Shit: The Final Chapter

  Hello!  Well, this is it!  Finally, the end to my three-part series on shit.  As the other two installments were quite lengthy, I will try to keep this final piece of shit short.  Just a quick recap, I was supposed to run my 10th marathon in the Bahamas as part of the Mountains to Marathons (M2M) Leadership Program.  The idea was to spend a weeklong leadership and self-development retreat in the Bahamas with the other participants in the program.  The retreat would culminate with each of us completing the Bahamas Marathon in January of 2021.  Unfortunately, or at least I thought unfortunately at the time, the Bahamas Marathon went all virtual sometime around late November because of Covid.  Jamin and Jen, the M2M coaches,tried to stay positive and reassured us that we could still create a beautiful retreat but I wasn’t so sure.  Although I had done a lot of work on myself and my attitude, I still had asshole tendencies that expressed themselves occasionally.  To be honest, I was extremely disappointed.  All of the marathons at that time were being cancelled.  How was I ever going to run my 10th marathon without a race being held?  I remember messaging another participant in the program, Melissa, and just venting about how pissed off I was. I honestly didn’t know if I would even continue the marathon training or the program at that point.  It is a big ask to train for a marathon over the holidays, and I was tempted to say fuck it.  

Jamin and Jen explored several options, however, at the end of the day, with travel being so dicey and all of the quarantine rules pre- and post-travel, the decision was made to have a virtual retreat over Zoom.  I have to admit I was angry at first.  Zoom?  Are you fucking kidding me?  How can anything meaningful happen over Zoom, I wondered.  I was sick of Zooming as I had been working from home since March of 2020.  I found it hard to focus and concentrate on Zoom and had been looking forward to meeting Jamin, Jen and the other participants in person.  And what would happen with the marathon?  Jamin and Jen told us the plan was that we would still all run the marathon on the day it was scheduled.  We would just be running it by ourselves, in our own remote locations.  Great, I thought.  I live in fucking Iowa.  I am sure most of you know how shitty the weather can be in Iowa in January.  I was frustrated and honestly did not think I had it in me to run 26.2 miles, in Iowa, in the frigid cold, by myself.  At any rate, I sort of put all that in the back of my mind, half or maybe more than half, believing it would never actually happen.   

Eventually, the first day of the virtual retreat arrived.  I remember on the first day, Jamin and Jen gave us this wonderful pep talk about how none of us were going to flake out on the marathon.  They said it much nicer than that, but that was the point.  We were supposed to report back with our race plans and send a picture of our race layout, which is basically a layout of everything you will need on race day.  Jamin and Jen talked about getting people out as support persons and setting up a Zoom link where friends or family could check in on your progress.  I still didn’t know if I had it in me to complete a one-person marathon so outside of Jamin, Jen and the other M2M participants, I literally told three people I was running a marathon by myself on Sunday, January 17, 2021.  One person lived out of town, the other person was traveling out of town and the final person was watching my kids during the five hours it would take me to complete the marathon.  Jamin and Jen were going to be keeping track of us on Zoom and checking in on us every hour.  My plan was to run around a two-mile lake trail 13.5 times with my water and fuel stored in my truck.  Every two miles, I would stop at my truck and drink water or refuel.  My back up plan was to straight treadmill that bitch but that was a last resort. But part of me still believed I might just do a half marathon or maybe not do it at all.  

In order to save time, I am not going to get into all the details of the retreat.  Suffice it to say, it was a powerful experience and I felt badly for thinking it would be a piece of shit over Zoom.  The overall theme of the retreat was examining what kind of life I wanted to create.  The second half of my life did not have to look like the first half.  That realization, in and of itself, was extremely impactful to me.  Prior to the M2M program, I had felt stuck, depressed and had little hope for the future because I was so focused on the failures and disappointments of the first half of my life.  However, with some of my old baggage resolved, I could envision a different future for the second half of my life.  Before I never let myself dream of the possibilities because I didn’t think they were possible for a person like me.  But now, well, I could vocalize how I wanted my life to look and believed it did not have to look the same.  It was during the retreat when it finally dawned on me why I could never get motivated to complete my 10th marathon.  I was carrying around too much baggage from the past and had lost hope in the future and faith in myself.  Jamin and Jen told me I had already ran my marathon before the actual marathon.  Thinking of what I had been through a lot over the past six months, running the marathon by myself during an Iowa winter didn’t seem so daunting.  I finally started to believe I might be able to run the marathon in spite of the less than ideal circumstances.    

