My recent trip to the emergency room
I felt bad about taking up space in the waiting room with a crowd of sick people who probably needed help more than me.
But what if I was really dying?
I was experiencing chest pains that were so bad it felt like a thirty-foot python had coiled itself around my torso. The force of the constriction and heart palpitations reached a point where I decided to let a professional take a look at me.
Finally sitting down with the doctor, however, my blood pressure measured 119 over 79, even in my state of distress. The EKG test also showed no signs of an issue with my heart.
So I headed home, wondering what the heck was going on.
But it would get worse.
In the days following, my shallow breath, the pressure in my rib cage, along with a throbbing sensation in my temples, slight tunnel vision, and mild disorientation continued to elevate.
In dire need of answers I started watching myself like a hawk. What was I doing, thinking, or perhaps even eating that might be causing this?
It didn’t take long to see that all these symptoms got worse when I sat down at my computer. Even now, typing this, I have to look away from the screen, out my window, and take in the blue sky now and then to avoid going down the rabbit hole.
You might be thinking this is a tale about the danger of EMFs and screen time. But that’s not where I’m headed with this.
The source of the danger here was none other than me.
The bullies that came before
I’m a speaker and entertainer by profession. Work stopped when the pandemic hit, and after being home for a couple of months I looked back at my life and realized I hadn’t been in the same city for more than 3 weeks at a stretch in 40 years.
I love my job as a meeting presenter, but during the two years I was out of work and able to stay home, I’d randomly burst into tears for no apparent reason. And it wasn’t because I missed being on the road. It was because I missed myself and my family and I didn’t even know it, until I slowed down.
After forty years of transit, I had no idea what it felt like to enjoy continuity of place and relationship with those you love. Constant travel and running from city to city required a kind of physiological armor that buffered me from stress. The only problem is that it also prevented me from feeling.
As the months rolled by, something strange was happening. The inexplicable tears were healing me. A softening was occurring, which in some ways left me feeling slightly unrecognizable to myself. The usual punishing schedule, the push to achieve, sell, create, move, win, and repeat was starting to look . . . crazy.
I spent more time sitting on my deck at home enjoying the view than getting anything “meaningful” done.
That’s when the memories started.
The first one was of an elementary school field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. My class was making its way to the museum’s working coal mine and a group of four inner city kids carved me off the back of the line, pushed me into a dark corner of a nearby exhibit, and proceeded to punch a tooth-sized hole in my lower lip.
Wow. I hadn’t thought of that in years.
But a day later I remembered being taken to the hospital by my mom after a kid had thrown a rock at my head while I jumped the fence behind our house that led to a hideout where we’d built secret forts in the woods.
And then the memory gates fully opened. As my body was relaxing, my mind was purging itself of accumulated shocks, particularly incidents of bullying, that I’d tucked away long ago.
My childhood was full of adventures as a young performer, appearing in stage productions, television commercials, and even some professional theater roles.
At age 12 I was chosen to fulfill the only child’s role in a production of the Broadway musical Mame. I was hired locally in Milwaukee, while the rest of the cast had been flown in from New York. During the first cast meeting and introduction, the lead actress, who’d later go on to star in numerous movies, decided I was so cute she needed to shove me under her blouse in full view of the cast, nuzzling me into her cleavage long enough to emerge tousled and short of breath as the gales of laughter rolled forth from the cast.
There was plenty of grabbing and touching in the wings of other theater productions by men who I wouldn’t understand until later were not just being friendly. But it felt weird enough at the time to leave a mark on my psyche.
As I grew and we bounced from one school system to another while my dad searched for better teaching jobs, I’d run into a string of neighborhood bullies. After being taunted, roughed up, cornered, threatened, and detained enough times, I came to absolutely dread leaving the house, and would avoid it if I could.
These rapidly surfacing memories and extra time at home motivated me to reestablish regular contact with my parents. We enjoyed many authentic, heartfelt, and healing conversations, some of which included my brother, about the dynamics of my family of origin.
During these conversations, other stories came to light.
