Sharing Too Much, page 1
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BELIEVE
Believe.
Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines.
Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from His bow.
It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips.
Believe as if your life depended on it.
For indeed it does.
BEGINNING
One bright August morning my wife, Keri, called me at my office. She wasn’t happy.
“Did you write a blog about our marriage?”
From the tone of her voice, I could guess I was in trouble. “Yes. Why are you asking?”
“They were just talking about it on the local news. You need to take it down.”
At that very moment I was in the middle of corresponding with a woman at the Huffington Post who was asking for permission to translate my offending blog worldwide into a half dozen languages.
“Why would you want me to take it down?”
“I don’t like it. You didn’t even ask me if you could share it.”
“You’ve heard me share this in public before,” I said. “You were in the front row sitting next to the governor’s wife when I shared it with more than a thousand people at the Governor’s Marriage Conference. You said you liked it.”
“This is different.”
“Why is this different?”
“You wrote it.”
“Why is that different?”
“Because it’s written,” she said.
Hmm. “I don’t understand why you’re upset. Was any of it not true?”
“That’s the problem. It’s all true.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea you didn’t like it. And I thought it would help others with their marriages.”
“I’m sure it will,” she said. “But it’s our life. Our life is none of the world’s business.” Then she said something that gave me pause. “You’re too honest. You share too much.”
I considered her words for a moment, then said, “I think the world needs more honesty. People respond to my writing because it’s true. If I can’t write honestly, I’d have to stop writing. And I can’t do that. It’s who I am. I believe it’s my calling.”
She thought for a moment before her voice softened. “Fair enough.” Then she playfully added, “But if you ever make money off this one, I get it.”
The offending blog post, “How I Saved My Marriage,” went on to have more than a hundred million readers. Marriage counselors across America told me they’ve made it required reading for their clients. One of Keri’s close friends even called to tell her that the article saved her daughter’s marriage.
I’m often asked where the ideas for my books come from. “Life, mostly,” I reply. This book is a compilation of my life as an author, husband, and father—my thoughts and musings over the last half century. Collecting these essays helped me realize just how remarkable my journey has been—an unlikely one for a poor kid from a large family from Utah.
There were some difficult times growing up. Even a few horrific ones, as you’ll read. I still hold pain but not resentment. I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for those experiences.
Some of what I share is spiritual. I’m not apologizing for this; I’m just forewarning you. These are my experiences and my perception of them. Take or dismiss them as you will.
As most of these stories involve others, I have, in a few instances, changed names and details to protect others’ privacy. Keri may be right. Maybe I do share too much. But, then again, maybe if we all were a little more vulnerable the world would be a better place in which to live.
LESSONS FROM CHILDHOOD
RICKY THE GREAT
The year I turned eight was a particularly hard one for my family. Our downward spiral began when my father lost his job as a manager of a chain of senior care centers—they called them convalescent centers back then—and was unable to find work. I came from a large family, the seventh of eight children, and things quickly turned desperate. My mother fell into severe depression and started to exhibit suicidal tendencies—something that would haunt her for most of her life. On top of that, this was the year my Tourette’s syndrome first manifested and, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, my body was ticcing uncontrollably.
With no income, we were forced to sell our home in Arcadia, California, and move to Salt Lake City, Utah, into a dilapidated three-bedroom, rat-infested house that had been abandoned after my grandmother’s death. Our new home was in a poor neighborhood just a few blocks from the pawn shops and bars of State Street. My first day at school I learned profanity I had never heard before. I was beaten up three times that year and bullied daily.
The bullying started the week we moved in. Our first weekend in Utah our mother dropped the three youngest of us off at the Avalon movie theater for the Saturday dollar matinee. When the movie was over, a group of boys we’d never seen before—along with a crowd of spectators who I assume had been promised a good show—followed us out to the parking lot.
The ringleader, who was a good head taller than me, started calling my brothers and me names and daring us to fight him. This went on for several minutes before I couldn’t stand the humiliation any longer. Even though I wasn’t the oldest or the biggest, I clenched my fists and stepped out to fight the bully. Before a punch was thrown, my older brother, who wasn’t much bigger than me, pushed me aside and went after the boy. My brother beat him up pretty badly. In the end, the bully was on the ground crying while the crowd he’d gathered mocked him.
As the crowd dispersed, my mother pulled up in our wood-paneled station wagon. The three of us got in the car and went home. We never even told her what had happened.
