“Excuse me?” “Something my father said. He was old, very old at the time. I went into his room and he was sitting alone in the dark, crying. So I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘My shoes are too tight, but it doesn’t matter, because I have forgotten how to dance’. I never understood what that meant until now. My shoes are too tight and I have forgotten how to dance.”

Londo and Vir in Babylon 5, J. M. Straczynski

At five years old, my shoe size is already immaterial.

I remember my first day of kindergarten. My mom takes me into this room full of strangers… and then leaves. I cry. I bawl my eyes out.

I can remember the teacher having us all sit together in a half-circle to sing. I hate singing, so I sit there and sulk.

I see so many kids that love to sing and dance. I don’t recall ever doing either as a child. I was just too damn embarrassed.

One day while I’m in the fourth grade, the powers that be have all of us kids go down to see the music teacher so she can determine if we will be chosen for chorus class or not. Now I have absolutely no interest in being in the chorus, but that little fact doesn’t seem to concern anyone.

So I sit there in line as the children ahead of me go in behind closed doors and then come back out a few minutes later. They appear unharmed, but this does little to convince me that I’ll be so lucky. I’m going to have to sing. In front of someone. This is not good. Not good at all.

My turn comes and I’m led into the office of the music teacher. I can’t remember the details, but I do remember the impression of being expected to sing, whether I want to or not. I remember the words croaking haltingly out of my throat as I stand there before her desk with tears in my eyes.

“Mortified” does not even begin to express how I feel at this moment. I want to die. I want others to die. I want to inflict severe bodily harm. Most of all I just don’t want to be singing. This does little to improve my withdrawn nature, as I’m sure you can imagine. Years go by, and I never take a step that even resembles dance. When expected to sing, I hum, but only if in a group where my noise will be drowned out.

In high school I have only a few friends. I don’t even really fit in with the brainy geeks. I’m one of those misfits; one of the rejects. You know, the type that gets “does not fully apply himself” noted on his report card even more often than “runs with scissors”. For my group, our grades do not report how smart we are, but merely how interesting we happen to find our classes.

I feel so alone. I so desperately want to take part in life. I feel like so much is happening that is passing me by. I want to join in, but I don’t know how.

Just having a girl say “hi” to me is enough for me to withdraw into my shell and start talking a mile-a-minute about some inane thing that only I seem to be interested in. The talking is a shield, you see. As long as I talk, I can focus; I can focus on that thing which so interests me that I can forget about what I fool am. As long as I’m talking, I can feel like I’m not really there.

That can last only so long until there is no one left around willing to listen.

Things don’t change much after high school. Now I’m out on my own (relatively speaking) and sharing an apartment with a high school buddy. I’m still feeling very much alone except for my few friends, my lifelines.

There’s still no girl. Why can’t I find someone? Why can’t I find someone I can love and who will love me? Is it really supposed to be this hard? I see so many couples, so many happy people. How the hell? How the hell do they do it? I want to know! Why is this is so… damn… hard?!

I don’t find the answer to that for several more years, but the seed has been planted. The journey begins with a night of desperate boredom watching late-night television. It begins with, of all things, an infomercial.

---

This is pathetic. I can’t believe I’m watching this. I hate infomercials. I am such a loser. Why aren’t I reading, or playing a video-game, or visiting a BBS?

Why aren’t I in bed?

Maybe it’s because of that prayer I learned as a kid. You know, the one that starts “If I should die before I wake…”? Very comforting, that one.

Yeah…

Take a highly imaginative kid with obsessive tendencies and a fear of the dark, and then plant the suggestion that he might not live to see the morning sunrise.

Okay, so I don’t see the sunrise anyway, if I have any kind of say in the matter, but you get the idea.

My first bedroom: I have a window near my bed. With curtains. God I hate those curtains. Oh, the color is fine: a nice navy blue; no stinky plaid patterns or anything. That isn’t the reason I hate them. I hate them because they have pleats.

“Now, what’s wrong with pleats,” you may be asking yourself. There’s nothing to get excited about, right?