I learned that I had spent the first week or so of my life without much physical contact with my mother. I lay next to her in a crib while she recovered from blood poisoning that she had somehow contracted during my birth. I have no memories of feeling cut off and alone, desperate for connection — but my rigid insistence to this day on being fiercely independent and going to great lengths to avoid the need of anyone’s help starts to make sense in light of that early experience.
I was even more fascinated, however, to hear for the first time about my maternal grandfather’s upbringing as one of 15 children.
My grandpa’s mother apparently decided that he was expendable and would routinely reassign food, clothing, and other necessities to her favored offspring — leaving him to fend for himself. When my grandfather came down with appendicitis as a teen, he led himself out into the woods to die. (His father forbade the use of anything manmade in his home, so medical help was out of the question.) Had one of my grandfather’s older sisters not intervened, rescuing him from the forest and delivering him to emergency care, neither my mother nor I would ever have been born.
My mother herself, I learned, spent an extended time in a medical unit as a child in a city far away from her home, where her parents remained to work.
My father’s father, I learned, used to have to fight his way up and down the street, a Protestant in a Catholic neighborhood, just to attend school.
At one point I started a list (that eventually tallied about 40 incidents in total) of what I experienced as life-threatening episodes — including accidentally winding up lost in the infamous housing project of Cabrini-Green in downtown Chicago as a young man and being extorted for safe delivery from the hood.
I had discovered that reasons to question my chance of survival were not only encoded into my own cellular memory and experience, but had its roots in an extended family pattern.
The strangest part of it all is that I have never thought of myself as someone who had any bullying in his history. I had somehow dismissed all of these episodes as part of a meaningless past, but as it turns out, I hadn’t left it behind.
In fact, bullying has continued to have a significant influence in my life, but in a twisted and sneaky, rather than obvious way.
The bully within
At some point, the bully “out there” ceased to be an issue.
I was an athletic, larger than average white male who could enjoy walking any middle-class street with no reason to fear for his safety. But my history created a different kind of stalker: my own brain, which despite the lack of threats still found reasons to fear — everywhere. I was one step ahead of all the possible confrontations, blind corners, accidents, illnesses, disasters, and emergencies that might lie ahead. On guard, and often overreactive.
And every day that I — and later my spouse and children — survived was proof that my 24/7 vigilance was working.
I had learned to juggle up to 7 balls simultaneously as a real-life circus performer without having any idea just how perfectly symbolic that was of my psychic condition, working just that hard with little margin for error to keep the show of my life from crashing down. The only problem is that I was juggling imaginary problems and threats.
What do you do if you find yourself with the laser attention and hyper-vigilance of a warrior?
Find a war, of course. And so I did.
Without a real outer enemy, I applied myself to self-improvement. Surely I could become a person who was worth the grant of safety, protection, love, and rest. My past had proved that I didn’t warrant this by default — and so I would earnit. I racked up achievements in performance, athletics, and then business success as a way of ensuring that my loved ones and I would never be at risk again.
When those pursuits fell short of addressing my unrest, I added spiritual practice to my docket of evidence that I deserved to exist. Surely once I had conquered enlightenment and become undeniably radiant, holy, and wise, I’d arrive in the promised land of ultimate inner peace, confidence, and safety. I became a serial retreat meditator. I vowed to confront myself, my shadow, root out everything impure and unconscious until I had attained . . . what? I wasn’t sure. But I was convinced that if my efforts were severe enough, a prize would appear at the end of the rainbow. It is obvious here in the telling (but invisible to me at the time) that my very approach to finding relief was a perpetuation, within myself, of the bullying wound.
I was bullying myself.
I spent many years in that self-driven cycle. Traveling, working, achieving. Fast-forward to 2020. Despite all the achievements, accomplishments, competencies, efforts, and vigilance — I didn’t see the pandemic coming. And I berated myself for it. I blamed myself for not already having a back-up plan, some way to earn a living that was properly diversified — meeting-proof, pandemic-proof.
I found myself sitting at home in a new, heavily mortgaged house we had just moved into weeks before the pandemic hit, watching all of my upcoming speaking work vanish as the virus wave headed for American shores.