My parents were pretty much oblivious to our suffering as they struggled with their own challenges, especially financial. My sneakers, with holes in the soles and kite string for shoelaces, left my feet cold in the snow, but I felt too guilty to ask for new shoes. Most days we ate gruel for breakfast—a thin watery cereal made by boiling oatmeal—into which we’d add torn pieces of bread. Struggling to pay the bills, my father worked construction until after dark each night, and in such a small house, I was often privy to stressful conversations my parents had over money. In the throes of her depression, my mother would spend days in the confines of her bedroom. We children were pretty much on our own in a town where everyone just seemed mean. Every day the crossing guard for our school, an angry, desiccated man who looked as old as the small section of road he patrolled, would shout at us for some infraction—walking too fast, too slow, outside the crosswalk, whatever he could growl about.
The meanness extended to my classroom. That year I had a soul-crushing fourth-grade teacher named Mrs. Covey. I’ll never forget when, two weeks before Christmas, Mrs. Covey asked who still believed in Santa Claus. Nearly all of us excitedly raised our hands. Mrs. Covey just smirked. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Your parents lied to you. There is no Santa Claus.”
Shattered, I walked home and, entering my mother’s dark and shuttered room, asked her if there was a Santa Claus. “Santa Claus is the spirit of giving,” she said softly.
“But he has reindeer and a sleigh and brings presents down the chimney, right?”
She sighed, then shook her head. “No. There is no Santa Claus.”
My heart sank still further at the realization that Mrs. Covey was right. Faith and kindness were supposed to prevail, not cruelty. After a moment I looked back up at my mother and asked, “Did you lie about Jesus, too?”
A few weeks later, two days after being beaten up by an older boy and having my one treasure, a Mickey Mouse watch, stolen, I was turning in an assignment at school when, on a whim, I wrote next to my name:
Ricky Evans the Great
I don’t know why I wrote it. Clearly, I had no delusions of grandeur. Everything around me testified to my worthlessness. But something about writing those two words next to my name made me feel good, if only for a few seconds.
The next day when we received our papers, I found that Mrs. Covey had erased my two extraneous words and written three of her own:
Shame on you
Then she stood at the front of the classroom and lectured us on the sin of pride, a scolding meant to humiliate and further shame me—the boy who would be great.
That was more than forty years ago. After fourth grade I never saw Mrs. Covey again. She was ancient back then; I’m sure she’s long gone now. But I’d like to see her. I’d like to look her in the eyes and say for that innocent little boy, “You were wrong, woman. That little boy was fighting a battle every day and, in spite of fear and neglect and nasty people like you, he not only survived but went on to reach millions of people with his words of hope. He went on to help thousands of abused boys and girls. Ricky Evans was great. And you were just mean.”
Sadly, there will always be Mrs. Coveys in this world, erasers in hand, eager to blot the greatness from o ur lives. Don’t let them. I’m not advocating hubris or narcissism, but an honest acknowledgment of the beauty and intrinsic worth of each of our souls is something far too many have let the world erase.
GROUNDWATER
Most of my teenage memories of my mother were of her lying in bed in a darkened bedroom. She suffered from depression, complicated by severe hormonal imbalances. It was an era when Valium was handed out like candy to relieve Middle America’s housewives of their “anxiety,” and those who suffered from depression were just considered weak and sometimes sinful. It would be years before my mother received the help she needed. In the meantime, there was hell to pay.
It was a warm summer evening. I was walking home from a friend’s house when I saw all the cars parked in our driveway and around our house. I broke into a run. I opened our front door to find our foyer filled with people—family and neighbors. As I was trying to figure out what was happening, one of my brothers’ girlfriends took me aside.
“Why is everyone here?” I asked.
“Your mother slit her wrists. She’s dead.”
I looked at her in shock.“My mom’s dead?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Where is she?”
“The ambulance just took her.”
Thankfully, my mother wasn’t dead. The paramedics had stopped her bleeding and gotten her to the hospital in time for lifesaving transfusions. Not surprisingly, she spent the next week in the psych ward. It was a painful and confusing time for a young man.
I never saw the knife she had used to slit her wrists, but there was still a physical reminder. We had an electric knife sharpener in the house. I couldn’t tell you the name of my first-grade teacher, but I could draw a detailed picture of that sharpener. It was an avocado-green can opener and knife sharpener in one. It had a small doughnut-shaped magnet that held the can in place as you clamped down on it. It had a slightly sloped plastic appendage on its back with two small slits to run a knife blade through.
Several times, in the weeks following that incident, my mother would go into the kitchen and start sharpening a knife. The shriek of the blade against the sharpening stone could be heard anywhere in the house. I remember hiding behind the couch and covering my ears while each pass of the knife sent shivers through my body.
One night, after my mother had gone to bed, I stole the appliance. I wrapped it in a bath towel and hid it beneath the downstairs bathroom sink.
