I'm Writing a Book 😬
I sat and stared at the above sentence I'm Writing a Book for quite a while (about 2 weeks) before I finally decided to have the guts to use the title and send you a series of stories (first one below) that I am considering including in the book.
For years people have encouraged me to write a book about my life and all of its travails (especially my younger years). I hesitated for a long time since, in my mind, there were so many other people in the world who had a life so much more difficult than mine. I felt writing it would be self-absorbed and an exercise in "look what I did."
After I left my job at the University I spent about 2 years studying creative writing (something I have always loved) by taking classes at The Loft in Minneapolis and studying books about writing and famous memoirs. Then I spent two years trying to write a memoir.
I hated it. Sitting at the computer for long stretches thinking about myself and my life was depressing, and it felt like the pinnacle of self-absorption to me. So I dropped the project. Plus, the writing stunk, since I was trying to hard to emulate other memoirs and their style.
Turns out not writing it may also be a sign of self-absorption! As I am in the final stretch of my life it has started to bug me that I could die without getting out on the page what I have learned about how to live and deal with life's challenges culled from my rather vast repertoire of life experiences combined with my peculiar determination to study, learn, and grow personally.
Simultaneously, in writing this newsletter, and giving a keynote called "Seeing Is Believing: The Power of Human Connection in Everyday Leadership" that has resonated so strongly with others, it has become clear that sharing my experiences and what I have learned is a way to give back and help others - thus the notion of not writing a book as being a form of self-absorption. So I started to write my stories in this newsletter.
Then, as I have shared many of my stories with you, I started to get such wonderful feedback about the value of the stories and so many strong encouragements to write a book.
So those are the forces propelling me to write a book and to be courageous by putting myself out there, to you, by putting the stake in the ground of my intention.
The challenge for me still? What kind of book? The memoir thing, what they call creative memoir, is not for me. Nor is another topic book like one on resilience where the focus is on a single topic with solid data and stories intermingled to highlight the principles. This route had some appeal because I'm a surgeon scientist (every time I write that I am a surgeon in the present tense I never know what to do since I am not literally in this moment a surgeon, but I am, as part of who I am, at my core, a surgeon), and I care about facts and reality and being as sure as possible that what I am writing is accurate.
Then my daughter Anne sent me a copy of Matthew McConaughey's book Greenlights. My daughter Maya had pounded the table trying to get me to read it a while back - this is kind of embarrassing to admit - when I saw the cover with his face on it with his good looks and hair so cool and the deep reflective tone with his hands
it triggered the self-absorption issue with me and, counter to what I have told others so often, I didn't keep and open mind and read the damn book.
Then Anne sent the book to me as they say - at the moment I was ready, and I read it, and it was a fantastic read. Funny, raw, honest, and (this is what is so important to me) filled with lessons from Matthew's experience. Now we are talking! Instead of writing stuff that looks like "oh look at all the stuff I have been through and what I did" I could write a book of stories from my life while incorporating what I have learned from the experiences and from what I have learned about myself and life from my endless reading and studying.
I felt that feeling of determination and energy surge inside me that has always served to move me along, and the desire to write a book became, as Derek Sivers says, a Hell Yes. I sincerely hope that it will be of value to others, but at the very least I will feel great that I have put together a book that can be a small part of my legacy and hopefully of use to my children and their children as they go through life.
When I wrote My Take On Resilience a few weeks ago, it hit me like a sledgehammer upside the head that I forgot one of the most crucial elements of resilience that has played such a profound role in my ability to surface from the deepest pits of life's setbacks: people. My good friend Ann Masten (no BS - a world expert in childhood resilience) would have have been disappointed by my egregious and embarrassing error!
In every setback and challenge of my life, other people have so often played a crucial role in helping me to not only get through the ordeal, but also to grow in the process. So, over the next several days I will share a series of stories about other people that have played a role in protecting me, from myself, and from the external forces trying to bury me along the path of my life. Some of the stories may be fun to read and not may not seem to have a lesson, but as you read the stories, there is a trend happening over time.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. If you think a story should be included, please give it a thumbs up, or if not, a thumbs down, and if the spirit moves you, please comment.
I hope you enjoy the stories!
Story 1 - Leroy
I was sent up to reform school for the first time when I was 13 years old. I had just graduated from 6th grade and had left the safe cocoon of Douglas Elementary School in the tony Kenwood neighborhood to enter 7th grade in the sprawling, massive, and scary as hell Jefferson Junior High School on the wrong side of the street, the side of the street where I lived. It was like leaving the set of Leave It to Beaver to be in a John Wick movie.
The timing of my set change was impeccable. At home, I had recently graduated from the mental cocoon of childhood innocence on the Sunday morning when my mother stumbled over to me drunk, in her wide open white terry cloth robe with only her panties on, and asked me to dance with her.
