Driven

March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 / T Wayne Hicks / Leave a comment

When I was younger, I used to drive. And I mean drive. When I was in the midst of thought about my purpose, my meaning, and in those years, my unhealthy continued pining for a girlfriend, which I specifically thought was my purpose.

Damn, how far I’ve come.

Those days, living in my two bedroom apartment in Indianapolis, IN, with my two best buds and immediate family as the only outside contact for me, working 14-18 hour days on a cold dock, I had to wonder what the hell my life was going to become.

Dealing with eternal anxiety, with OCD thrown in to boot, I had just struggled through 4 years of college with no clue on how my life was going to go. Terrified to go anywhere, relapsing my senior year of college, still a virgin, I was told to go to work, get a car, get a job, and the wife / kids thing would come into place. I was at an impasse in my life, but really? I wasn’t. I was at an imaginary wall. A point that didn’t even exist but for in my own fucking cranium. I was to grind eternally at work until I was ready to have a family, and then I would find a wife and do the life thing.

Except, I was struggling with finding a girlfriend. My horrible social skills had culminated at that point in my life with just 5 dates, several kisses and an impromptu blowjob for hanging a girl’s vertical blinds. I was 23 years old.

So, in the midst of this “pretend” crisis in my life and it was a “pretend” crisis, because I didn’t see what real crises people were going through. In my shitty little world, it was all about me and my “pretend” crisis, but it led me to a tactic that has helped me sort through the difficult issues of my life, more difficult than this minor bullshit, and it is, driving.

I used to saddle up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, get into my GMC Truck, and drive. I drove for hours. For a few years, it was on I-465 (the loop) around Indy, then in the boonies around my stomping ground near Greenwood, IN. I would just drive. A full tank of gas would drown out the anxiety. One night, I drove to Fort Wayne and back, a 3 1/2 hour jaunt, and my longest drive was in the middle of the night on a Saturday night to Chicago and back.

I just drove. Why? Because it cleared my mind. It allowed me to make sense of the senseless. And with the growth of my own character, it has become an indispensable asset in my quest to seek truth in my own life as well as take real time to make real decisions that I know need time to simmer.

Alone With Thoughts

What many people don’t understand, especially people who believe that they don’t need it, is that time alone is one of the most valuable things you can possess. With men these days, they barely have enough time to process everything in their lives, let alone taking an hour a day to get the fuck away from it all. Wife, kids, job, family, bills, etc, it all coalesces at their front door and won’t go away. So he copes, deals, and but never fully exorcises those demons. And they don’t go away…

The only way many men could and should cope is by having a healthy amount of alone time.

When I was single in my 20’s, I pined for a woman because I felt very alone. And I was, I didn’t have many friends, and only in 2003 (5 years after graduation from college) did I finally start to understand that that alone time I so foolishly squandered pondering for a girlfriend was and should have been used to get to know myself, travel, explore, and understand what I wanted. I was so focused on getting to the goals set for me by others that I completely forgot to set goals for myself! My life was being lived for others.

So I drove.

Between 1998 and 2003, I easily logged 50,000 miles on my truck just driving. Two – three times a week I would drive. I would drive, and drive, and drive. And it was invaluable to clear my head.

As 2003 ended, when I was lost at the beginning of the year, I had a girlfriend and was headed to marriage in 2005. I was still lost, but I felt that at least I had some kind of direction, even if it was the direction that I truly, deep down, thought I didn’t want to go, at least I had accomplished what my family and others were wanting me to accomplish.

It would be a decade before I finally got the hint that my life needed to change.

As my decision to divorce in 2015 finalized with my official divorce almost 4 years ago, I was again on the road in my Jetta. The drive has been indispensable to me as an effective means of getting my mind right and clearing out so I can make good decisions about my life.

But now, instead of having to make decisions based on what everyone else wanted of me, I now make them for me.

Being Alone and Being Lonely

There are vast differences between the two. Being alone is a vital part of a person who is mentally fit and healthy’s life. It is an important aspect that many millions of people don’t use as an effective way to stem the tide of anxiety and depression. Instead, they hope for a pill to make them all better. And that mentality has us where we are today.

