I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

Typing that title feels ridiculous. Because, like of course I know what I'm doing. Sometimes... most of the time anyway.

But then there are those moments in life where you fuck up so badly that you realize you have no idea what you're doing.

To put it in therapy speak (because owning our feelings and experiences is important); I have fucked up so badly, I felt so wrong and horrible, that I had to admit that I don't know what I am doing.

This hasn't been easy to admit to myself. I grew up an awkward kid, as most of us do. But my awkwardness was acute and as it felt to my 13 year old self; never ending.

My face would blush when I talked to girls. I would get nosebleeds randomly at school pretty frequently, and guess what—my face would blush, which would make me blush more. My hands would sweat incessantly; they were seemingly always cold and moist. People would repeatedly tell me to my face that I was awkward. My family made fun of me at sports games because I was so bad and uncoordinated.

You get the point.

This went on for years.

I remember sitting on my couch at home when I was 15, on the night of the annual high school dodgeball tournament, so lonely, angry and sad that a knot formed in my gut. I twisted back and forth on the couch trying to wish it away. It was like the pupae from the Alien movie churning in my gut, ready to burst. My nose was broken from a fight the previous week with a 'friend'. No one had invited me to be on their team, all my friends were. I felt this massive gaping maw in my life of something missing and simultaneously powerless to do anything about it.

And then, slowly and then all at once, I seemed to be popular. Of course, there were many moments over the years, but by the end of high school I became 'popular'. So much of that was faking it and pretending I knew what I was doing.

I remember reciting to myself before school in the mornings waiting for my ride - 'Calm, Cool, Collected, Confident.' over and over in my head. This was my mantra. (Not a bad mantra actually, in retrospect, shrug)

It took years but I eventually was in the cool kid clique. And I found I both loved and hated it. But I felt like I *knew* what I was doing. Which was huge for me. I wanted it so desperately and I had finally made it happen. Or so I thought.

This really only came from three places - I was good at football, good at laughing my ass off with my friends when we were stoned, and good with my girlfriend.

I was ok at school, and I loved to read on my own. But I had no idea how those things would materialize in the real world and I was just showing up to school, doing what I needed to do, so people (my parents) would leave me alone.

But finally, senior year, I felt like I knew what I was doing. I felt like I had made something out of my life. We made it to the state semifinals, I was an all-state athlete, I got into college, I partied, smoked weed, 'got with' girls and drank 'like a savage'.

I was doing all the things.

Yet, when I got to college freshman year, I was suicidally depressed. I literally tried to kill myself one night by going to the 10th story floor of my dorm room. Thank God, the door was locked.

I crept back down the stairs to my dorm that night still half-plotting to buy a gun at Walmart. I imagined what it would be like to have the hard, uncaring steel in my mouth, gritting against my teeth.

Yet, I didn't do it. God some days I wanted to. I felt like such a piece of shit for so long.

But the night I tried to kill myself I felt what I can only describe as a spirit surge within me, showing me the massive potential that I still had in life. It offered me the possibility that I could become great.

That was truly a saving Grace. A few months later during the holidays, I no longer felt that I would kill myself.

Yet life does not necessarily improve if you go through these events. That would be too easy.

But over the years I grew. I conquered challenges, like getting great grades in college. I successfully spoke publicly and developed entrepreneurial projects. I dated, had dumb college fun and expanded my horizons.

But then two roads in a yellow wood emerged in my life. And I chose the path thorny and thick.

In the period of intense growth over a year and half after my suicide attempt, I became increasingly disillusioned with college.

I was getting pretty good grades, I had fallen in love with learning and studying. But in turn, I realized most of my peers did not have the same passion. They were, more often than not, just showing up to class because that's what they thought they should do and it gave them an excuse to go party on the weekend.

So I left school. I figured I would start a business and make a shit ton of money, showing all of them what fools and hypocrites they were.

And I ended up incredibly lonely in a shitty apartment, crying myself to sleep most nights after working a dead-end job at a diner right off of the campus where my student ID still worked at the basketball court. I also played a lot of basketball (I had a lot of free time, I got pretty good lol).

I now realize I was incredibly insecure and inexperienced. I was FINE - Fucked Up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional; to quote the great Neil Strauss.

I had no idea what I wanted to do as a business, nor the intense and dramatic amount of work involved. I had a lifetime of trauma and confusion swirling in my psyche. I felt like an utter disappointment to my parents and lost without my friends who I had so harshly condemned just a few months before.

