A few days earlier, Beth had made an oblique reference that she knew where Cathy had ended up. I mentally filed that away, but didn’t bring it up again. Most of the time I have the context “Cathy who?” She doesn’t come up in the day to day. But there are ordinary objects, places, phrases and people which are actually disguised keys that unlock a hidden time period. In this group of friends, the Cathy-shaped gap must be quite prominent for them. I never really thought about it until now. She essentially fell off the face of the planet for seven years. For all of us. [read more... ]

Last week my company graciously flew my back to Albuquerque to participate in the company Christmas party. I decided to stay a whole week so I would have time to visit my friends. [read more... ]

I’m currently in the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, the third and final course in Landmark’s curriculum for living. The main focus of the program is to create a project that inspires you and has an impact in one of your communities or the world in general. They encourage you to think big and take on something unlike anything you’ve ever done before.

I looked at the communities in my life and I really struggled to find something where I could do a big project. There were some obvious things that I was probably going to do anyway, but nothing that really jumped out at me and lit me up.

Then it hit me. Single mothers are really important to me as they have had a big impact in my life. I wanted to do something that would empower, recognize and perhaps even aid them. Then I thought about how much I love movies. So I decided that I would enlist 10 women filmmakers to contribute or create a short 5-20 minute film on a subject that empowers women. The idea would be to have a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse. So the project would end up empowering and recognizing the filmmakers and single mothers as well.

I need to see if there are any sort of national organizations that somehow benefit or provide aid for single mothers. And I need to start talking to filmmakers, women’s groups and the like.

And I need a good name for the project.

Yesterday I did something pretty brave. I came out of the closet, so to speak, in front of a room full of almost strangers.

And I was totally okay with it.

And the world didn’t end.

And if you haven’t been paying attention to the code words I use in the message tags, then now is the time to start.

I had issues that I had given up hope on get resolved during the Advanced Course.

We were doing an exercise where we examined an aspect of our life where things just weren’t working out. We cast our memory back to early instances where we noticed that we felt like something was wrong and we had changed our behavior to compensate. My area had to do with how I behave when I feel that I have failed/disappointed/hurt a woman in some way. Somehow this has become the worst thing in the world and I feel horrible if I let a woman down.

At first, my earliest memory had to do with the time I decided to make my mom happy by taking out the garbage unasked. She had always wanted me to do more chores around the house, so I thought this would be a nice thing to do. As it turns out, for whatever reason, she had left the garden hose in the bottom of the garbage can and it got taken away when the garbage truck came. She scolded me, telling me “That was a perfectly good garden hose you threw out!” So I learned that, despite my good intentions, I was never good enough for a woman to approve of me and I carried that with me in life.

But then, an earlier memory opened up like a forgotten door. There are whole years of my childhood memories that are just blank and dark. This was a memory before that time.

I was however old I was when I was in kindergarten (I have a problem with tracking  time). I had been put in a small, dark shed next to one of the neighbor’s houses. I was sitting on a wooden chair, maybe tied to it. There was someone else in a chair next to me. A boy, I think. There were two older girls there, one of which was my neighbor. I remember being told to stay quiet as they peeked out the crack in the door. My neighbor’s face moved in towards mine, filling my vision and then everything went dark. I have no idea what happened. I just remember having a crush on her and thinking it was important to impress her and do what she wanted. From that point on, I was attracted to girls and women who had a facial resemblance to her. If they were older than me, that was even better. There is nothing wrong with this attraction. It simply is. But that experience was ground zero for my behavior towards all women in my life since then.

I had speculated for a long time about what may have generated certain relationship issues and challenges in my life. I say “challenges” to protect my family, but some of you know what I mean. This insight tied so many issues together, it was indeed a missing piece of the puzzle and I cannot express the kind of freedom I feel having faced it.

A lot of the work in Landmark education has to do with inventing new possibilities for your life. This essentially comes down to speculating about a new way of being and then living into it rather than believing your future will be just like your past and acting accordingly.

I don’t remember the specific context, but during the Advanced Course, we turned to the person we were sitting next to and told them about the possibility we had just created. I said something like the “possibility of being loved.” My friend thought there was something more to it than that and she asked me to try saying it again. Then my heart just broke open and I said “The possibility of being safe.”

Because I had never been safe. I had lived in a world where I had to guard myself on every side, from an array of possible attacks. I was threatened by heartache, betrayal, deception, people getting too close, people not getting close enough, varying breeds of rejection, and on and on.