On Marathon Day, I woke up to one of the most beautiful snows Iowa had this year.  The flakes were large and steady, blanketing the world in white as they clung to the trees and ground.  I was immediately pissed as hell.  Fuck the beauty, I thought, how the hell am I going to run in this shit?  I immediately called Jamin and just let him have an earful.  Jamin, always the epitome of calm, told me I needed to at least try to run it outside like I had wanted to.  I showed him a picture of what it looked like outside and he was not deterred.  He said I had to try to run the race how I envisioned doing it. I think Jamin knew if I didn’t get out there, I wasn’t going to do the marathon.  If I tried to run it on a treadmill, I would never start or if I started, I would stop well before I finished 26.2 miles.  I honestly don’t know why I did half the shit Jamin asked me to do over the past six months, but this was no different.  I waited until around 11:00 am for the temp to warm up a couple of measly degrees, put some plastic bags on my feet, said goodbye to my mom and kids and drove to the lake.  The trail had not been cleared off and it was still cold but I forced myself out of my truck and just started running.  After about six miles, I had had enough.  I honestly didn’t think I could keep going and I wasn’t even close to being halfway through.  How the hell was I going to do another 20.2 miles out in this shit?  Luckily, Jamin was available on Zoom and after listening to me bitch, told me there was no way I wasn’t finishing this marathon.  Once again without really knowing why, I listened to him and kept running.  I told myself I could finish a half marathon so I would run that far and see how I felt.  

I didn’t stop at exactly mile 13 because the trail was 2 miles around so at mile 14, I had a decision to make.  My feet were wet and numb but I had an extra pair of shoes and socks.  I was tempted to pack it up and go home.  I told myself I could switch to the treadmill but I knew in my heart I would not finish if I started to drive home.  I remembered Jamin and Jen saying I had already ran my marathon before the marathon.  Somehow, that inspired me to keep going.  I hadn’t come this far to just do a half.  Besides, by this time the snow had stopped, the trail had been cleared and I was already one mile over a half marathon.  So I changed my shoes and socks, rubbed my feet until they weren’t numb and got back out there.  I don’t know how to explain what happens when you get in a zone when you are running, but somehow miles 14-20 flew by even though I was just plodding along.  I just told myself do one more time around the lake (two more miles).  Then, I would stop at my truck, drink water and tell myself to do one more lap.  Six point two miles left, or about three more times around the lake.  Although it was going to be another hour or so of running, I knew I could not turn back.  I had to finish.    

At mile 26,  Jamin and a few others virtually “ran” with me the last two tenths of a  mile.  When it was over, they cheered and I thanked them, then got back in my truck, let the three people I had told know I had finished and drove home.  There was no after party, no medal, and no beer.  And yet, it was the best I had ever felt after running a marathon.  My time sucked due to all the stopping I had to do but I didn’t care.  I honestly think it was my favorite marathon – even more so than the Disneyworld Marathon-because I overcame a lot of self-doubt and adversity.  It was truly unlike any other marathon I had ever run.  I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything but I had no idea I could run that far by myself.  I was afraid I would fail, which was part of the reason I hadn’t told anyone about it.  Yet, I really felt like running that thing all by myself was a necessary and critical part of my journey with the M2M program. There was a final lesson I needed to learn and it was about fear.  You see, as I was running, I kept thinking of some Eleanor Roosevelt quote that I vaguely recalled – something about “you must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  After the marathon I looked up the entire quote and it goes like this:  “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror.  I can take the next thing that comes along.’  You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”   I think it is a profound statement on fear and not letting it rule your life or your actions.  Everyone is afraid of something.  It is what we do with that fear that defines us.  I was afraid to look at my past and deal with my failures and grief.  I was afraid to envision a better life for myself because I didn’t think it was possible.  I was afraid to try to run a marathon by myself because I might fail.  And yet, here’s the thing - fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.  The fears you don’t face become your self-imposed and self-chosen limits.  I still have my shit.  We all have some.  I’m still afraid of getting hurt, I’m still afraid of failing, and I am still afraid of the future.  The difference is that I feel like I can face these fears instead of fighting with them.  Fighting your fears is an endless battle, facing your fears is what leads to freedom.  

