Time to Eat

Just sat down to write and I hear those words drifting across our house from my hard-working wife. Lucky guy, right? Right, let’s go eat together.

Back from dinner. Kids were at each other’s throats. And mine. I still think I’m lucky, it’s just I feel a little overwrought these days…keep telling myself how lucky I am. And there’re moments when I feel it, really believe it. As when watching my daughter on her balance beam just now. I even felt good standing there. Even had the feeling I’d been feeling good all day. That’s curious, because now as I write, moments later, I feel badly when my daughter shrieks in my ear by surprise to see if I’ll jump. I jump. My heart skips. I feel a PTSD-like emotional response. Guess that’s it, why I feel good and bad, because I’m recovering from feeling under stress too much, too often.

Now my daughter does her homework and my son is quiet. This is as peaceful as it gets while the family’s all here… About the PTSD thing. Let’s start at the end and work backwards. In the end I now spend lots of time trying to relax. Between projects, work tasks, meetings. In between moments of alarm at Donald Trump, my child’s classroom issues, communication with family members, colleagues (who are also competitors…), and the attorneys and manager through whom I connect with my difficult neighbor, I find myself looking for problems. Ha ha, yes, the habit of checking the news for trouble sets in. I’ve mocked the hourly evening news cycle for being all about drama. Guess what, the drama people (is that the news media or the viewership?), whomever they are, are winning, because I’m allowing myself to be drawn in. I watch and look for more drama, even though arguably I’d prefer none.

That’s now. Yet there was something before, something that broke me down, besides all this. That led to what I’ve loosely labeled “PTSD.” I made 30,000 outbound cold calls as a Commercial Real Estate Agent and then broke my leg. At the time it didn’t seem such a big deal. I crawled to the side of the road from my scooter and could tell it was broken or at least dislocated. Called the ambulance myself. There were construction workers and passers-by gathering around, but I told them thank you I’d already taken care of things. My whole family happened by and my daughter spotted me first, sort of half-lying in the gutter in my suit. But I smiled and planned with my wife how to meet me at the hospital after she dropped off the kids. As I lay on the emergency room table I made a phone call about a transaction I was working on so things could keep moving forward while I was in surgery. I wasn’t in pain and didn’t go into shock.

But the surgery itself did cause pain. And the nurses didn’t stay on top of it. But I prevailed, and used the painkillers when I got home, and recuperated. And did the physical therapy. And gradually all motion came back and now I can even run again. In fact I hadn’t been running much for years and now I do so that’s even better than before. But life hasn’t been the same. I feel a bit like Rip van Winkle. My Assistant quit shortly after I returned to work. The resultant precipitous drop in outbound sales calls, surprise, surprise, didn’t lead to as much business as previously. The business model had been broken. So fix it, right? It took me a while to notice how broken it was. And during that time it broke more. I hired another Assistant, this one off-site, someone I knew who was a good worker. Didn’t work out, and with this one also it took a while to notice that it wasn’t working out because she was so industrious. And, ironically, her early departure was because I was looking for someone else to add to the team, someone local… But about the PTSD, I think it may be a combination of the sales calls and the constant competition with all of my peers. It wears on me. I have a peer who made an agreement and then broke it, on what I believe was a technicality. I still got paid a partial fee, but don’t feel as good about him or about how hard I had to fight. Another peer quit and tried to get more than the agreed amount from a transaction we shared. He ended up doing more work so he could get paid more, but he got another colleague calling me an asshole. Like emotional ducks getting shot down one by one. I often get paid at the cost of collegiality.

It’s Valentines’ Day and I’m at a restaurant alone to write this. My wife and I will meet later. The point is it’s my work at the moment and I’m not too sure I have supporters or peers in this. Am I supposed to make a big decision and pursue writing with more verve (key phrase “supposed to,” in second half of my life I feel there may be no such thing as supposed to, only is)? Take a workshop? All good. I push forward with writing and see results. Push forward with other things too, doing better in certain aspects of the real estate arts than I’ve done before. Persisting. Traveling to I-know-not-where, but steadily. So while Donald Trump self-immolates I persist. When the dust clears I’ll be the traveler, photographer…real estate expert…the writer and observer. I see what goes on, at least a little bit and I can raise my eyebrow and I can watch. Thank God that I can have those roles.

Just finished eating and that’s something else I can do. A secret to tell: we eat. You think your work matters, or your relationships with peers, friends, colleagues? Maybe, yet I’ll tell you for sure something that matters is eating. You have to do it and it can be wonderful. One could build a life around sitting down and having a meal. PTSD? Not so much while enjoying taking care of the body. Message to self, Stop trying so hard? Maybe. Or how about this: enjoy your meal.