A work in progress

This is a work in progress. Both in the sense that I am and in the sense that this is a living document because it doesn’t serve as most of my pieces do to capture a moment in time or perspective I hold. This serves as my best effort at my most up to date way of conveying my personal myth that allows people to know why I do what I do and how I aim to do it. In all the ways that this work fails to communicate that, and all the ways that this work fails to live up to its own values, I will continue to edit it, so that it can become more true, more relatable, more simple and kind gentle and easy.

This work is both the talking about and the live processing of topics including suicide, dropping out, financial failure, relational breakdown, broken trust, and the sense of impending doom. That I neither diminish nor hyperbolize the dramatic effect that those things, and most especially the shame of those things, has had on my life is critical here. If touching on those feelings in any way makes you uncomfortable in a way that you don’t appreciate or don’t feel ready for or are not interested in right now then I advise against reading this post.

This post is also potentially an intro to my next book. Which I am working on now.

For my mom, who told me it doesn't matter what I do, as long as I'm a good person.

And for Ruby, who has tirelessly loved me even when I'm not.

I would love for this to live somewhere public, so people can see who I am and why I do the work I do. But more than anything, this is a user manual. It's for Ruby, so she can understand why I'm so insistent on doing what I do. And most of all, so she can see that how I do what I do matters to me more than what I do, or why.

I have hard feelings

I don't mean about something, I mean about everything

I mean they came factory installed

Living with those feelings growing up was difficult. The world was black and white. And while it sounds like things could be good or bad, they couldn't. It was bad.

That's not to say I didn't have good times. It's to say that the honesty, the truth that came to bear, was that the world that made me sad was the only world I thought was real.

I want to tell you what's coming before it comes, and I want to tell you why, because the why matters as much as the what.

What's coming is a list. It's short, and it's specific, and it's going to name the times I tried to end my life. I'm not telling you because I have to. I'm telling you because I chose to, and the choosing is the point. If we can't talk about the hardest things, we can't actually be together, not in a marriage, not in a coaching relationship, not in a room full of people trying to move their bodies and their lives in new directions. And without showing you the full distance I've traveled, there's no way for you to see what the tools that work for me are actually worth. A gift can only be trusted if it shows itself against the limp.

So before the list, I want to do one more thing. I want to let you hear how I hear myself, because I think if you can hear it, you might start to notice the same thing happening in you.

There's a part of me that wants you to know I chose this. That wants to be seen as someone who decided to say it, not someone who had no choice but to.

There's another part that knows you can't see what parkour and circle and parts work and writing have given me unless you see what they're standing against. That part isn't interested in being liked. It just wants the contrast to be visible, because the contrast is the truth.

And there's a third part, quieter than the other two, that doesn't need you to read this correctly at all. It knows the first two parts think this matters enormously, and it doesn't argue with that. It just also knows: we'll be okay either way. This can land with grace instead of force. You're allowed to take this in however you take it in.

I'm telling you this is happening because I want you to notice it happening in yourself too, if it does. You might feel more than one of these things reading what comes next. That's not a flaw in the piece, or in you. That's the piece working.

My dog died at 9. Someone stole Pokémon cards from my locker at middle school at 12. A girl broke up with me at 15. I didn't want to live in a world where money existed at 18. (I broke my arm at 19.) A girl loved me and someone else at the same time at 21.

Almost like clockwork. Those are the reasons I tried to kill myself. They are not the only reasons that I thought about killing myself.

Those are my hard feelings. I don't have a brain that wants to quit. I have a brain that doesn't want to start.

And if I do start, then at the first hint of challenge, my hard feeling brain tells me something.

It says:

End your life. Quit your job. Leave your wife.

I say my reasons at those times for letting myself go to let you know how little it took for me to think the world was not worth participating in.

Those were not my lowest lows. They were often not my saddest times. They were frequent, and common. The thoughts came from a place in me that felt, and feels, calm, considerate, and incredibly logical.

