The Resilience Protocol: People - Continued
My last post on the people who helped nurture me into becoming something other than a washed up juvenile delinquent was about my relationship with Tom, the young boy with cerebral palsy, who I grew to know and (I paused before typing this word to ensure that it was accurate) love over the course of my volunteer work feeding him.
Tom was a sweet, wonderful, smart little goof of a kid, and he was one example of the process of my starting to learn how any surface judgments of another person based on appearances or how they talk or act can be so profoundly misleading.
Well, now that my heart was opened up by Tom at the Children's rehab center, I next had to open my brain to learn basic high school material like how to write and do math. After getting through the 0009 math course (how to add and divide fractions) and other beginners courses I started the science prerequisites for physical therapy. To my great surprise, I liked science, and I started to do reasonably well.
So I had a bit of momentum on my side, and one day, as I am sitting at the bus stop in the sun waiting to catch my bus home, I couldn't stop thinking about how cool it would be to be a doctor and how much money I would make. Out of nowhere I had this sudden surge of determination well up inside of me. The moment is burned into my brain's hard drive - I can see the grass I was sitting on, the kids around me waiting for the bus, the sun, Coffman Union across the street, and my brain spoke to me with a fervent maniacal tone of determination : "fuck it, I'm gonna go to medical school."
All of a sudden I'm staring at Mount Everest, but at least now I was at a base camp a bit closer to the summit. I kicked into high gear and committed my entire existence and every waking hour to the work required to get into medical school. Fortunately I had another person on my side to help carry me to the finish line: my first wife Linda.
I met Linda when she was a pharmacy student at the University. It was a chance encounter at Coffman Union where I met her in the large cafeteria where the students hung out. She was wild and wildly irreverent and a total free spirit, features that greatly appealed to me but that I had worked hard to get under control in myself. It was the perfect match at the time. She helped give me structure and direction and she was a daily antidote to my self-doubt and she helped keep a spark of my old self alive in the midst of my singular seriousness and determination to get into medical school.
Linda was a rock that kept me in the cave of work and commitment. She was there every step of the way and she took care of me when all I did was study and work, every day of every week. The only time off I would allow myself was Friday nights when we would go out to a burger joint called The Haberdashery for a hamburger, fries, and couple of drinks.
The science classes got serious, and I was seriously inadequately prepared for the rigors of things like calculus, physics, and organic chemistry. So I hired a private tutor, Dawn, who nurtured my poor overtaxed brain to intellectual health by gently and patiently holding my hand with problem after problem and guiding me away from the dark cloud of my relentless frustration and disappointment with myself. Every day I was haunted by my inadequacies, and by the end of nearly every day I had a stiff neck and a stress headache, relieved only by exercise.
But then one day it clicked. I was sitting in calculus class and not only did I suddenly get it, but I loved it. It was like I had discovered the music of the universe, and my infatuation was so powerful I even toyed with majoring in math, especially since my calculus teacher was dressed like a biker with a black leather jacket and chains and jeans.
I wrangled my quixotic tendencies to the ground of reality and stuck with my biology major and started to crush math and organic chemistry without the help of a tutor. I had crossed the great mental divide by hiring a private neuron coach (Dawn) to coach and spot me during my brain workouts until they were strong enough to do the heavy lifting on their own.🏋️♂️ My early anemic GPA of 2.5 skyrocketed to 3.5 due to the straight A's I was getting.
The next problem? I needed references from some kind of work or volunteer experience in medicine. There was a lounge in the basement of the Health Sciences tower called the Chip Lounge staffed by volunteer med students and others who were there to help prospective medical students navigate the application process. It was there I found a paper flier advertising a job doing patient chart research for Dr. James Ausman, an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota.
I filled out the application, took it to the 5th floor of the hospital, entered his office, and handed it to his secretary who, with one brief glance, dismissed me with a "sorry we had a ton of applicants and it's filled."
Dejected, I moseyed off with no prospects. I have no recollection of my thinking at the time, but once the dejected BS passed, I can only assume that I had that same surge of determination as I had at the bus stop, because I decided to go back and pressure him for a job.
