This Fool

I never thought I would be the kind of person that went to therapy, much less the kind of person that’s proud to be in therapy. 

The catalyst for me entering therapy was not a bottom or an existential crisis. I’m confident that the most troubling parts of my life are far behind me. 

My mentor recommended that I start therapy. I was highly skeptical, but he had never had an off recommendation, and It was offered In our benefit package, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll try it once. 

I was convinced that I was tough, that everything I had overcome in life was due to being resilient, and that the behaviors I had utilized to get me this far in life would help me cover the rest of the distance I needed to travel. 

I should have known better. Prison will teach you that you’re not really tough. There’s always someone willing to eat more gas than you. And though the strategies I’d utilized to get myself this far had worked well, a newer version of myself would need to embrace different actions to get farther. 

Therapy was about self-awareness, not self-pity. 

Instead of crying about my past in therapy, I learned about nervous system regulation. I developed tools to help me identify how my system responded to my environment so I could better control it. 

One of the unexpected tools I’ve picked up in therapy is a drill. To gain some perspective about myself that I lacked, my therapist suggested that I tell stories about myself … to myself. This was a stretch for me. It felt uncomfortable; I don’t talk about myself in the third person. I recognized, however, that the drill could help me gain insight about myself that I lacked. 

It did. Every day for several months, I went on a walk and told myself a story. The story always started with ‘This Fool’. “This Fool, who nobody ever thought would be shit..” “This Fool from Dallas who, on faith, packed up his car and drove to Los Angeles to chase his dreams…” “This Fool who only knew loneliness and despair in a cold, windowless seg cell…”

You get the idea. We often have blind spots about ourselves that everyone but us can see. The drill helped me uncover some of my own blind spots. This has helped me interact with the world much differently. The drill has made it more possible for me to see myself for who I really am, which in turn has given me the confidence to step into and own who I am.