That’s during the day. At night is a different story altogether.

At night, they become the Pleats of Doom™.

When I get into bed (after many futile attempts to stay up “for just a little bit longer”), there is just enough light in the room to see the curtains hanging above me and to the side a little. I make sure they aren’t directly over my head, but they are still over my bed.

I can see the curtains… but I can’t see inside them.

At this point, The Pleats of Doom™ become portals to the underworld. They harbor all sorts of nasty things: long, slithery centipedes that leave trails of acidic slime; huge spiders with barbed legs and venom dripping from their fangs; little people…

Yeah, little people; like in Gulliver’s Travels; carrying sharp pointy things. I can see them in my mind’s eye repelling down out of those Caves like a SWAT team from the bad section of Hell and landing on my bed, murder in their eyes…

I hate those curtains.

I sleep with my covers tucked in all around me. I lift my legs so that my blanket curls under my feet when I set them back down, and then I roll side to side a little so that I end up truly tucked in. My blanket gets pulled up close around my neck, too. I’d sleep with it over my head, but that would mean I couldn’t see if anything was approaching.

As an adult, it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I stopped tucking the blanket up under my feet.

Summer was always torture. Summer meant I’d have to choose between exposing myself and sweating like a pig. I’ve always wanted at least something covering me, even if it’s just a thin sheet, but there’s nothing like a nice thick blanket.

As I listen to the deep baritone that is emitted from the glowing box before me, there’s another reason I don’t want to go to bed, and I think it might be somewhat related to that prayer.

I’m afraid that if I “switch off”, I won’t be able to turn back on again.

Letterman is long over and Bob Costas has finished interviewing his latest guest on Later, so here I am stuck watching this giant in a suit tell me my life could be different.

Yeah, right.

I’ve seen him before. I’ve caught a few minutes here and there and have always switched away. There’s a reason.

I hate infomercials.

Not so much because they annoy me in and of themselves (which they do), but because if I don’t change the channel in a hurry, I’ll get hypnotized by the damn things and then spend the next half-hour staring at the screen like a brainless dolt.

I feel so used.

But, I don’t try to switch away; not this time.

Something he’s said has grabbed my attention, something that rings home with me. He’s starting to make sense.

Ohdeargodno! Not that! It’s an infomercial, for Christ’s sake! This guy’s a charlatan, right?

Right?

The half-hour is over and I sit there staring at the screen. I feel strange. I feel tingly. Instead of used, I feel enthused.

I want those tapes.

Okay, I’m not spending that kind of money on something that’s advertised on late night TV. No way, no how.

But he did make sense.

Damn.

A thought strikes me, and I smile. I feel both calm and excited at the same time, as I make my way to bed.

I have a plan!

---

I am standing at the entrance of Walden Books in Eastview Mall.

The Gates of Heaven.

It’s nowhere near the size of the super-stores we have around nowadays, like Borders and Barnes & Noble. No matter. They have books I haven’t read yet. That’s good enough for me.

To this day, the words “Walden Books” induce a smile infused with fond memories. I love to read, you see. I also have this strange compulsion to own the books I read. I’ve taken a few books out of the library, and I’ve borrowed one here and there from friends, but by and large, I own what I read.

I own a lot of books.

Walden Books has a lot of my money. It was a happy day when they came out with their frequent-buyers-club card.

I enter and head for the “Self Improvement” section looking down at the piece of paper in my hand. There is a name written on it:

“Anthony Robbins”

And below that…

“Awaken the Giant Within”

I don’t really need to look at the paper. I know what it says. I wrote it. But that’s another story.

I find the book on the shelf and pick it up. It’s a hardcover. Drat. $22. Well, it’s cheaper than the tapes…

There’s an earlier book by him there also. It’s in paperback and therefore cheaper.

Yeah, but it’s also older. The newer one would be the most up-to-date.

Whatever that means.

Flipping through the book, I find a printed card. It has the name of a local Anthony Robbins and Associates franchise. Hm… That didn’t come from the publisher. Someone must have come in and tucked it in there.