By now I had changed my sartorial style to better fit with the sartorial ambience of the student body - t-shirts and jeans. To this day cannot believe I wore this to his office, but I did: jeans and a t-shirt. I asked his secretary if I could meet with Dr. Ausman, and after several rejections I returned one day to find him in his office, bent over, working at his desk. I looked right at him and with an insistent tone laced with a tiny bit of desperation asked him if I could talk to him for a minute.
He looked at me as if I were a Martian and waved me in and sat and stared at me waiting for me to spit out whatever it was I was there for. I explained the situation - I had applied for his job, it was taken, but I would be willing to do any kind of chart review or whatever for free if he would give me a chance.
Jim was, like most neurosurgeons, a TIDY and meticulous man. Bow tie, crisp tight haircut, suit, and well shined shoes. Me, I'm in a Taj Mahal t-shirt and jeans.
He told me there were no positions and thanks for asking. I left, but determined not to give up. I went back nearly every day to see if anything had changed, until he finally relented and took me under his wing and gave me a chart review to do - look up patients with metastatic melanoma to the brain.
The chart review was a whole-nother ball of wax for me to figure out. I had no medical lingo in my lexicon, so I bought a book on medical terminology. I sat for hours in a room in the bottom of the hospital in the bowels of the patient records room going over the charts of these horrifyingly misfortunate people who were dying of metastatic melanoma to the brain.
One day down in the chart dungeon my mind took over and it created a bone chilling TV series about this young man named Mike Maddaus who had this big mole on his back, and who, in the fortunate process of learning about people with melanoma started to actually feel the big, and previously silent, mole on his back start to tingle on its own. Mike was convinced of the accuracy of his perceptions and, with the same determination he displayed toward getting into medical school, immediately left the dungeon, headed straight upstairs to the 5th floor of the hospital to Dr. Ausman's office (thankfully he was there sitting at his desk) and barged in, insisted on talking to him, turned around with his back facing him, whence he pulled up his t-shirt and insisted on a mole examination.
"It's fine" he said.
So why am I telling you this story?
For two reasons. The first, and most incredible reason, is that Jim Ausman was able to see beyond the surface appearances I appeared with - the t-shirt, my tattoos, my almost certain challenges with syntax in my communication - and like Stacy, see something deeper in me.
Just like I did with Tom.
(And he overlooked what appeared to my potential for becoming a hypochondriac.)
The ability to stop and dismiss/discount/or question the endless immediate judgments our brains spit at us constantly as we wander through our days is a skill to be nurtured, for it impacts us in all walks of our lives. It would have been so easy (as nearly everyone did in the past with me) for Jim to dismiss me as a loser and lost young man with little hope or prospects in life.
He saw potential in me, and I believe with all of my heart, that we all have untapped potential, for something. So often it just takes another person to believe in us to ignite the spark, like Stacy and Linda and Jim did with me.
To believe means to have faith or confidence that something is true. It may or may not be based on a particular set of facts or information. We can all decide what we believe in, and based on my experience and the obvious mountain of evidence that we humans in general have a massive amount of potential, I choose, in general, to believe in the ability of others to realize their potential, especially if given the rocket booster power of another person believing in you.
The second reason I am telling you this story is to highlight the massive power of persistence, and not letting the fear of others judgments of you, or your own judgments of yourself, deter you. The comparisons my brain made of me to nearly everyone else could at times be crippling, and over and over I had to face that resistance and the voice in my head and do it despite all the mental B.S. going on.
For me, it always seemed to boil down to this simple rubric: if I don't do whatever I feel I need to do (for instance go back again and again to Ausman's office) then I know what the outcome will be. Or if I don't ask the answer is no. If I did act, then the worst that could happen is embarrassment, and one can train themselves to be resilient in the face of embarrassment just like anything else. To recap:
- If I don’t act or ask, the answer is no.
- If I do act or ask, the worst outcome is embarrassment.
There is a great scene in the beginning of the sensational documentary Dying Laughing where Kevin Hart, at the age of 21 and at the beginning of his career, finished a set at a comedy club and after, in the back with the owner, is told how he did:
Kevin Hart in Dying Laughing
So, believe in yourself, and others, no matter what, like Jim Ausman, Linda, Stacy Roback, and so many others have done with me.
