I hit a wall when I was 47 years old.
That’s when the tumor-like headaches (that I mentioned previously) knocked me off autopilot. But that wasn’t my first crash.
The first was a life-changing plane crash when I was in my early 20s. For years, that near-tragedy actually made for one of my favorite adventure tales.
Now I see the story from an entirely different perspective. Have you ever noticed that some of your most important personal stories change over time? Not so much in the facts about what happened, but what those facts mean to you, and what they say about you as a person?
I would take it even further. The impulse to keep the deeper meaning of our life story hidden from ourselves is hardwired into every man I know.
We could almost say our past writes our present. This is especially true when we’re talking about the wounds from the past.
Owning what really happened
My father told me only a few stories about my Grandpa Jack. One that sticks in my mind is when my dad was a boy trying to help his dad fix the screen door. Grandpa asked him to use the hammer while he held the nail, but dad missed, hitting grandpa’s thumb.
Grandpa picked up his young son and threw him off the porch. I guarantee the emotional pain of that incident lasted far longer than the pain of the hammer.
When grandpa died at age 48, it fell on my father to support his mother and younger sister. By then, he had inherited a lot more than a family to support from Grandpa Jack. He owned a temper, a deep fear of failure and an overpowering drive to succeed.
Like many who grew up in the Great Depression, my father lived with the near certainty that the proverbial wolf was always at the door and guaranteed to leap for our throats again. But he was determined to never let that happen.
He became a successful businessman in real estate development and gave me the opportunity to join him when I was still in college. I was focused on not letting my dad down. What I saw ahead was limitless opportunity. What I missed entirely was the importance of confronting my family story and the unprocessed hurts that came with it.
Father wounds are psychic injuries that can be passed down for generations. They shape a child’s interior world — his emotional makeup, self-identity and survival instincts — through intense pressure of spoken or unspoken demands, expectations, fears or family values.
Trust me, at 21, I didn’t understand any of this. Who does at 21?
In the future, I’ll share more details about the plane crash that followed soon after following in my dad’s footsteps — and the crucial lessons I learned from it.
Thanks for coming along for the ride!