Little Fish, Big River, Bigger City

Finding Myselves

Yesterday, I spent the day on working on a writing exercise. I recently learned that the average person has about twenty "sub-personalities" with a couple of them being the dominant ones from time to time. As we grow through life, we develop every sub-personality to serve some "purpose" in our lives. The dominant ones are the basic, "who we are" on a daily basis whereas many of them lie dormant, sometimes for years, until triggered by certain events. At first, it seemed like a whack thing to do, silly, dumb, stupid but, being the person I am who is willing to try anything I started writing.

Part of the exercise is to "name" each sub-personality. Then, the exercise is to write out the attitudes, the beliefs, the choices the personality makes and the triggers which bring it to the surface. Lastly, you write out the fears of each sub-personality. What I found incredibly interesting is how my dominant personality has changed over this year, triggered by a lot of events such as moving, having a job, getting enticed by a Segway Tour, having it pulled away, money problems and the like.

Most of you know me as my two dominant personalities which I named "James" and "Golden Scott." James, has been the main character for most of my years. When this sub-personality is in place, it's the "me" most everyone knows and loves. I'm confident, happy, suave, charming, nice and I exude an energy that people are drawn to. Oddly, and this is a bit hard to say, but I also have an air of humility about me so that I never come off as egotistical while being all that I am. It's when I'm at my best and a large by-product is that I am a source of strength and inspiration for others. He's the guy with a thousand friends and who people admire and look up to. He's the guy who can win the heart of the woman of his desires and he's the guy who is confidently successful and comfortable in who he is, come what may. However, James has been missing for most of this year...which is unfortunate.

Golden Scott is the "please everybody" guy who goes the extra mile to help people move, to do extra work, help little old ladies get a taxi and in general, he's the angel, the giver, the kind-hearted selfless part of me.

Over the course of several events over the year, "Dick" has been triggered and my personality changed from the "James" style to much more of a Dick. My Dick personality is a brash, foul-mouthed, angry, hurtful bastard. He comes out when things start to go wrong and he starts kicking me down inside. It's my inner voice that calls me a loser, a jerk, a bastard, etc. The list goes on and on at how much this voice beats me up and tears down my happy, confident nature. Dick pretty much killed James over the course of this summer. He also kicked Golden Scott as much as he could but Golden Scott still looked for opportunities to help others, if not himself.

In doing this exercise, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that Dick is actually trying to "protect" me from disappointments in life. He's a fighter but he's too angry about it and since he's usually pushed down because "life is good" when something triggers it, he comes out in full, raging force. Dick is sort of a demon deep inside that I have feared my whole life since there have been very few times that he has been triggered. It takes a lot of life-changing disappointments for him to be triggered. The role of this personality is to bring me back to earth from my dreams and to try and get me to distance myself from everyone and everything around me in an effort to just be safe from further disappointment. It's the voice that says, stop trying, start hiding and push everyone away in the process so you don't get hurt.

Oddly enough, in writing out the twelve sub-personalities that I could think of yesterday, I found I missed James. All summer long, I have felt "different" somehow. Not happy, not "normal" and I couldn't put my finger on it until now. It's because I became a Dick and left the confidence and energy of James to die. As I wrote, I found that I was stunned by a sudden realization that I have not been who I normally am. Yea, go figure. Hence the long feeling of simply not being the guy I have always been. I missed being "me."

Luckily, as I continued to write things out, James popped out as the person I used to be, right around sub-personality number 11. Whereas Golden Scott was number 1 and Dick was number 2. In going through the exercise, part of what I wrote out was that Dick isn't really needed. In fact, he needs to be replaced since he's a personality left over from an early childhood of hurt. This personality needs to be replaced by a much more constructive, positive voice inside which can protect me and fight back when necessary, but not in a bad way. The abusive internal name calling is totally unnecessary, for example. I'm not sure if you've ever experienced this or not, but if there have ever been times when you've gone through something and afterward said, "what the hell was I thinking, doing, saying????" Then you've probably been through what I have to a degree. One of your sub-personalities was triggered and came out and did stuff that the more dominant you normally wouldn't do or say. Yes, at the end of the day, it's all "us" but the key is "choice" in the face of "triggers."

