It was the moment I saw her face in mine. I was feeling angry and frustrated as my two sons refused to do what I told them to do. I started swatting them on the rear end with my open hand and there she was; the stepmother who had shouted at me, demeaning me and followed by hitting me with the belt over and over again. I know an open hand isn't the same as a leather belt, but somehow there she was, in me. I felt a deep sense of shame.
I stopped and sent them to their room with some books and told them to just read for an hour. That's the day I searched out a therapist to deal with my anger at someone who was no longer in my life, the shame I felt as she dragged me around in a circle whipping me. I knew I had to be done with whatever this was, not take it out on my boys. I never hit them again. My therapist helped me to see that the feelings that came up were not about the boys, they were about me, and I could do something about that. I still have a wonderful relationship with them. We can talk on deeper levels, and it was because I decided, in that moment, to not allow my past to control my future.
This is wonderful, I hope you get heaps of great responses and look forward to reading them.
Mine would be leaving the "dream job" I landed in my early 20s, because (forgive the melodrama, there's no other way to put it) it wasn't worth the cost of my soul. Through outrageous luck I had somehow managed to score a role as content director for a big entertainment website. All the hype, glamour, partying with bottom-to-mid-tier celebrities, free concerts, free *everything*. It was exactly as hollow, carcinogenic and stupid as you can imagine. I can't know all the lives I haven't lived, but I think I am very probably a lesser person because of those years and what happened there.
The moment I knew I was leaving came when a huge disaster had just happened in a big neighbouring city. Awful death toll, everyone horrified and shocked watching the TV, and when I went back to check my computer there were a bunch of excited emails from the big boss telling me this was "an incredible opportunity to leverage traffic for ad revenue" and I had better be finding ways to "make the most of it". I just picked up my bag and left, nobody noticed, walked home and just sat for the rest of the afternoon.
Handed in my notice the next day, then went off to teach sailing and get certified to work offshore boats. Everyone thought I had lost my fucking mind, but the day I left I knew I was the most sane person in the building.
It was ... but at the same time, it was simply the thing that finally shot a hole in the illusion that I was enjoying it, or even wanted any of it in the first place. I wanted to write, everything else was *stuff you SHOULD want* and I hadn't the maturity to recognise that earlier and get out of the acid bath quicker.
Career choices are full of these kinds of landmines and your “stuff you SHOULD want” really resonates. I want to get paid a lot of money to do math and draw and write and go for long walks and bike rides, LOL. In the absence of that, it’s a trade-off of interest and annoyance vs security and money. I think about this stuff a lot. I seriously considered becoming an actuary. I enjoy studying and taking tests, and the math is challenging enough to be fun on some levels (not others; there’s not enough intrinsic meaning, it’s all man-made formulae for the most part). And I’d be making more money than I am now. But actuaries ultimately help insurance companies, and I think that industry is pretty corrupt in most respects, so I’d have been miserable underneath it all. So I went with data science. While I absolutely believe that turning to AI to do data science is going to backfire spectacularly and I’ll end up more secure than ever — cleaning up the messes people will make and are making — I also understood the likelihood of at least a few years of instability being in the future.
Ultimately I just trusted myself, I think — I knew I had a reasonable level of intelligence, was good at self-teaching, and was good at writing and reasonably creative. I trusted that if I added exceptional math skills and a decent coding portfolio, I’d be able to figure something out. And so far I have.
I think that's it, right? What are you good at, what can you make money at, what are you interested in, and (I think this one's way more important than people realise) *what can't you stand*. If you know that reasonably well, you'll probably land somewhere where you can make a life. I'm glad you were smart enough to realise money can't help you feel good about what you're contributing to the world, even if you would have made a great actuary.
I could have written all of what you did for AI and data science, but for AI and therapy. Interesting times indeed ... at least it'll clear out the tier of practitioners that only do validation, I suppose.
My wife taught Chemistry at the Community College level for years. She would keep "office hours" in the cafeteria--she was an "adjunct professor" so she had no office or required office hours. She had one very bright student who was doing well but constantly anxious about her grades. She talked to her and found out her parents had instilled in her that she, being so smart, had to become a doctor when what she really wanted to be was a journalist like her uncle. The advice she gave that student she later generalized into, “Find something you’re good at that you love. You might love something you’re not good at. Keep that as a hobby. Being good at something is not enough though. When the going gets rough, you’ll either bail out or lose your job. If you love what you do, it will get you over the inevitable rough spots.”
I was fortunate to have two careers I love. I love writing, but when I found I couldn’t make a living at it, I went another way. I love puzzle solving, and found that my software job was mostly that. Of course many times my ability to be the guy who understands code and can also write got me places where others couldn’t go.
