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
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