Biographical

I was born three-quarters of the way through the 20th century. 

Why this matters is that my childhood was entirely contained before Dec 31, 1999, otherwise known at the time as Y2K, the year the world was supposed to end.

The schooling and upbringing I experienced in the years of my childhood turned out to be more like a game I was pretty good at. School was comprised of wall-clock-staring contests, pencils-on-paper riddles and, later, slogging through Sunday afternoon essay writing on an Apple IIE. It was mostly about compliance and a call-and-response type of education that would prove moderately interesting and developed my sense of tireless perseverance and unreasonably high standards for myself. I was able to achieve pretty damn near perfect results in this system… so naturally I was poised for a bright future in the real world, or so they said.

The next twenty five years would be spent trying to put that education to use in the form of being productive and doing the life things. What actually happened was getting repeatedly blindsided by events in work, family life and romantic relationships - crises that appeared out of nowhere and knocked me off of my life raft of understanding of the world. It was not, it turned out, a place where you could rely on people to be any base level of considerate, fair, reasonable, or moral. There were no teachers or parents to keep order or punish those who couldn’t keep themselves from causing harm to themselves and those around them. And there also didn’t seem to be much by the way of established systems or plans to deal with these incidents. They happened abruptly and spontaneously, on a random Tuesday or Saturday, it didn’t really matter when - and left a nice big bag of mess for me to cart around for years as I made small progress here and there in resolving and offloading the fallout from these events.

I know that it’s annoying to read something where the writer never tells you the specifics of unseemly acts. Those with decency feel obligated to protect others, because it’s decent to keep such matters confidential. And with some of these things that happened, they were health-related matters that I will indeed keep private. Other events, however, were the result of series of choices made by fully capable people, and if those people didn’t want their name out there attached to such acts, they ought to have thought of that beforehand. Keeping this information to myself has proven detrimental to my own well-being. So going forward, I won’t have a problem talking about the details as they relate to my own experience. 

So at the next quarter century mark, with the accumulated anxiety, distrust in people, the world, and myself, unease, disappointment, isolation and loneliness, lack of fulfillment and joy, I was now in the midst of an episode of major depressive disorder. I asked the heavens for a job. Just a job. I was without structure, direction or purpose, floating mostly untethered in the world, and I just needed to have another game to play or purpose to serve. In my head the word sounded itself out, and I heard it just like someone had spoken it out loud.

Substitutor.

The word was given to me and I took it. It was the beginning of the next chapter. Obviously this is not even a real word, which is brilliant, because even the definition was left up to me. This was a new game, and this time I was going to create it - using the truths that I had become familiar with and the ideas of the person I had always wanted to be. I would not be doing business as usual. I would be like a substitute teacher, the good ones who let you talk and chew gum in class and who shared stories rather than making you do your work. Predictability and routine would be broken up by spontaneous freedom and random snippets of intriguing information and activities. I would tutor - myself? others? - with the wisdom I had gained. And I would not be following many rules, but instead following breadcrumbs, offers from God, and my heart’s desires. I would be taking a left turn from the life I knew.

I believe one of these truths is that there are a very small number of decisions that you can make that can actually “ruin” your life on the spot. Most things just don’t matter that much. (If they did, humans probably wouldn‘t have survived very long.) Why people had impressed upon me that so many things mattered so very much… I guess that was more about them, and less about me.

This is my story.