I have changed but the shift is ongoing. The temptation could come back and I could indulge but if so I will prevail. I snapped after a, or rather...I was a degenerate. I mean it. A real one. I really hate that and I snapped. And it was a eleven year streak of being a degenerate. The usual difference was I engaged in being or doing degenerate activities but I did not act as a degenerate. The distinction is more of getting high off of watching someone else get high rather than get high yourself. Not to make excuses or commit fallacies. And that was in the context of researching Jesus, his resurrection, the Anglican N.T Wright's defense and Bart Erhman, perhaps unoriginal, evolved argument against it. I want to be a Christian and I am considering going to Church. Then I became, gave in to being a degenerate. I don't like that. The constant switch between improvement, evolution and de-evolution of reverting back and really not improving at all. I do improves but fundamentally, nothing changes.
I'm done. I want to be free of it. I want to go home. To back to being a innocent kid I was before I met it on the internet. No more. To being clean again would my Birthday Wish.
You know, I never realize how magical the ending of Polar Express was. It was really special to understand it as I thought on this. I kept in touch with my innocent self but I never fully realize this in how special this is. It is kinda scary to be cynicism, to be doom-piller, to be without life, magic, or wonder. I guess I am finally shedding the dark coat off. Thank God.
Considering I have been walking this earth for some time, there are numerous changes in my past, some minor, some major. I suppose the most recent was my decision to start my own Substack in July, 2023.
During the Covid scam, which I spotted early in 2020, I named the stuff coming out of the television as “boolesheets”, invisible 1 mm thick sheets that emanate from the set with every lie told and spread in two dimensions to fill the room. When they got to be almost three feet thick, I turned the set off, and haven’t turned it back on since. Now I get the news from web sites and Substacks.
I managed, by the grace of God, to survive Covid after 12 days in the hospital, and then a heart attack three months later in 2021. The beard you see in my icon is my protest: I didn’t shave during the hospital stay and won’t again until the perps are prosecuted. In the time since, I dropped two doctors who were requiring face masks; just said “No,” walked out and never went back.
As the news got darker and darker, and as I compared it with what I was seeing in my daily Bible reading, I decided to start a Substack to encourage others to pray and fast for our country. It’s free and WA&I: when I get inspired, as I have the time and if I feel like writing that day. It’s wide ranging, and covers some of my life experiences as well as exhortations to pray. You are welcome to check it out at johnstalmach dot substack dot com.
Probably my most momentous change in recent years began over a decade ago, when I began grounding moral and ethical points in various online discussions with various Bible verses.
That might not seem like much, but it meant that I spent progressively more time reading the Bible....and steadily realizing that God was what my life was missing.
That was not a small transformation, and at times a traumatic one. Over time it compelled me to make a number of changes in my life, such as quitting drinking, and also putting some much needed distance between myself and some seriously toxic people.
It's a transformation that continues even today. I'm not the same Christian I was even a year ago, and I have no idea what manner of Christian I will be a year from now. Hopefully I will not be too hypocritical about matters of faith.
People who think change is not possible do well to realize that, with or without faith, life has only two modes: change and death. The moment we stop changing is the moment we cease living.
As I was finishing my undergrad degree (English & Creative Writing), I began applying for graduate school. My goal was a MFA in Creative Writing, and I applied to over 20 schools. This kind of program requires a writing sample with the applications, and I had a choice to make. I knew exactly the sort of short story that would get me accepted into any program I wanted. Exactly the sort of woke, elitist, snobby tripe that I hate.
I chose not to do it. I chose to write the sort of story that I like, knowing that it would cost me being accepted into some of the schools I applied to. (I knew this, because one of my favorite stories I wrote during my undergrad degree prompted my professor to lash out and publicly scold me for writing something so "dangerous"). It never occurred to me that this choice would result in ALL the grad schools to reject me, but that's what happened.
Having been rejected by all, I was left in kind of a shock—everything I had been planning, career wise, had just imploded on me. What was I going to do now?
It's been quite a road since I received those rejections, but I can confidently say that much of the good I have in life now came because of that choice I made when applying to grad schools—refusing to give in and write the garbage I knew they would love is easily one of the best decisions I ever made.
Jon, just keep writing and then publish it all yourself. Start with ebooks. We live in an era where self-publishing is possible. The trick is to keep doing it until you get noticed. It will take a lot of time, but nothing like the years you put in chasing an MFA and a traditional publishing deal. Exelsior!
I used to be afraid of a lot of things, and those fears kept me from doing a lot of things that I might enjoy. The worst phobia, though, was spiders. I would become paralyzed with fear and start hyperventilating and crying if I just saw a spider, or even sometimes if someone merely told me there was a spider in a room.
