No. 192 - Back in the Driver's Seat: How I Got My Agency Back

Several years ago I was told I have Sensory Processing Sensitivity. In nonmedical terms, it’s best described as a sensory bandwidth issue.

Put me in a restaurant and I simultaneously notice people’s body language, music, and the garlic in the kitchen, whereas normal people enjoy the company of their friends. Going out to eat alone can feel less like dining and more like working the switchboard in a Marx Brothers film.

I’ve been told that upwards of twenty percent of humans have it – animals too, namely dogs, horses, and primates. But if you don’t know you have it, you definitely know something is off. I’ve always assumed the other nineteen percent are in monasteries and hermitages.

Anyway, I remember being in the fourth grade walking home from school by myself having deep philosophical thoughts that I knew I couldn’t share with anyone. Hell, I doubt I could have articulated them at that age. My brain was absorbing everything all day; from the shame a kid felt for not being picked to play kickball to the darkness of a judgmental teacher.

This is the life of what most psychologists call a “Highly Sensitive Person” or HSP, which sounds like a perennial cry baby. What a STUPID name.

Once I studied this “thing,” if you will, my life started making sense. My love for the arts, nature, aesthetics, just beauty in general, was no longer a mystery. And when I realized this, I also realized why I prefer the company of writers, poets, and playwrights over bankers, lawyers, and consultants.

The problem was, I created a life with the latter.

Around that time I left my corporate job to work for myself – talk about the blind leading the blind. I failed spectacularly. Not once, not twice, not three times, but four times in a row. It was humiliating.

So, in addition to knowing I was never going to cut it in a real job, I couldn’t work for myself either.

It was enough to make a man lose his mind.

Along the way I also realized I needed to stop drinking alcohol, which, along with my twice-a-week squash game and fly fishing, were my only coping mechanisms. To quote Bush 41 when explaining his son’s drinking, “He wasn’t drinking in the morning and he wasn’t drinking every day,” but I knew I was approaching a line in the sand. So I gave it up.

I also realized I had to temper caffeine because my body “felt” it more than others. I’m trying to paint a picture of a guy who had to dial back, if not entirely lose all his vice. And I LOVE vice.

Vice helped me through the toughest parts of my life. But, because of this damn sensory thing, I was staring down the barrel of a terribly boring life.

I also 86’d sugar for a while because I was convinced it was negatively affecting my nervous system.

Add in anxiety from all the other stuff in my personal life and I was a train wreck, but a train wreck in a perfectly cut suit and shined loafers. No one knew what I was going through. I made damn sure of that.

After years of this, I was barely getting through life. I had lost my agency and didn’t know it – a VERY dangerous place for a man to be, and surprise, surprise, I was in my mid-40s. I was the poster child of a mid-life crisis.

All those years of failing in business caught up with me. I was situationally depressed – not clinically, and there is a big difference. The lucky ones are the former. I was angry as hell because I felt like I gave up everything I enjoyed; with an exception – tobacco.

I usually had a cigar or a bag of Red Man in my back pocket. People think I’m being funny when I explain my love of tobacco, but it saved my life.

When a man with my brain can’t have a drink or a pot of coffee, he needs something, and for me it was tobacco. As I write this I’m slowly shaking my head with amazement and gratitude.

Things would’ve been a lot worse if not for the Carolina brown leaf.

I felt like I had no control over my life. I existed in a dizzy fog; trapped by insecurity; smothered with fear, begging for deliverance.

Then my mother got sick.

I’ve spent a month’s worth of nights at the hospital sleeping next to her. All the while traveling nonstop for my company. Usually to Austin but sprinkled in were half a dozen other cities. And when I say travel, not first class on Delta, but the back of the plane on the worst airlines.

Someday I’ll write a book about building a company from scratch. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is as hard as building a company by yourself.

I believe I’ve been honest in how I tell my story, but it’s not always received that way (and I could care less). I understand it’s a hard sell to complain when guys see me in Aspen or Manhattan. I get it. But it’s all work, all the time.

The romance of living a “Kerouac life” is anything but. Between cheap motels and a menacing loneliness, it’ll break the toughest of men. Though, I have a freedom most men dream of. It’s the economics of chasing a dream.

What I’ve learned is you can’t run on empty – not forever, at least. I believe part of being an artist and part of being a business builder requires massive sacrifice that can kill you. I mean that – I’m not talking metaphorically. This life is all or nothing, and it’ll push you to places you wish you didn’t know existed.

But I chose it --- or did it choose me? I’ll probably never know.

For every dinner at the St. Francis Yacht Club there are a dozen lonely meals where you and your distorted thoughts sit by the proverbial candle light arguing.

Day by day – week by week – month by month – year by year, you lose yourself and don’t know it until it’s gone.

What inevitably happens is you wake up, like I did yesterday, and realize something that’s as shocking as it is freeing:

I control very little. In fact, outside of who I choose to spend my off time with, I control nothing.

This realization hit me yesterday when my mother fell. She passed out after a long night of kidney dialysis. Luckily Dad and I were there to help her up and get her back into bed.

When it was over, I sat on the patio and laughed. I finally realized I have NO control whatsoever, so I might as well accept the absurdity of life.

I felt like Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski:

“Fuck it Dude, let’s go bowling.”

*Composed, Edited, and Published in Atlanta, GA