Inspiration:
- “I never thought there’d be someone for me. Another soul that can share my story.” – Hold Each Other, A Great Big World
- “You’re a revolution. I will liberate you now. As the walls come down.” – Revelation , Troye Sivan
- “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave.” – Buffy Summers
I’ve been on a personal journey since leaving Seattle and Microsoft and I want to share a part of that story.
Let's rewind 20 years. I was relentlessly bullied in middle and high school. I was made to feel different and unsafe. Consistently emotionally and sometimes physically. I remember one bully in particular – we’ll call him Evan. There were others in Evan's friend group, but Evan was the ring leader. Evan's locker was next to mine in the boy’s changing room. Every gym class became a routine in what jokes and laughs would come at my expense. This lasted years.
These memories are like a weight inside of me. Looking back, I've experienced most of my life through the filter of these experiences. I’ve felt like an outsider. The kind of person who doesn’t – who can’t – fit in.
Evan's primary concern was my sexuality. He made it his daily chore to call me a ‘homo,’ ‘faggot’ or both. On good days, I was just gay. Mind you, at 11, I hadn’t declared a sexuality and if I had, I had a crush on Molly and Jill. What I was, though, was gregarious and outgoing. I was raised on Jim Carrey’s In Living Color (a questionable parental choice in hindsight!) I would do Jim Carey impressions for my parents and they would endlessly laugh. I internalized Jim’s brand of outsized, loud, cartoonish humor as normal. When I brought that to school, I was made fun of.
Let’s talk about Jim Carrey for a second. Nowadays Jim paints a lot, meditates and invests his public persona in political activism. Jim Carrey in 1990, however, was about to turn 30 when he landed on In Living Color. A lanky, energetic guy from Canada – Jim was comedically innovative for his character absurdism, underpinned by a finely honed sense of gumby physicality and energetics that rivaled Robin Williams. Besides the comedy, something deeper about Jim spoke to me. The fact that he also was 1 of 4 children, also of French/Irish background – also Roman Catholic comes as no surprise to me now. Whatever frequency I was picking up on, it opened the door to my belief that life ought to be incredibly playful. That has never left me; to find playfulness – whether a laugh is large or small – is critical.
To Evan, though, I was a loud and overly-expressive anomaly. As it often turns out, I found out years later that Evan's Dad had a terrible temper. He beat him. Like many bullies, Evan was being bullied in another realm of his life. It was never lost on me that victims of bullying often become bullies. I watch myself closely.
I remember going to my guidance counselor about all this. His name was Joe. Joe listened well enough. There was soothing parent-like advice. Maybe he called Evan's parents. I don’t remember because the bullying didn’t stop. To me, frankly, the adults did nothing. Looking back, I don't know why they didn’t just move my gym locker to at least make that small daily transaction more tolerable.
I cried. My parents were young parents. They didn't know what to do or say. They did their best. This went on for years. I’d love to say it got better in high school, but – in many ways, it worsened. Evan explicitly teased less. He and his friends openly laughed more. Like a weed, the roots of anxiety grew deeper. To this day, my primal reaction to ambient laughter is that someone must be laughing at me. It’s an absurd, narcissistic vestigial childhood insecurity. We all have them. Better to understand them than to serve them.
As ill-equipped as I was as a teenager to understand what was happening, I tried to take those experiences and transform them into strengths – notably acute observational skills. Anyone who has been bullied can speak to the hypervigilance that often develops as a kind of sixth sense. Scanning people’s body language for unspoken micro-expressions is a default mode. For years, I’d use this to reflexively people please. Adjacent family dynamics only strengthened the effectiveness of these coping mechanisms.
In my adult professional life, coping mechanisms became superpowers. To someone who never feels enough, a corporate career provides the rules of engagement, clear swim lanes and never-ending goals to prove to someone – to anyone - “I’m enough!” Root issues around self-esteem, self-image get sublimated into titles, promotions and team size.
This is the way of life for many. Once we find an economic return for our specific set of default behaviors, many of us lock-in and hold on for dear life. This means, though, that a meaningful examination of our own lives becomes nearly impossible without risking disruption to income and perhaps more. As a matter of survival, we convince ourselves that coping mechanisms made us who we are: we are successful!
The dark side of this bargain is silent and ever-hungry. An almost imperceptible racket: to scan adults who don’t communicate clearly and to find situations where my role as a people pleaser is valued requires finding more bullies and more bullying. And while I’m proud of climbing to Everest Base Camp, running 20+ marathons, finishing an Ironman - among other adventures – I understand, at some level, I was also bullying myself.
As they say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” So then, I began to see it everywhere in my adult life: in friendships, romantic relationships, and particularly at work. I would unconsciously navigate into situations that paid off my adaptive resiliency. If I couldn’t help myself as a child, I would certainly triumph as an adult. To be clear, in some ways, I did triumph. Those coping mechanisms-turned-skills served me well. But each triumph required paying the silent cost: the only way to end up being enough was to start by being diminished.