Being lonely was a big part of my life. I wanted to have folks in my life. But make no mistake, being lonely was a “me” issue. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault. You can be alone and be completely happy. And you can be lonely and be terribly unhappy. The tie that binds is the fact that both are completely your issue as well as how your perspective runs. It’s all internal, it’s all manifested in how you are able to process your time by yourself. Many people feel sorry for themselves. Many struggle to take the time to understand that their alone time isn’t a time to pine for what they don’t have. It’s a time to appreciate what they do have, who they are, and how valuable they are to themselves.

Alone time is a REQUIREMENT. You cannot function as a person unless you have time to decompress. Whether it be meditation, breathing, or just 10 minutes of quiet, you have a choice to make yourself a priority in your life, and alone time does just that. As I often say, “You cannot pour from an empty cup.”

So I drive.

The miles of pavement, the lights, the quiet. The stop signs, the horizon, the clouds, the sky. The potholes, the road hazards, the other drivers. The world without physically touching the world. I let my mind wander and contemplate. I need to process my thoughts, my emotions, my world.

So I drive.

Snow, sleet, rain, fog, day, night. Headlights gleaming through the night, or reflecting on the other passing cars. The shadows of buildings, the neon lights of 24 hour joints, the letters on a sign falling down. The places still in business, the places out of business. I have to figure things out, but I have all the time in the world because, as the world goes, I drive through it. Time stops when you’re driving. Night becomes forever. Yellow lines pass into infinity under your tires. I have to figure things out.

So I drive.

You have to let yourself be with yourself, by yourself. People that don’t give you that time are clingy, needy people. There has to be boundaries for you to have this time. There have to be lines people can’t cross where your self care trumps everyone else (and it does). My self care was non-existent for over 20 years. I had to get away from the world to get myself right. I had to escape to have some time to figure things out.

So I drive.

Last night, I was driving in Phoenix, AZ. I decided, with a bit of excitement, to take a lesser route back to Tucson. I wanted to go away and be by myself deep in the Arizona desert. So I got on US 60 and took off east towards Tucson. I was in nothing but desert, with only the mountains and brush for company. I needed to see the desert, the real desert, not the I-10 passing by desert. I got out of my car on several occasions and took pictures, but I noticed one thing….silence.

The desert is so quiet. Many folks would be unnerved by the silence, even being afraid of being out in the middle of nowhere at night in the desert. But not me. I had to think. I knew myself, and I knew that I was okay. I wasn’t concerned about anything but getting my thoughts out and being content with this world. And I smiled, knowing this part of my life, this world I’ve created for myself, is the most contented I have ever been. It’s amazing what a good drive in an amazing world can do for a person.

So, if you find yourself wondering about yourself, wondering about your world, may I recommend a drive. As the song below states, a song I’ve loved since college “The road unwinds towards me, What was there is gone, The road unwinds before me, And I go riding on”.

Take a drive. You’ll be thankful for that time to unwind and be alone. It’s not only therapeutic, but it’s a requirement. Alone time. Try it sometime.

Driven up and down in circles
Skidding down a road of black ice
Staring in and out storm windows
Driven to a fool’s paradise

It’s my turn to drive
But it’s my turn to drive

Driven to the margin of error
Driven to the edge of control
Driven to the margin of terror
Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole

Driven day and night in circles
Spinning like a whirlwind of leaves
Stealing in and out back alleys
Driven to another den of thieves

It’s my turn to drive
But it’s my turn to drive

Driven to the margin of error
Driven to the edge of control
Driven to the margin of terror
Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole
Driven in, driven to the edge
Driven out on the thin end of the wedge
Driven off by things I’ve never seen
Driven on by the road to somewhere I’ve never been

Driven on, driven in on the thin end of the wedge
Driven out, driven to the edge
It’s my turn to drive
But it’s my turn to drive

The road unwinds towards me
What was there is gone
The road unwinds before me
And I go riding on

It’s my turn to drive
But it’s my turn to drive

Driven to the margin of error
Driven to the edge of control
Driven to the margin of terror
Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole
Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole

Diary of the Despondent

December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 / T Wayne Hicks / Leave a comment

One of my favorite bands is Breaking Benjamin. I discovered them in 2005 after a sales symposium I went to and a colleague from Pennsylvania mentioned his close to home town band had hit it big with primal screams, towering riffs, and ice-cold lyrics.