I am thankful for the M2M program.  I do not regret for one second spending the money in retrospect.  While I was in Cape Cod debating whether to do the program, Jamin told me I couldn’t even begin to imagine what my life would look like after completing the program.  To be honest, it still looks a lot the same, but the difference is that the person living it regained something she had lost – hope—and one can’t really put a price on that.  And that’s it.  That’s the end of this shit.  Thank you to Jamin and Jen, thank you to the other participants in the M2M program, thank you to the three people (you know who you are) that I trusted enough to tell about the marathon, thank you to the people that I didn’t trust enough but will next time, and thank you to you all for reading about this journey I went on.  As Jamin would say, Big Love to each and every one of you.  Oh, and the Bahamas Marathon sent me a medal and the shirt for completing the virtual marathon so in the end, I did get my 10thmarathon medal, which is pictured below.  And, as a courtesy, all registered participants for the 2021 Bahamans marathon were automatically transferred to the 2022 Bahamas Marathon.  So who knows.  Maybe I have one more in me :)  

Shit-Part II

SHIT Part II

Welcome to SHIT Part II.  I think Part II is going to be harder to write than Part I because here is where we are going to really get into some shit.  If you recall, we left off in SHIT Part I with me reluctantly agreeing to participate in a six-month program called Mountains to Marathons (M2M) after speaking with Jamin, one of the coaches while in Cape Cod on vacation.  Looking back at pictures of myself in Cape Cod, I can tell I wasn’t feeling well.  It’s funny to me how a picture can capture nuances like that.  Maybe the difference isn’t noticeable to anyone but me but the picture I have attached to this blog is one of the photos where I can tell something was off internally.  I feel like the emptiness in my eyes is palpable. 

Anyway, after faking it through the last few days of vacation in Cape Cod, I returned to Iowa  feeling even shittier because I had failed at vacationing.  What kind of individual could not enjoy themselves on the Cape?  I felt like a total zero.  Being at home, however, was somewhat worse than being at the Cape.  At the Cape, at least I had distractions-it’s hard not to when you have 13 people living in the same house for a week.  But back in Iowa, it was just the kids and me.  I still woke up a lot of mornings and thought, “Fuck me, I have to do this shit all over again.”  I also was experiencing massive buyer’s remorse about the M2M program.  I felt guilty for spending money on myself and essentially signing up to take a vacation to the Bahamas without my kids.  I really fucking hate to admit this because it is hard to do, but I also felt immense sadness because I felt like I had no one authentic to take to the Bahamas with me. I don’t know why but admitting loneliness is hard for me to say out loud.  Admitting the presence of this emotion causes some shame and guilt over who I am and the choices I have made that got me to the point of being lonely.  I pictured everyone else in the program showing up with significant others, having romantic dinners in the Bahamas, and taking walks along the beach.  Meanwhile, I pictured myself alone, ending up at some oceanside bar with a bunch of fucking randos.  I really didn’t feel up to being in this imaginary position.  However, the M2M program was starting in 3 days so I didn’t have much time to reconsider my decision.  

After my first call with Jamin and Jen, I was immediately overwhelmed with everything that was going on.  There was homework, weekly individual sessions with Jamin and Jen, team sessions with the other participants, nutrition and running coaching sessions, all on top of training to run a marathon which is quite time consuming in and of itself.  I began to wish I had paid more attention to what Jamin had said about the program.  I was still hyper-focused on just the marathon training piece and hadn’t completely bought into the leadership bit just yet.  Quite frankly, the other stuff sounded like a lot of work, and I didn’t want to make time for it.  I remember thinking to myself, “Well, I am just going to have to half ass this shit.”  I would come to find out, however, that this was not the kind of program one could half ass. So here is where I have to start to summarizing things because otherwise this blog will last until SHIT Part XV.  So my reality when I started the program is a bit embarrassing. I was working too much, eating like trash, staying up too late, hanging out with people who did not have my best interest in mind, and not working out.  I mean, as I write that it is no wonder I felt like shit, but I had started doing all of these things to try to feel better.  It is an oddity of the human experience that we seek out quick relief when we are feeling bad through, for example, alcohol or food or nicotine, and yet in the long term, these vices only contribute to and exacerbate the sea of problems one might be swimming in. I had fallen prey to this vicious cycle without really realizing it.  Jamin, being all Jamin-esque proclaimed that the M2M program would help me stop doing these things.  “Well,” I remember thinking.  “That was fucking bold.”  What Jamin did not know was that I wasn’t interested in completely revamping my lifestyle at the time.  I literally just wanted to run a fucking marathon.    

