By Don Hall

My fifty-seventh year on Planet Earth was not great in a lot of respects and rarely have I been so blocked in writing my annual list of lessons learned. If you bother to follow me either here or on my SubStack, you understand. I’ve been penning these yearly recaps since I was thirteen years old and I can state without hesitation that this year has been the roughest to endure. As more and more of those people my age keep croaking, I’m sure I have a few more years of big loss to look forward to but, so far, this has been the worst yet.

The quick hits of the year:

• The single loneliest birthday I can recall.

• Left a stable but ethically questionable copywriting gig with the comfort of knowing that the years of savings and hard work would cushion me financially until I made writing freelance a viable income.

• Except in April, my wife of seven-and-a-half years and keeper of the copper parachute informed me that she had a long-term boyfriend and had been working for nearly three years as a prostitute.

• I hid in a Las Vegas apartment for four months trying to get my head around that while she was practicing her trade a stone’s throw from said apartment.

• I finally decided that my family needed me to help with my dad’s failing health and that I needed them to find some clarity in a world that had spun completely out of control.

• Five months, a bit of substitute teaching, some casino surveillance, and a lot of wound healing later, I snagged a job working as the Promotions and Events Director for five radio stations in Wichita, KS.

Hey—I recognize I haven't had it as hard as Prince Harry or Elon Musk—the trials and traumas of being ridiculously wealthy must be stultifying—but that’s the sum total of my year. The question presented is thus: what does someone learn from such an absurdly comical ruination? Less reinvention and more building myself up from the rubble, I'm at a standstill on which direction the self education goes. If you nearly drown wading in the ocean, is it better to learn to simply avoid the ocean in the future or learn to swim?

Red Flags Exist for a Reason

"No shit," says the Prophet. As ridiculously obvious as this one seems to indicate, apparently it is one worth mentioning and repeating until the words red flags exist for a reason become near-gibberish.

Red flags in human beings are not warnings of what might happen like a sign on a Chicago building declaring that ice might fall, they are predictions of the inevitable, of consequences that almost always will happen despite your best efforts to avoid them. People can change but no one can do the changing for them.

In hindsight, I should've seen this entire year coming from at least a few years prior. I knew my ability to judge the character of those I loved was highly dysfunctional—Christ, I've been divorced twice before—but my facility at ignoring qualities practically screaming at me is almost unmatched in modern times.

Let's be frank, getting engaged after three dates is stupid. Romantic, magical, and moronic on almost pathological levels.

Once the die has been thrown, however, the multitude of red flags were categorically ignored or justified. The fact that she was living for free with a hoarder as a method of escaping a boyfriend who was practically homeless should have set off a few alarm bells but no. The fact that she spent a lot of time angry at her boyfriends of the past and spoke ill of every one of them? The fact that she was a hard worker but only took cash under the table so she wouldn't have to pay taxes? Her bizarre kink-snobbery for anyone, including me, who wasn't into bondage, cum-swapping, and pegging? The frequent moments of existential crisis when she would say horrible things about me?

Later, when we arrived in Vegas she had several meltdowns and not a few instances where she'd bring home strange men or go out and meet more men and declare she was just being friendly. The Cosmic Eye blinked and the Voice from Above barked out "Are you a fucking idiot?" My answer was a shrug and a smirk.

The very concept that three years later I was surprised that she had jumped into the back of a stranger's van and had sex for a c-note is legendary on the drooling mouth-breather scale and, to think, I was judgmental of those who bought Trump's dog and pony show.

So, yeah. Red flags. What defines a red flag? I know who I am. I can even say that I mostly understand whyI am who I am. Red flags are those tendencies that indicate potential harm upcoming. Potential inconsistencies in the future of a relationship. If I were building a home on Miami Beach, a red flag would be that in the past few years, hurricanes have completely destroyed homes on Miami Beach. If I ignore that dire possibility, that almost guaranteed certainty, whose fault is it when I decide to build the house only to have—SHOCK— a hurricane destroy it?

Perhaps the lesson isn't that red flags exist for a reason but to recognize what that reason is in the first place. I saw them but ignored them which has more to do with the unearned hubris of someone who believes he can build that house so goddamned solid that no hurricane can level it. That's some A-level ego and so the lesson may be that I cannot circumvent the red flags out of sheer arrogance and will. That red flags exist and I am not so special or brilliant as to avoid the devastation they portend.

On top of that, I was head over heels in love with her and that sort of love masks a host of potential ills. She was The One and nothing, including the myriad red flags tossed out like confetti, was going to change my mind.