And as I grew fonder of them, one of their songs, with probably nothing to do with the subject, hit home as an anthem for the forever plugged in male attitude that I’d experienced for the vast majority of my current adult life.

“The Diary of Jane”, which officially has something to do with a movie star from the ’40s, I think, had lyrics that screamed through my head as the forever hopeful beta man who’d prayed, pined, and yes, even wept over that “perfect” girl for him, the girl that he loved that didn’t love him. The lyrics tell the tale…

“If I had to I would put myself right beside you
So let me ask you,
Would ya like that? Would ya like that?
And I don’t mind If you say
This love is the last time
So now I’ll ask,
Do ya like that? Do ya like that?

Something’s getting in the way
Something’s just about to break
I will try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
So, tell me
How it should be?

Try to find out
What makes you tick As I lie down
Sore and sick
Do ya like that, Do ya like that?
There’s a fine line
Between love and hate
And I don’t mind
Just let me say,
That I like that, I like that

Something’s getting in the way
Something’s just about to break
I will try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
As I burn another page
As I look the other way
I still try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
So tell me
How it should be?

Desperate I will crawl
Waiting for so long
No love, there’s no love
Die for anyone
What have I become?

Such was my lot in life throughout my 20’s and briefly after my divorce before I truly became knowledgeable about the ways of things.

Rationalizing Dust

As with most times in the lives of our current modern men who are lost, I call the 10 years between 18 and 27 of my life the “lost decade” simply because I felt I squandered my youth on the fruitless pursuit of true love, passing on from one female crush to the next, desperately hoping that this girl would love me. I didn’t have sex, I kissed four women, I rarely dated, hung with friends, played a shit ton of video games, and generally went from woman to woman like some damn episode of Quantum Leap, hoping that my next crush would be the one that set me free, that this love would be “the one”.

Pathetic? Sure. But when you see that many men are taking this path these days, it’s becoming more problematic seeing men, young men, believe the lies that I believed, and be balls deep in the fiction. My lost decade involved crushes on 5 girls, each who came into my life on more than one occasion, and each time, I was convinced fate, more than anything else, would show them that I was the guy for them.

But fate, or as I now prefer it, “rationalizing dust” is a losing and sometimes deadly game for men.

Fate, hope, and destiny are banners for the weak. I firmly believed, at my young age, that I only had partial control of my life, and these three magic words above were truly in control. So I lived my life on these as fuel. If I truly wanted, yearned, and pined enough for a girl, that she would be mine. I would use any sign, any small gesture, even her talking to me, as a rationalization that “this is why we’ll be together, this is fate taking the wheel.”

Absolute madness.

But the harshest truths are the ones that we refuse to accept, simply because it goes against all we think we stand for, all that we were told we believe. And we as men don’t want to believe such things, because not only does the truth not spare our feelings, it kicks the living shit out of us and then makes us get up for more. We want the feel-good story. We root for the underdog. But as you know if you’ve done any gambling, the underdog seldom wins. And consistently playing that role as a man looking for a woman will yield terrible results, not because of fate, destiny, or magic fucking words, but because of brutal, cold, real, reality.

Call it a pill. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the hardest, most real, most unfortunate truths about women that I didn’t, nay, refused to recognize in my gumdrop, lollipop, unicorn world of hopes and dreams. And these truths are what make or break men in their dealings with the opposite sex.

Fate is fantasy. It’s the belief that something will happen, and when fleshed against the rigidness of reality, it buckles like a belt.

The girls that I fell in love with never cared for me. In fact, more often than not, I was a nuisance to them. And, as the lyrics above opine, most, if not all of the time, I didn’t even register in their psyche. No pages in their diaries for me. None. Zip. Zilch.

Years of my life were wasted on girls who didn’t give two shits about me and never would. I should’ve done more, been more, worked on myself more. Regret is a bitch, and you can’t get those years back. “Die for anyone, What have I become?”