A side note: traditional talk therapy was absolutely unsuitable for working through this with me until I was able to get a handle on specific language around it. Sharing that I had thoughts of something I have thoughts of all the time locks me up against my will, makes it unsafe to let a therapist know what's going on in my thoughts and experience. And if I can't do that, as far as I can tell, a therapist can't help.

I dropped out of school because my final paper was one I had already written, freshman year, at another school. The thought that a significant rite of passage, graduation, the first term paper, hinged on work I had already done but needed to show again, in order to demonstrate to people that I was worthy, seemed ridiculous.

To see that, for people who did not seem particularly invested in either me or the shape of the system they participated in.

I left high school ungraduated because I was not willing to feel that it was necessary, or even important, to get my teachers' approval, a credential from a school, or the traditional rite of passage.

I was committed to building a life without it. I wouldn't call it pride. If you had asked me then, I would say it was a simple, easy, non-emotional decision.

For me now, it was yet another example of my collection of the littlest hills to die on.

I got my GED a couple years ago. Not because I needed it. Not because I thought I was wrong to not graduate. Not because I thought it was important. I did it because it was important to me that I had done the work to move something I'd been told was a big deal into a place that wasn't.

I couldn't get my GED until I could prove I didn't need to, for myself. Until I had run a company for more than ten years. Paid my bills. Grown my business.

It's only when I know I don't need you that I am willing to trust you.

It is a dirty secret that not once, at the helm of The Movement Creative, have I been asked for my educational credentials. And it helps that my partners starting out both had degrees from esteemed places, without needing to reconcile their learning and teaching styles with my own. They most prefer to go to a teacher who knows things, and to be a teacher who says the things they know. I most prefer to see what's possible with as little input from others as possible, and to be recognized as developing my unique self through that process, while being in a group of people doing the same thing that looks like an entirely different thing. The more different, the better.

I have taught gym programs and run movement therapy sessions and built massive temporary public playgrounds and have been paid to scout abandoned buildings and have been trusted to support the development of thousands and thousands of children and adults.

If you want to plan for a century, educate children. If you want to know if the world can change inside people's experience of it, educate children. If you want to see people bring their world view into and impact the shape of the world in a broader way, educate children.

We are all children.

That is also a huge privilege, owning a business, being someone who appears to be well educated, or at least educated, in a traditional sense.

Here's another aside, a whisper before we keep going. What I just told you, that I couldn't trust you until I knew I didn't need you, I said that one plainly. Most of what I write, I leave open, I'd rather you find your own shape in it than have me hand you mine. But that part I wanted you to have straight, because it's the hinge the rest of this swings on. Now I'll get out of the way again.

Truly traditional learning happens most typically in groups, as a result of social cohesion, in order to meet the real demands of that group. It will sometimes also happen by facing, as an individual, something so difficult that survival depends on success. Enter parkour and circle, where your viscera and your identity are held to the fire to the extent you're willing, and you're given a strange and beautiful opportunity to navigate real stakes, time and time again, and come out invariably, nearly always, ahead.

It has taken a long time to love that other part of me. The one that doesn't embrace challenge. To be able to sit with it and hear a long and arduous rationale about why an issue with a bank account, a failed attempt to communicate something effectively, a relationship changing. To be able to sit with that and not need to change anything, and also be willing to make an imperceptibly small effort.

I'm a true believer of parkour. I don't care about the name of it, I care about the practice of it.

Not because it's fun to jump outside, or because I want to show off. Because it changes the way my brain sees the world. It transforms physical space into possibilities, and teaches me that I can work through that transformation to irrevocably see, in simple terms, that I can make changes and become more capable. Not because of someone else. Because of me.

I changed without someone telling me what to do or how to do it. Autonomy isn't an option in the experiment, it's required for the results. What movement challenge I give myself is not important. What's important is that I went somewhere and saw nothing, and then a glimpse of something, that I thought I couldn't at the same time as I thought I could, and then that I worked long enough to know it's possible, to give evidence to the part of me that believes in me.

That is what training is. It is proving to myself that change is possible no matter what conditions I find myself in.

It's why I do dumb and difficult things in horrible weather. It's easy to find impossible there. And it's also incredibly easy to challenge it.