The other reality I had to admit in some of my very early sessions was that I had essentially numbed myself to most emotions.  The reason I was so closed off was that I did not want to remember or feel certain things.  I was afraid that once I started feeling difficult emotions, they would never cease.  So instead of feeling them, I put them away in a trunk and just kept keeping on keeping on.  Jill got hurt?  Fuck it, put it in the trunk and move on like it didn’t matter.  Something bad happened to Jill?  Also went straight into the trunk.  I had little capacity for joy or happiness because all my energy was focused on keeping the trunk shut.  I am not quite sure how to explain what happened next.  But basically, Jamin and Jen helped me look inside that trunk.  Oh my, it was nasty business.  Pain, betrayal, fear, shame, guilt, hurt, sadness, and well, just overall wretchedness engulfed and overwhelmed me.  It was not what I would call a fun time.  How I longed to just be numb again instead all this other bullshit.  All I wanted to do was a run marathon and now all this other shit was going on.  There were times I was mad I signed up for the program.  There were times I wanted to quit.  Jamin and Jen told me to just keep showing up and trusting in the process.  So what did this self-proclaimed asshole do?  I cried-well, wept really, for the first time in a long time. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?  I mean everyone cries sometimes, and I was overdue.  The problem was that I just kept crying, sobbing really.  I woke up crying, I went to bed crying.  I would be with my kids, start bawling and have to explain that mom was just sad right now.  I was grieving shit from my childhood, shit from being mistreated in the military, shit from my deployment, shit from my marriage, shit from my divorce, and shit from other personal relationships where I had been hurt. It wasn’t like I was having a pity party; I can’t really explain it.  I mean I didn’t feel bad for myself or anything like that, I was just, well, really fucking hurt and really fucking sad.  And so I just kept crying.  

At some point, I became scared that I would be stuck in this chasm of grief permanently.  Jamin and Jen assured me there was a bottom but I wasn’t so sure.  It seemed to be a never-ending well of sadness.  I don’t think everyone who completes the program cries as much as I did- so I don’t want anyone to be freaked out by that- but this is how mine went because (1) I’m a sensitive fuck, believe it or not and (2) the level of, well Jamin and Jen call it trauma, but I don’t like to think of it like that so I’ll just say shit, I had been through.  And then, after a bit, I woke up one day and I didn’t feel like crying.  In fact, I felt pretty good and a bit at peace.  The next day, I was back to crying.  It was like that for a bit, up and down, but eventually I began to string together more and more good days.  I remember a friend I had not heard from in a while texted me and asked how I was doing and I replied that I was so happy because it had been over a week since I cried.  Not having the full story, my friend was a little appalled that I was considering that a victory, but it truly was.  Eventually I began to cry less and less.  The well was actually drying up.  Now when I thought about certain events, I felt at peace.  I didn’t like that they happened, but I could accept that they had.  One morning, I was with my daughter and I actually found myself having fun with her.  I was not faking it, forcing it, doing it because I had to in order to be a good mom, or going through the motions as I had been in the past.  I was really and truly enjoying myself and we both were genuinely giggling.  I think I will always remember this moment because I was fully present and didn’t have any anxiety distracting me.  That’s when I knew I had turned a corner.  