I like to think that experience taught me empathy. I like to believe I’m a stronger man for it. But every now and then I feel those memories seep up through my thoughts like groundwater. And I realize that deep within me, there is still a shivering little boy covering his ears and hiding behind the couch.
TOURETTE’S SYNDROME
At the age of forty-one I was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. It’s not that I hadn’t suspected that something was wrong with me. I was certain there was. By then I had had more than a dozen different tics—along with the peculiar impulse to shout profanities in public places or spit in the faces of important people. Still, hearing the diagnosis from the doctor had a powerful impact.
“It sounds like you’re saying I have Tourette’s,” I said.
His brow furrowed. “You mean you didn’t know?”
His response shook me.
“I knew something was wrong, but I just thought I was weird.”
Then something happened that I didn’t expect. I began to cry. Not a few tears but a deep, primal sob that rose from my belly. For several moments I just wept. It was embarrassing, really. Get ahold of yourself, I thought. You’re a forty-one-year-old man. Then I realized I wasn’t crying for me or my life—I had a great life—but for that lonely little boy who endured years of teasing and torment. Tourette’s syndrome is a particularly difficult disorder for children to experience, as it brings ostracism, ridicule, and pain. I remember on many occasions holding my twitching face, hoping the tics would stop. I constantly wondered why I couldn’t be normal like the other kids.
As I sat there crying, the wise doctor said, “Richard, your Tourette’s is a gift.”
I looked up, angry at his comment. A gift? I didn’t want to be on this man’s Christmas list. “You call this a gift?”
“Do you know why I’m seeing you?” he asked.
I thought it was an odd question. He was, after all, a doctor. “I made an appointment,” I said.
“I’m a researcher. I don’t take patients. But when a colleague of mine told me that she suspected you had Tourette’s, I wanted to see if I could help after what you did for me.”
“What have I done for you?” I asked. “We’ve never met.”
“More than you can imagine,” he replied. “Many years ago, when my wife and I lost our child, my wife didn’t think she would ever heal. Your books helped her through her pain. It was your writing that brought her back to me. In her darkest place, she found you. And she felt hope.” Then he said something I found profoundly interesting. “Richard, do you think it’s a coincidence that you write the books you do—with empathy and sympathy—and you have Tourette’s?” He shook his head. “No, you write the way you do, not in spite of your Tourette’s but precisely because you have Tourette’s.”
It was a life-changing moment for me, one I’ve considered many times. Oftentimes we succeed not in spite of our challenges and difficulties but because of them. At that moment I realized that, if I had a choice and I could magically live a life without Tourette’s and replace my childhood memories with happy, carefree ones or live the life I do now, with the opportunities and experiences I have, I would choose to have the Tourette’s.
It’s one of life’s great ironies. Sometimes our greatest gifts are presented in the packaging of adversity.
THE GRAND BUFFET
A man was looking for a place to eat when he spotted a sign outside a restaurant that read:
ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET.
JUST ONE DOLLAR.
He walked inside where he was greeted by another sign that read:
SEAT YOURSELF
The man spied a small table in a crowded corner of the restaurant and sat down. A waitress soon greeted him. “What can I get for you, sir?”
“I’ll have the buffet special.”
“The special?” she asked.
He looked around the dining room. “Yes, I’ll have what everyone else is having.”
“All right,” she said, handing him a plate. “Help yourself.”
There was a long line at the buffet table, and when he got to the food he was disappointed by what he saw. The selection was meager, the quality mediocre, and most of the bins were empty or appeared to have been well picked over.
No wonder it’s only a dollar, he thought. He took what he could stomach, then went back to his table grumbling about the food.
After he finished his meal, he went up to the checkout counter to pay. Only as he pulled out his wallet did he notice that there was another room in the restaurant. It was much nicer and less crowded than where he had dined, with crystal chandeliers and beautiful art on the walls. There were long tables laden with food, including many of his favorite dishes: lobster and crab, great roasts and gravies, plump, colorful vegetables, and large platters of cakes, magnificent pastries, chocolate truffles, and desserts of all kinds. A chef stood at one end of the table slicing great slabs of roast beef.
The man asked the waitress, “How much is the buffet in that room?”
“One dollar,” she replied.
“It costs the same?”
She nodded. “Everything here is the same price.”
“How come you didn’t tell me about that room before I ate?”
She looked at him with a nonplussed expression. “Because you said you wanted what everyone else was having.”
* * *
That is how most people live their lives. Why do we settle for less? I believe, in part, because of fear. We fear risk because we fear the unknown. So we settle into the comfort of the known world and don’t sail our ships toward horizons that might turn out to be edges.
