Lightening the Load

Reflections on setting yourself free

Unsplash/Praswin Prakashan

Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time

— Paul McCartney and John Lennon, 1969

If you are a regular reader of Coffey Grounds, you know that we typically focus on people/places/things that we think will make for a good read. Today I want to change it up. Today, at the risk of having my esteemed readers consider me deeply neurotic, I want to write about the noise in my head.

Sometimes the noise is faintly audible and only mildly annoying, like the music you get when somebody has you on hold. Other times it’s like standing near a speaker at a heavy-metal concert, an ear-splitting cacophony that you can’t get to stop.

What’s the noise about? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Most often, my noise is fueled by regret and guilt, or as they say in 12-step programs, by ‘shoulding’ on myself. I should’ve been more present when our kids were young. I should’ve been a better husband and father. I should’ve learned construction so I could’ve built a deck in the back of our house.

More?

I should’ve finished that young-adult novel I started 40 years ago. I should’ve been more relaxed when we’d go on our annual family retreat to the coast of Maine, instead of obsessing about the book I had to write. I had several informal job interviews with The New York Times over the years. I should’ve believed in myself more and pushed harder to land that job, because, well, it was The New York Times.

Whatever manifestation the ‘shoulding’ would take, the common thread was that I was not enough. I would’ve published the novel if I’d had the courage to take the risk. Maybe I would’ve gotten hired by The Times if I felt worthy enough to really go for it. Not feeling worthy was the whole problem.

I’d look at myself a dozen different ways, and I’d come up short in every instance. I’d read other writers and think, “They are so much better than me.” I’d look at the father playing with a bunch of kids at his little boy’s birthday party over the back fence and think, “He’s having much more fun than I had at my kids’ birthday parties. Almost 15 years ago, I collaborated with former major-league pitcher R.A. Dickey on his memoir. On my last pass through the manuscript before publication, I honestly believed that it was unpublishable — that the editor would pull the plug on it and tell me what a mistake it was to sign up the book in the first place.

The book, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, made the bestseller list. In a review in Sports Illustrated, Jon Wertheim said it was one of the best nonfiction baseball books since Ball Four. I don’t say this to brag. I say it to underscore just how distorted the noise can be.

Over the years, I’ve perfected the art of self-criticism. And not just generic, I-probably-could’ve-done-better self-criticism. No. My specialty was, and sometimes still is, harsh self-criticism, the sort that feels like Nazi stormtroopers are marching through your head.

It’s no mystery to me where the Nazis, and indeed, all the noise, come from. I grew up in an alcoholic home. It was loud and sometimes violent, and you never knew what was going to happen next. We lived in a handsome, upper-middle-class home in a lovely neighborhood. It was on an acre of land with a quality basketball court in the driveway and a pitcher’s mound in the backyard, my two favorite retreats when things got crazy. I remember walking home from the bus stop, rounding the bend, looking at the house from the street and the big picture window in the living room and thinking, “If people only knew the insane things that go on inside that place . . . .”

I haven’t lived in that house for more than a half-century, but what the late, great songwriter John Prine called “childhood souvenirs” don’t want to leave. When you are a kid living with alcoholism, you learn survival techniques that may help you in the moment but don’t do you any favors later in life. The big one for me was learning to not feel, to set the spigot of emotions off because it hurts too much when it is on. I became quite adept at going numb. It helped, but it did nothing to prevent the souvenirs that are hallmarks of children who grow up the way I did. You live with the shameful secret of where you are from. You live with guilt. You guess at what normal is, and even though the drinking isn’t your fault, you subconsciously feel as though it is. You learn to beat yourself up and judge yourself without mercy.

None of this is fun, but here’s the good news: I don’t live there anymore. And I don’t have to listen to the noise anymore. It took years of therapy and attending meetings of Al-Anon (the support group for people who live, or have lived, with alcoholism), but I’ve come to see that I have a choice. Apologies for mixing metaphors, but I can choose to let my mind go down the same old toxic rabbit hole, because it’s deep and terribly familiar. Or I can choose not to go there at all. I can take a step back and understand that I am not a victim. Just because I have a negative thought doesn’t mean it’s true, and it doesn’t mean I have to pay attention to it. I have power. I can make choices that are self-affirming, not self-immolating. In the case of the R.A. Dickey book, I can look back now and realize how ridiculously distorted and harsh my judgment of it was.

Self-awareness is life-changing, don’t you think?

Some years back, a therapist friend said to me, “You don’t have to carry rocks in your pocket.” It made sense then and makes even more sense now. It is not a perfect process, but I’m learning that I feel a whole lot freer and lighter when I leave the rocks behind.