Of course, I have to look and see if the other books have the cards in them, too… Aw, what the heck. I decide to take it as a sign and buy the book.

I head home, wondering if I just blew twenty-plus clams on snake oil.

(Here’s an example of just how weird my life has gotten: Just a few hours before writing this, I discovered that a friend I recently made is probably the very person that put that card in the book I bought a decade ago.) *cue spooky music*

---

I’m in my element. I’m reading!

While don’t tend to do well in classes, especially the ones where I’m expected to just sit and listen, I do excel at self-learning.

Give me access to a few books, or now an Internet connection, and I’ll have working knowledge on a subject in a very short time.

If I have an interest in it, that is.

I became interested in computers when my dad bought the family and Apple ][e the one summer while I was in junior high. I went to town learning everything I could about it. I taught myself BASIC, played with Assembly Language for a week or two, then got bored and went on to Pascal.

Things kind of blossomed from there.

More than fifteen years after I did my fiddling with Assembly, I was asked to look at some code intended for a device that exposes digital images back onto film. (They used the resulting production model in the making of the movie Batman & Robin.) Needless to say, I was a little rusty.

But I did find the bug.

I’ve done the same kind of thing with auto-mechanics and photography.

Photography is an interesting example. I’ve been into making pictures for a several years now, and have been published and gained a little recognition. I’ve found classes that have interested me and books that have contained knowledge that is new to me.

Until now.

There’s still plenty of book knowledge out there for me to learn, but I’m not applying everything I already know, so reading another book isn’t going to help me right now. For me to get better, I need to go out and shoot some more pictures. A lot of them.

I need practice.

This leads me to the bane of my existence: practicing sucks.

I’ll repeat that. There’s going to be a quiz later.

Practicing sucks.

Or maybe I should say, I suck at practicing. At any rate, I do not like it, and I don’t end up doing it.

I played trumpet for five years while I was in school. I’ve always wanted to be able to play a musical instrument well. Mind you, I said “well”. I can do without the long part where you sound like a wounded elephant that precedes it.

Even after five years, I stink. I don’t mean, “Was that the dog?” I’m talking the dog is already dead and everyone that’s left conscious is running for the exits.

My poor music teacher: He asks me, “Did you practice this week?”
“Um, yeah.”
“How long.”
“Ten minutes… on Tuesday, I think.”

About four years ago, I buy a cornet off of e-Bay. I really want to be able to play an instrument. Maybe if I get really focused I can manage to swing it before lose interest again. I buy the cornet. I buy a really cool mute that makes it difficult to hear the instrument even in the next room, but it has the stethoscope attachment on the end so that the player can hear the horn almost as if there was no mute in. I get it cleaned and start playing around with the scales that I can remember. I order a lesson kit from on-line.

While waiting for it to arrive, I pull the instrument out a few times to play through the scales. I have somewhat of an embouchure even after all these years, but I still suck. Of course I do.

Somewhere along the line, the cornet case becomes a piece of furniture.

I pulled it out a few weeks ago, first time this year, to show a friend the “really cool mute”.

This happens with my martial arts and meditative training, too. I have a fair amount of book knowledge about the various style and their strengths and weaknesses, their teachings and philosophies. But have lasted less than a year at everything I’ve taken. Sometimes much less.

Okay, so I’m reading. I’m happy! This is a really good idea. I can decide if I want to spend the cash on the tapes based upon how helpful the book turns out to be. If it stinks… well, then I’m out less than $25 and a little bit of time.

I’m breezing along, absorbing what he’s written and liking it! He’s making a lot of sense.

Wow.

And then it happens. The part we all loathe and hate.

Yes… An exercise.

And not just any exercise. This one requires you to think. This isn’t “add 2 + 2″, it’s “Make a list of your Disempowering Beliefs and of your Empowering Beliefs.” Great. I’ve got to go digging in the muck. And he wants me to spend at least ten minutes on them? Uh, riiiight. I’ll come back to that later. I’d much rather read.

In the first line on the next page, he asks if we really did it.

“Uh, no.”

