A On Going Conversation With Myself
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An On Going Conversation With Myself
John Paul Derryberry
I have both been running from this moment and to this moment since the 5th grade. My dad had his first real health scare at age 41. I turn 41 this summer. No amount of healthy outlook on life can have me ignoring the genetics that make up John Paul Derryberry. It has never been far from my thoughts that my father didn’t make it to his 50s. It has both pushed me to do a lot in my first 40 years, and never look too far into the future. No one can accuse me of not living life. It has also made me move too quickly, be impulsive, and take on too much. Every strength comes with a weakness, and I do know I walk a fine line between overloading myself out of fear of not getting to do more, and being a goal driven person who accomplishes a lot as life moves forward.
I know it’s the result of life occurrences that have shaped my view of how I should operate. It happens to all of us: life happens, relationships impact us, and we slightly alter our thinking, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Just recently, I started to have this odd feeling of how vulnerable all of life is. Recently the strength is a weakness. The thought of leaving the life I have early scares me. I’ve got a good thing going, family, friends, purpose, passion, hobbies, and most importantly clarity about who I want to be. I know how hard it is to get to this point, only because, at a couple of points in my life, I had suicidal thoughts. To work on yourself to have a wonderful life, only to enter the stage of thinking, well I might lose it all because of genetics, is a mental game I’m struggling with. The brain is a fickle beast, once you think you have your thinking figured out, it throws you a curve.
Some of this is extremely healthy, to confront your own thinking and eventually death provides clarity for life. It provides a test of whether you are living the life you want. As my sister put it to me one time, you only get to do this once; we should do our best do it right. For those tha attempt to put it out of sight as if it will not happen; that creates a whole new set of unhealthy thinking. To assume it will happen later in life, allows us to put things off, things we shouldn’t traveling, experiencing special moments, and communicating to people we love how important they are. We aren’t guaranteed as much time as we think we will get, so it’s important to balance all this. What can I do now to live, but also what do I need to be responsible for, if I’m here at 93.
So this is where I sit today, doing my best to process this in as vulnerable a way as possible. It’s the way through these moments; a way to work with those weird thoughts our brain sends our way even if we are healthy. Talk about it with people we love, to use our coping skills, to embrace the fact it I might be on limited time. Yet, that shouldn’t stop me for enjoying now while planning for the future. It’s a delicate conversation I always have with myself. In my younger years, the impulsive side of me always won. Now it’s 60-40 in favor of being patient. I’m good with that ratio but it doesn’t mean the pull of impulsive behavior doesn’t sit there within reach. That’s what happens when you start interacting with death in 5th grade. Well, at least that’s what happened to me.
I realize it’s not some grand realization, but being able to admit and communicate where we are in life; living to the fullest, something I always want to do. That way, when my time is up, people who love me will say, he never wasted a second of his life. And that will provide comfort to them while they grieve. I just hope it’s a long time from now and my head gets wrapped around how to handle moving through the age my dad struggled with his health. It’s the ability to be vulnerable that supports us during these moments of struggle and reveals to our loved ones, how much we care because we trust them with the stuff we struggle with. And for me to be there all these years later, is a sign I’m healthy in facing this thought pattern out in the open. No long just having the conversation with myself, but with people who love me.