Fragmented to Whole

Chapter 1 Where It All Begins On the night of my high school graduation, I vividly recall being in the Orlando Arena, where the entire lower bowl was full of extended family members and friends there to witness the momentous achievement of their loved ones’ graduation from high school. Given the demographics of our high school, the expectation for a vast majority of us was going away to college and launching out into the world. After the ceremony, when everyone was hugging and congratulating their loved ones, everything for me seemed to stop. It was as if I had exited my body. I vividly recall stopping and doing a couple of full 360-degree spins in a surreal moment of observing thousands in the arena. It seemed as though my world was standing still, and everyone else was in motion. I had never experienced that sensation before. At that moment, I knew that the trauma I had experienced throughout my life had led me to feel stuck and too emotionally immature to face the challenges of the next phase of my life. I was intensely envious of my peers who seemed so ready to launch into the world. I, however, wanted to hit the pause button and somehow make sense of and come to peace with everything that had transpired in my life to that point before launching into the world. I also knew that, like a freight train, the next phase of life was coming whether I was ready or not. The next time I recall feeling the disorientation and acute awareness that I was not ready for the next phase of life occurred when I was forty years old. I was in the operating room after my wife had a C-section when our daughter, Savannah, was born. After performing some preliminary checks, they wrapped her up and placed her in my arms. All seven pounds, seven ounces of her. Her weight seemed overwhelming to my arms despite being in pretty good shape at the time. She honestly felt as if she were more like seventy pounds. This was my body and my emotions telling me that I simply wasn’t ready to be a father. At least not the kind of father that I so desperately wanted to be. A couple of short years later, when I was in my early forties, I realized I was completely overwhelmed by life. I was loyally and faithfully carrying out my responsibilities, but I was merely existing. I certainly wasn’t living life to the fullest in a carpe diem way, which is what I was designed for—a purpose-driven life. I had a few friends to hang out with, but these were certainly not the deep, brotherly relationships full of authenticity and vulnerability that my heart ached for. I was so lost. I didn’t have a clue who I was or how I was going to get much of anywhere. I was married with a young daughter, a son on the way, a career, and a mortgage—the typical responsibilities of adulthood. However, I knew that I wasn’t yet ready for any of these responsibilities. I grew up with an emotionally unhealthy mother and a father who drank himself to death when I was twelve. I had a series of stepfathers who mirrored what not to be rather than emulating true and honorable fatherhood. I knew that if I didn’t get help, there was no way I could be the kind of husband and father I wanted to be, and I would end up making the same mistakes my father did. It was as if my body was telling my mind, It’s time for you to take a break. It’s time for this stored trauma to be healed, or it will ultimately kill you. As I mentioned, this wasn’t the first time I realized that I didn’t have the tools for life. This was just the first time that I had the courage and ability to deal with it. My goal in writing this book is to share my story so that many can hopefully find themselves in my story, where commonality and overlap occur within their own stories. I hope that through the journey that I have traveled, readers can be encouraged to take the necessary steps to process that trauma and move forward to a greater sense of emotional maturity and movement to wholeness, along with identification with who they are and what their purposes are. As Henry David Thoreau stated, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I want to point out that it doesn’t have to be that way. Men, or women for that matter, don’t have to be isolated and lonely. They—you—don’t need to be the solitary person at the bar drinking away private sorrows.