Hi, Friends

Welcome to the first edition of Things I Wish I Knew at Twenty, Now that I’m Forty - a weekly newsletter sharing all the wisdom I’ve learned that I’d loved to have happened across sooner.

Great, But What Are Your Credentials?

I don’t claim to be “expert” at many things, but when it comes to living life, I’ve clocked up my 10,000 hours. In fact, I’ve notched over 10,000 days (almost 15,000 at the time of writing). During that time, I’ve ridden the rollercoaster.

I was a happy kid and went to primary school close to where my family lived. So too, as it turns out, did most of my friends. I was about five when I first felt fearful of dying, and not much older when I started doing OCD rituals. It began with counting, and breathing, and stepping on or over things. It was OK though, because at least they kept me safe.

A few years later I realised my parents weren’t particularly fond of each other, punctuated by my dad sleeping on the couch for a few years, and their conversations limited to shouting about money. Didn’t faze me too much. It seemed better than the alternative – them divorcing and me being one of those unfortunate teenage delinquents from a broken home. Anyway, for whatever reason, they gutsed it out.

I rode my bike to secondary school and it was the perfect way to start the day. Fresh air. Exercise. Friends. A few nips from those small bottles of liquor you find in mini bars. All things that kept the anxiety down. We were in our own world, my friends and I, insulated from politics and relationship drama that can be a feature of the high school years for many. We had no overt interest in girls, no desire to be in (what would conventionally be considered) the cool crowd. We had no need to be anyone we weren’t already, and we had safety in numbers. It was a blessing while it lasted.

This was around the time the internet went mainstream. My Dad worked at a telecommunications company, so we were kinda in the vanguard of that. When I was 13 or 14, he bought 100 hours worth of the stuff for us to use. This was on our Commodore Amiga computer. It wasn’t a big deal though. There was nothing really on it for me back then, except a few skateboarding tutorials and guitar tabs. Soon, MSN Messenger came along and it was a game changer. I’d spend hours every night on it. (Picture the group text via a VR headset). Everyone was on there and it ruled. Napster happened too (sorry Lars) which put an end to my burgeoning CD collection (sorry Sanity / Brashes).

My first job was at a video store (look them up, Gen Z’rs), aged fourteen and nine months, where I got paid $5.30 an hour. Despite the slave labour, I loved that gig. I made the economics work by stealing enough confectionary each shift so that my rate was something closer to $11 after taxes.

I worked every Friday and Saturday night with one of my friends. None of the other staff wanted those shifts, preferring to go to parties and piss up. But we never felt the need, because we hung out with our mates all the time, and hit the booze on the bike track whenever we liked. Not wanting to be that guy, but it was a golden age.

I got my first real girlfriend aged fifteen and it was good. I’d ring her on the home phone and converse with her dad or mum before she got on the line. I was painfully shy in these situations and didn’t call her parents by their names more than a handful of times over those couple of years. Not sure what that was about. I remember acting weird in a lot of ways, but I don’t think they took it as me being rude. Hopefully, because that wasn’t what it was. Education around ASD seemed non-existent back then, so no one presumed me to be on the spectrum.

I assumed I’d marry their daughter and we’d have kids by the time I was 22. That’s how the developing brain of a kid from the country thought back then though. It was a different era. NOTE: hi Taylor Swift.

This was a time before people picked up their dog’s shit. Those little plastic poop bags were yet to be invented, at least to my knowledge. Our family pooch pooed freely and often, wherever she wanted. No questions asked. But if she made a mess on our premises, that was my jurisdiction. My household chore was to collect it on a shovel and throw it down the storm drain. At the time, I didn’t overthink it but do now wonder where that heavily polluted water ended up.

The day after I graduated, my parent’s called it quits. There were no hard feelings, as far as I could tell. By then, I didn’t have any, at least. I commenced University before I was eighteen, and when I was, I didn’t race to get my license like some other kids had. I was in no rush to be an adult. There just didn’t seem to be any great upside. This was around the time mobile phones started popping off.

I ridiculed them to begin with so was a bit of a laggard when it came to getting my own. Maybe that was a defence mechanism, knowing they were cost prohibitive. On $5.30 an hour, a Nokia 3310 was my annual income. I should’ve tried to do a contra deal at the Telstra shop – I could offer all the new release movies and bags of Cheetos the guy wanted. Even sweeten the deal with a couple of dozen Magnum ice creams too, if he liked.

I got a degree in Marketing and Economics thanks to a couple of dudes in my course that I befriended. They were real clever guys, and I was smart enough to hitch my wagon to them. We spent a crazy amount of time together over those three years, for a trio of people that have probably never been in the same room again since. There was no social media or group texts back then, so I guess we just scattered. Fond memories of those times and fellas though.

I don’t know what to tell you about the rest of my twenties, other than they were marred by a job I hated, but felt duty bound to do. My understanding of work was that it was either frivolous and badly paying, or mind-numbingly boring with slightly better remuneration. I had been conditioned to expect little from a vocation, with my dad’s only advice on jobs being to make sure I worked indoors and avoided weekends. By those metrics, I was a success. I ground out almost seven years. But having been a happy kid, I knew this had turned me into an unhappy man.