What was the difference from counseling you wonder? I don’t want anyone to take this as in I don’t think counseling is appropriate and beneficial.  I absolutely believe it is imperative and helpful.  It is good to talk about one’s problems and get a different perspective or viewpoint.  We often have myopia when it comes to ourselves and counseling can help expose that.  However, for me, I felt like counseling never really gave me closure.  This was probably mostly my fault, as I think I just wasn’t completely ready or in the right place.  With counseling, I would talk about my issues but then when the hour was up, I would carefully pack up my emotions and put them back in my trunk.  I never learned how to get my issues and emotions out of the trunk for good.  This is where the M2M program was different, for me at least.  There is a lot more to the program than this but in general, I had to write all of the details down about the disturbing or painful event or situation.  Writing things is easier for me than saying them.  I can pound away on the keyboard and just put my thoughts down, raw and uncensored.  In contrast, with counseling, most of the time, because it was face to face, I dressed things up a bit.  For example, I would say I was “angry” or “frustrated” about something when what I really wanted to say was I so fucking pissed I wanted to throw a coffee cup against the wall.  True story, I told that to a counselor once and she looked shocked and then backed her chair up like she was afraid of me.  So, I learned to censor myself a bit or leave certain things out when talking face to face with a counselor. But writing something I thought only I would ever see allowed me to really let loose.  The F-bomb was littered throughout these gems – they were not literary works of genius.  I hope no one ever finds these rants, which reminds me I need to delete them off my computer, but I digress.   So when I was all done writing, I thought, “Great, I got it all out, mission accomplished.”  Wrong.  I then had to read it out loud to Jamin and Jen.  Reading it out loud was the part I hated the mostbecause most of the time, while reading it, guess what?  Yep, I cried.  Plus, I hadn’t told anyone about some of these things or how I truly felt about certain situations and that was intimidating.  I thought it would be too much for Jamin and Jen to handle but they never once made me feel anything but acceptance.  Then, sometimes, Jamin or Jen would then read it back to me.  Oh, to hear sweet Jen say the F-word a million times was truly something.  But, uncomfortable as it might have been, reading it and hearing it helped somehow.  The last part was I had to take action to clear the situation or close it out.  And this-this was the place counseling never got me to.  A place where I felt some closure or some peace.  A place where I didn’t just put everything back in the trunk.  

Once I had gone through this process, I was able to see I wasn’t just some actor stuck in a shit play being directed by someone else.  I realized I was empowered to be a leader in my own life and relationships.  I could leave the practice of law (a career I have never really enjoyed).  I could own a restaurant if I wanted to.  I could move out of Iowa if I wanted to.  I finally understood what Jamin and Jen were talking about when they used the term “leadership.”  It wasn’t the hokey Army leadership bullshit.  It was about being the leader of your own life.  I know I probably lost some of you here because it does sound a little hippy dippy.  But, here is the remarkable thing that happened after six months.  I was eating better.  I was sleeping more.  I no longer had to take a sleeping pill to fall asleep.  I was doing the marathon training.  I was working less.  I had stopped hanging around the wrong kind of people.  I was taking a new class.  I had more energy.  I was a better mom.  The funny thing is that I didn’t have to consciously try to achieve these results.  It wasn’t like I ever said “I am going to try to not take my sleeping pill.”  It just organically happened.  Jamin and Jen always told me if I stuck with the program for six-months I would experience a transformation.  I really thought these two were just trying to market some bullshit pipe dream and honestly, until the final days of the program, I myself did not fully realize what had happened.  But once I started thinking about how my life had changed, in my reluctant, non-excited, excited Jill sort of way, I kind of began to accept a transformation had occurred although I still don’t like that word.  I’d rather just say I changed some shit up.  Don’t get me wrong, things are by no means perfect.  I’m 42 and divorced with two young kids.  I don’t love my job.  My close friends live out of town.  I’m still afraid of getting hurt which makes it hard for me to get to know people. This is not a life anyone dreams of or seeks out.  But I’d like to think I’m at least getting my shit together, not using the trunk as much and creating a better future for the second half of my life.             

So you may have noticed I have not mentioned the marathon much or the Bahamas and you might be wondering what happened with that.  Did I spend every night on the beach alone?  Did I end up with the randos at the bar?  I guess this means there will be a SHIT Part III.  And then I promise to be done with this series of shit.  

Shit-Part 1

Hey, all.  Older, Middle Sister Jill here.  It’s not really my turn on the blog this week – it is actually Baby Sister Kristen’s – but she is at military training, and I have been sandbagging on writing, so you are stuck with me this week.  I haven’t felt like writing recently for at least a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, I don’t really have anything that is weighing heavy on my mind.  When I was in the military, I was constantly triggered and had a ton of angry topics to write about.  Since I retired from military service, my life is gentler and calmer.  This unanticipated result is great, don’t get me wrong, but it also doesn’t make for very exciting stories.  Second, I have been working through some shit lately.  Not the kind of shit I want to write about.  Hard shit, real shit, emotional shit, just all kinds of shit.  And no one likes to talk about shit.  So here I am, on the blog, with nothing to really say.  So fuck it.  Maybe I will talk about some shit.  But shit can’t be talked about in one sitting, so I guess this one will have to come to you in parts.  

