How I Got My Moose #1
The blog is gonna take a little turn, not forever, just intermittently. With everything that’s been going on and with my friend killing himself yesterday, the weight of not having this story down, not for anyone but me. I used to want to tell it so that it would bring something to somebody, but I just want it down, so I’m gonna get it out there.
This is episode #1. We might as well call it How I Got My Moose. That was its name a while back, so this can be How I Got My Moose #1.
And like every great journey, it starts in the corniest way possible. In the northern mountains of California at a Christian hoedown mock rodeo cowboy-and-Indian fight.
My oldest sister had sent my wife and I on a marriage retreat back in 2016. If you’re married, you need a marriage retreat. I was gonna say we needed it, but everyone needs it. It was a bad time in her life. Her mom was dying and my business was certainly dying. Things were low. Nothing in our life was settled and the repercussions of that kind of echo through today, and financially, I’m trying to get organized to where we just don’t live like that anymore. Here, I guess, ten years later, we’re taking the first steps to really get organized, which is great. It also makes me feel real stupid, but whatever.
So we arrived in Northern California at this Christian hoedown rodeo and we’re in a small group of adults who were also going or sent on this trip, most of them Southern. So, of course, what this leads to is a trust fall.
We’re going up the hill, we’re walking, we’re talking. You can see the stump from a mile away and it’s like, oh boy, here we go.
One of the things they said at the rodeo was, I think very self-aware, that you guys need to put on your participants. For some reason, I decided to do it. That’s not typically me, but I do enjoy the summer camp vibe and I’ve always been real comfortable around all types of very Christian people (my Aunt was a nun). So I decided to put on my participants. And then I endured my first test--oh shit, there’s a trust fall.
That’s not happening for sure. So, wallflower mode enacted. I was like, let’s see what these nerds have to say, blah, blah, blah. A couple of people got up, trouble at work, this and that, whatever.
And then we were about to break for lunch and one more person went, and that one person wasn’t me. So I got away with one.
She said that she wanted to release herself from the guilt and pain of losing her son who had gotten out of drug rehab into a halfway house, and his first night out the dealer found him and he super-dosed and died of an overdose- usual amount but he had been sober for 45 days or so. Dead.
It was quite a shock, both for somebody to be that honest and me to be such a, like, just such and ass. It really set the tone for the day and the rest of the week.
She went, it was a moment, and then everybody was off walking down the hill to lunch.
About three quarters of the way down, the leader of the group, this lady named Pam, who I would describe as a Christian witch, and this is a high compliment, this lady is wonderful and she has magic powers, but she also has, in a very conservative Southern way, a head of hair like Robert Smith from The Cure, and not the current one, the old good stuff.
She comes up beside me and goes, “You know, JD, you’re gonna be my boyfriend on this trip, and I just know you had something to say walking down when we were up there at the trust fall, so after lunch we’ll just go back up and do it.”
Oh shit.
So it was a very complex run of emotions. We had what feels in my memory like an incredibly long lunch and went back up the hill. I had no idea what I was gonna say. I felt like a total charlatan. What, I’m gonna get up there and boo-hoo about my problems or about how hard it’s been or blah, blah, blah, whatever.
So what I did say was this.
I got up there and I just said, I want to be released from the guilt and shame of all the bad decisions I’ve made with my business. I feel like I’ve made more good ones than bad, but it’s the bad ones that I carry around with me every day, all day, and I see them in people’s eyes. Everyone's.
And when I say see in people’s eyes, I was actively very well aware that I was putting those judgments in their eyes, which they probably weren’t thinking about anything.
So I said it. I meant it. I probably cried like a B and I took the fall.
I felt better. I wasn’t totally released. It wasn’t like a lightning bolt or a smack in the head from Benny Hinn, but it definitely felt like I’d crossed some sort of threshold. If not totally walking downhill, I felt like I could start dealing with my business problems with a clear mind, looking forward, not eating my past every day.
It was the first step in the journey.