I decided that this was no way to live my life, so I decided that I would get over my arachnophobia. I took a lot of classes in entomology, and then specifically in spider biology at a local college. I got to be able to play with toy spiders, and eventually to handle real ones. It was really hard getting over this fear. I cried a lot, and I almost every night I'd have vivid nightmares about spiders while I was working on it. But then one day I realized that I wasn't merely no longer afraid of spiders, but that I loved them. At this point, when there's a spider in the house, I'm the person who picks it up (sometimes with my bare hands) and takes it outside.
And then I became less afraid of everything. A lot of those other experiences I had cut myself off from because they were scary no longer scared me. I became a lot more adventurous, and I think a lot happier overall, as a result.
Ironically, some years later the thing that I had most feared from spiders--that I'd be bitten and have painful consequences from that bite--happened to me. But by then I didn't really care: it was more like, "well, brown recluse bites are supposed to be pretty bad, so I can predict that this will hurt a lot and a bunch of my tissue will die, but in the long run I'll probably be pretty ok, so I'm interested to see where this new necrotic spider bite experience takes me!"
I wrote more about what I learned from my arachnophobia and some things that overlap with your concerns about the awful effects of social media on out psyches here:
In 1986 or thereabouts, I was deeply depressed. I would sit in my office after everyone had left for the day, lights off, unable to move, debating with myself whether to live or die. I had two small children and a young wife, but I found no joy in anything and I was increasingly disengaged at home. And then a friend and mentor took his life. He, too, had children at home. He had impressed me as someone with everything going for him, when the truth was that he hated his life. The toll his death took on his family and friends was shocking, and I decided I couldn't do that to my family. I did something hard for me -- admitting that I needed someone's help -- found a fantastic counselor, and started a years-long process of self-discovery and reflection and confession and restoration that made me a much better person, gave me hope, gave me back joy.
I am nearing my 80th year of my trip around the earth. I have had many ah ha moments where I quit being my old self and started anew. I injured my back and had to have surgery at 26 and while lying in bed recovering I determined that I didn’t want to live as a weakling and smoker so I ditched cigarettes and started on a life-long journey of fitness, nothing radical but running, lifting, cross country skiing, hiking, etc, culminating in competing in triathlons from age 64-74. I still walk and ride my bike indoors and have great, strong posture and can walk as much as I want, although I am not running anymore. People are amazed that I look 10-20 years younger than my peers but moreover, I can still do things. Spiritually, another transformation was when I had to put my mother in a nursing home after a contentious relationship with her most of my life. I knew I would be her primary familial contact and needed to get over my anger with her. I prayed to God to soften my heart. He did. We had a great time for about 8 years as she received the care she needed and I could minister to her with a loving kindness. She had dementia and almost every time I would come to see her (3 X or more every week) she would smile brightly and say, “How did you find me?” She was always happy to see me and when she passed at 92, I could say that I tried my best to make sure she knew she was loved and that I forgave her for her early treatment of me. (no need to get into the weeds about that). I am at peace.
This is long, but you asked for stories about changes that people made that came from within them. My account needs some explanation, so here goes.
I quit smoking four days before my 25th birthday, after smoking heavily for ten years. I come from a long line of smokers: two of my three remaining siblings still smoke. My grandmother died of COPD (emphysema as it was called then); my mother and uncle died of mesothelioma exacerbated by heavy smoking; one of my brothers died of lung cancer; and the other one, who’d exchanged “dipping’” with smoking, died of esophageal cancer that spread to his bones. I had bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis, and almost lethal asthma attacks several times a year, being a “lunger” and smoking two and a half packs of full-tar and nicotine cigarettes a day. I also was living in poverty, although I referred to it as “being broke,” and while cigarettes were much cheaper then than they are now, I still had to scrape by to afford them. (No ashtray ever went un-plundered, and Prince Albert in the can was a pal of mine!) I had two little girls whom I didn’t want to have to grow up seeing their mother smoking and sick, or worse, letting the habit completely debilitate her or cause an early death.
