Life's Razor Edge

Nearly twenty-five years ago, August 1992, I was suicidal. It is not easy for me to remember and write about but I want to give hope to others by telling my story...

I would spend my waking hours checking the postal mail to see what rejection letters arrived that day from job interviews. Each rejection letter was another cut to my self-worth. One of the slices that cut the sharpest and deepest was from a juvenile detention facility in Delaware that incarcerated kids who had killed people. That position was a major step backwards which made the rejection even more painful.  

You know your life is bad when the highlight of your day is rejection letters from job interviews. 

When not reading the daily rejection letters, I perched over the john with a razor blade in my hand looking at my left wrist's veins and contemplating just doing it. I had resigned a middle school/high school counselor position (in a toxic district) earlier that summer figuring that I could get another job without much a problem. The summer before, right out of grad school, I had several promising opportunities and thought that it would be a replay. At the end of the summer, I had a file of rejection letters that I kept for over a decade as a reminder to not take employment for granted. 

I played a very sad song over and over again that summer by the 77's called "Frames Without Photographs". To this day, I am not sure if it helped or hurt. Probably both.  

What brought this to mind today was using a razor blade to slice out some useless pages in the front of a book that I am reading to prep for a course that I am going to be teaching 9th graders later in the year. I am actually reading the adult version of Jack Canfield's Success Principles but using the teen version as a reference. Besides using money as a barometer of life success, the book has a lot of good advice in it, but does seem to be preoccupied with material gain as the arbiter of winning. Apparently, the author has never met miserable people with money.   

I had also come to the realization this morning that I am entering my 25th year as school counselor at the high school.  It has been a rocky road at times but I have persisted and outlasted a lot of my problems, some people included.  And myself.    

25 years ago, there were other things going on. The woman that I was infatuated with had moved back to Chicago. I had contemplated moving out there and go to school to earn my Ph.D. in Psychology. In a moment of truth, I decided that school was only the surface reason for going to Chicago (the real reason was to be around her) and my feelings about this woman was more based on fantasy than anything. There had been opportunities but I had blown them and her decision to go home to Chicago was a clear message that I wasn't part of her relational calculus. 

There was some family stupidity that had surfaced yet again and one of my neighbor's from high school had killed himself, for which I felt indirectly responsible. I had premonitions that he was in trouble and made only a half-hearted attempt to track him down. I had quit playing rugby because of a serious injury that could have caused me to be functionally blind had the injury to my right eye been a bit lower. Sports had always been a means to demonstrate my value and hanging up the cleats was a harsh but mature move. But, it left a void nonetheless. A realization that I would never be a contender even though I had come close sport-wise a couple of times.

In the middle of this storm, a woman I knew from church was trying to persuade me to talk to her Upward Bound program of high school kids planning to go to college. Her name was Joy and she wouldn't drop it. She had the persistence of a bulldog with a bone. I finally relented just to get her off my back. I decided to tell the kids the good, the bad, and the ugly about my life. I figured that it was a time to be honest. I had nothing to lose. I am not going to retell what I shared then but take my word for it, they got it straight.

My essential message was that I had messed up a lot but also did a lot of things right. I admitted that I didn't have all of the answers and was struggling myself to be successful. At the end of the summer, the students of color ranked my presentation second highest of all that they had heard during the six week summer program. Me, a suburban white guy. They, mostly inner city kids. 

As a result of the presentation, I was invited to the end of the summer banquet. And as a result of going to the banquet, I sat at the same table with someone who I had gone to grad school with and who let me know that the district she worked at had a school counselor job opening at the high school. After several seriously odd events including my car's engine having a total melt-down while in the district waiting for the in interview to start--and me having to walk about a half-mile in my best suit in the summer swelter to meet with the Superintendent at the Admin Building (he had seen me walking and looked at me quizzically and tentatively waived before I explained to him what was going on after getting to the interview)--I had the job   

It was one of the few times in my life where I felt God's hand strongly and unmistakingly open doors for me. Those times are rare in my experience. I have revelatory experiences of the highest order punctuated by long period of wandering like a lost child in the mall. Looking for the hand of God to take me home. I did get lost at the King of Prussia Mall when I was 8 years old and it is probably one of the reasons I can't stand malls to this day. Plus, the overarching consumerism. And shitty food courts. 

Here are some take-aways from this long tale:

1)  Life's razor cuts closely. Sometimes it has to cut closely to release us from sinful and destructive patterns that just won't let go. Adversity causes us to be willing to forgo attitudes and behaviors that good times just don't touch. If things are sailing smoothly, there is no need to jettison our psychological and spiritual cargo, rotting as it is sometimes.

2) Hang in there. Troubles are much too real and often not temporary. They can be chronic and keep manifesting themselves in awful ways over and over again. If you can't outrun the monster (sometimes you can), the only other thing you can do is fight it and try to prevail with what you have.  The fight itself makes you stronger and more skillful. There are other monsters down to road that may present different challenges but your past experiences with help.

3) Always be honest. With only a few exceptions, I have never been accused of dishonesty. I have been quite guilty of over-promising and under-delivering, but it rarely was because I deliberately misled someone. I had plenty of lessons I had to learn over and over again, including being more caring, discreet, less talkative, and judgmental. But, I always showed up for life, worked hard, did my best, and usually admitted my mistakes. People don't expect perfection. I also have a rapier wit.

4) Because of my life experiences, I have the ability to flag people who are not being appropriate. I don't let authority alone dictate my willingness agree to a direction without providing my thoughts if I have concerns. I have a tendency (OK, that is an understatement) for getting defensive. However, I try to be respectful and discreet if I disagree with someone, yet no one owns me or my soul except God. I feel like I owe people my honest opinion, whether they concur or not. When I was 18, I promised myself that I would stand alone if necessary. The crowd is full of people who cheer for you one day then laugh when you stumble and fall the next. Frankly, most people just don't give enough of a damn to care either way.  

5) You can't turn back. Some defeats are permanent and can't be made to be something redemptive. We all want to be Rocky and get back up to fight after getting a right to the jaw. That is not always the case. I have had to come to terms with several defeats that are part of my permanent record. The losses don't reflect well on me. I can't make excuses and dance away from them. Instead, I have to own them.

6) Give up on the illusion that life is totally cause and effect in terms of being fair. The other day a bird smashed into my front bumper when I was going 50 MPH. Feathers flew. God's eye is on the sparrow but remember Jesus says that the sparrow had fallen, presumably after something bad had happened to it. A couple of days later, I was ready to make a left turn on a green at a busy intersection only to see that an SUV  was flying through the red and would have crushed me and my compact Civic like an aluminum can had I not hesitated and looked. Another day, I may had been distracted and now be disabled or dead. 

7) Life on this earth will be over before you know it. Too many people put their hopes on this world and they are already lost. They make this life the sole focus. I know that it is hard to have faith that there is something better and worse on the other side. If Jesus had never come into this world, suffered and died, and been resurrected, I would probably not believe in a good God. At best, I would be a Deist because design typically connotes a designer. 

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