The Operating Manual for Being Human

I'm Mark.

I built a career out of keeping it moving. Decades of performance. Decades of solving, achieving, producing. And underneath all of it, a quiet certainty that if I ever stopped moving, whatever I'd been outrunning would catch me.

I have often been more comfortable one-on-one than in groups. In a room full of people, part of my attention can leave the conversation and turn toward me. How am I coming across? Do I belong here? Does everyone else know how to do this in a way I somehow missed?

For years I thought belonging would arrive when I became confident enough, successful enough, interesting enough, something enough.

From the outside I looked like I had it handled. I worked at big companies, then built my own. Bought them, sold them, raised money, sat in boardrooms. I could walk into a business that wasn't working and find the problem, usually fast. People asked me to do that for them.

I could explain a company's cash flow. I couldn't explain why my chest was tight.

For most of my thirties I was convinced something was wrong with me. Not dramatically wrong. Not the kind of wrong that gets a diagnosis or earns anybody's sympathy. Just a low hum of not-okay sitting underneath everything. I could close a deal, run a meeting, make people laugh at dinner. And then I'd be alone, the performance would stop, and there'd be this weight I couldn't account for.

I thought everyone else had figured something out that I'd missed.

That's the part I want to say plainly, because I think a lot of people are carrying it. Not a crisis. Just the sense that there's an instruction sheet somewhere and you were out of the room when they handed it out. So you watch how other people do it, and you copy the shape of it, and you hope nobody looks too closely.

So I went looking. Books, papers, therapists, courses, teachers, anything. I read the way people read when they're trying to solve themselves. I learned a lot. Some of it helped. Most of it explained beautifully what was happening and then stopped right where I needed it to keep going.

After my marriage ended, I went years without letting anyone regulate me. I didn't use that language. I just said I was fine. I was handling it. I didn't need anyone.

Then on October 8, 2021, my closest friend Jonathan and his daughter were killed in a plane crash. He was my business partner. I talked to him almost every day. He was one of the few people I never had to explain myself to, and there aren't many of those in a life.

My body knew before my mind did. For weeks my hand kept moving toward my phone to call him. Not as a figure of speech. My hand would actually move.

Six months after Jonathan died, I drove to a Buddhist monastery in Mississippi. I didn't go looking for answers. I went because I'd exhausted every other option and I needed to be somewhere that didn't ask anything of me. I sat in the meditation hall and didn't meditate. I just sat.

A doctor later told me my cortisol was consistent with someone in a combat zone. I wasn't in a combat zone. I was running a business and grieving. My body couldn't tell the difference. I got sick constantly. My memory got bad enough that I started forgetting conversations I'd had that week.

What I remember most clearly is a panic episode in a parking lot. I got out of the car, put my feet on the asphalt, started naming cars by color, put my hand on my chest. About four minutes. I had no idea what I was doing. I found out later that every piece of it has a name and works for a reason.

That's when the reading stopped being interesting and got urgent. I wasn't curious anymore. I needed it.

One of the stranger parts of becoming a father was discovering how often parenting my son brought me face to face with the child I had been. I wanted him to know his feelings were allowed. Then I would hear myself react too sharply to something small. And sometimes, underneath my own voice, I could hear an older voice.

My son does not need a father with no wounds. He needs a father willing to notice when an old wound is speaking and come back.

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