SAVAGE GARAGE
I would like to tell you a story……
So let me rewind the tape a couple of years. I want to tell you about the week leading up to my 40th birthday. Just a little backstory on me, I operate an auto repair facility for now approaching 25 years. I have tow trucks, and we are contracted with multiple municipalities. We do non-consent towing for police departments when they need us. Most of those tows are usually in the middle of the night. For years, every one of the calls we took was dispatched through me. Needless to say getting sleep was never a priority or very consistent. The week or so leading up to my birthday we had about 10 days straight where there were multiple calls per night. The 10th day was August 28, my birthday. I was not feeling well mainly due to my terrible sleep patterns. My wife asked what I wanted to do for my birthday and I told her I just wanted to go to Poor Henry’s, a great little pub close to home, have a great burger, and one of Mike the bartender’s amazing Long Island Iced Teas. So we went. We walked in, I knew something didn’t feel quite right inside of me and I was not sure if I was just exhausted mentally or what the hell was going on. It never felt this heavy before. This day, the day I turned forty, hit me super hard. In my eyes, my life just checked the halfway mark. About one and a half drinks in, my phone rang. Another police department needed us. So I took the information and attempted to remember it in my head. But let me tell you Mike’s Long Island Iced Teas were no joke. So I called my driver and he didn’t answer and then it came. For me it feels like you would feel if you saw someone pulling out of a parking lot with their baby in a carrier on the roof of their car. It was the only emotion that I was able to feel. Panic. Sheer panic, my heart races I can’t breathe and the stories I tell in my head. Oh shit he’s not answering and here I am at the restaurant.
What am I going to do?
It’s my reputation on the line here, if my company does not respond to this call all the doomsday scenarios would start to run in my head. What am I going to do for money? How am I going to pay my shops rent? What If I lose the contract? I prided myself in that we never said “No”. My life depended on the story I told of never being able to say no. I suffered tremendously because of that decision. I can tell you today I don’t even remember what happened with my driver, whether he answered or not I don’t remember. I tried to stay for awhile and listen to the guitar guy playing the music I usually loved. One of my friends even stopped in to wish me a Happy Birthday, and I think I forgot to say Thank You to him, even after he picked up the entire check. I wasn’t really even there anymore. I shut down. I could not run any harder.
It was at that moment I knew I was going to die.
My stress level and the weight I carried around daily was too heavy. I want to share how my anger almost killed me. See this scenario I just laid out for you was my life for over twenty years. I had racked up two broken engagements, I lost my first house that I had purchased to the carnage of a breakup. I was affectionately known as Mr. Happy among pretty much everyone that came into contact with me. My fitness was a yoyo at best. Things at home were less than stellar. There was fighting, I wasn’t present with my daughter the way I needed to be. And the holes in my walls were an everyday reminder of this fight that I was losing. And then I decided I would run from it a little more. I needed a get-away. My plan was a trip to Key West that October after my birthday to blow off steam with the boys. So I went to florida, I had $2500 in my pocket and a mission to get myself right That worked out well. I had woken up in my hotel room after the first night with no clothes on from a 3 am swim in the hotel pool. I had four one hundred dollar bills left to my name and not a single recollection of the events of the night before. I had to call my wife and tell her I lost my money. That was at about 1pm when I finally came to. My buddy was sitting next to the bed laughing, “Mike, do you want to see the video of you trying to dry hump a Mercedes S600 on the side of Flemming St last night?” What a ride. But the thing about it was that I thought I was doing it right. Life, I was killing it right? I had a little money, I had a beautiful wife, I had a business, and an amazing 5 year old daughter. Despite all that, I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wasn’t suicidal but the hollowness that I felt could not get any worse. I felt like an animal in a cage. I felt like I was such a shining star out of high school and here I was, 40, overweight, miserable and dying from the inside out. I needed something to change. I didn’t want to drink away the fact that my life was half over. I didn’t want to hate my business anymore. I could not stop trying to find something better than the marriage I already had. Nothing worked. I could not run any faster. I had no fucking idea what to do. I thought maybe if I was lucky enough with the path I was on, I may see fifty but I wasn’t confident about that.
I wanted to paint this picture for you for a very specific reason.
I want you to see how miserable I was in my own skin. At times when alcohol would not work I would just sleep. Sleep was the only thing that would give me relief from how I felt. I was so angry that I hated myself. I know so many people have the feeling of not wanting to be around themselves, and just never talk about it. It is sad, because it’s the first situation in my life that I ran into that I had no solution for. No way out.