I had many, really good reasons to quit smoking, but that’s not why I quit. Despite being a high-school dropout, a recovering hippie, and a spouse to a philandering musician, I always wanted to be better, clearer, wiser. To that end, I’d taken up meditation and had been practicing it blind, because I had ended up in the hinterlands of Panama City, Florida, with a controlling narcissist of a husband, and was isolated from almost everyone I’d ever known. At any rate, I’d been meditating for several months, and I couldn’t abide being addicted to those little white sticks. If a hurricane was on its way, one of the things I made sure to stock up on, after water, candles, and canned goods, was my smokes. I’d tried to quit many times, sometimes by slowly cutting back on them—where I ended up obsessing endlessly over when I could have my next one—or sometimes by resolving to quit the next morning and (conveniently) forgetting about it until I was on my third cigarette. This time, the time I actually quit, instead of worrying about the financial or physical costs, I just wanted to be free. I wanted the chains off. I wanted to be a non-smoker. I’d just bought a carton (much cheaper than ten packs!), so I gave the rest to my husband (a four-pack-a-day guy) and tore up a whole pack and left them in a cake pan on the kitchen table where I couldn’t miss them when I got up. This time, though, I knew I wasn’t going to smoke when I got up in the morning. The next couple of weeks were pure-T Hell: I was dizzy, sick to my stomach, confused, crabby as all get out. I did things that were out of character for me, like biting the heads off store clerks. But I persevered. Anytime the cravings got too much for me, I meditated. It didn’t make the cravings and the sickness within me go away, but it helped my resolve. It was absolutely the hardest thing, in a life full of hard things, that I’ve ever done. When other things come up, I remember that I’m a person who quit smoking cold turkey while living with a four-pack-a-day smoker, and I know that I if I could do that, I can do almost anything that life asks of me.
By the way, I disagree with you on conversion experiences. Change always comes from within, even with conversion, in my humble opinion. Conversion happens when people have laid some kind of groundwork for the change to happen. We don’t change because of a lightning bolt from above, even if the lightning does come!
After graduating from college in 1969 I got a job setting up a computer system for a medical practice. In 1974 I took a job with a computer manufacturer. The work was not especially challenging, but a I was promised a position that would be both challenging and prestigious. After 4 years of unfulfilled promises, nothing had changed. Meanwhile the personal computer market was exploding. I spent most of my free time building my own computer. In 1978 a fellow enthusiast encouraged me to quit my job and join him in creating new products. At the time we had 3 sons, two still in diapers. There was enough money in the bank to tide us over for no more than a month. I asked my wife if she would be OK if I quit my job. She agreed, for which I am forever grateful. Being self-employed gave me the freedom to create and build software systems for a number of successful businesses. After that I helped my wife build her own dream business, which we worked at side by side for 25 years. This month we'll have been married for 56 years, enjoying every day to the fullest. When my time comes, I will exit with no regrets.
Just over ten years ago, I realized that I was the most volatile person in my family. My anger response was spectacularly non-linear, and there was no telling what would set it off, so my wife and kids learned to tread very lightly around me to avoid triggering the volcano. I was never violent, but was verbally abusive and relentless, with no ability to let go whatever it was for hours on end. I. Had. To. Be. Right.
I finally decided that wasn't who I wanted to be. Can't remember the exact moment, but it was as though I was observing myself from outside and thinking "yeah, that's not a good look there, sport". Although I do have my moments of rage now and then, they are far less frequent and don't last nearly as long.
The one regret I will always carry with me is the damage that my earlier outbursts did to my family relationships, both immediate and extended. My daughter lives with generalized anxiety disorder, and my youngest son immediately locks down whenever he hears raised voices. I wish they'd had a better dad when they were young.
It's a simple thing, but I started meditating 122 days ago, at a real low point in my grief. 25 minutes a day. I haven't missed a single day, even when I've been sick with the flu or otherwise compromised. It has gently but undeniably changed me deeply. Setting new, unapologetic boundaries where there was "unfinished business," rooting into myself in a new way. Bolstering internal stability. Again, it's quiet, but on the inside, it's a new freedom from FOG, emotional caretaking, over-functioning, etc.
This is a great project! Would make a wonderful book too! I think that we all have been given this time to “ change” to transform into what God would have us be and grow into the image of Christ. Some moments are huge some are tiny but each nanosecond of our lives is a potential miracle!!!!
I have three change stories. First one was 17 years ago when I end my love affair with alcohol and got sober. I took the path of asking for help and doing the hard work of recovery by freeing my mind from the daily "toxins in my life as well as freeing my body from the daily spirits that poisoned me.
The second was three years ago when I embarked on a weight loss journey. My A1C was in diabetic range and I did not want to take medication. So I followed my same sobriety pattern by asking for help and doing the hard work of personal change. I am please to report I have lost 90 pounds and maintained my current weight for over a year. My A1C also dropped to normal range with no medication.
The final change was just ten days ago. I found myself getting upset about the news of the day. Out of nowhere a few weeks ago, I snapped at my family for not taking the news serious while we were driving towards a weekend getaway. I didn't like how I felt at that moment and decided to make a change. I challenged myself to quit all current news articles, talk radio and television for the month of June. So far so good and I seem to be more productive, happy and carefree. You can ask me at the end of the month how my recent challenge went.
It was the moment I saw her face in mine. I was feeling angry and frustrated as my two sons refused to do what I told them to do. I started swatting them on the rear end with my open hand and there she was; the stepmother who had shouted at me, demeaning me and followed by hitting me with the belt over and over again. I know an open hand isn't the same as a leather belt, but somehow there she was, in me. I felt a deep sense of shame.
I stopped and sent them to their room with some books and told them to just read for an hour. That's the day I searched out a therapist to deal with my anger at someone who was no longer in my life, the shame I felt as she dragged me around in a circle whipping me. I knew I had to be done with whatever this was, not take it out on my boys. I never hit them again. My therapist helped me to see that the feelings that came up were not about the boys, they were about me, and I could do something about that. I still have a wonderful relationship with them. We can talk on deeper levels, and it was because I decided, in that moment, to not allow my past to control my future.
Thank you for sharing this!
Thank you for asking, Holly, and for opening the door to sensitive subjects.
This is wonderful, I hope you get heaps of great responses and look forward to reading them.
Mine would be leaving the "dream job" I landed in my early 20s, because (forgive the melodrama, there's no other way to put it) it wasn't worth the cost of my soul. Through outrageous luck I had somehow managed to score a role as content director for a big entertainment website. All the hype, glamour, partying with bottom-to-mid-tier celebrities, free concerts, free *everything*. It was exactly as hollow, carcinogenic and stupid as you can imagine. I can't know all the lives I haven't lived, but I think I am very probably a lesser person because of those years and what happened there.
The moment I knew I was leaving came when a huge disaster had just happened in a big neighbouring city. Awful death toll, everyone horrified and shocked watching the TV, and when I went back to check my computer there were a bunch of excited emails from the big boss telling me this was "an incredible opportunity to leverage traffic for ad revenue" and I had better be finding ways to "make the most of it". I just picked up my bag and left, nobody noticed, walked home and just sat for the rest of the afternoon.
Handed in my notice the next day, then went off to teach sailing and get certified to work offshore boats. Everyone thought I had lost my fucking mind, but the day I left I knew I was the most sane person in the building.
Oh wow. Yeah, I can see how insane a situation that would be. Thank you for sharing this!
It was ... but at the same time, it was simply the thing that finally shot a hole in the illusion that I was enjoying it, or even wanted any of it in the first place. I wanted to write, everything else was *stuff you SHOULD want* and I hadn't the maturity to recognise that earlier and get out of the acid bath quicker.
Career choices are full of these kinds of landmines and your “stuff you SHOULD want” really resonates. I want to get paid a lot of money to do math and draw and write and go for long walks and bike rides, LOL. In the absence of that, it’s a trade-off of interest and annoyance vs security and money. I think about this stuff a lot. I seriously considered becoming an actuary. I enjoy studying and taking tests, and the math is challenging enough to be fun on some levels (not others; there’s not enough intrinsic meaning, it’s all man-made formulae for the most part). And I’d be making more money than I am now. But actuaries ultimately help insurance companies, and I think that industry is pretty corrupt in most respects, so I’d have been miserable underneath it all. So I went with data science. While I absolutely believe that turning to AI to do data science is going to backfire spectacularly and I’ll end up more secure than ever — cleaning up the messes people will make and are making — I also understood the likelihood of at least a few years of instability being in the future.
Ultimately I just trusted myself, I think — I knew I had a reasonable level of intelligence, was good at self-teaching, and was good at writing and reasonably creative. I trusted that if I added exceptional math skills and a decent coding portfolio, I’d be able to figure something out. And so far I have.
I think that's it, right? What are you good at, what can you make money at, what are you interested in, and (I think this one's way more important than people realise) *what can't you stand*. If you know that reasonably well, you'll probably land somewhere where you can make a life. I'm glad you were smart enough to realise money can't help you feel good about what you're contributing to the world, even if you would have made a great actuary.
I could have written all of what you did for AI and data science, but for AI and therapy. Interesting times indeed ... at least it'll clear out the tier of practitioners that only do validation, I suppose.
My wife taught Chemistry at the Community College level for years. She would keep "office hours" in the cafeteria--she was an "adjunct professor" so she had no office or required office hours. She had one very bright student who was doing well but constantly anxious about her grades. She talked to her and found out her parents had instilled in her that she, being so smart, had to become a doctor when what she really wanted to be was a journalist like her uncle. The advice she gave that student she later generalized into, “Find something you’re good at that you love. You might love something you’re not good at. Keep that as a hobby. Being good at something is not enough though. When the going gets rough, you’ll either bail out or lose your job. If you love what you do, it will get you over the inevitable rough spots.”
I was fortunate to have two careers I love. I love writing, but when I found I couldn’t make a living at it, I went another way. I love puzzle solving, and found that my software job was mostly that. Of course many times my ability to be the guy who understands code and can also write got me places where others couldn’t go.
Wow! What a wake-up call. Good choice.
I have changed but the shift is ongoing. The temptation could come back and I could indulge but if so I will prevail. I snapped after a, or rather...I was a degenerate. I mean it. A real one. I really hate that and I snapped. And it was a eleven year streak of being a degenerate. The usual difference was I engaged in being or doing degenerate activities but I did not act as a degenerate. The distinction is more of getting high off of watching someone else get high rather than get high yourself. Not to make excuses or commit fallacies. And that was in the context of researching Jesus, his resurrection, the Anglican N.T Wright's defense and Bart Erhman, perhaps unoriginal, evolved argument against it. I want to be a Christian and I am considering going to Church. Then I became, gave in to being a degenerate. I don't like that. The constant switch between improvement, evolution and de-evolution of reverting back and really not improving at all. I do improves but fundamentally, nothing changes.
I'm done. I want to be free of it. I want to go home. To back to being a innocent kid I was before I met it on the internet. No more. To being clean again would my Birthday Wish.
You know, I never realize how magical the ending of Polar Express was. It was really special to understand it as I thought on this. I kept in touch with my innocent self but I never fully realize this in how special this is. It is kinda scary to be cynicism, to be doom-piller, to be without life, magic, or wonder. I guess I am finally shedding the dark coat off. Thank God.
Anyway, sorry for the rambling.
Considering I have been walking this earth for some time, there are numerous changes in my past, some minor, some major. I suppose the most recent was my decision to start my own Substack in July, 2023.
During the Covid scam, which I spotted early in 2020, I named the stuff coming out of the television as “boolesheets”, invisible 1 mm thick sheets that emanate from the set with every lie told and spread in two dimensions to fill the room. When they got to be almost three feet thick, I turned the set off, and haven’t turned it back on since. Now I get the news from web sites and Substacks.
I managed, by the grace of God, to survive Covid after 12 days in the hospital, and then a heart attack three months later in 2021. The beard you see in my icon is my protest: I didn’t shave during the hospital stay and won’t again until the perps are prosecuted. In the time since, I dropped two doctors who were requiring face masks; just said “No,” walked out and never went back.
As the news got darker and darker, and as I compared it with what I was seeing in my daily Bible reading, I decided to start a Substack to encourage others to pray and fast for our country. It’s free and WA&I: when I get inspired, as I have the time and if I feel like writing that day. It’s wide ranging, and covers some of my life experiences as well as exhortations to pray. You are welcome to check it out at johnstalmach dot substack dot com.
Probably my most momentous change in recent years began over a decade ago, when I began grounding moral and ethical points in various online discussions with various Bible verses.
That might not seem like much, but it meant that I spent progressively more time reading the Bible....and steadily realizing that God was what my life was missing.
That was not a small transformation, and at times a traumatic one. Over time it compelled me to make a number of changes in my life, such as quitting drinking, and also putting some much needed distance between myself and some seriously toxic people.
It's a transformation that continues even today. I'm not the same Christian I was even a year ago, and I have no idea what manner of Christian I will be a year from now. Hopefully I will not be too hypocritical about matters of faith.
People who think change is not possible do well to realize that, with or without faith, life has only two modes: change and death. The moment we stop changing is the moment we cease living.
As I was finishing my undergrad degree (English & Creative Writing), I began applying for graduate school. My goal was a MFA in Creative Writing, and I applied to over 20 schools. This kind of program requires a writing sample with the applications, and I had a choice to make. I knew exactly the sort of short story that would get me accepted into any program I wanted. Exactly the sort of woke, elitist, snobby tripe that I hate.
I chose not to do it. I chose to write the sort of story that I like, knowing that it would cost me being accepted into some of the schools I applied to. (I knew this, because one of my favorite stories I wrote during my undergrad degree prompted my professor to lash out and publicly scold me for writing something so "dangerous"). It never occurred to me that this choice would result in ALL the grad schools to reject me, but that's what happened.
Having been rejected by all, I was left in kind of a shock—everything I had been planning, career wise, had just imploded on me. What was I going to do now?
It's been quite a road since I received those rejections, but I can confidently say that much of the good I have in life now came because of that choice I made when applying to grad schools—refusing to give in and write the garbage I knew they would love is easily one of the best decisions I ever made.
Jon, just keep writing and then publish it all yourself. Start with ebooks. We live in an era where self-publishing is possible. The trick is to keep doing it until you get noticed. It will take a lot of time, but nothing like the years you put in chasing an MFA and a traditional publishing deal. Exelsior!
I used to be afraid of a lot of things, and those fears kept me from doing a lot of things that I might enjoy. The worst phobia, though, was spiders. I would become paralyzed with fear and start hyperventilating and crying if I just saw a spider, or even sometimes if someone merely told me there was a spider in a room.