A lifetime of experience as a live presenter didn’t count for much in a lockdown world. My only other marketable skill was writing. So I started researching online marketing, writing platforms, content creation, and course-building — preparing to make a quick pivot into success as an author.
But writing was a completely different animal from live performance. I was sharing with an audience that I couldn’t see. My only metrics for pleasing the crowd were likes, comments, follows, and the stats of views and reads. And I tracked all of them with a vengeance—analyzing, dissecting, and strategizing how and why one article would perform better than another.
My mood would soar and plummet as I rode the roller coaster of stats. But I denied that I was simply addicted to the whims of the algorithms, the snare of social media. In my mind, I was a real writer — producing “long form” content. I was a creator, an educator, an artist. I was on the road to becoming a respected influencer.
Courage, fear, and creative expression
It’s been a year now since I committed to the online writing focus. To support my writing opportunities and the potential for monetization, I’m approaching the launch of two online membership sites that will make my archive of professional development material available for use in a community setting.
I’ve been pulling out all the stops — risking showing and sharing myself more than I ever have before. But with every step I’ve taken toward being more visible and human, I’ve also taken on the anxiety and paranoia of expecting, once again, to become the target of aggression I never saw coming.
Despite being given a “clean bill of health” after my most recent trip to the hospital, I could clearly feel that all is not well. The way things were going—my heart, some vital organ, or my mental health was going to pay the price.
I considered backing off of my effort to find an audience I can serve, but then what? Avoiding the triggers of my distress would do nothing to ultimately address it — a distress I’ve been hobbled by for decades. Even understanding the possibility that I might cause myself serious harm, I decided to keep going with the writing projects, desperate for a deeper resolve of the issue than running away could provide. Somehow, I needed to find a means of offering and expressing myself from an honest and vulnerable place without feeling as though I might die from the attempt to be of authentic service. I resolved myself to the fact that physical or mental breakdown might come before a personal breakthrough, but I had to stay with the effort.
I continued to write, comment, publish, and a day came that pushed me to the final edge. In a desperate need for emotional release I started playing videos of Britain’s Got Talent in the midst of work. I called up compilations of the most inspiring singing talents. We’ve all seen the clips of those simple citizens, young and old, whose families had only heard them sing in the shower and somehow convinced them to get on stage. And then suddenly that shy hairdresser, or sanitation worker, or florist, would come to LIFE; releasing an inner power through vocal expression that, at least for me, always leaves me weeping in witness of their courage and triumph.
So there I was, balling my eyes out, and at the same time, watching this contorted stress-creature living in my body continue to twist my insides into a knot so tight that even emotional catharsis could not touch it. Even the demonstration of these brave humans who were fully letting go could not untangle it.
I turned next to Spotify. I like music, but have never been much of a listener. I didn’t even have a Spotify account. So I signed up and tried easy listening, jazz, classical, heavy metal, cycling through styles at various volumes while continuing to work.
At the end of my rope, I could feel that the full responsibility for my suffering, anxiety, stress, fear, and dread was my own.
An early life pattern of expecting a threat to my existence had been installed, reinforced, but ultimately picked up and sustained by me.
Now, I was the only bully I had left — fully internalized.
An inner bully who was hovering and ready—no matter where I went, what I thought, what I did — to condemn, punish, scrutinize, and stir up fear for its life.
No bully has ever been worse than me.
I’d been running from this fear and this pain, this constriction ever since I can remember. I couldn’t recall being without it. At this crisis point, at the pitch of its overwhelming weight, it threatened to swallow me.
And so I tried the only thing I hadn’t ever considered: turning toward it instead of looking for an escape.
What was this — really?
And I allowed myself to fully feel it, its fist up against the bottom of my lungs, denying any semblance of a full breath, pushing against the back of my spine, its other hand twisting my entire system of assimilation into an impassable tangle of digestive distress.
That’s when the most bizarre of thoughts arrived.
This exact feeling is how I preserve and perpetuate myself. If this feeling disappears, I disappear as well.