So I found a coping mechanism. I found a dark corner of the internet where the 'red pill' lies. There men have scientifically examined how to hook up with as many women as possible. And what they teach works.

So instead of fully committing to my business, writing, etc. - I did what I could do to tell myself I was pursuing it. And in reality, my main priority was hooking up.

And this pattern repeated for years.

I was always able to fib to myself about how I was really pursuing that greatness that I had touched in my lowest moment. But I was also slowly and steadily growing further and further away from myself.

The hardest part to reckon with was that I did have so many adventures and I was progressing. I was getting better all the time at hooking up, sometimes having great sex, and experiencing things I never imagined possible. In some ways, it was great.

But as this part of my life advanced, so too did the hypocrisies. I was no closer to owning a successful business than when I originally set out. I had several aborted entrepreneurial attempts, all with people who ended up having major personality defects. I would rage at them and wonder how I could attract such people into my life. All the while, I couldn't see the same defects in myself.

And so I got really good at lying to myself. Not so much direct lies, as I always tried to seek the truth. But lies of distortion and omission.

I realized to get what I wanted I could frame certain topics in certain ways. I could present to people what they wanted to see and hear as myself, whether it was true or not. I could heighten the base ingredients of my personality to fit whatever the partner I wanted to hook up with needed to see in that moment so I could 'achieve' my 'goal'.

And this permeated into the rest of my life. With employers, with family, with friends. I became a chameleon and eventually lost who I was.

I had lost that thread that I was given on that darkest night.

But that all changed when it happened and I realized I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

We had been hooking up for about a year on and off. She was a nurse, originally from the state over. She was beautiful, a big girl and from a working-class family. Although our arrangement was great, I could never see myself being with her long-term. Our personalities and eventual lifestyles were too different.

But she let me come and go as I pleased and we had a great time in bed. It was lovely to hangout with her too; no pressure, just enjoyment.

Because she was a nurse she claimed expert knowledge of her cycles. She said this with a glint in her eye one night when she mentioned she had gotten off birth control.

I felt partially hesitant, but I was so used to taking risk for pleasure at this point that I don't think I believed anything bad could possibly happen.

That night came and went. I had broken it off at some point shortly thereafter because both us had started developing more intense feelings for each other.

And then, after not speaking for several months, one day I got a call at lunch at work. It was her. Something inside me knew, with a shocking calm underneath the superficial adrenaline dump, exactly what it was about.

I called her back and she told me. She had missed her period several times. She was pregnant.

Despite the feelings I was supposed to have - shock, anger, disbelief, panic, etc. - something entirely different emanated from a place deep within me. It was an immense joyful excitement. I was going to be a dad.

But then the rational mind stepped in.

This wasn't a woman I could settle down with. Our families were too different. It would ruin her career. Her goals didn't match mine long-term. Our personalities were too different.

All true. All sad, yet all true.

So after work I called her back and we discussed it. We ran through the real world choices of bringing a baby into this world together. We recognized where we were both at. It just didn't make sense.

Yet there was a moment, as we had been walking through the conversation, right at the culmination of the decision, where a pause arose. Within that pause lay the potential for two very different worlds. The noise my tongue and mouth would make would cause one of them to become reality.

And so I spoke the one I did. And she agreed.

But I could tell in her voice there was a part of her that wanted to have it. There was a part of her that would have agreed with me if I had said we should have it. And deep down, I felt the same.

But I said the opposite.

So she went to the clinic. She got the pill. She told me the day and what would happen.

I went over to her place after it was done. I brought her Gatorade and soup to keep her hydrated and hopefully make her feel better. I rubbed her back and cuddled with her. And then I left.

I kept in touch with her and told her that if she needed anything she shouldn't hesitate and I meant it. She didn't reach out again after a few more heartfelt but uneventful check-ins.

Her insurance paid for it all.

It didn't hit me until a few days later.

The excitement and joy that I hadn't known was possible went from a sea on a calm day into a seething gale. Grief pulled and clawed from the depths and gripped my whole being.

I was racked with sobs in the fetal position on the floor of my apartment. I cried for at least an hour. I didn't know I could feel such retching, awful sadness.

I have never so clearly and completely experienced an all-encompassing sense of wrongdoing in my life.

I could see that my life was wildly off-course and that I had just put the cherry on top of a truly gargantuan mistake.

Actually, a mistake doesn't even begin to fathom the true sense of what I was realizing I had done. What really occurred was that I realized that I had truly sinned.

And so that day I realized I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing.