Contents
Prologue pages 4 to 6
Introduction: 2017 to 2018 pages 7 to 22
Chapter 1 Beginning of the End
Chapter 2 New Strength
Part 1 From the Beginning: 1980 to 2019 23 to 152
Chapter 3 A New Life Isn’t Always a Good One
Chapter 4 Guilted Apology
Chapter 5 The Kissing Slut
Chapter 6 Fostering Dependency
Chapter 7 Finding Flow
Chapter 8 The Excremental Ascent 46 to 54
Chapter 9 Beyond Borders 54 to 56
Chapter 10 Everybody Jumps 56 to 59
Chapter 11 Bittersweet Love 59 to 66
Chapter 12 The Way the Cookie Crumbles 66 to 71
Chapter 13 Figuring out a Future 71 to 73
Chapter 14 A Country to Love but also to Hate 73 to 76
Chapter 15 Choose your Hole 76 to 79
Chapter 16 Radu/Sadhu 79 to 82
Chapter 17 The Rain Came and Went with the Storm in my Head 82 to 90
Chapter 18 Join the Stampede 90 to 92
Chapter 19 Numb to Pain and Suffering 92 to 95
Chapter 20 Dream Boy Drew 95 to 107
Chapter 21 Strong Like Durga 107 to 115
Chapter 22 A US Resurgence 115 to 119
Chapter 23 An Unromantic Arrangement 120 to 124
Chapter 24 The Shit that Saved my Life 125 to 127
Chapter 25 Pushing a Heavy Cart 128 to 129
Chapter 26 Leaving the Comfort of the Cage 129 to 132
Chapter 27 Admitting Weakness 132 to 138
Chapter 28 The Greatest Love I Never Knew 138 to 144
Chapter 29 Sucking Snakes 144 to 152
Part 2 Love Amidst a Tragedy: 2020 to 2021 pages 153 to 291
Chapter 30 Like a Nice Guy 153 to 162
Chapter 31 Lingering Place 162 to 172
Chapter 32 Universal Intervention 173 to 180
Chapter 33 Free Fucking 180 to 190
Chapter 34 Quit While you are Behind 190 to 196
Chapter 35 Skill of Seduction 196 to 190
Chapter 36 Dreams of Going Down 199 to 203
Chapter 37 Components of Trust 203 to 208
Chapter 38 Be Present for the Experience 208 to 212
Chapter 39 Falling for the Swinger 212 to 216
Chapter 40 Lady in Red 217 to 226
Chapter 41 Fearful Confessions 226 to 230
Chapter 42 Heart and the Bottle 230 to 236
Chapter 43 Don’t Stop Loving out of Fear of Losing 236 to 240
Chapter 44 Practice Being Kind, Not Right 240 to 241
Chapter 45 Seeking Other’s Advice 242 to 246
Chapter 46 A Sensible Reunion 246 to 250
Chapter 47 Wanting What's Real 250 to 254
Chapter 48 A Bit of a Do-Over 254 to 257
Chapter 49 Letting Go of Anything Romantic 257 to 263
Chapter 50 Shit to Gold 263 to 268
Chapter 51 Am I Capable 268 to 272
Chapter 52 Finally Maybe Moving On 272 to 273
Chapter 53 Love Won’t Turn you to Ash 274 to 279
Chapter 54 Small World Connections 279 to 291
Part 3 Death Looks Pretty on You: 2022 to 2023 pages 292 to 314
Chapter 55 Cupid’s Toybox 292 to 298
Chapter 56 Plan of Support 298 to 301
Chapter 57 Wasted Life 302 to 305
Chapter 58 Live into the Answers 305 to 308
Chapter 59 Widdle Away What’s in the Way 309 to 310
Chapter 60 Do It for You 311 to 314
Chapter 61 Breath of Fresh Uninfected Air
Acknowledgements pages 318 to 320
Introduction: 2017 to 2018 pages 7 to 22
Chapter 1 Beginning of the End
Chapter 2 New Strength
Part 1 From the Beginning: 1980 to 2019 23 to 152
Chapter 3 A New Life Isn’t Always a Good One
Chapter 4 Guilted Apology
Chapter 5 The Kissing Slut
Chapter 6 Fostering Dependency
Chapter 7 Finding Flow
Chapter 8 The Excremental Ascent 46 to 54
Chapter 9 Beyond Borders 54 to 56
Chapter 10 Everybody Jumps 56 to 59
Chapter 11 Bittersweet Love 59 to 66
Chapter 12 The Way the Cookie Crumbles 66 to 71
Chapter 13 Figuring out a Future 71 to 73
Chapter 14 A Country to Love but also to Hate 73 to 76
Chapter 15 Choose your Hole 76 to 79
Chapter 16 Radu/Sadhu 79 to 82
Chapter 17 The Rain Came and Went with the Storm in my Head 82 to 90
Chapter 18 Join the Stampede 90 to 92
Chapter 19 Numb to Pain and Suffering 92 to 95
Chapter 20 Dream Boy Drew 95 to 107
Chapter 21 Strong Like Durga 107 to 115
Chapter 22 A US Resurgence 115 to 119
Chapter 23 An Unromantic Arrangement 120 to 124
Chapter 24 The Shit that Saved my Life 125 to 127
Chapter 25 Pushing a Heavy Cart 128 to 129