Perhaps the lesson is recognize the obvious red flags, see them for what they are, and make better choices based on the available information. The more pragmatic way for me to learn it goes like this—pull your head out of your ass, boy-o. Wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which one fills up first.

Red flags are there to tell you what will happen not what could happen. Recognize inevitability and proceed better.

Family is a Key to Survival

I've been telling myself and anyone who will listen that I came to Kansas because my family needed me which is true. What is also true is that I needed them just as much or more.

My dad is ill but the guy is built like a leather boot. It turns out that he'll be around for a bit longer than anyone thought and that the assistance required of me was for my mother who was slowly drowning in the extended caregiver role. That assistance came in the form of helping mom with the transport of my pops to dialysis three times a week, giving her some of her own time back but also someone to talk to about more than cancer and the daily indignities of a slowly fading body. That help will continue without reservation.

What I needed was time and perspective. I didn't need the unwavering cheerleading my family gives me (although, after my year, I ain't dismissing that as a phenomenal aspect of living at home) but what I needed was a safe place to wallow for a bit and then pull my head out of my wounded ass and get back on the train.

My default is to go it alone and I will always go in that direction. My mother raised me to be self sufficient. It turns out that I needed another bit of raising in my mid-fifties to learn that self sufficient doesn't mean self sacrificing or self destructive. I needed to learn that my family—wonderfully flawed and full of life and joy—is an absolute key to my survival and I'll not forget this. They are absolutely here, smack dab in Mayberry, USA, willing to put together a bedroom and feed me and remind me that, at least in this tiny corner of the universe, I am welcome.

I'm a rolling stone and expect I always will be but knowing there's a home base where they are, living life, and ready for me to come home for a short time to heal up for the next adventure.

It is the kind of loyalty and acceptance I suppose I've always sought in a wife but came up short every time. Whaddya know? They were here all along.

Pain is Inevitable; Suffering is a Choice

This isn't so much a lesson learned this year but one that I knew and was emphasized by my experience.

None of us can escape pain and loss. It’s perhaps the most constant aspect of living in the world even beyond death and taxes. Unavoidable, pain is simply going to happen. Physical pain, emotional pain. Get used to it, fuckers, because you cannot live without the accompanying discomfort. No safe space on the planet or in your mind can help.

Suffering, on the other hand, is a choice.

Grow up. Grow a pair. Muscle through. Process your loss and rebuild. Step up. Move on. Get real. Whatever phrase you embrace, it always means the same thing: to endure a loss or a trauma, you have to commit to enduring it rather than reliving it. You have to cease the rush of self righteous whining and blame and get into the rehab room and do the work.

That guy who lost his legs in a war zone and now plays basketball on the weekends? He didn’t get from one (loss of legs) to the other (basketball) by sitting around complaining about the war or how hard it is to be him or seeking out any ear to listen to his talk of woe. He went from pain that is useless and made it useful. He muscled through it and came out better than he was before.

That woman who was raped multiple times and mutilated by Islamist extremist in her own country now presenting TED talks and influencing international politics? She didn’t get there by stewing in her pain.

The man who was fat shamed as a kid who went into the gym and busted his ass every day until he lost 150 pounds didn’t get there by crying about being fat shamed.

It is an absolute guarantee that to live in the world is to suffer pain. You simply cannot avoid it in any way. What you decide to do with both the knowledge of the existence and inevitability of pain and the existence of your own specific pain is entirely up to you. Choose to suffer or choose to become stronger from it.

“There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that's only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.” — Frank Underwood (House of Cards, Season 1)

Underwood, in the opening scene of House of Cards, makes his above statement about a wounded dog and kills the dog. “There…no more pain,” he intones.

Psychopathic? Sociopathic? Yup. And given that the character is grotesquely Machiavellian and designed to demonstrate the evil among us, probably not the best solution to suffering. Yet, the concept of useless suffering versus motivating pain is sound.

Except that the binary is false. There is no useless pain unless you decide to make it useless. The decision and task is how to take useless pain and make it useful.

The incomplete axiom is “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” To complete the equation, you must add “…if we choose strength over suffering.”

It is MY Fault

In the closing scenes of Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams finally finds the phrase that breaks down Will's resistance and opens him to begin healing. "It's not your fault," he repeats.

In Will's case, traumatized by a horrible childhood, he's correct. In my case, not so much. In fact, Williams's therapist would need to say what I'm realizing this natal day: it is my fault. No, I didn't choose for this year to be so devastating both emotionally and financially but I chose to ignore those red flags, I chose to get engaged to a stranger on the third date and blithely tell her "We're married. Now we can get to know each other." I chose to take her to Las Vegas without considering the fact that she was always just a secret away from becoming what she became.