It’s a real testament to the power of a Catholic upbringing that I actually feel immense guilt over this.

I think about it a minute. I bought this book for a reason. If I want to get something out of it, I’d better play along.

I do the exercise.

Okay, I’m not happy about it, I grit my teeth, I wrack my brains, but I come up with the two lists.

I go on. He starts talking about the lists. I now have something to refer to: actual examples. Okay, I’m glad I did it. In fact, I do every single one of the exercises in the book as I come to them.

This is no small feat, let me tell you, but well worth it. I actually notice some small changes in how I do things; how I think about things. I’ve begun to practice something new. Little do I realize just how long the practicing is going to go on for.

I pick up the card that I found in the book, the one with the local franchise’s phone number on it.

Normally, I would never make the call. I can ask things like “How late are you open?” because the answer is going to fall into a known set of parameters. I won’t have to think on my feet. I can ask, “Do you have [insert item here] in stock?” because I know the answer will be yes, no, or perhaps “would you like that in mauve or chartreuse?”

For this call, after my opening line, anything’s game.

I’m terrified.

I think about what I learned from the book. I think about what the exercises taught me. I ask myself if I’m going to quit now.

I pick up the phone…

I slam it back down again. What in the blue blazes am I doing? There’s going to be a real person on the other end of that line! A person with… questions. Good lord, what was I thinking?

I look at the book…

Oh, hell.
I pick up the phone.
I dial.

“Anthony Robbins and Associates.”
“Hi, um…. I’d like to… I mean… What do… um…”
…
“Canyousendmesomeinformationaboutwhatyoudo?”

---

It’s a Friday night and I am on my way to an office park on the other side of the city. Imagine that. It’s a Friday that I’m not spending at home. Not that I have a date or anything…

I look down again at the piece of paper in my hand. I know what’s written on it. I was the one that wrote it. It’s an address.

I look again.

For some reason the idea of driving past my destination and having to turn around always fills me with a panic. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with getting it right the first time. Maybe I’m just afraid that people will notice and laugh.

I didn’t say it made any sense.

I’m on my way to a three-day workshop at the Anthony Robbins and Associates franchise I had called earlier.

Why am I doing this?
Oh yeah, self-improvement.

That term always makes me think of big, warehouse-sized stores with various Borg-like body enhancements on the shelves and in bins. Need a new attitude? Buy this new chip, only $29.95! I imagine shows like This Old Body where a bearded man in a surgeon’s gown shows us how to install a new titanium-alloy femur for enhanced durability. Don’t forget the high-tensile sinews!

I’d use the term self-discovery, but that involves a whole other set of image.

After reading the book, I felt that there was enough to all this stuff that I wanted to learn more. The tapes would have been nice, but I wanted something hands-on. This was to be three days: Friday evening, all day Saturday, and most of Sunday. There was no way I could afford this.

I talked to my parents about it. They had put a chunk of change towards both of my younger brothers’ schooling, but not me. I had left before the first year was even over. Somehow I thought college was going to be different from high school. Oh it was, but not in the way that was important. That’s another story, entirely.

So they agreed to foot the bill. I’m not sure what they thought about it all, really, as I was a bit too excited to notice, but they said that if I felt that it would help me in life, they would do what they could.

‘Gads, but I love my parents.

So I’m in the parking lot, looking around for the screaming maniacs. You know the ones: the people you see in the audience on TV, jumping up and down, waving and smiling like they’ve all just won the lottery. There’s something else I should mention: Tony isn’t going to be here. That’s right, it’s not a live workshop. It’s on video-tape. The people who own the franchise are going to show it and act as facilitators.

I am such a loser.

I get out of the car and head inside. As I sign in, I notice a few others who came in before me. No manic grins. No overenthusiastic handshakes. No high-fives, even, though I suspect those will come later.

Several people are in business attire. There’s a woman who’s in that weird age bracket that is noticeably older than I am, but younger than my mom. She looks like a model. That’s all a good sign. No obvious losers.

Well, except for me.