I could see how this feeling, as awful as it was, had become a familiar and habitual safety zone. And in the same moment that I became aware of my attachment to this feeling, as me, as a part of my identity, something inside — let go.
And suddenly the strangest and most unexpected release occurred. The knot unfolded, like an egg being cracked, the hard blockage becoming a stream of nourishment. The pressure in my head immediately subsided, my lungs dropped into my belly, drawing fresh air into the pathways to starving alveoli.
My entire life had been the chronic habit of manufacturing threat, and my identity had crystallized around being the person who anticipates it, outsmarts it, outworks it—and survives.
In letting go of the knot, I had to let go of that old “me.” And what I experienced was a tremendous amount of space. The space to just be.
Not in some mystical, transcendent, enlightened sort of way—just the natural realization that space is the fundamental ground of humanness.
But minutes later, I wanted to fill that space again—load it with some threat. The old habits are strong. In contrast to the space, I could see the threats as a fiction, a shadow-show being cast onto the cave wall of my primate brain, easily fooled into believing a monster is looming, and that I should fight or flee.
Those self-projected threats have always been my cue to leap into evasive action—to prove, become, earn, impress, win, and conquer. But I’ve only been evading the real me.
I now had a reference point for a counter-disposition as the knot started to rise up again. I’d had a deep drink of this inner condition of spaciousness. The gentle and workable field of now that was right here for me.
The instant I brought my attention back to that vast, stable, quiet, and connected feeling in my body — to a home base of naturalness—the release into being was restored.
Who was your last bully?
I wonder how many other artists, creators, writers, singers, entrepreneurs, designers and self-expressers are in this same club?
How about you?
Have you been trying to claw your way back into the skin of that free-spirited, fully expressive being you know yourself to be, but instead, you’re bullying yourself into a corner of fearful withholding? Offering less than you are? Playing small?
Perhaps it’s not as common as I imagine that a history of bullying and struggle with self-expression go hand-in-hand, but if anyone else out there experiences this, I’d like to hear your story.
The last several weeks since this phenomenon occurred, I have passed back and forth between the worlds of survival and spaciousness no less than 1,000 times. The 60-year habit of being a moment-to-moment survivor, identified with this special arrangement of tension, re-establishes itself the moment I allow my attention to fall back into the old pattern.
That old groove is the activity of processing every perception in terms of what it means in relationship to my survival—always wondering—am I seen, honored, respected, safe, threatened, loved, ignored, at risk, on solid ground?
My entire life has been focused around the pursuit of full aliveness as an individual and the desire to help others embrace their most full, present, joyful, creative, and giving nature. I can see now how much that has been driven by a need to help myself.
The truth I’m working with now is that I have a tremendous amount of love in my heart and fear in my mind.
To some extent I imagine that every human being is fighting the same battle—to stand consciously and courageously in front of imagined fears and yet allow the love, creativity, and joy in their heart to find a pathway of expression through the labyrinth of their own defenses.
As far as I can tell, overcoming those obstacles necessitates moving back into the body and acting in ways that prove, to the body, that we are not in the danger we imagine; fully feeling the patterns of constriction and then humbling ourselves, in a manner almost like prayer, and asking to be shown the way back to the heart and to our essential, reliable connection to Source.
As a performer and communicator, I learned long ago that the shortest distance between me and a crowd is honesty, vulnerability, and authenticity. Now I’m learning that these same qualities illuminate the shortest distance between me and myself.
Only a bully would stand in the way.
I’d love to hear of your experience with the bullying dynamic, externally or internally, and its impact on your creative life.
Wow! This is really deep and personal, Rick. It makes me wonder what things I may be suppressing or that may be impacting me in negative ways. When I look back at my past, nothing sticks out as a form of bullying or any other type of trauma, but I'm now wondering, “what might I be missing?”
Also, happy to hear you received a clean bill of health from the doctor.
Thank you for writing this!
“A softening was occurring, which in some ways left me feeling slightly unrecognizable to myself.”
What a powerful piece, Rick. I especially love the line above and how it unravelled so much in you.