By identifying triggers and knowing the things they can bring out, knowing the choices that we have at our disposal, we can then choose more appropriate actions and words in our lives. In a sense, we are simply further developing parts of our personalities as we have done throughout life but in a conscious, controlled way. For example, in writing out the exercise as I did, I realized that it was time to get back to being "James" again, the person I have been for most of my life. It came from the realization over what has happened and how I got into this foul, Dick-mood and that really, none of it was necessary, it was just left-over childhood hurt coming to the surface in an unhealthy way. As I mentioned in an earlier journal entry, it's time to grow up.

Another part of this growing up is letting go of "The Loud One." The Loud One is the crazy, screaming and obnoxious little boy inside of me who wants strives to be the center of attention at all times. He's the guy who interrupts every conversation mid-sentence to just say, "look at me, me, MEEEEE!" This is because it's an overcompensation for Dick and an effort to drown him out and hold him down. By letting go of Dick, I can let go of the Loud One, too.

As I've been thinking over the last few days about life, people, why we do what we do, how to get to where we want to be, I found it odd that they never really teach us any of this in school. We learn how to write and do math and all the things necessary for a job down the road, but we never really learn how to just "be us," or how to "live life on purpose." I guess maybe that's because we're supposed to just learn it as we go and find our own lessons along the way as I am doing. But I'm telling you, it sure would be nice to have a little guidance along the way so perhaps that's all I'm doing here, sharing my learning and giving some guidance to others.

In any event, as silly as it sounds, I would urge you to just give it a try. Start writing down your dominant personality attitudes, beliefs, choices, triggers and fears. Give them names. Write down all of the sub-personalities or moods that you can think of. Figure out all the facets of yourself. You're different at work than at home, you're different with some friends than with others, you act differently in different situations such as sports, career, holidays, rainy days, sunny days, etc. I would especially urge you to give this a try if you are finding yourself looking to be someplace other than you are right now. Maybe you're facing something difficult or trying to achieve something great. Maybe you're treating someone in a way you don't really want to. It could be that, like me, they just triggered a sub-personality that developed from somewhere long ago. You might discover that it's not even this person that you're angry at, but someone else from years past. Look inside and see which personality is taking over when certain things trigger it and what choices are being made. Look inside and decide who should really be in control when life events come along and trigger your different moods. How do you really want to be in given situations? How do you really want to treat each person in your life?

You have the choice to love or not love, be nice or not nice, be giving or selfish, be happy or sad. Additionally, if you're going after something, perhaps you want to try and bring out the sub-personality or mood that can best get you there. And perhaps in recognizing a lot of this like I have, you can let go of parts of your personality that can defeat you along the way with self-doubt and lack of confidence. You also might find that you are treating certain people in your life a certain way that you don't necessarily wish to do, but you are doing so because they are triggering something in you to be that way. Think about it and choose differently. It's really that easy. It just takes a little time to sit down and write things out and see what lesson can be learned for going forward.

With that, I'd like to announce to those of you who know me that the "old Scott" or "James" is coming back to life again and the Dick side of me, the "I'm a stupid idiot" part is going away since I don't need it from here on out. It was left over from a tough childhood but isn't necessary for this grown up man to carry with him as extra baggage. Lastly, if you enjoyed The Loud One's crazy antics, I'm sorry to report that he's taking a long break since he's had a good run, but isn't really needed any longer. The hurt has been uncovered and I'm cutting some staff from the payroll in order to be profitable, if you will pardon the analogy. It's a lot like looking at your emotional financials and discovering where you need to trim down and where you should redirect your sales efforts.

Yea, I know a lot of this sounds like a scene from the movie "Fight Club" or "A Beautiful Mind," but what really matters is that I learned something important and as a result, I have grown as a person and am headed to where and what I want to be in life. And so I share this with you, because who knows, I just might be able to help someone else in doing so. And that's always a good thing.

From all of "me's" to all of "you's"

~ Scott, James Scott

Friendship

I have been learning a lot about friendship over the past several weeks. The biggest thing I've learned is that friendship starts with me and not the other way around. Friendship is me trusting first and being a friend first to others. I have learned that it is the ability to listen and not judge or accuse. It is the ability to accept my own faults to the degree that I can accept the human faults in others, because we all have them. No one is perfect. Being a friend can be as simple as just accepting that simple fact.

Friendship is the ability to step outside of our own selfishness and take the time to see and understand what someone else is going through. Like many things in life, I have found that when I take the time to understand the what and the why of something or someone, it allows me to appreciate it or them in a new way. If I do not take the time, if I close myself off to learning and listening, I don't grow, I don't appreciate, I don't become better as a result. Life is about becoming better whenever we can, in small and large ways. In being a friend to someone, we also help them become better but oddly, we also become better ourselves.

