ON being officially useless.

A few weeks  ago I told my wife I was “officially useless.”  Later she told me how much it hurt her to hear me say that.

3 years ago I lost my job.  The circumstances are unimportant.  For a long time I tried to explain to people what happened, but found that just left me angrier and more bitter and left me mired in a sense of resentment I had a hard time getting past.  I found it so much easier to cope with what happened if I did not obsess about why it happened.  It has been a lesson hard learned, but one perhaps worth the struggle and pain.  Acceptance seems so much easier to preach when you preach to other people.  For me it was initially an inconvenient necessity.  I found I had an appetitite for “tilting at windmills”, but no matter how righteous I managed to convince myself I was  it just didnt help.  I dont know it ever does.

I had 35 years experience in mental health.  At one point, with a couple of friends with raised $500,000 and started our own program.  I had been a therapist.  I had been a program director more than once.  I had been a presenter in a national convention.  In every way you could count I was a success and indispensable.  And I found out I could not even get an interview for an entry level position.

The applause and recognition that once seemed so easy and so everywhere was gone.  Life became about getting from the beginning of the day to the end.  Intitially we knew it was going to end quickly but that was soon obviously not true.  Opportunities in my field were either absent or not availible to me.  Applying for jobs became my daily torture.  I still remember the letter from Target telling me I was not qualified to be a stock boy.  After a while I started wondering if I would ever find a job.  Finally I just started hoping I would stop wondering.

We learned how close homelessness was.  Many times we were one day, one hour, or one occasion 2 minutes from finding ourselves living “under the bridge.”  We found out that prayer worked, grace was real, and that we couldnt manage God could.  And strangely enough I found a real peace in knowing I wasnt in control.  Because if I was we were in more trouble than I thought.

We found ourselves grateful for things that we probably had never been grateful for.  And we learned we could cope with things we never thought we could.  We would laugh about things being so bad  we were sure we would wake up in the morning dead and somehow we never did.  We were scared and fearful many times, but the most important thing we learned was no matter how many bad things there were and how bad they were and how long they seemed destined to be bad they were not the only thing and they were not the only real thing.  And  hope was real and we were more grateful for more things and what was important didnt seem as important as it once did.  We found out life was not about diminishing returns.  It was about different returns.

And Hopeworks was born and took off.  It began when Linda was diagnosed as bipolar.  We finally had a name for the elephant in the room that had tortured Linda for a long time.  She spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.  I was upset about the circumstances that led to her being hospitalized, but was horrified by the way she was treated.  The experience changed us both forever.

I had struggled with depression for a long time, but found it had a new meaning.  On the edge of emergency after a while shutting down seems to make such sense.  The trauma of everyday living took everything and made it a ton.

Strangely I learned things again I already knew.  How you live is more important than how you feel.  And the decisions I made on  a daily basis helped to set the momentum of my life.  It was not what they made happen.  It was what they made possible.  And for me, recovery  came to be about enlarging what was possible in my life.

Hopeworks became something far past our biggest dreams.  We met people from all over the world and found out that we shared an experience, a vision, and a sense of hope with many people.  A lot of times all we did was share stories about ourselves or people we had met.  And many people seemed to find they were not alone and that seemed like a good thing.

I struggled with not having a job.  I felt like part of me had died and part of my life had been buried.  After one  disappointing experience I told Linda I was “officially useless.”  She told me later how scared she felt and how hopeless it felt coming from me.  A day after that remark we got a call from a couple.  She was bipolar.  They had been referred to us by a local mental health center.  They had told them we were the “experts in coping with bipolar” and if they had hope we could help them find it.  We sat down with them at Mcdonalds for a couple of hours. I think we helped.  I know they helped us.

We are too eager to diagnose each other.  We are too eager to diagnose ourselves.  Too many people identify their “usefulness” with what they are called.  I have met a friend online who talks a lot about the effect of trauma on life.  He says the most important question is not “what’s wrong?” but “what happened?”  One of the most important things Hopeworks has taught me is how important it is to know that what has happened to you has happened to others, that they have survivied and prospered and the possibility is real that you can too.

Life is hard because it is hard.  The life of every person I have ever known, every person I have ever heard about and every person I have ever read about tell me this is the most documentable truth there is.  But life is also good and the promise of a better life is real– for everyone.

I am so grateful to be a working man again.  Financially the last 3 years have left us ruined beyond repair, but that is really not what working is about.  Emergency may become the place I used to live and not the definition of my day and that is exciting.  Many, many, many other people have it much worse than us.  The bad times give us no particular value or credit.  We have been profoundly blessed and have much to be grateful for.

Life anew.  It feels great.  Thanks to so many for your support and care.  It means a lot.  A very, very, very lot.  I hope God blesses you as He has blessed us.  And I hope that in some small way we can be a blessing to you as you have been to us.

Thanks.