Can I do something small that changes my abilities and self image toward self compassion? Last winter I taught rail precisions, jumping to a metal object and landing without losing your balance, in the freezing rain and snow on the Long Island City waterfront. I did it because I would never do it. We had almost twenty people there. Everyone tried, most of us had fun, no one got hurt.

I am not a true believer in circle because I like touchy feely bullshit. I don't like talking about my feelings, or listening to other people talk about theirs. I don't value the muscle of listening, to myself or others.

I am a true believer in circle, taking turns answering a question as you pass a real or proverbial talking piece.

There was a circle where someone said something I had never said out loud, something I'd carried as proof that I was the only person who'd ever felt that particular thing, and they said it plainly, like it was nothing, like it was just a true thing about being a person. I sat there and felt the floor of my own experience get wider. Not because they fixed anything. Because I found out I wasn't the only one standing on it.

Because it changes the way my brain views what parts of me are acceptable for human consumption. Are able to be heard and held.

And because it changes the way I see people. Not the way I judge them, the way I move from knowing, if curiosity is sometimes love then knowing is sometimes an act against it, to coming to accept them as complex and worthy of dignity.

I don't add circle to every class and every meeting because my adamant business coach thinks it's a worthy experiment. It's because once you know what the medicine you need is, you need to start making it for yourself.

Like parkour, like not needing a gym or a coach or a tailored space, this is about seizing the means of production. This is about finding free ways you can control to make sure your life has what you need in it. That it has what I need in it.

I am a true believer in parts work, because it lets two things be true at the same time inside of me. Different thoughts, conflicting emotions, and it lets me try to hear those sides out.

When I have yelled in frustration, after another book, another workshop, another conversation or practice has not changed my marriage, after I have tried every tool I know and have come up short of resolution. Yelling is the last thing I would ever want to do, and also an express ticket to bathing in shame. When I have emptied all of my reserves.

Still, somewhere else inside me, when I can sit and listen, says: you can be okay even if things are not okay.

It says there might be something else worth trying, some other way of doing, or some amount of distance and frequency in this relationship that will preserve complexity and dignity, remove urgency, and allow life to feel lighter than it does at that moment.

It has taught me that when I want things to radically change, that is a part screaming for attention, begging for something small to be noticed, held, sometimes to come to new agreement, and then, with a breath of kindness blown like sand from a hand, to never come up again.

Parts work gives me a tool to let something be important, and also to listen to how it's not a big deal.

I am a true believer in writing, because it lets me reauthor, time and time again, my own personal myth. The stories that make me me, coming out of parallax and into loving compassion.

In some real way, every emotion, every thought, every action by every person, from the unthinkable to the ones that bear it, is a collection of personal myths, our often well intentioned aspirations, sometimes misguided efforts, and sometimes exactly what we needed to make our life lighter.

Life is a metaphor for itself. Movement was my first language, the one that let me see I could change the shape of reality. Compassion was my second language. Understanding was my third. English is my fourth. I didn't learn I could become myself until I jumped on walls as a teenager. I didn't learn that I could accept everything and everyone until my late twenties, or that I could speak it until my early thirties. I didn't learn to write this piece until I was 38.

I did not have the English to communicate what I'm saying here, in a way I am confident will be heard fully, until now.

All of those stories, the ones with movement of body, thought, and feeling, are doing one clear thing. One common thread.

They are teaching me to keep loving. To keep going. To embrace challenge.

These stories happen with myself through movement, in parkour practice. They happen with myself in my parts work practice. They happen with the compassion I learn to write for myself, for others, and for the world, in such a way that it changes my reality anew.

That's most of what I have to say plainly. The rest of this, what it means for you, what you do with it, I'd rather leave to you. That's not me stepping back. That's the last part again, the quiet one. It already told you: however you take this in is allowed.

Every jump, every word, every thought and feeling, every word spoken and heard, every noticing and noticing of the noticing.

Leads me to be ever ready to embrace

the challenges I perpetually find inside me, and the challenges I perpetually see around me.