I decided that this was no way to live my life, so I decided that I would get over my arachnophobia. I took a lot of classes in entomology, and then specifically in spider biology at a local college. I got to be able to play with toy spiders, and eventually to handle real ones. It was really hard getting over this fear. I cried a lot, and I almost every night I'd have vivid nightmares about spiders while I was working on it. But then one day I realized that I wasn't merely no longer afraid of spiders, but that I loved them. At this point, when there's a spider in the house, I'm the person who picks it up (sometimes with my bare hands) and takes it outside.
And then I became less afraid of everything. A lot of those other experiences I had cut myself off from because they were scary no longer scared me. I became a lot more adventurous, and I think a lot happier overall, as a result.
Ironically, some years later the thing that I had most feared from spiders--that I'd be bitten and have painful consequences from that bite--happened to me. But by then I didn't really care: it was more like, "well, brown recluse bites are supposed to be pretty bad, so I can predict that this will hurt a lot and a bunch of my tissue will die, but in the long run I'll probably be pretty ok, so I'm interested to see where this new necrotic spider bite experience takes me!"
I wrote more about what I learned from my arachnophobia and some things that overlap with your concerns about the awful effects of social media on out psyches here:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/fear-and-loathing
In 1986 or thereabouts, I was deeply depressed. I would sit in my office after everyone had left for the day, lights off, unable to move, debating with myself whether to live or die. I had two small children and a young wife, but I found no joy in anything and I was increasingly disengaged at home. And then a friend and mentor took his life. He, too, had children at home. He had impressed me as someone with everything going for him, when the truth was that he hated his life. The toll his death took on his family and friends was shocking, and I decided I couldn't do that to my family. I did something hard for me -- admitting that I needed someone's help -- found a fantastic counselor, and started a years-long process of self-discovery and reflection and confession and restoration that made me a much better person, gave me hope, gave me back joy.
I am nearing my 80th year of my trip around the earth. I have had many ah ha moments where I quit being my old self and started anew. I injured my back and had to have surgery at 26 and while lying in bed recovering I determined that I didn’t want to live as a weakling and smoker so I ditched cigarettes and started on a life-long journey of fitness, nothing radical but running, lifting, cross country skiing, hiking, etc, culminating in competing in triathlons from age 64-74. I still walk and ride my bike indoors and have great, strong posture and can walk as much as I want, although I am not running anymore. People are amazed that I look 10-20 years younger than my peers but moreover, I can still do things. Spiritually, another transformation was when I had to put my mother in a nursing home after a contentious relationship with her most of my life. I knew I would be her primary familial contact and needed to get over my anger with her. I prayed to God to soften my heart. He did. We had a great time for about 8 years as she received the care she needed and I could minister to her with a loving kindness. She had dementia and almost every time I would come to see her (3 X or more every week) she would smile brightly and say, “How did you find me?” She was always happy to see me and when she passed at 92, I could say that I tried my best to make sure she knew she was loved and that I forgave her for her early treatment of me. (no need to get into the weeds about that). I am at peace.
Exercise is the fountain of youth. Good job.
This is long, but you asked for stories about changes that people made that came from within them. My account needs some explanation, so here goes.
I quit smoking four days before my 25th birthday, after smoking heavily for ten years. I come from a long line of smokers: two of my three remaining siblings still smoke. My grandmother died of COPD (emphysema as it was called then); my mother and uncle died of mesothelioma exacerbated by heavy smoking; one of my brothers died of lung cancer; and the other one, who’d exchanged “dipping’” with smoking, died of esophageal cancer that spread to his bones. I had bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis, and almost lethal asthma attacks several times a year, being a “lunger” and smoking two and a half packs of full-tar and nicotine cigarettes a day. I also was living in poverty, although I referred to it as “being broke,” and while cigarettes were much cheaper then than they are now, I still had to scrape by to afford them. (No ashtray ever went un-plundered, and Prince Albert in the can was a pal of mine!) I had two little girls whom I didn’t want to have to grow up seeing their mother smoking and sick, or worse, letting the habit completely debilitate her or cause an early death.