I find a place to sit where I hope I won’t be noticed. It doesn’t work. I am approached by a rather confident looking woman who… tells me that there is some fruit and light snacks in the other room if I would like some before we get started.

Right. Food. Good.

After the snack, we go into a room with a bunch of chairs and a large television. We are going to be watching that box of glowing light a great deal this weekend, but I had no idea how many other things we were going to be doing. There are going to be exercises. There are going to be interactions. Oh yes, with people. We are going to… share.

Kill me now. Please.

I am terrified. Yet at the same time, I know that this is something, well, special. As hokey and contrived as it looks on the surface, I’ve found something that makes a difference. I’ve felt it already; that’s why I’m here. It was just a taste, but enough to know. And now I want more. Little do I know just how extensive the terrors that await me are. If I did, I’d ask for a refund right then and there.

---

Well whaddaya know.
She is a model.

And I have made a new friend.

I make several friends while I’m here, but she is the only one I see again on the “outside”, at least to any degree. Over the next couple of years we get together every so often to talk, exchange tapes, give each other support… We write a lot. I haven’t seen her in a long time now, though. I wonder what she is doing now.

It’s amazing how fast you can get close to people when you let your guard down and share all the nasty little secrets you usually keep hidden. We all did that. Funny, none of us ran screaming from the room when confronted with the horrors of another’s psyche. What we found was kinship.

That doesn’t mean it was easy.

A lot of the details are clouded by time at this point, but I will share what I remember. We watch Tony on the monitor, then we break up into pairs, or sometimes groups, and work on what we had just been taught with the help of the facilitators. She and I pair up early on. We pretty much became partners after that.

One of the things we do is take turns feeling an emotion, and letting ourselves express it with our body. The other person then matches the first person’s body language as closely as they can: posture, breathing, all that. The imitator then gets a very good idea of what the first person is feeling.
Talk about intimacy…

We split into medium-sized groups. They have us all write down ten words or ideas that we use to define love. We count how many items make it onto everyone’s list. I think the group with the most has three. The point is, if we don’t all agree on the definition of something as simple universal as love, how can we assume that everyone will use a certain word the same way as you do. We talk about perception and communication.

We break boards.

I know: technically it’s no big deal, most people can; but that’s different from actually doing it.

The weekend is packed with learning about new ways to look at the world and at ourselves. But not just looking; we lean how to change things. You often wonder, with things like this, just how long the change will last. How long does the average New Year’s resolution hold out before it is deemed “not worth it”? But this stuff can be permanent. No shittin’. If you let it, this stuff sticks. But you have to really want it.

It’s mid-day Sunday, and we are all a little bit high from all the work we’ve been doing. We’ve been through a lot; we’ve leaned a lot. Now comes the time that we bring it all together. It’s time for the big “Whammo!”

This is going to be the longest stretch of watching the Big Man on the screen out of the entire weekend. The details that I remember won’t mean much without the whole picture, but I will say he leads us through one hell of an experience. We strip away our limiting beliefs, we take our most painful memories and discharge them, ground them, so that they no longer have a hold on us

You know those smiling idiots you see on the infomercial? The ones jumping up and down, pumping their hands, and acting like… well, you know who I mean. That’s us.

I know why they are doing that, now. They haven’t suddenly lost their minds. They’ve finally found them.

I have never felt so pumped, so juiced, and so capable of taking on anything the word has to throw at me; AND I feel like I can go out and DO anything. The world is at my fingertips.

And that’s when he has us implant the anchor. It still works, you know, ten years later. Hell, I even think about rubbing my hands together and I can feel the rush building. We come down off of the high. But instead of falling into a slump, we are all standing there with big smiles and looks of awe on our faces. They begin to play the Pointer Sisters’ I’m So Excited as we all stand in a circle.

We begin to dance.

I begin to dance. No shame. I want to. I feel too good not to.

We begin to sing.

I begin to…
Sing.

Holy.
Shit.

I don’t mean humming. I don’t mean mumbling. I don’t even mean trying to make sure my voice isn’t louder than my neighbor’s.

