Trauma, Masculinity and Culture: Through the eyes of a hothead
Twenty-five years ago a doctor gave my parents a slew of ten-dollar words on a piece of paper that basically said that I was diagnosed with arthritis. Ankylosing spondylitis. My left forefinger knuckle was swollen. My right hip was in agony. My ankles, knees and back were consistently sore for the first 4 hours of every morning. On good days, I looked and moved like most any other 14-year-old kid. On bad days, I ended up in the emergency room, with aghast nurses helping befuddled doctors drain 12 ounces of fluid from my knee. (It looked like Mountain Dew soda, which made the story sound better.)
Ankylosing spondylitis. Christ, it’s bad enough I’m a teenage kid, barely entering puberty while in 24-hour pain, but couldn’t the affliction have the decency of being easy to pronounce? Prior to that day at the doctors office when they referred to something about “sedimentary” levels in my blood which “pointed to” AS, I was about as active a kid as you could find. When I wasn’t at basketball practice for my traveling AAU squad (the Orange Express!), you could find me on a bike, literally anywhere on the not-so-mean streets of Eugene. The mall, the park, the movie theater. Mileage wasn’t a problem because I never got tired of pedaling.
When my parents could corral me for another doctor visit, they often took me 100 miles north to Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland. During one visit there, a young physicians assistant listened to my heart, and turned white. She called in the doctor, whispered something to him, and he put the stethoscope to my chest as well. With a look of consternation, he wrote a few words on a chart, and turned to address my parents.
(Man, I really miss the naïveté of my youth. I used to think that the furrowed brow on a doctor’s face had nothing to do with me. I’ve since been conditioned to believe that every doctor’s grunt means I’m fucked in some hard-to-pronounce way.)
“Your son has a heart murmur,” he said. Or words to that effect. None of this meant anything to me. How does a heart “murmur”? What in the actual fuck are you talking about, you quack? (Would that I had such a colorful vocabulary as a high school freshman.)
Turns out a “murmur” means something cataclysmic. It meant decades of heart surgeries, lots of expensive medical bills in adulthood, and even worries that my own offspring will suffer my fate. More specifically for me it meant aortic insufficiency; my aortic valve was not closing completely, causing oxygenated blood that was meant for the rest of my body to come spilling back into my left ventricle, where it overworked the heart muscle to a dangerous degree.
“Can I still play basketball?” I eventually asked after several more appointments and something called an “echo-cardiogram.” “Oh no,” the doctor said, patronizingly. It was as if the audacity of my question was absurd to the point of being adorable. “You can’t get your heart rate up. You need to keep calm and you can’t exercise.” The desperate plea for mercy in my eyes went unheeded. “I’m sorry” she said, as an afterthought.
Excuse me? Is that life? My life? Ha. No. Don’t think so.
I cried way harder than a proud teenage boy is supposed to cry that day. But in between waves of tears, I told my parents that we’re getting a second opinion. Non-negotiable, or I was going to literally “run” away.
That proved to be wise. The next doctor said I could play basketball, and run to my heart’s content. But — always a “but” isn’t there? — I could not lift weights or engage in anaerobic activity. That would exacerbate the leak.
No big deal, I thought. A tiny high school freshman, I was 5 foot 4, maybe 110 lbs, drenched. I had no weight-lifting aspirations. Hell, to the extent I tried to lift weights, nothing happened. Maybe my string-bean bicep would get a little more pronounced after a few weeks, but I had no reason to see any benefit to this. I was a basketball player, not a linebacker. I was a skinny kid, growing a big Adam’s apple under a size 7 and 3/4 hat (I always kept my too-big head concealed).
But things change. It wasn’t long before just about every male classmate of mine was bulking up, and attracting female attention as a result. My arthritis had worsened to the point that my only proud athletic feats in high school involved above-average success on the varsity golf team. I could limp through 18 holes and fire a 78 at the district championships. “And I’m single, ladies!” **crickets**
I needed another identity. So the weight room started calling me. I was 16 or 17, and found that I could make pretty quick progress if I stuck to a plan. My concave boy chest developed pecs. I started seeing my arms swell, and I’d admire the vein running the length of my bicep. Shoulders started layering muscle fiber upon muscle fiber, making my awkwardly huge head look downright normal (!!) from the correct angle. The dopamine was pumping into my brain when I witnessed the results, and I was hooked. And this was before the rampant vanity culture of instagram and Snapchat. (#OldSchoolNarcissism)
My next visit with the cardiologist ended in a heated argument. For the first time, I snapped back furiously at the adults who were chaining my physical activity. “Why would you want to do that to your heart?!” said the incredulous doctor when I asked about lifting weights.