SHIT:  PART I

​Although the shit goes back much further than this, I will say it probably culminated almost a year ago, when I was in Cape Cod with my entire family.  The Cape is extraordinary--quaint villages filled with seafood and snack shacks, oceanside bars, lighthouses and picturesque beaches.  History intersects seamlessly with the modern day and creates the rare circumstance where literally anyone can have a good time.  Anyone but me, apparently.  I was completely and utterly, well, miserable.  I prayed every morning for the strength to fake it just one more day for my family’s sake. I often got up early and cried outside the presence of my kids and family.  I wondered how I could be so despondent in such an amiable place.  I knew what I was experiencing was not okay, and yet, I had no clue what was wrong.  I didn’t know how to fix a problem I couldn’t even identify.  I felt lost, alone and empty.  One beautiful morning, I literally found myself googling “why do I feel like shit” and “what to do when you feel like shit and don’t know why.”  These outrageous searches are probably what prompted Facebook to generate an ad in my newsfeed for this program called Mountains to Marathons Leadership Program. I’ll call it M2M for short.  I don’t ever click on ads.  I really don’t.  But on this day, in the midst of my misery, I clicked on the M2M ad. You can access the link here if you are curious at any point: http://mountainsandmarathons.world/

Upon clicking the link, I learned M2M trained its participants to either run a marathon or climb a mountain and also provided some kind of leadership development and training.  To be honest, I completely glossed over the leadership stuff because of my own hubris.  I believed that since I had my master’s in management and had taken countless of leadership courses through the Army that the leadership part of the program would be the standard run of the mill crap I had already encountered.  I clearly, in my head at least, did not need more b.s. leadership training.  However, what did catch my interest was that the next session of M2M was slated to run a marathon in the Bahamas.  For the past two years, I had been trying to find the motivation to run my tenth marathon, but I hadn’t been able to stick with the training.  I never previously had problems with motivating myself to train for a marathon, and therefore, I had no idea how to regain my inspiration.  In retrospect, I know why I was unable to get motivated or have the energy to train for a marathon but at the time, I was stymied.  At any rate, when I read the next M2M session would culminate with a retreat in the Bahamas to run the 2021 Bahamas Marathon, I thought I could probably put up with the leadership stuff (that I didn’t need) if it would motivate me to get that tenth marathon done.  It was the first time in a long time that I felt a small spark, but any spark, no matter how slight, was welcome at that point.  Without much thought, I filled out the information request form and pressed send.  As I would come to find out, even the tiniest spark – ill-placed as it might be – is sometimes all it takes to ignite something remarkable.    

Much like clicking on some rando Facebook ad, the events that transpired next are somewhat inexplicable.  In less than 24 hours from when I filled out the online form, I found myself on a Zoom call with Jamin, one of the M2M coaches.  Here is why that is unusual.  Until recently, I absolutely hated talking on the phone.  Text or Snap were my preferred methods of communication.  Shit, even letter writing was in front of having a damn phone call.  Zoom added an entirely different layer of stress to the equation because I did not want to look at someone and vice versa while we were talking.  That was the stuff nightmares were made of.  Yet, for reasons I cannot quite articulate, I agreed to this Zoom call with some stranger named Jamin.  Before I write this next part, I have to apologize up front to Jamin and anyone who knows Jamin that might ever come across this piece.  I have learned that Jamin is a warm, giving, and heartfelt person.  I’ve never met him in person, but it sure feels like I have.  Anyway, that is how I know Jamin now.  But, when I first spoke to Jamin, I firmly believed he was full of shit.  My mindset at the time refused to let me trust anyone or anything.  I was shut off to possibility, and I honestly really put that guy through hell.  Yet, this cat named Jamin never expressed frustration with me or gave up on me and for that I am truly grateful but it doesn’t change the fact that I thought he was full of it when we first talked.  On our first call, Jamin gave me the overview of the program.  He started with the leadership crap that I wasn’t interested in - some something about inner peace and being in alignment.  “Blah blah blah,” I thought, get to the marathon training part.  But Jamin didn’t want to focus on the marathon part. Instead, he wanted to know about my life, why I had made the inquiry, what was missing, who I was, what I was passionate about and all sort of stuff I didn’t have the answers on.  I honestly wondered why this guy was asking me all of this stuff because it had nothing to do with marathon training, which I had made clear was my primary motivation.  So I gave Jamin, well, virtually nothing to work with.  I was closed off, tight lipped, probably a little flippant and possibly a real asshole in retrospect.  Normally, by this point in a conversation, I have either exhausted, intimidated or offended the other party so much so that they will go away but this Jamin person did not seem to be phased.  In fact, he wanted to schedule yet another Zoom call.  WTF.  And double WTF as I heard myself agreeing, opening my damn calendar and scheduling the call.   Who was this person?  