I mean I SING.

My god, I had no idea it could feel so good.
We part ways. She and I exchange contact info.

And this is only the beginning.

There’s still a long, hard, and very amazing road ahead for me. Not everything we did that weekend stuck, but a lot did. I still had a lot of self confidence issues to work through, among others. Some remain to this day. But I’m working on them. I’m still making progress.

One of the biggies that sticks, the one that sets the stage for everything else that follows, is how I turn from a pessimist into an optimist.

I have two ways of visualizing this: One is to imagine one of those tiny micro-switches clicking. The feeling is that subtle.

The other is to imagine one of those big knife switches being slamming down with so much juice flowing through it the contacts weld shut in the new position. The effect is that profound.

There’s a definition of depression that I have always found interesting: it’s feeling sad about feeling sad. Here’s how it is for me. When I’m just “sad”, it doesn’t feel like my natural state. I know it’s going to be temporary. That doesn’t mean it isn’t painful, but it does mean that I know that there’s and end to it, somewhere.

When I’m depressed, I see no end. Even worse, it feels… right; like this is how I’m supposed to feel. It’s comfortable. I don’t mean there’s no pain, I mean that it’s familiar.

To me depression feels like I slip into another place, a smaller place. Nothing can live there, including me.

There are many song that deal with depression. Everyone probably has one that speaks to them. For me, it’s Bill Ward’s Pink Clouds an Island.

Pink clouds, an island.
It’s a place
Where I can hide.
Selfishly I cling to
Parts of me
I’m afraid I might find.

Pink clouds, an island.
It insulates me
From letting you know
That I’m quietly dying.
I live here
When I don’t want to grow

I’m alone
Out here again.
Goodbye, over.
And it really doesn’t matter,
Matter.

Repeat Chorus

And it really doesn’t matter,
Matter.
And it really doesn’t matter,
Matter.
And it really doesn’t matter,
Matter.
And it really doesn’t matter,
Matter.

What I discovered several weeks later, as I hit another downward swing in the everlasting cycle of life, was that I was no longer allowed in. The way was blocked, sealed, warded… Actually, I could enter for a moment, but I would be summarily thrown right back out. Something had happened.

I would feel the start of it: the closing in; the sinking, shrinking; the cold; the dark. And then I would find myself saying, “I don’t need to feel like this.” It’s the strangest thing. I would then choose not to feel that way. I would feel myself lift out of it. I would still feel hurt, sad, pained… but I never again sank back into that deep, dank swap. It’s like someone had lain down one of those clear pool covers over the top. I could drop in, but the cover kept me from sinking too far and would pop me back to the surface.

I can say with confidence that it isn’t just me thinking feel-good thoughts and simply suppressing everything. I’ve made a lot of progress over the years “digging in the dirt”. The real test came three years ago when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

I remember it very clearly. I’m in the living room, in front of the couch, pacing a little. On the phone, my doc tells me that they’ve run a bunch of test, and considering them and the results of the MRI, that I probably have MS. I feel myself shatter. All I can see ahead for me is pain and suffering. Here I am, in what I though was the prime of my health, and now I have visions of wheelchairs and having my diapers changed by a nurse.

I hang up, and now I’m plummeting right for that swamp. I hit, and I hit hard. I feel myself going deep. I must have ruptured the cover, because I can feel the cold, dark waters taking hold of me. I feel myself growing tired, sinking. WTF. What’s the use. I give up. Fuck this.

But I don’t have to feel this way…

And I’m at the surface again. Oh. My. God. I’m still confused. I’m still very, very afraid. But I’m not depressed. I’ll deal. I’ll wing-it. I’ll make do, and then, when I’m ready, I will make much more. The amazing thing is all that takes place in about a minute’s time. Two tops. It takes me a lot longer to come to terms with it all. I still have moments when I feel the cold water’s heavy pull as my feet graze the surface. But I always come back up.

Always

---

I originally posted the above in several pieces to Wil’s Soapbox over the period of several days. I’ve also heavily edited it because I need to fire my proof-reader.