I had many, really good reasons to quit smoking, but that’s not why I quit. Despite being a high-school dropout, a recovering hippie, and a spouse to a philandering musician, I always wanted to be better, clearer, wiser. To that end, I’d taken up meditation and had been practicing it blind, because I had ended up in the hinterlands of Panama City, Florida, with a controlling narcissist of a husband, and was isolated from almost everyone I’d ever known. At any rate, I’d been meditating for several months, and I couldn’t abide being addicted to those little white sticks. If a hurricane was on its way, one of the things I made sure to stock up on, after water, candles, and canned goods, was my smokes. I’d tried to quit many times, sometimes by slowly cutting back on them—where I ended up obsessing endlessly over when I could have my next one—or sometimes by resolving to quit the next morning and (conveniently) forgetting about it until I was on my third cigarette. This time, the time I actually quit, instead of worrying about the financial or physical costs, I just wanted to be free. I wanted the chains off. I wanted to be a non-smoker. I’d just bought a carton (much cheaper than ten packs!), so I gave the rest to my husband (a four-pack-a-day guy) and tore up a whole pack and left them in a cake pan on the kitchen table where I couldn’t miss them when I got up. This time, though, I knew I wasn’t going to smoke when I got up in the morning. The next couple of weeks were pure-T Hell: I was dizzy, sick to my stomach, confused, crabby as all get out. I did things that were out of character for me, like biting the heads off store clerks. But I persevered. Anytime the cravings got too much for me, I meditated. It didn’t make the cravings and the sickness within me go away, but it helped my resolve. It was absolutely the hardest thing, in a life full of hard things, that I’ve ever done. When other things come up, I remember that I’m a person who quit smoking cold turkey while living with a four-pack-a-day smoker, and I know that I if I could do that, I can do almost anything that life asks of me.
By the way, I disagree with you on conversion experiences. Change always comes from within, even with conversion, in my humble opinion. Conversion happens when people have laid some kind of groundwork for the change to happen. We don’t change because of a lightning bolt from above, even if the lightning does come!
After graduating from college in 1969 I got a job setting up a computer system for a medical practice. In 1974 I took a job with a computer manufacturer. The work was not especially challenging, but a I was promised a position that would be both challenging and prestigious. After 4 years of unfulfilled promises, nothing had changed. Meanwhile the personal computer market was exploding. I spent most of my free time building my own computer. In 1978 a fellow enthusiast encouraged me to quit my job and join him in creating new products. At the time we had 3 sons, two still in diapers. There was enough money in the bank to tide us over for no more than a month. I asked my wife if she would be OK if I quit my job. She agreed, for which I am forever grateful. Being self-employed gave me the freedom to create and build software systems for a number of successful businesses. After that I helped my wife build her own dream business, which we worked at side by side for 25 years. This month we'll have been married for 56 years, enjoying every day to the fullest. When my time comes, I will exit with no regrets.
Just over ten years ago, I realized that I was the most volatile person in my family. My anger response was spectacularly non-linear, and there was no telling what would set it off, so my wife and kids learned to tread very lightly around me to avoid triggering the volcano. I was never violent, but was verbally abusive and relentless, with no ability to let go whatever it was for hours on end. I. Had. To. Be. Right.
I finally decided that wasn't who I wanted to be. Can't remember the exact moment, but it was as though I was observing myself from outside and thinking "yeah, that's not a good look there, sport". Although I do have my moments of rage now and then, they are far less frequent and don't last nearly as long.
The one regret I will always carry with me is the damage that my earlier outbursts did to my family relationships, both immediate and extended. My daughter lives with generalized anxiety disorder, and my youngest son immediately locks down whenever he hears raised voices. I wish they'd had a better dad when they were young.
It's a simple thing, but I started meditating 122 days ago, at a real low point in my grief. 25 minutes a day. I haven't missed a single day, even when I've been sick with the flu or otherwise compromised. It has gently but undeniably changed me deeply. Setting new, unapologetic boundaries where there was "unfinished business," rooting into myself in a new way. Bolstering internal stability. Again, it's quiet, but on the inside, it's a new freedom from FOG, emotional caretaking, over-functioning, etc.
This is a great project! Would make a wonderful book too! I think that we all have been given this time to “ change” to transform into what God would have us be and grow into the image of Christ. Some moments are huge some are tiny but each nanosecond of our lives is a potential miracle!!!!
Here’s something I wrote about changing careers. https://enterthelabyrinth.substack.com/p/changing-careers-fate-vs-faith-ef5d7eaaa641
I have three change stories. First one was 17 years ago when I end my love affair with alcohol and got sober. I took the path of asking for help and doing the hard work of recovery by freeing my mind from the daily "toxins in my life as well as freeing my body from the daily spirits that poisoned me.
The second was three years ago when I embarked on a weight loss journey. My A1C was in diabetic range and I did not want to take medication. So I followed my same sobriety pattern by asking for help and doing the hard work of personal change. I am please to report I have lost 90 pounds and maintained my current weight for over a year. My A1C also dropped to normal range with no medication.
The final change was just ten days ago. I found myself getting upset about the news of the day. Out of nowhere a few weeks ago, I snapped at my family for not taking the news serious while we were driving towards a weekend getaway. I didn't like how I felt at that moment and decided to make a change. I challenged myself to quit all current news articles, talk radio and television for the month of June. So far so good and I seem to be more productive, happy and carefree. You can ask me at the end of the month how my recent challenge went.
Cheers!