I have learned that friendship is not a rock to stand on. Each of us is our own rock, our own happiness. Friendship is merely the incredible act of sharing our successes and our sorrows with people we trust enough to not judge us in any of them. A friend who loves you only because you are a success is selfish. This is not a friend, but merely someone who will walk away in your times of failure. Friends do not give up on each other, in good or bad. Friends do not make us happy, they only share in the happiness. We create our own success, create our own happiness and overcome our own failures on our own. Friends are the good, loving people we trust to share it all with and a true friend is someone who does not waiver, but cares for you the same through good and bad.

In the past weeks, I have gone through good and bad. I have shared some of it with some people and am discovering who my true friends are. I have found that as I share things with friends, they begin sharing with me. It's difficult to find the words, but to know that someone trusts you enough to tell you their fears, their pain and their dreams is an incredible feeling. It is a feeling that "I'm okay enough that this person trusts me with something so difficult or something so joyous." In trusting, I receive trust back, and that is golden.

From one human being to another, I urge you to begin trusting friends, begin listening to them, begin sharing with them. While we are each here to walk our own path, we are not alone in this life. I believe that you will find, as I have that the journey is more full, more rich and more meaningful when shared with a friend. I believe you will find that the darkest hours are not so dark and the brightest moments are even brighter if shared with a friend.

No man is an island. Reach out, trust, share, talk, listen. Then, and only then will friendship unfold its leaves and blossom into the beauty that it can be.

Lastly, if you ever need someone, I am here for you because when you think about it, a person can never have too many friends.

Answers

Last night, I prayed myself to sleep, asking God the big questions in my life.

This morning the answers seemed to be sitting in my heart like misplaced keys that were in my hand while I searched for them everywhere else, not realizing I was simply holding onto them the whole time.

The answers go something like this.

Life will always work out the way it should. You just have to trust. Trusting is hard because sometimes we are too impatient to wait for life to slowly unravel. But if we wait, it does reveal itself.

Dreams do come true if just believe in them with all your heart. Whenever all seems lost, when everything seems over, you will suddenly wake up and realize, it's not. If you dream and wish for something to come true, it will. The difficult part is, unless you refuse to give up, if you do not keep trying, all will be lost. I am continually learning that those things which I think are lost or over...never really are lost or over if I just wait a bit longer. Everytime I simply and quietly believe in something, I find that, bit by bit, things turn around and what I wish for in my heart, comes to be. It's that simple.

Maybe I'm just "lucky" but then again, I know luck has nothing to do with it. It's about believing and trusting and following my heart. It sounds so incredibly easy but at times it seems so incredibly impossible. I have found, in my darkest hours, that if I sit and listen to what my heart is saying and then take the brave step of believing all that is there...that things magically work out.

Nothing is ever over when you think it is. It's just that it takes time for it to come around. I think the reason this happens is so that we can grow in the meantime and learn to appreciate the difference between what we have and what we don't have and what we find again. By losing something, following your heart and having it return to our lives someday, we realize how very important and meaningful and beautiful that thing really is.

In my life, I have spent a lot of time pushing away that which I truly loved and wanted and dreamed of. I spent a lot of time running away to be alone, thinking that I would find the answers in doing so. I found that there was no need to push and no need to run away from the things I loved and dreamed of. I learned that sometimes, the keys are right in my hand.

I guess happiness is a lot like a big, blue butterfly. One day, long ago, I walked through a butterfly exhibit and the instructions were to not chase them, but simply let them fly as they wished. As I walked, a beautiful creature landed on right on my heart not because I chased it there, but because I simply let it land where it wanted to. It was delicate and fragile and had I grasped it and hung onto it, I would've hurt it. Dreams and wishes are like that, too. You have to simply walk through life with quiet purpose and then, only then, will you find that your butterflies will land on you softly because there is nothing for them to fear.

Yesterday, something I've dreamed of landed lightly in my life. It was just the thing I needed at the perfect moment. I believe it landed on me because I have learned the lesson of trusting that things work out the way they should. And so, I continue on my journey in this life, walking softly and believing with all of my heart that dreams do come true, things turn around just when you think they're over and that we truly can have all that we wish for if we patiently trust.

I have three things I wish for in my heart and now, just when all seemed lost but I continued to trust, one of them came true. I believe the second one will follow closely as I continue to trust life. Lastly, I know with everything in my heart...that the third, most definitely, will slowly turn around someday soon and land like a butterfly on my heart once again.

Because life alway works out the way it should. We just have to trust and let it fly its erratic and sometimes dizzying course until it does.

Growing Up

Over the weekend, something inside of me changed. I decided to sit down and write out a list of things I would like to get done over the next 60 days before I hope to leave on a trancontinental Segway adventure. One of those things was to sort through my past, my life, as it has been to this point and let go of that which has mentally held me back.

That thing, I discovered, is childhood.

I looked around at the things which I've been carting from home to home, always cursing as I loaded and unloaded them from moving trucks. I had boxes of letters and cards from the last twenty years. I found a photo of a hand held in front of the camera, a blurry non-memory that I kept simply because the film had developed. It's as if the hand signalled "stop, hold on." I'd done that too long. It was time to go. I began to purge. I looked in closets and our storage unit to find toys I dreamed of playing with in order to somehow remain youthful in my mind. I realized that I was holding onto a long-gone spring, that summer is past and fall is here. It is time to grow up and let go.

I got out some shopping bags and began filling them with box after box after box of the ridiculously unneeded clutter of my youth. I marveled that I have two skateboards I never ride. I have nerf guns and radio control cars I don't play with. I keep a few happy photos of my days as a child, but let go of the anchor holding me in place when it is long past the time for me to set sail into manhood.

I realized that there is nothing wrong with growing up. It is not to be feared. It is time to stop acting like a child and start behaving like a man. It is also time to stop feeling sorry for myself because of the hard lessons life has brought my way. It is time to apply the lessons and use the strength I have gained from them. In some of the pictures, I saw the pencil-sized arms on a skinny boy who has been cowering in the past instead of standing up and walking solidly into his future. I have been a carpet and have been letting things walk on me my entire life as an excuse to hide from the fear of failure. I failed anyway. And so, I came to the conclusion that I'm tired of acting this way, tired of feeling this way, tired of being the complete opposite of what I want to be.

And in coming to that conclusion, I found a simple truth. Choice. Life is all about choice.

We choose to fight or give up, we choose to grow or not grow and we choose to love or not love. And so I choose here and now to fight, to grow and to love. I choose to lighten my load by letting go of the past so that I have room for a bright future to enter. I repeated to myself a thousand times during the process, "LET IT GO, I CAN DO THIS." Oddly, a sensation slowly crept over me throughout the day. It was a sensation of "waking up" and wondering why I have held on so long to being a child. As I continued to wake up, I felt an enormous sense of relief. It is okay to be an adult. It's not so scary. In fact, it feels pretty damn good. I began questioning all of the things I had dreamed of doing. I questioned "why?" And the answer was that I wanted to do many of the things simply to hide from life as long as I could.

I think the biggest epiphany came when I regarded sailing. Since a short time after my parents passed away some 32 years ago, I've wanted to sail around the world. As I marinated the thought yesterday, it dawned on me that the reason I wanted to go was to simply run away from it all. The longer I thought about it, the more the dream gently floated away on the tide of growing up. I found I didn't feel the urge to run away any longer. Sure, I love sailing and would still hope to sail the world someday, maybe many years down the road when I'm retired and want to see what's out there,but the urgency of going soon, of just getting away from it all, has vaporized. Instead, I find that I desire to be a success and to establish a nest egg for further down the road rather than piddle away each dime I earn on useless toys for a boy afraid of growing up.

Today, I feel taller, older, stronger and oddly, comfortably mature. I have stepped into the manhood that has been patiently waiting on the other side of a door I've been too afraid to open. As I look back, the reason I've been afraid to open the door is because I always believed it led to a windowless room singaling the end of life. Instead, it leads outside into a bright, sunny day full of endless potentialities. As I look down this path leading from the door, it stretches to a promising world I needn't have feared.

Life is funny in this way. The very thing that I have hidden from, that I feared, that I have fought so hard against is actually everything that I have been looking for and dreaming of. It's being comfortable and happy with myself instead of putting on an immature act for others to see. I find a huge sense of relief in losing the need to be an obnoxiously loud misfit begging for the attention of others. It's been replaced by knowing I'll be an admirable, sensible person full of class who only needs approval of himself. The loud on-stage act had it's run and has been replaced by a good, hardcover book.

I gently shut the door behind me as the last scraps of my youth are now tucked safely into a recycling bin... I think about the word for a minute: "recycling." Taking something old, unneeded and used and turning it into something new and useful. And so, I walk out into this new (and highly useful) day, a responsible adult...who just so happens to be big on recycling.