One pound of pressure.

It is finally time I write about this.

It takes ~5lbs of pressure to break the trigger (fire the weapon) on a Smith and Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. Go press down on your bathroom scale with one finger until it reads 5lbs and see how little this is. Now press down until it reads 4lbs and internally measure how small the difference between the two was.

I have spent many nights, 1lb of pressure away from not being here.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the taste of gun lubricant. It initially stings the tongue with a pungent taste and then settles on your lips with a muted burning sensation mixed with the taste of gasoline. I remember the first time I placed the barrel of my M&P in my mouth I was surprised by the weight of it. I had shot thousands of rounds through it at the range, I knew how it felt in my hands, but in that moment it was twice its normal weight. The steel felt hard and dense on my teeth, as cold and metallic as I expected.

I quickly returned it to my lap. “Not tonight. Just a test run” I told myself.

I wrote this piece both in 2 days and 6 years.

2 days is all it took for me to put the words you’re reading together into lines and paragraphs that express a human experience.

6 years is how long I have spent navigating the “after”. Healing, reflecting, learning, growing, failing more (safely this time) and finding my way. For 6 years, I have thought about that season of life, every single day, trying to understand.

Looking back at it, I’m still not sure how I got to that place. I see the actions and the life events, the poor decisions, bad behavior and trauma that led my body into that space. I have however made peace with the fact that I will never be able to fully put myself back into that place internally to understand how my brain followed my body. The darkness I experienced was a language I no longer know how to speak and so I can only reflect on the memories that linger from that period of lived life and the lessons I have learned from it.

I was living in Chicago, fresh off a divorce that I set into motion. I had lost everything I thought I needed and did not have a penny to my name. I was undoubtedly, the worst version of myself I had and have ever been. I was spiraling, lying, deceiving, ignoring and evading. Present me would have thrown past me through a wall if I saw the life I was living.

My internal experience was one of going through my days as a dark shadow. I felt I had been the worst, had the worst done to me and that I was a martyr destined to carry all the worlds pain on my shoulders because that was just why I was here. Happiness was not something in the cards for me, this was my purpose.

The reality of my experience was that I was just a dude who went through a real rough patch of life and was stuck in a cycle of some pretty shitty habits and behaviors including lack of self accountability, lack of empathy and a general lack of morality. Who couldn’t tell the truth to others let alone himself and who was currently throwing the largest, most undeserved pity party in the history of humanity.

Hurting is ok. Sadness is ok. Hard times are ok. But allowing those things to damage those around you and yourself, is not. And I was guilty of all of that and more. The hard things can never win.

My ears are ringing as I write this. It is something I dealt with for years in the past, a symptom of the C-PTSD diagnosis I had not yet received. It is something that has nearly gone away completely in recent years. Last night, after writing part of this piece, I ground my teeth so aggressively in my sleep that I woke up with fragments of my own teeth in my mouth. Having the physiological responses of my trauma return while revisiting this experience in my writing is a reminder to myself how fragile we all are and that it is something I will always carry, simmering just beneath the surface.

It is both terrifying and motivating.

I remember posting the picture above on my instagram story one night during this time. No caption, no context, just a drawing of a boy dragging a teddy bear. In reflecting, actions like that are confusing to me because I was, in fact, surrounded constantly by love. I had my family, reaching out daily to support me. I had clients and friends who knew a little of what I was going through, who would ask me to meet up for drinks or go for a walk or grab lunch. My post would get dozens of messages and replies letting me know I had people around me who cared if I needed anything. I kept waiting for something like this to make myself feel better, to feel a little more whole, to feel like I had a grip on things.

I didn’t. I just keep feeling alone, dragging a teddy bear down a street toward an end point. I was alone not because I was not in the presence of love, but because I was not allowing myself to receive love.

I leaned into that. I declined the invitations from friends to meet up, I wouldn’t answer the phone when my family called and if I did, I never let them into my pain. I pulled back from all the love and support that was being poured on me and kept myself trapped in this little corner of “woe is me”. I was alone only by my own doing. I am grateful for those who forgave me in the years later for my distance and neglect of their compassion and I am deeply sorry to those who understandably have not. I am angry still at myself for not accepting and putting to work the help that was offered from every angle.

I have also forgiven myself, for I am human.

Occasionally during this period, there was light.

I’ve already written “The Story of Bia” so I will spare the details here, but in one brief period of positivity, I unknowingly took one of several steps that would save my life. I adopted a 4 month old little monster that would provide me something I needed, a reason to be. This would become a theme in my navigation out of the darkness.

Even with Bia in my life, my days became robotic.

Wake up→train→train clients→spend the afternoon sitting on my couch, listening to sad songs, cry until I felt sick, all with my 9mm twirling in my fingers while living in that 1lb of pressure zone. I would have moments I “wished” to be ready, to be “brave enough”, to just exhale and go. But, I had a reason. In the lowest moments, I would look over at the sleeping dog next to me and set the gun down. “I don’t want the noise to scare her” or “She needs someone to feed and walk her so it can’t be today” was enough to get me to the next day. And the next day. And the next day.

