I Ran Away from my Life

And Learned that We are All Human

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The Blue Ridge Mountains. Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash

I have a friend, a poet, who likes to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Myself, I prefer to read books and printed text. In a conversation with him recently I said, “I just want to make sure you know that I don’t think reading is superior to listening.”

He said, “Don’t worry, I know you’re not one to feel superior. Or rather, to grasp and identify long-term with those feelings of superiority we all get.”

You gotta love Mike. He is a unique and deep-thinking friend with a PhD in linguistics. (Check out Mike’s poetry here.)

I’m not even sure how my brain connected his comment to this memory, but I found myself thinking about a guy I met years ago on the Blue Ridge Highway the day I ran away from my life.

Let me explain: I had recently gone through a divorce that had spiraled out of all control and I was still battling for visitation rights with my two young children. My girlfriend during these difficult years was a woman who was caught up in an unsolvable and hurtful obsession: she wanted to be the first to bear my children and could not accept in her heart that I already had two. My estranged ex-wife was blocking access to my kids, and I missed them terribly, so, obviously, I had little sympathy for my girlfriend’s irrational dilemma.

One day, I found a framed picture I kept on my desk of my son and daughter turned face down. If it were anyone else, I would have assumed the picture had been knocked over accidently. But I knew exactly what my girlfriend had done. It connected with a pattern of behavior.

I understood that she suffered from emotional compulsions that were beyond her control—that her actions were not intentional or meant to hurt—but just the same, it was the final straw (and probably a godsend). We got into a huge fight and I threw my backpack and a few other things into my car and started driving. I didn’t know where I was going but such was my anguish and distress—from my myriad troubles, not just her­—that I didn’t come back to Massachusetts for four months.

I didn’t come back to her ever. I’m actually embarrassed that I stayed so long with someone who couldn’t accept me for my most profound and important distinction: that of Father.

The Blue Ridge Parkway. Photo by Ashley Knedler on Unsplash

Back to the story at hand: On the first night of my spontaneous road trip, I checked into a hotel on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. In the morning, at breakfast, I got into a conversation with a guy at the next table who was on a business trip. He was already suited up, ready for the day’s meetings. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was a carpenter.

This guy was so intrigued! He asked me a lot of questions about the life of a workingman. “I envy you,” he said. “I wish I could work with my hands and be outdoors all day.”

This was the first time anyone had ever said anything like this to me. And a guy in a business suit no less! I was in my thirties at the time, still struggling to find my true calling, and not yet awakened enough to know that a professional in a suit and tie is no better than a carpenter in jeans and flannel shirt. His comment threw me into unknown territory. It was actually the beginning of my awakening.

Thinking about it now, I realize that at least some of my ignorance came from my Catholic upbringing (the rest came from being an American). My parents may never have heard of the “Great Chain of Being” or even knew the words “hierarchy” or “patriarchy” but these concepts are unknowingly assimilated by any kid who goes to church every Sunday for the first eighteen years of his life. It’s amazing really the awe I’ve always felt, and deference I’ve given, toward anyone dressed in a suit and tie (or cassocks and robes), even as I don’t even like them or want to wear them!

I get now how Mike’s comment led me to this memory. It was this idea of feeling better-than or less-than.  Shoot, at one time I would even have felt intimidated by Mike, with his Stanford education, his multiple degrees, his fluency in Spanish and Japanese and mastery of English. But Mike, who I actually met and connected with here on Substack, is just a regular ol’ guy. No more or less important than the pope, the president, or the richest guy in the world (sorry to only mention men; I’m speaking to my own historical illusions of inferiority). Mike deals with the same everyday stuff as I do: he struggles to balance family, work, and personal time; he balks at the rising price of a gallon of milk, feels elated when one of his poems is well received on Substack, hurt when a friend unintentionally trivializes his passion. He’s human.

Mike Speriosu: Poet, family man, friend

Coming from very different backgrounds and family expectations, my new friend’s early days were of course very different from mine. I tried college right after high school—the first in my family to do so—but my older brothers and most of my friends were working already, making money and starting their grown-up lives. I felt as though I was indulging in a dreamy whim going to college—and I was spending hard-earned money instead of making more! I dropped out, worked a few years, tried again, dropped out again and became a carpenter. I didn’t finally get my BA in English until I was 47.

Mike says, of his advanced education, begun and continued without interruption directly after high school, “At twenty-two I was terrified of becoming a ‘real adult’ so I signed up for more school.”

Mike is younger than I. His two kids—also a girl and a boy—are about the same age as mine were when my careless, ignorant, and desperate choices resulted in a broken family and damaged lives. He and I have become close over the past six months and I know that he and his wife are still falling in love even as they raise two very lucky and adorable cherubs.

It is true that income and education levels have a profound effect on the trajectory of one’s life but it is not true that one life, one person, is superior to any other. I’m only sorry it took me so long to understand that. The blessing is that, these days, I am capable of seeing and understanding the humanity and suffering, the little joys and big dreams of all people, from those in Salvation Army threads to those in Gucci and Prada.

Now if I only don’t let that hard-won ability go to my head and give me a superiority complex!

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Here is a poem by

Mike Speriosu

:

Message for the Doubtful

Go, now
and scatter your seeds
from the tired height
you have reached.

Let the howling
of every towering thing
fill your ribs, and breathe
your love into the wind.

Do the mountains resist
the sunrise warming
their shadowed curves
each morning?

(You can read this poem and enjoy its accompanying photography on Mike’s Substack page.)

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For more on the subject of illusions of superiority/inferiority, please check out one of my most popular personal essays, “No One is Better than You.”

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