Broken Down

Dear Matt,
 
At the age of 36, you will lose your mind.
 
You will also lose your job, your reputation and your dignity. You will lose your money. You will lose your career. You will lose your marriage. You will lose your house. You will lose access to your children. You will lose control over your money. You will be pursued by people you trusted, lawyers, accountants, credit card companies, banks, medical boards, the IRS, and Medicare. At one point, someone will joke with you and say, “at least they can’t take away your birthday.”
 
Sounds scary, right?   It is. No question. It’s terrifying. It sucks and it keeps on sucking for years.
 
I don’t want to dwell on this much longer but you need the heads up so here’s a summary of the stuff that breaks you.
 
By the age of 46 you will have recovered from opiate addiction that started after contracting meningitis while working in the ER. You will serve an eighteen-month suspension and spend five years of pissing in cups to get your medical license back. You will leave the big city ER’s and go back to work in ER’s across the state of Ohio.
 
In 2014, you will discover your marriage isn’t what you thought it was. You will try to salvage it only to find that your first wife doesn’t want what you want.  You will go through the trouble that comes when a white professional male seeks integrity from his wife. You won’t find it, and instead you will have to endure emotional upheaval, blatant lies, threats to your professional life, financial manipulation, homelessness, massive legal bills and huge tax problems.
 
Fortunately, your first wife will be unsuccessful in depriving you of a relationship with your kids. In the end, you keep your parental rights but lose your home and all the equity in the marital assets. You will be compelled to fund the divorce process which will leave you with all the debt. Your first wife will walk away from a 20-year marriage where she never once behaved as a partner with a house, a car, minimal student loan debt and false narrative about how she was the victim. 
 
That’s just  the personal side. The professional side sounds even worse.

As I’ve told you already, you find success early. You become an ER doc. You fly in helicopters and work with SWAT teams. But the healthcare system isn't what you thought it was and you become another cog in the machine. You will become skilled labor with no control over your practice. Corporations will reap the financial rewards of your work while avoiding any responsibility for their failed policies and programs. You will carry the legal risk but it will be the patients who will suffer the most.
 
As for your finances, you might have guessed already but your earning potential makes you a target. No matter how much debt you have, the people around you (ex-wife, lawyers, accountants) will see you as an endless supply of money. You’ll have to figure out a way to balance all the debt.

The first few years after you recover from addiction are the toughest. You’ll be treated with a level of disgust and hostility you never thought possible. It will make earning a living more than a little complicated.
 
Getting paid will be tough. You’ll work days, nights, evenings, weekends and holidays. At one point you’ll wait 2 months for a paycheck from a hospital system that brags about its 8-Billion-dollar revenue stream.
 
Eventually you’ll figure out that your medical education did not include any information about curing disease or restoring people to health. You only learned about symptoms and disease, surgery and drugs.
 
You will see the people around you get fatter, and dumber and sicker. You will meet thousands of people who went to their doctor and only got worse. You will meet hundreds of people who did everything they were told only to be left injured, sick, and abandoned. They’ll come to the ER as the place of last resort.

Eventually you’ll see the truth. The healthcare system turns human suffering into money more efficiently than it turns medical care into health.

And that’s why I'm sitting in my truck writing this note.  

It all sounds tough right? It has the makings of a decent book, right? People will want you to tell that story because they can connect to the emotion with which you tell it. 

But guess what...that same emotion will keep you replaying the story until you decide to stop. You will literally relive the story and identify with the energy of that life each time you tell it. Repeating this story will keep you stuck. It is the siren on the shore of your life. Fall for this song and you will never get away. Believe what you think and you'll stay stuck in it forever.

You have to get over it. You can get over it. You will get over it. 
 
I know...I know....You followed the rules. You played nice. You were a good little Christian boy. You were a virgin when you got married. You never cheated. You worked your ass off to become a doctor. You chose to live in a hospital and serve others while others in your age group lived their lives and did whatever they did. You got sick. You nearly died. You got better. You submitted to the process. You earned back every responsibility you were given. You did the job. You paid the bills until the bills became bigger than your paycheck. All the money you earned went to someone else. Your only option will be to watch it all fall. You can’t work your way out. You can’t wish your way out. You can’t even wait your way out and you certainly cannot think your way out.

Right. Enough already. You're done with that life.
 
One day you will sit your truck and look around. You’ll recognize this place. It’s called the bottom. It’s different than the ones that came before. It’s the bottom where you see that everything you believed in was an illusion. It’s the bottom that comes when you finally see the truth of who you are.
 
And that’s it. You just are.

You are not the stories you tell about yourself.

You are not the things that happened to you.

You are not even the thoughts and feelings you think and feel. 

​You just are.

And then a funny thing happens.
 
You find peace. Peace that passes understanding.

You know there’s something beyond your little self.
 
You know there are forces you cannot comprehend.

You know there is a purpose even if you cannot define it.

You know nothing is what it seems.
 
The illusions have lost their hold.
 
They don’t carry the same threat or trigger the same fears.
 
You’ve absorbed all the hurt and transformed it into life.
 
You know you can do it again (and you will).
 
You will find freedom when there’s nothing left to lose and you will know that you can live come hell or high water.
 
So, what are you going to do with it?




 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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