“We are where we are today because of the choices and decisions we made yesterday.” -S. Whalen
I know this has been said many times before, but did you ever realize that it could kill you? We all want to change things about our life. We all want that better relationship, or more money, or a better job. Unfortunately I’m here to tell you that you can’t get there from here. What you want, whatever is on that vision board inside your head, the cars, the marriage, the money, you can’t get there from here. I struggled so hard. I suffered tremendously and I still could never find what I was looking for. It took my turning 40 and the events of a few months after to open my eyes for the first time. Some people may have heard me talk about my experience leading up to the Lions Not Sheep experience that I attended. I’m not here to tell that story again but I am here to tell you how different my life is today. It’s different because of one very big thing that never crossed my mind.
I HAVE A CHOICE.
I don’t answer the phone in the middle of the night anymore. My wife and I have a better understanding of how this relationship thing works, and guess what… The sex is better. I have stopped buying spackle. It’s a waste of money. I stopped impaling my phone in the sheetrock of my walls. I hardly hang out with my older friends anymore. It’s been a long road the last two years. It took me crying in front of grown men I didn’t even know, and my face exploding all over a wrestling mat two thousand miles from home to wake me up and tell me that the world needs me. My wife needs me. My daughter needs me. And the people in your life need you also, but you can’t get to them if you are in a similar spot as I was. There is only one path to get you to where you want to be, there is only one way to stop being drunk and miserable or depressed or lost or fat. When I flipped my eyes around, and pointed them inside, that’s when I began to change. It got uglier before it got better. I saw things about myself that I can’t unsee. I saw the cheater, I saw the liar, I saw the fraud and the thief that I was. And as you start to explore those things in yourself, it’s going to look very different than what you think. I will give you my biggest example. I was a thief, and do you know what I stole? I stole my wife’s heart and I threw it on the fucking floor. That’s some ugly shit. It’s a hard thing to accept.
If this message hits home, even one part of it, I want you to do one thing right now. I am going to help you launch the rocket. I want you to start with one simple thing. Please understand your journey is going to be so different than mine. I want you to give yourself credit for reading this. I want you to start to feel good about your path. I want you to understand that all the lessons I learned were all the lessons I was supposed to learn. When you learn to first accept, and then start to feel good about these life experiences, you will attract more good feelings and more good experiences. Feed on that. Revel in it. Built on it. Peel back the layers, they are infinite. Until recently I kept this story to myself because I always thought it wasn’t dark enough, who would want to hear about it? There was no epic tragedy to tell the tale of.
I HAVE A CHOICE.
I don’t answer the phone in the middle of the night anymore. My wife and I have a better understanding of how this relationship thing works, and guess what… The sex is better. I have stopped buying spackle. It’s a waste of money. I stopped impaling my phone in the sheetrock of my walls. I hardly hang out with my older friends anymore. It’s been a long road the last two years. It took me crying in front of grown men I didn’t even know, and my face exploding all over a wrestling mat two thousand miles from home to wake me up and tell me that the world needs me. My wife needs me. My daughter needs me. And the people in your life need you also, but you can’t get to them if you are in a similar spot as I was. There is only one path to get you to where you want to be, there is only one way to stop being drunk and miserable or depressed or lost or fat. When I flipped my eyes around, and pointed them inside, that’s when I began to change. It got uglier before it got better. I saw things about myself that I can’t unsee. I saw the cheater, I saw the liar, I saw the fraud and the thief that I was. And as you start to explore those things in yourself, it’s going to look very different than what you think. I will give you my biggest example. I was a thief, and do you know what I stole? I stole my wife’s heart and I threw it on the fucking floor. That’s some ugly shit. It’s a hard thing to accept.
If this message hits home, even one part of it, I want you to do one thing right now. I am going to help you launch the rocket. I want you to start with one simple thing. Please understand your journey is going to be so different than mine. I want you to give yourself credit for reading this. I want you to start to feel good about your path. I want you to understand that all the lessons I learned were all the lessons I was supposed to learn. When you learn to first accept, and then start to feel good about these life experiences, you will attract more good feelings and more good experiences. Feed on that. Revel in it. Built on it. Peel back the layers, they are infinite. Until recently I kept this story to myself because I always thought it wasn’t dark enough, who would want to hear about it? There was no epic tragedy to tell the tale of.
Here is the deal, there are a shit ton of people that are promising people the world out there when it comes to self help and making there life better. If the message above vibes with you, awesome join the group and lets get started. If you have questions, awesome, reach out and lets have a conversation. If you don’t want to join, that works too. I will promise you this,
NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES
CONNECT WITH ME, IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, SEND ME A MESSAGE AND LETS TALK