My world fell apart, and I fell apart, and now I was in a school on the wrong side of the tracks full of other kids like me whose cocoons of innocence had been shattered by reality. One of them was Rick, my new buddy, and together we burglarized and vandalized a home in Kenwood in broad daylight (a member of Ocean's 11 I was not), the very same wealthy neighborhood where my grade school was.
Someone spotted us and three days later I was arrested in the middle of class and taken to my first of 24 stays at the juvenile detention center and later sent up (sent up being the vernacular of the day indicating one's trip to a reform school) to Glen Lake, a boys reform school outside of Minneapolis.
Glen Lake reform school used to be the Glen Lake TB sanatorium, and the building was old and dark and run down.
Context is important here. I was a 13-year-old skinny as hell, prepubescent, nude mouse-like kid whose plaintive prayers for even a few strands of pubic and armpit hair were ignored, while the majority of my fellow inmates were, from my perspective as a nude mouse, criminal gargoyles of post pubescent development with forest like patches of hair that I could only dream of.
I did not fit in.
(Lest you think I am being overly hyperbolic about the hair thing, here is a deeply embarrassing tidbit: just before my matriculation at Jefferson Junior High I saw an ad in a comic book one day for fake sideburns. I cut out the page, filled in my name and address, and along with whatever it cost, put the money and form in an envelope, mailed it, and a few weeks later they arrived: tiny rectangles of short stiff mouse-like tan hair shaped like the state of Louisiana mounted on some black material. All you had to do was peel off the white paper on the back, stick them to your face, and presto, instant sideburns. My elation upon receiving the sideburns turned to massive disappointment and a depressing return to my hopeless nude mouse status.)
My reform school days were spent either working outside on the grounds clearing brush and cutting up felled trees, punctuated by time in front of the boob tube in the TV room. We all sat around the small black and white TV on folding metal chairs arranged in the shape of a small amphitheater, and during the day we watched soap operas, and Dark Shadows was the one all the kids loved.
I had never watched soap operas before, so I had no familiarity with Dark Shadows. On my first daytime viewing session, I cautiously approached the metal chair amphitheater looking for a seat on the end of a row as far away from the other kids as possible. Several of the post pubescent gargoyles looked up at me with either disdain or indifference, adding to my mounting terror. There were only two chairs free, and one was next to a black kid named Leroy. I sat down next to him.
Leroy was ebony black, about 16, and had (especially from my emaciated perspective), massive muscles. He looked like a bodybuilder or an athlete.
I had never seen a black kid at my school, and I had only seen black people occasionally out and about, or on TV. I had no direct experience with another black person in my entire life until that moment in the TV room with an episode of Dark Shadows on the tube. Plus, in the enlightened household from whence I came, my "stepfather" Ralph had strong, and vocal, racist views of anyone who wasn't white.
My relentless curiosity and gregarious nature has always steered my actions even when I am scarred to death, so after a few moments of silence, I tapped Leroy's solid oak bicep and asked him what the show was about. After looking at me like I just shit on the chair, which is what my facial expression must have looked like, he gave me the one sentence rundown: "a vampire who fucks with his family."
I turned my attention to the episode and kept quiet. Then nighttime rolled around, and it was time to take our showers, downstairs in the basement, where the communal shower rooms were.
With the reluctance of a poor soul going to the gallows, I straggled behind the group of gargoyles, found a locker in a corner, undressed, grabbed a towel, and wrapped the nude lower half of my prepubescent structure up tightly. I was the last to approach the shower room, a large room with about 20 shower heads lined up on three walls. All the shower heads were taken by one of the gargoyles.
I took off the towel, revealing my nude mouse status to all, hung it on a hook, and with a staggering display of naivety, walked up to a tall, roughly 16 or 17-year-old white kid (more like a man from my perspective) as he was lathering up his parts and asked him if he would share the shower head with me.
"Fuck you."
Having realized my egregious error, I stepped back to wait till a shower head opened up. Unfortunately for this white kid, Leroy was lathering up his adonis like physique in the shower stall right next to him. Leroy angled his body ever so slightly in the direction of the white kid, raised his arms above his body as if he were stretching and yawning, clenched his fists, and hit the white kid with a crushing right hook that sent him sprawling to the shower floor to soak in the soapy water running off the other boys bodies.
"Take it," Leroy said. Then, in a continuation of what I now know to be a certain sort of kind of charming, curious, and genuine naivety, I saw Leroy washing his rear end with the same attention one would give to detailing a car, and I actually asked him why he was doing that.
"You'll know when you're older" was all he said. Leroy took care of me that night, and everyone knew he would take care of me if they fucked with me. I was safe, for the time being.