I slowly found myself in the 1lb of pressure zone less. It wasn’t zero, but it was no longer a daily occurrence. I had something I had committed to and that relied on me, and while still hurting immensely, it was enough. I had moments where I would almost instinctively reach for it in the evenings, but I would pause and say out loud I have a reason.

I did not want to do this. I wanted to get better. I wanted to find a way out.

I think having direction is something that so many people undervalue. It carries so much more weight than solely what it did for me in my lowest, darkest moment. So many flail in life and end up in trouble because they have no direction, no purpose, no reason. We need this as humans. We do not do well simply existing, we desire to be aimed at something. Complacency is a death sentence, literally and/or figuratively. The moment you believe you have arrived, is the moment you become a lesser version of yourself. You need to have something on your radar, always, far on the horizon that you cannot have, do or accomplish right now. You need to create a void in front of yourself that you can grow into.

I began expanding the concept of a reason. I needed to commit to something that I was not currently physically capable of doing and so I signed up for another round at GORUCK Selection, a 48hr, ~100 mile endurance event that very few make it through (2% finishing rate-ish). I had attempted GRS a few times before, failing early and in spectacular fashion each time. I had always showed up young, dumb, tough (I thought anyway) and underprepared and was always shown to be exactly the last bit. It is not the typical event type that I would be drawn to, but something really resonated with me about its incredible ability to demonstrate where you are not enough. The people who have historically done well at it seem to have lived a fair amount of life. Now that I had done that, I wanted to see if I could channel that darkness and pain and those lived experiences of the 1lb of pressure into something positive, something growth provoking and something I could build forward to.

As soon as I clicked “register” a fire lit in me. I trained morning, day and night, under a 70, 80, 90, 100lb ruck. I covered hundreds of miles under load, broke myself in the gym every day and replaced my time on the trigger with time watching videos from past year events and settling into a focused headspace for what was ahead. From the moment I signed up, I never tasted gun oil, ever again. I had somewhere to be, something to do. I had direction. I had a reason.

I did not finish Selection that year. I was one of the final 4 people left around the 24hr mark. I physically was fit, but I was mentally tired. I quit. And thats ok. I got what I came for, which was the journey to the start line. Alive, better and finger off the trigger. I built a path to a place I wanted to go, and I went there.

In the subsequent years, I built on this model for life. I identified a thing I desired, then the 3 things that were beyond that and I worked my way step by step through the work that needed to be done. Rinse, repeat, grow. No luck, just intention and direction. You cannot fail if you have both.

See the thing, want the thing, do what is needed. Repeat, forever.

I write this for 3 primary reasons.

The first, as always, is to explore my own experience of living. Internally digesting a series of events vs writing them on paper (and sharing those words) are two distinctly different methods of reflection, both holding value. In the years following my low point, I used countless resources that I can praise endlessly. Therapy, destruction of ego, reframing of life, actively practicing empathy, selflessness and so on. I am not, nor will I ever be a finished product, and so the work will never stop. You also, will never be, so your work should not either. You will never arrive, there is more to do.

The second, and more important to me, is to impart on you what a difference you can make in someone else’s life. I am a normal dude. I am a husband, a son, a brother, I walk my dogs and take the trash out, I am a mediocre ultra runner, some people call me coach and even back then, to the outside world, I was a genuinely happy go lucky guy. But I was a breath away from ending my life, dozens of times. What kept me here, what stopped me in those moments, was not some dramatic rescue. Nobody descended from the light and scooped me off my feet and solved all my problems and made the pain go away.

What kept me there, and here now, were the subtle reminders of why I needed to be. I just needed reasons, and I had them. The most impactful messages I received were not from people offering solutions to my problems, but simply ones expressing I was needed, I was a part of their life, that I had a purpose. Do not ever, for a second, hesitate to tell someone nothing more than “you are important to me, I love you”.

Third, and most dear to me, is in hopes of my lived experience impacting someone who has, is or may one day live through your own version of this. Before I entered “that place”, I only associated suicidal ideation with extremes. I didn’t see my buddies get blown up in war, I didn’t watch my house burn down with my family inside, I (in my mind anyway) wasn’t suffering from some sever mental illness that caused me to not function in society. THOSE are the people who experience that stuff, not a random dude from a nice background who is going through some shit. And yet there I was, experiencing “the thing”.

I look back with a lot of grace for myself during those darkest moments. I don’t see a deeply flawed man, I see a little boy who was hurting and who was struggling to carry what it means to be human, because what a task it is to carry. So when you are confronted with your own humanity, look yourself in the mirror and recognize it is ok to feel the hard things. You deserve the same grace to be an imperfect human.

The hard things just can’t win.

Onward, Always.