When I turned thirty, I finally summoned the courage to make a change. I went back to university to do a Diploma of Education. I’m no longer working as a teacher, but it remains the best decision of my life.

Tertiary education, this time around, was a lot like secondary school had been, minus the bike rides and morning swigs of mini bar Bacardi. I was learning again. Meeting new people again. And spending every day with my friends. Importantly, I was no longer going to bed depressed at the thought of another day of unrewarding and uninspiring labour. I wished I’d done it sooner, but I’m grateful I acted as soon as I did.

That situation taught me a lot about making choices. Choosing to do nothing is a choice and can be valid, while you collect more information or see what eventuates. But from my experience, it’s the least satisfying option.

I dreaded turning thirty and freaked out about it a lot in the lead up. I’d not been in a hurry to become an adult at 18, so you can imagine how unenthused I was to be 30 and “officially old”. I soon realised I turned a day older on that date, and not a decade older. That helped me reframe and embrace a new decade. As it turned out, it was the best yet, but for a couple of weeks there where I believed I was going to die.

I’d experienced fairly extreme stomach problems on and off from about the age of 27. I’d been examined and it was described as chronic gastritis. I’ll spare you the details of what that looked like. But when I was 33 it returned along with a stitch behind my upper right rib cage.

Over the preceding 20 years, I became fairly proficient at the art of hypochondria, yet had no real reason to think it was much more than a flare up. But this was a month after my friend’s sister tragically died of bowel cancer in her mid-thirties, so I was in a state of heightened awareness that saw me visit my doctor. He got me in for a gastroscope and colonoscopy. A routine procedure I’d had five or six years earlier. I was to be in and out in twenty minutes.

I awoke to feel the “telescope thing” being retrieved from my anus, and while groggy I did think that was a little weird. Turns out, the sedation had ended a tad early, due to me being in there forty something minutes while the doctor lassoed 12 pre-cancerous polyps from my colon ranging from a three to 15 millimetres. He stressed they were PRE CANCEROUS and once I’d properly come to, he told me he suspected I had serrated polyposis syndrome.

Those were words that meant nothing to me. What I did know was that I had not been expecting to hear “cancerous” in the procedure’s aftermath. Whether it was the pre or post variety. He said he’d sent off some biopsies and would talk to me in a week or so. I was alright with that.

Once I got home, a quick Google search of said syndrome led me to a paragraph that indicated people with this would likely get bowel or colon cancer, so I stopped reading and my heart sank. I couldn’t sleep or eat for days. After a week, knowing nothing other than those few daunting words, I started to be OK-ish with my presumably short life.

So, when I went to see him and he very nonchalantly explained he’d simply continue to cut them out, and I’d theoretically be less likely than most to contract bowel or colon cancer due to the constant supervision, I felt like I had been given a second life. It was a feeling I tried really hard to not take for granted, and still now remind myself of. On this occasion, my hypervigilance had saved my life.

It turned out the stitch-like feeling I had was nothing serious, but in investigating it they found something far more sinister. Had I not gone in when I did, and left it for another few months, I’d likely have had a stomach full of the nastiness. While an incredible bit of luck, this did reinforce the validity of my health anxiety, which has given new life to a different set of complications to live with. I began seeing a psychologist a few years later.

I was 35 when I decided my OCD rituals were wearing me down, so I sought help. It was a huge success, and we took care of the majority of them fairly quickly. Once I was there (therapy), I was able to explore a range of general anxieties I’d been using a lot of energy to keep down too. From an irrational fear of social interactions, illness, and death, to an aversion to small talk, body image issues, and family matters as well.

In an early session, my psychologist asked me if I’d change the way I was, if I could? I told her “probably not”, knowing I’d found a way to live in the world how I was. I believed thinking more soundly might jeopardise the things I liked about myself – a risk I wasn’t willing to take. A measure of the success of seeing this therapist is that I now confidently answer that same question differently.

To think that I didn’t have to endure certain aspects of myself, to get to enjoy the parts of me I already liked felt greedy, and more than I thought I could ask for. I loved the way I analysed things, and the confidence I had in my convictions about certain matters. I felt as though I had certain creative superpowers too, so I believed it was my version of suffering for my art. A silly concept, really.

Irrational fears only serve to expend energy that, if redirected to my artistic endeavours, would actually greatly enhance my creative footprint. A valuable lesson. I’ve learned a lot these past forty years, in and out of those sessions.

Things like - how having a group of friends that accept you for who you are gives a person a shield to go out and live confidently in the world. Or like how quitting your shitty job and going back to university, can highlight the importance of having agency over your life. And like how realising life gets better as it goes can take the power out of a lot of anxiety and worries about the future. Also, like how learning that good health is the thing to be most grateful for while you have it.

I wish I’d known these things at twenty but am happy to know them at forty.

I hope you enjoy more insights like these, big and small, each week. (I promise the real newsletter won’t be this long).

ZP / NpG

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