Everything that happened in my fifty-seventh year was a direct result of choices I made along the way and, in some cases, years before.

Yes, I was lied to on an epic scale for the better part of three years. I was put at risk without knowing it, I was betrayed almost casually, I was discarded like a toy a child no longer has interest in, and yet…

It is my fault.

This is not to say that I need to self loathe and beat myself up over it. It is merely the recognition that none of it was her fault, or the fault of the universe, or bad karma, of God's will, or destiny. It was and is the fault in my choices, in my broken judgment of character, in my need to be of use to someone who can only see me as a stepping stone to, as she put it, "something amazing." It is likewise not to say I don’t have a certain bitterness and anger at her for her choices. She was duplicitous, she became a fictionalized wife, she leaned into the deception with relative ease.

One of my twelve tattoos is a quote from a Chuck Palahniuk novel. "Every breath is a choice." It is an admonition and reminder to own your shit. There have always been those looking to blame others, blame bad luck, blame the system, for their hard experiences but that is a path toward self pity and victimhood. I am the author of my destiny and if I only accept the successes I'm guaranteed to squander them.

So, I accept the fault of my circumstances. It was all my fault which means I can avoid similar by remembering the mistakes and not making the same ones again.

Speaking of not making the same mistakes,

Three (Marital) Strikes and I'm Out

Yes. The adage is to "never say never." That phrase does not include saying "I'll never put plutonium in my pocket," or "I'll never intentionally light myself on fire or drink gasoline."

I have been down that "I do" train three times and I'm just not good at it. Like walking down a flight of stairs and tripping down to crash on the landing below every single time, maybe I should stop taking those stairs. I'm never getting married again. This is not to say I won't date or even find a long-term companion but under no circumstances will I be a married person ever again. There's no reason for it. I'm not having kids, don't have kids, have no desire to own a lot of property, and the idea of putting anyone through dealing with me when I'm too old to remember my name just seems selfish.

Also, it turns out I really like living alone. I mean, a lot.

So, unless she is so wealthy and old I can't say no for the payday coming, I'll live out the rest of my days as a comfortable bachelor, thank you.

A few more thoughts before I close out another year and start another:

Shame and Blame are Past-Focused, Hope and Forgiveness are Future-Focused

Given that my lessons this year have been about my bad choices, I’ll choose hope. I've felt a bit hopeless, lacking in any optimism about my future but that handwringing is also choice.

I'll choose forgiveness even though I still lie in bed some nights having arguments with her in my head, wanting some sort of personal justice or at least some remorse from her that I know I won't receive. Forgiveness is not saying "It's all right." Forgiveness is letting go of the need for that personal justice and moving past the hunger for retribution.

As the Knight in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade warns, "Choose wisely."

Optimism is Like Groot. You Can Blow Him Up but He Still Grows Back (and Dances)

That Moment When You Think You Can't Hang On for Another Second? Hang On for Ten More Seconds

Seriously. Ten more seconds. Then ten more.

You Don't Have to Have a Lot of Friends as Long as The Ones You Have Are True

A huge debt is owed to Donnie, Bob, Eric, Ari, Kelli, Erik, Jenn & Wency, Charlie, Peter, Allison, Paul, Tom, Wayne, and most important, Joe and David. I couldn’t have survived without them.

✶

I know my grandfather died at fifty-eight and my uncle, whom I'm named for, had a heart attack at sixty-one. I'm hearing those bells toll but the question I'm asking isn't "What now?" but "What? Now."

To win at life, you need to live. Not in some adolescent “fuck, fight, and get fucked up” sort of way or even the FOMO “live your best life… in Cancun!” manner but in doing things that matter, in appreciating the things that are often taken for granted, in living the life in front of you rather forcing a life you think you deserve.

So, I'm working a job I really dig. I'm moving into a kickass loft apartment next week. I'm going to the gym. It all feels like I'm living someone else's life as if it isn't really me going through these motions and I hope in the Groot optimism that those feelings pass on.

This is the life I have rather than the life I think I deserve because, let’s be honest, none of us deserves anything. We earn it, we embrace it, we settle into it. I’ll always be looking to conquer life because death is coming. It’ll get here whenever it wants and, hopefully, it’ll have to wait until I’m done doing something cool and wonderful before it invites me to discover the undiscovered country.

I hope Death likes Key Lime Pie because that’s my go-to for a birthday.