And here I was, doing things that were inherently unsafe. The Forum was not safe. The Advanced Course was not safe. Being a group leader in both the weekly seminar and the course (I was both) was not safe. Being open about my past and current life was not safe. Trying to repair disconnected relationships in my life was not safe.

I learned that the key to safety lay in all these bold, unsafe moves. My own safety and security was my own responsibility, but it had nothing to do with keeping life at a distance.

The way out is through.

The Landmark Advanced Course the middle stage of the Landmark Curriculum for Living. It is a follow up to the Forum. It’s like you’ve learned all these amazing tools, but now what do you do with them?

The Advanced Course was like an emotional boot camp. Linda, the course leader, really kicked our collective ass. We learned about true integrity, authenticity, and having concerns larger than your own.

Both the Forum and the Advanced Course are incredibly intense and challenging. It’s fourteen hours a day for three days, immersed in the work, taxing on every level. Personal transformation is not magic; it is putting constant effort into developing cognitive muscles that are rarely used effectively. Every day. Forever.

Since I finally had dental insurance, I decided to find a dentist in Austin. A few weeks ago I had an initial exam and I had to come in today for a filling. I had a previous filling on one tooth and somehow decay had snuck in under the filling, somewhere below the gum line. My new dentist said the old filling needed to be removed so that he could start from scratch, cleaning out the decay and putting in a filling with a better seal.

This involved slicing my gums open, peeling the flesh back, doing the filling and then stitching everything back together. I was then instructed not to speak for about 48 hours or to chew anything for the next few days.

I had the Landmark Forum in Action seminar to go to later as well as a date tomorrow night. The old me might have thought that I had a reasonable excuse to back out of these commitments. The new me found it an interesting challenge to communicate with everyone by writing on a notepad.

One of the first things I did when I got to Austin was to sign up for interesting groups at Meetup.com. I get to meet people with similar interests and check out cool new places in Austin.

Right now I’m part of  Discovering Austin, a couple wine/coffee/singles Meetup groups, a sushi group, two Landmark groups, and two movie groups. One of the movie groups is the Alamo Drafthouse Fans, which I am an assistant organizer for. That means I get to pick movies, schedule events and get people to come to the Alamo to have a good time!

The actual mechanics of the Forum aren’t all that important. What is important to me is the impact on my life.

I went into it afraid and distrusting of men. I was never going to let a man get too close to me as they were inherently dishonest and possibly violent. That’s gone. Most of my friends in Austin are male. I have no qualms about approaching strangers and engaging with them about anything.

I went in to the Forum convinced that I was broken, deep down. I believed that I was ugly, unattractive, grossly incompetent, and talentless. I thought I had everyone fooled, but it was only a matter of time before I was found out. So I reigned in my creativity and my participation in the lives of others. No need to get their hopes up or to accelerate things so that I would fail them sooner rather than later. I apologized for my talents, I downplayed everything I ever made, and I sabotaged relationships to avoid anyone finding out these dark secrets.

Of course, these dark secrets were all made up. They were things I told myself  as a way of coming to terms with events in my childhood and later life. They became my reality and I never thought to examine them as anything but.

Now I know that I am wildly creative, extremely smart, quite attractive, and worthy of loving and being loved.

Personal growth is neat and all, but the real value is the impact one can have in the lives of others and the world in general.

I had pretty much written off my family. I felt like I had failed them as a son and a brother and I was embarrassed by how little connection I had in their lives. So I told myself that they were bound up in their own problems and that they resented me for having an easier life, so I just go on and live it without them. That was easier than trying to make a difference.

But I realized that I made up all those things about me and them too. That wasn’t reality. It was an invention to explain why I was doing what I was doing. So I created the possibility of a closer reconnection with my family by calling them up and having a genuine conversation. Some of you are really close to your family and this doesn’t seem like a big deal. I haven’t seen my family in years. I hadn’t spoken with my sister in many years. I hadn’t had a real conversation with her since I was in college. I thought she hated me and I was afraid to ever create an opportunity to confirm it.

My sister is one of the strongest women I know. She has faced more medical problems than a lot of entire families combined. She (and my mom and nieces) deals with scenarios that some of you will only see on COPS or the evening news. She struggles to raise three children. She somehow finished college and got her degree during all of this. Where I would have given up and bailed or just shot myself in the head, she has forged on. When my life seems overwhelming and impossible, I can look to her and know that it *is* possible.

I probably would never had tried to begin to re-establish connections or tell my sister who she is to me without going through the Forum.

And this is only a start. The real work lies ahead.