, I've got some physical health issues to deal with and I will deal with them but the mental health issues to me seem more insidious, being invisible as they are and often seemingly not dangerous until it's too late.

If you're a father, reach out to your kids and ask them how they are doing.

If you're a brother, call your siblings and ask them if they need help.

If your parents or grandparents are still with you, reach out to them more often to see if they need anything. 

Sometimes your time is enough.

Reach out to a friend to say hi. They might be desperately waiting to hear from anyone.

And while depression and other things can overrun men and women, I can only speak from the context of a man.

If you're a man and you haven't gotten over your manliness, your so-called strength, your sense of self that doesn't need help and all of that bullshit that we as men have been told defines us, I would beg you to pause and reflect. I know I have a lot of work to do and while I've told people for years to "put their mask on first", I forgot to put mine on at all. That changes moving forward.

Find resources that help you, like Diane's book that I mentioned earlier. 

Read great books like Leonard Szymczak's book Power Tools for Men: A Blueprint for Healthy Masculinity. Join a men's support group.

Find someone to talk to.  Someone who will listen without judging. Call me if you have to.

Call anyone.

Otherwise, you might be catching a bus and you will be denying the world of the great man that you are and the great value that you bring to the world.

And if you are already on the journey to healing, please reach out to those who might be struggling.

We are all on this journey together.

With love,

Harry

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This is part 1 of a series where I share my journey towards stronger mental health after deciding that I didn't want to live any more.

The entire series can be found here:

• The Wrong Way to Catch a Bus
• Life: Choices and Possibilities
• Life: Self-Reliance and Courage
• Life: Forgiveness
• Life: Creating Space
• Life: A Question of Free Will
• Life: Who Will Bell the Cat?
• Life: The Significance of the Insignificant
• Life: Unconditional Gratitude - Embracing a Heart of Thankfulness
• Life: The Thing That Doesn't Kill Us ...
  

There is a power that comes from sharing difficult things.

We live, love, lift and learn together.