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I was thirty-eight years old, sitting in my living room in the middle of the night, thinking I would do anything to feel better than I was feeling right then, including to kill myself. The question that drove me to that moment, asked again and again in my mind, was simple: What’s wrong with me? Why am I a failure?
My life from the outside was not so bad. I was married to a woman I loved, raising two boys I adored. We had a little house we could easily afford, and I worked a job that allowed me all the time I needed to write, a pursuit that had been my passion since I was a boy. My only problem, in my mind, was that I had had no success as a writer, yet. I was still waiting tables to support my family. The shame and disappointment of this were becoming unbearable. What if I just didn’t have what it took? What if the great roulette wheel of talent or genetics had spun and I’d lost?
That question terrified me, as did the realization that for the first time in my life suicide seemed to be a viable option, that I could choose it the way I chose where to work or whom to marry. I didn’t actually want to die, but I felt as if I had wandered to a cliff’s edge and that if I wasn’t careful, I might fall. Though I never planned my suicide, never bought the pills or found the razor, I had gotten my own attention. I had to do something different, or I would be back here again, sooner rather than later.
A lot did change after that night. Since then I left restaurant work, published two books and numerous essays in magazines and newspapers, and am a regular speaker at writer’s conferences. Yet none of that would have happened if I did not, in fact, “have what it took.”
If you don’t have flour, you can’t bake bread. So how did I know I had what it took? Was it because I finally sold something, or that a big deal literary agent told me I did? No, I knew I had what it took because I decided that everyone has what it takes. Period, no exceptions.
The biggest difference between my life now and my life then is that I learned to stop asking that stupid, useless question. That question stood between me and what I wanted to do because it assumed some people were just better than other people, that we are not inherently equal, and that all my working days will be spent determining where I stand on some cruel, meaningless, imaginary ladder. The only difference I see in people now is how often they ask that question. The more you ask it, the more you suffer, the more you doubt, and the more you hate and envy the people who seem not to have to ask it. Stop asking it, and you open the door to who you actually are.
I think most men’s relationship to success is essentially suicidal. We see it as the source and measurement of our value. For many years, I never questioned this formula. I could not imagine a life where I was both happy and a failure any more than I could picture surviving without eating. But this is a backward understanding of value. My success has not shown me my value. Instead, it has come as I have learned to share what I already value. If you value anything, whether it’s writing or Fantasy Football or cooking or model trains, you have what it takes. Everyone values something. It’s what makes us human.
I admit that sometimes, when a book deal doesn’t go through, or a workshop is poorly attended, or a friend gets a great review in the Times, I look at my life and it seems small and inconsequential, a thing that would not be missed if it vanished tomorrow. Just like that, there’s that old suicidal thought, that I must prove my worth through achievement, that it must be placed upon a pedestal where it is evident to everyone. Nothing placed on a pedestal is mine. What belongs to me and me alone is what I love, the source and guide for everything worth sharing with the world.
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National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
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