Really? “Why?” Well, let’s see. 1,000 cheering people in my small town don’t show up to watch me ace my AP English exam, or churn out a news article for the paper. And they barely give a corn-filled shit about a birdie on 18. They want to watch athletic prowess. The kid with prospects to be a D1 quarterback got attention. The kid drowning three-pointers in the state playoffs got attention. The kid throwing 85 mph heat over the plate got the girls.
There’s no standing ovation for a 4.0 GPA.
The adults in my life made no secret about what they valued: athletic success. Physical prowess. Sure, they talked a good game about excellent grades, academic letters (yeah, put that academic letter — clearly altered to differentiate it from athletic letters — on your letterman’s jacket and stroll through senior hall if you truly enjoy verbal abuse). They encouraged my writing, my interest in social studies and mock trials. My love of journalism and photography didn’t go unnoticed. But that was the perfunctory, voluntary response they understood to be healthy when they had a kid with some brains. “Sweetie, keep learning, go to college. That’s great. But chill with the attitude.”
When it came to pride in the kid who could crossover in the lane and dunk on a defender, or take a pick-6 to the house, or throw a javelin 200 feet? That adult pride was visceral, immediate, unconscious. That was the pride that occupied the small talk in the front room of my dad’s local business, where the “Gibson boy” and the “Wilcox boy” were the heroes of every anecdote.
“Man, did you see that Dickman boy’s newspaper article about the game? Good stuff!” said no one, ever.
“So yeah, doc, that’s WHY I want to get in the gym and hammer my delts, pecs, tris and bis. I want someone to admire something tangible about me. We have a very clear definition of manliness in rural America. How can you not see that?!”
On to a third opinion. Except there was no 3rd opinion, at least insofar as it differed from the 2nd. Heavy weightlifting was a bad idea, and all the science in the world proved it. I used to sneak away and lift with a friend of mine, before my furious father rolled up and yelled at me to get in the car. Who can blame him? As a father now, I can certainly see why you’d want to stop your son from slowly killing himself.
But the damage had been done. I needed open heart surgery (about 20 years ahead of schedule) thanks to my vain desire to look like a man. So I took a term off from college to have my sternum ripped open, and my aortic valve replaced. I still graduated with a bachelors degree inside of 4 years, and promptly got a job within 2 weeks. Still no cheerleaders, no stadium wave, no headlines. “Do your job, asshole,” the world says to this kind of success.
At 21 (above) fresh out of school and three years past my first heart surgery, I stayed away from the weights. I was a copy editor at a newspaper. I was proud of what I did. (This was just before newspapers descended into total irrelevance.) I was also a skinny, unhappy, overgrown child without an identity. I was bitter at every “adult” in my life, and resentful of all my peers.
That’s the thing about adolescent emotional trauma. It has a tendency to arrest your development. So on I rode into my early 20s, with all the emotional maturity of a high school freshman. I was frozen in time in that doctor’s office, listening to people with several degrees instruct me on the limitations of my life. But their dancing, jeering diplomas on the wall couldn’t tell me how to replace what could kill me with something equally fulfilling that wouldn’t. In their defense, who the hell could?
I tried to just enjoy existing. Work, go home, drink lite beer, drive into the woods with a fishing pole, and feel content. But I was restless at home, fishing was boring, and beer — combined with my cocktail of NSAID pills — made me sick. I couldn’t even meet the masculine benchmark of alcohol consumption.
I had moved to a high-elevation ski town in central Oregon, and so I took up snowboarding. And if you think 300-lb squats are rough on a pair of knees, try sending them down a mountain on a plank of fiberglass. It was agony. And I sucked at it. What happens when you mix searing pain, frustration, failure, and an emotionally stunted, bitter kid? A whole lotta screaming profanities, that’s what.
