Nov 2022
Hope this finds you kids well. It’s the twelfth of November in the year 2022 and I’m currently stuck in Narita airport waiting for a flight to Seattle. Flying this time across the ocean for some training. Another 9 hour flight but I got here 4 hours before my flight. I typically tend to come to the airport way too early, I think it’s the paranoid mindset I’ve grown up with, I tend to do this with important things I don’t want to mess up.
Messing up is something I still have a tough time with to this day. It comes from when I grew up with your grandfather, he had a short temper and if I didn’t live up to his expectations, it was a cue to let his temper go and take it out on me.
I’m not saying I didn’t earn some of my ass beatings. I did some less than respectable things, like choke and scratch a girls neck when I was seven. I got spanked til I couldn’t walk for that but to this day I know I earned that. But most of them however weren’t warranted.
Your grand father was an Air Traffic Controller for the USAF, one of most stressful jobs in the branch. He also had a marriage that was falling apart and had the task of raising a son during all that.
I understand the mindset he was in, it’s not easy for me to juggle my career, my relationship with Mei, taking care of Mocha (a pitbull Mei and I rescued), my climbing, while also taking care of those around me. I get stressed and my fuse gets short too, sometimes I lose it and complain about how things aren’t fair, and each time I get more disappointed in myself, because it’s similar to how my father acted when he took his anger out on me.
My younger days were spent in fear. To not allow myself to mess up. If I didn’t upset my dad that meant I had the right to be loved, right? So growing up with this fundamental thought process I look at all my relationships with this lens. My self worth is equal to not messing up and sacrificing myself for those I love. It’s still a point of contention between Mei and I. (She wants me to be a little more selfish so I don’t put everything on my shoulders, it’s hard to do after being raised a certain way for 25+ years)
I’m learning to allow myself to be a little selfish, to be more in tune with myself. That reflection and understanding is necessary to grow, to improve your life, to change for the better. Can’t be all selfish though, there’s a dichotomy to all of this.
Failure is something that’s hard to come to terms with. At first it always hurts, it doesn’t matter how big or small. From losing a video game to my first marriage failing, it all starts with the same pain. I don’t want my children to be afraid of failure, I’d like for them to understand and come to appreciate the things failure can teach them. I learned so much more from messing up than anything else.
Life is like skating. You’re going to suck at Ollies when you first start, you will fall and scrape your knees and get bruised up but eventually you’ll find what works and doesn’t work. It’s gonna be annoying trying to do this one task but eventually you’ll get ahold of it, and you’ll learn how to do that one task. It took me 2 months to learn how to Ollie. To this day that I still one of my proudest achievements in my life. So don’t be afraid to fail, go and learn. Suck at something and then progress. That is how EVERYTHING in life works.
Well my flight is gonna start boarding here soon. So I’ll have to leave it at this. I know there wasn’t much in the sense of music suggestions so here’s one.
Manchester Orchestra’s “Simple Math”. It’s an album from my latter high school years that got introduced to me by my friend Robbie H. Love the lyrics and sound scape of this album.