During my second Zoom call with Jamin, Jamin started in again about the leadership stuff.  Seriously, this guy was not getting the hint that I didn’t need the leadership stuff.  My normal tactics of pushing people away seemed to have little effect on this guy.  In fact, it seemed like he was okay with whatever I was experiencing or expressing.  Jamin was an enigma to me, and I think instead of me wearing him down, he must have worn me down because eventually, I found myself telling him that my transition out of the Army had been scarier and harder than I expected, that I didn’t know who I was post-Army and that I felt completely and utterly alone.  “Whoa,” I thought.  “Why in the hell did I just tell a stranger all of that?”At the same time, I was sort of relieved – not because I had gotten it off my chest - but because I thought FOR SURE this Jamin character would not want to take on this level of cluster fuck.  I mean, his program was for people who weren’t googling “what to do when you feel like shit but don’t know why.”  His program was for people who had their shit together, which I clearly did not.  But, of course, since it was Jamin I was dealing with, what did he want to do?  He wanted to schedule another damn call with me.  I told myself I would not get on the call, that I would find some way to get out of it.  But instead, I found myself Zooming Jamin once again at 7:00 a.m. the next day.    

So here is where I am not going to do things justice because my memory can be shitty sometimes and all of this happened quickly in between me faking being happy in Provincetown or at some beach in Cape Cod.  I think it was on our third or fourth Zoom call that I finally began paying attention to what Jamin was saying about the leadership stuff I didn’t think I needed.  Jamin pitched it as a six-month program that could transform my life.  The leadership he was talking about wasn’t like the Army leadership I had been trained in, but more like learning to be a leader/creator in your own life instead of a passive actor in a play written by someone else.  And then he would throw in, “And yes, we will get you to finish your tenth marathon.”  During one or both of these calls, two things Jamin said spoke to me.  The first was that he said, “You can’t even imagine what your life will look like if you complete this program but you 100% know what it will look like if you do not.” Fuck. He was right.  Change only comes about by changing something.  If I did nothing different, I knew exactly what that looked like.  He also said, “Deep down, you know that this program can help you.”  And I so desperately wanted to believe him.  But it just seemed impossible that a program could fix in six months what 20 years of counseling could not.  I was worried about spending the money on something I had no guarantee would work or helpand I was tired of throwing money down the drain. Yet, once again, Jamin said something that made sense to me.  He said, “Even if just one quarter of what I say is true, wouldn’t improving your life even by 25% be worth it?”  I really couldn’t argue with that.  Feeling as bad as I did, I was damn near willing to do anything to improve my life even by 10%. But I still wasn’t completely sold.  Over the course of three or four days, I think Jamin and I had five Zoom calls.  No shit. That was the most phone calls I had experienced in the entire last year.  I vividly remember thinking to myself, “This man must be completely insane or he truly wants to help people.”  I decided to find out.  

I imagine when most people make the decision to sign up for an M2M program, they are filled with excitement, perhaps even joy or hope mixed in with a bit of trepidation.  Signing up to climb a mountain or run a marathon is a huge deal.  But not this asshole.  I was, and might always be, the least excited person who signed up for an M2M session.  I simply announced in a perfunctory fashion, “Fine, I’ll do it.  But I’m probably not going to like it.”  I had not met her yet, but the other part of the M2M dynamic duo, Jen, overheard me say this.  She would later recount this to me and, in a very loving and amusing way, told me that at the time she wondered what Jamin had gotten them into.  I will talk more about Jen in later segments I am sure.  Deep down, truth be told, I was a little excited, and I had even felt a little hopeful.  But I still felt mostly like shit, didn’t know if I had one more marathon in me and wondered if I had just blown money on another failed endeavor at self-improvement.  Jamin, just being Jamin, simply took it all in but now that I know Jamin a bit more, I am pretty sure he was excited enough for both of us but knew that if he was too over the top with it he would have alienated me at the time.  And so, with excited non-excitement, I embarked on a six-month journey that would hopefully take to me anywhere other than where I was.  

END OF SHIT PART I