Women who did like me weren’t the ones I wanted. And the ones I wanted would never return the affections in the way I wanted.

Romance isn’t dead, it’s just misplaced and misused by men desperate to prove something to women who don’t care if he proves anything or not.

There are always other dudes. And until you can prove you have better value than the majority, there will always be other dudes. Pragmatism trumps idealism every damn time.

Nothing you “do” will make her like you. She’ll find an attraction to you in how much you invest in yourself

Women are emotional creatures. That doesn’t make them bad, in fact, it makes them the exact opposite, but you have to know what to expect, how to deal with them, and their chaotic and unpredictable patterns that seldom side with logic. Men and women really are different, but that’s a good thing.

Hating women for being women is misogynistic. You believe that they are operating in bad faith. And while some of them truly are, many of them don’t realize they are, nor do they care to understand if they do. Hate the game, not the player. Societal advantages for women have been around for eons and will continue because they outnumber men on this planet. Majority rules. We can still rail against these disadvantages men face, but it won’t change the big picture.

With these truths in tow, many men need to move forward to their new lives under these truths.

But many men just can’t. Hence the title of this post.

The Six D’s of a Man’s Life Realization

I was there. I didn’t want to believe any of this. I still fought every day to believe the fairy tale, but it didn’t matter. The plug was pulled and I was out there floating. Many men will just float for decades, hoping to find that the dream really was true, many others will just continue to live their lives as if they weren’t aware and be disappointed. Still more will try to rationalize the irrational, stretching their beliefs into taffy to justify the behavior of others. And unfortunately, many won’t either unplug fully or those that do end their lives because they can’t believe that they were so wrong.

They feel they’ve wasted their lives on a narrative that wasn’t true, not even close, and rather than accept the hard work needed to pick back up, they won’t. They let go.

However, I, among many other men in this sphere that have all unplugged (yes, they all have), are living proof that there is life after death. The old you dies with all of the false knowledge you had and the new you arises equipped to deal with this new reality. It’s harsh but one thing that I can say is that you can be stronger. You can survive this new environment with renewed hope because the hope now comes not from outside forces, but from within yourself.

Self-empowerment and improvement is a cornerstone of this new reality. Faith is put into yourself which makes you more able to survive and thrive.

Here’s the six D’s I used: Denial, Disappointment, Despondency, Discovery, Drive, Domination

My message is simple. It’s never too late for you. I don’t care if you’re 20 or 80. You take responsibility for your life, your beliefs, and your knowledge at the age you do and you then grow with it. The bitter pill isn’t bitter, it’s only bitter for those that refuse to understand that the bitterness is a phase on your journey and it too will pass.

I want to show men that even after the harsh truths above, the six D’s that they go through in this process. I’m writing about this very issue in my book. The seventh D, divorce, is in some men’s lives as well as a phase of discovery.

This isn’t self-help as much as it is self-information. Men need to be aware of all of this crap because I sure as hell wasn’t and I can tell you my father nor my grandfather was either. And with masculinity under attack, the numbers of single mother households growing and the daily messages I get from men struggling, it’s only going to get worse before we can stem the tide.

We’ve lost too many good men to their own weaknesses. We can’t lose any more. The message needs to get out and it needs to get out in a big way.

Women aren’t your problem. You are. Your pining over women is wasting your resources. You’ve forfeited your life direction for a fiction. Something that you can’t control. But you can control this. You can control what you do.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do.

It will never change the fact that there will always be men that need help getting out of this morass they are currently stuck in because of society telling them what’s best for them rather than looking inside themselves. Weak men will always be a battle that needs fighting. But the real fight is getting this information to these men without it being attacked as being anti-female or misogynistic. It isn’t and never was. Male empowerment isn’t taking anything away from women, it’s sharpening the roles of each sex and playing to strengths that have been around for thousands of years and aren’t going to go away because of “feelings”.

So stop pining over a woman, deriding your despair into victimhood, and trying to justify the lies that have been told to you. Get out of your own head and get your ass to work. You’ll thank me when you get to the other side and see how fucking awesome it is.

Open your eyes and live. Your best years are ahead of you.