I tried mountain biking. That was a smoother form of aerobic exercise. But like it or not, healthy joints are still a must for this activity. Along with a healthy heart. So I was slow. In pain. Uncool. Certainly not impressing the few people who waited for me at the top of a 500-foot climb. More anger, frustration and failure.
For my size, I was still pretty strong. So I’d go back to the weight room, and get a few precious minutes of feeling proud about a bench-press max, or a solid set of 20 pull-ups. I started to fill out again. Then 9/11 happened. Like a lot of young men of military age, I wanted to be a true American and fight for my country. Turns out they frown upon enlisting soldiers with arthritis and giant, red, heart-surgery scars.
So I went to law school, and passed the bar.
Quick digression: Have you ever polled a few random Americans about their initial favorability reactions when confronted with a list of the following people?:
- Soldiers
- Competitive college or pro athletes
- Lawyers
Guess where #3 ranks in terms of favorability? There aren’t foam fingers for trial lawyers. There aren’t yellow ribbons on SUVs for public defenders. Women don’t admire calendars of men in suits, deconstructing an Internal Revenue Code memorandum. Even if attorneys who fight for the lives of defendants are FAR more integral to society than an Alabama fullback or an infantryman unloading a cargo plane at Bagram Air Base, we sure as shit won’t admit it as a society.
Frankly, we’re not a society of adults. We’re a society of high school kids, raised by high school kids. Our heroes are distinct, and our values aren’t especially geared toward “book-lernin.” Not in this country, anyway, and certainly not in the parts of this country with more cows than people.
As you can imagine, whether I had the mental maturity to argue circles around people of lesser IQ or not, I still didn’t have the emotional maturity to deal with….well, anything. My own failures, real or imagined, made me crazy. Any attacks from the outside were met with a nuclear response. To this day, my lip curls in disgust when I see a parent worshipping their athletic kid, or slathering adoration on their military offspring with obnoxious bumper stickers and Facebook posts.
This is not to say their pride in their children is any less worthy than the pride I desired. But tell it to the 14 yr old kid controlling my emotional impulses.
I learned early on I wouldn’t be an athletic hero. I learned shortly thereafter I wouldnt be a military hero. I’d never be called “brave”, even though it often took everything I had to walk downstairs in the morning. I would never even be a “patriot” no matter how many times I argued a case under the banner of American law, and defended a client as an officer of the court.
So I took a job that wasn’t exactly a stop on my dream track, but it paid me well. Compensation was performance-based, and my hyper-competitive mindset quickly made me the highest paid attorney at my firm. If I wasn’t going to be admired for athleticism, bravery, heroism….then fuck it. I’ll put some commas on my paycheck and earn respect that way.
Along the way, modern medicine created some better meds to deal with my joint pain. I was back on the trails, back in the weight room, back on the ski lift. I met a woman I thought I loved, and we made a child I love above all things. I started running. A lot. Hell, I kept lifting. (Old vanities die hard.)
But this isn’t some mini-memoir with a triumphant ending.
I ruined my heart. Again. I had two more failed surgeries to address an arrhythmia caused by my first surgery, they think. (Doctors REALLY don’t know as much as we’re led to believe.) I had another open-heart surgery. I got a divorce. My anger compromised my job security. It still does. I know I’m not a truly disadvantaged human being, globally speaking. I’m an educated, white, heterosexual male in America. I’m largely healthy.
But tell that to the scared kid in a doctors office 25 years ago who felt as though his entire world was taken from him in an instant.
That kid still seems to control most of my emotional impulses today (much to the consternation of this grown man nearing 40 years of age).
But I’m beginning to learn that we’re all scared kids inside. None of us sailed through infancy, toddlerhood, or adolescence without a few scars. We carry baggage with us that only grows. Small traumas are very big to small people. And together — the traumas, alongside the people — they grow at the same rate.
I keep that in mind as I try to raise my son to be a happy person, with as few traumas to sort out as possible. I can’t control whether his own body will betray him, like mine did.
But I know his dad won’t betray him. And whatever he chooses to be, I’ll be his biggest cheerleader.