At 30, I found myself in a toxic relationship I couldn’t seem to end. The more abusive the cheating and lying became, the more determined I became to fix it. I had a job with such toxic leadership I left my career with an autoimmune disorder. Each time my skills were rewarded, I deepened the internal wound which so desired the salve of success.
Curious, I wondered if I was alone in this. I looked around at my cohort. I figured they’d be a decent bellwether of where this road leads.
What I saw was alarming. Many of the General Managers and Vice Presidents in my immediate orbit were sick with stress-related illnesses. Almost all of them were living unhealthy lifestyles in traditional senses. More interesting were their attitudes. In workstreams and meetings that could be considered the apex of their working lives – they were miserable. Anxiety and stress dominated their worldview. I listened to their words. A scarcity mindset dominated: their work was never enough, the company would never do enough, they never had enough, they were never enough.
It was clear I had come to the end of the road, or risk becoming a caricature in my own life.
I packed a bag and hit the road. While my peers were pushing harder into their careers, I stepped away. While most were leveraging themselves into bigger homes or financial commitments, I let mine go. While most were doubling down on disciplines that yield handsome economic return, I’ve gone in wildly new directions where I am a beginner again. This isn’t glamorous: sometimes I start my week with a ‘failure list’ – which is to say that the desired and expected outcome is likely embarrassment. I embrace my status as a total noob. Over time, it’s become liberating. More importantly, I am always learning.
I’ve heard it all: “Jamie, you’re hiding from your life, “Jamie, is this a midlife crisis?” “Jamie, some of us have to work.” I get it. I examine these questions all the time. I did at 36 what many do in their youth. What some call a mid-life crisis became a deeply powerful process of personal renewal. For that, I am unapologetic and grateful. Jamie at 70 is never going to regret a moment of this. “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
It’s been the most precious year of my life. Certainly the most transformative. It has recast behaviors, motivations and patterns that previously characterized a way of Being that wasn’t serving me. It has shifted my economic motivations. It has realigned my priorities. And most importantly, it catalyzed a sense of purpose and meaning that had been in my life all along, but only existed in subtext.
I want to share one of the most daunting consequences of being bullied that I've had to face. For most of my life, I held back my own voice. I’d think and think and think before speaking because I cared so deeply about what others thought of me. At times, feeling this so profoundly, my throat would physically tighten. I’ve always done this, constantly monitoring, shaping and calculating my words – and to an extent my thoughts – so as to avoid looking weak or dumb. Early in my career, I remember asking my manager for help with this in the workplace. He laughed, waved off the exchange and told me I was fine. I was dismissed.
Anyway, my problem was bigger than he could’ve solved. As I grew older, my coping mechanisms began to fail; my hiding techniques too elaborate to maintain. Playing it safe was no longer working.
Why share this now? It was my birthday this week. Each year, I write one page on my goals for the year ahead. It’s written like a mission statement, spelling out the big achievements I’ll set my sights on. For the first time in a long time, I don't need a Type-A, hyper-productive, Jerry McGuire-style mission statement to feel like I'm enough. Don't get me wrong: I'm still writing. It's just that I’m much more interested in using that energy to celebrate the journey that’s led me here. Using my voice, knowing that you will read these words and make them your own – is a better gift to give myself. I’m beginning to think that an authentic sense of self begins the moment you stop holding on to your own story and start giving it away.
Listen, I’m still me. I worry too much about what other people will think. I avoid conflict. I watch myself for the maxim that bullied people become bullies. At times, this stuff tires me out and I fail. However, the gifts of self-awareness and growth outweigh the suffering required to get here. As a teacher of mine used to say, “Growth is all there is.”
Also. To be teased about one’s sexuality at an earlier age – too early an age – creates a hyper awareness of sex and gender. Struggling to understand why another human being would weaponize something so personal, I watched my own sexual and gender development closely. I find the endless flora of expression in this realm of life fascinating. My capacity for understanding, my empathy for any kind of otherness runs deep. I’ve loved women and men; love is on a spectrum. You might ask: are you gay? Well, if you’re read this long, you know my power comes not from the label you might require of me, but my freedom from it.
I recently shared my experience of visiting Cambodia - and the mystery of my quick interest in their dictatorship. The answer, in hindsight, was clear: bullying! Enormous endogenous energy was generated by witnessing the dynamic of a large institution take advantage of the disadvantaged. It made my blood boil. It's a string that runs from the present directly into my childhood. Even at Microsoft, my most rewarding jobs were rooted in fighting incumbents. That is meaningful purpose, even if it originated in suffering. I can work with that.
To me, that’s the magic of growth. To see yourself, including all the broken bits. To create a new way of being out of that awareness. To let it propel you forward into whatever domain of life matters most to you.
To live like the Yes Man, to adventure like Truman and to laugh like Ace. Thank you, Jim. And Happy Birthday to me.