Chapter 26 Leaving the Comfort of the Cage 129 to 132
Chapter 27 Admitting Weakness 132 to 138
Chapter 28 The Greatest Love I Never Knew 138 to 144
Chapter 29 Sucking Snakes 144 to 152
Part 2 Love Amidst a Tragedy: 2020 to 2021 pages 153 to 291
Chapter 30 Like a Nice Guy 153 to 162
Chapter 31 Lingering Place 162 to 172
Chapter 32 Universal Intervention 173 to 180
Chapter 33 Free Fucking 180 to 190
Chapter 34 Quit While you are Behind 190 to 196
Chapter 35 Skill of Seduction 196 to 190
Chapter 36 Dreams of Going Down 199 to 203
Chapter 37 Components of Trust 203 to 208
Chapter 38 Be Present for the Experience 208 to 212
Chapter 39 Falling for the Swinger 212 to 216
Chapter 40 Lady in Red 217 to 226
Chapter 41 Fearful Confessions 226 to 230
Chapter 42 Heart and the Bottle 230 to 236
Chapter 43 Don’t Stop Loving out of Fear of Losing 236 to 240
Chapter 44 Practice Being Kind, Not Right 240 to 241
Chapter 45 Seeking Other’s Advice 242 to 246
Chapter 46 A Sensible Reunion 246 to 250
Chapter 47 Wanting What's Real 250 to 254
Chapter 48 A Bit of a Do-Over 254 to 257
Chapter 49 Letting Go of Anything Romantic 257 to 263
Chapter 50 Shit to Gold 263 to 268
Chapter 51 Am I Capable 268 to 272
Chapter 52 Finally Maybe Moving On 272 to 273
Chapter 53 Love Won’t Turn you to Ash 274 to 279
Chapter 54 Small World Connections 279 to 291
Part 3 Death Looks Pretty on You: 2022 to 2023 pages 292 to 314
Chapter 55 Cupid’s Toybox 292 to 298
Chapter 56 Plan of Support 298 to 301
Chapter 57 Wasted Life 302 to 305
Chapter 58 Live into the Answers 305 to 308
Chapter 59 Widdle Away What’s in the Way 309 to 310
Chapter 60 Do It for You 311 to 314
Chapter 61 Breath of Fresh Uninfected Air
Acknowledgements pages 318 to 320
Prologue
“I’m hitting a wall,” I told my friend Kayla while I was writing this book.
“You should talk to my friend Nelly!” she told me. Kayla and Nelly had gone to Harvard together over twenty years ago. Nelly, who had grown up on a hog farm in Tennessee, was currently living in Guatemala working as a ghost writer and editor.
I sent Nelly an email about my project and we instantly planned a time to talk it over. The big idea of my book, I told her, was feces! My idea revolved around the concept of shit as a friend or a foe. I talked about the idea of shit being our enemy and all the ways in which it can be transformed to something positive.
I was grappling with how to pull my ideas together in an entertaining yet educational way. As I explained all this to Nelly, I then noted that I’d had a hard life. Her tart reply was: “Have you really had a hard life or do you just think you did?”
That was a valid question. “Compared to many people in the world,” I said, “I’ve had a very easy life. But relative to others, I’ve had a very hard life.”
It bothers me when patients or friends express guilt for complaining about their seemingly trivial life circumstances and hardships in light of all the death and abuse and trauma going on elsewhere in the world. When we compare our small challenges with the major life catastrophes others struggle with, we might want to suppress what feels trivial. But if we don’t express and validate our feelings, they will interfere internally with our health. Part of my purpose in writing this book is to validate any feeling its readers may have had about the shit that has happened to them. Instead of wallowing in pity on one hand or ignoring our issues on the other, how can we evaluate those hardships and then transform them to something valuable and good?
Speaking to Nelly, I mentioned the death of my father, my mother’s partnering with an abusive man, and my own wanderings around the world lost and in search of understanding—but understanding of what, I did not know.
“Some of those really hard experiences turn out to be the most transformative for us,” Nelly said.
She had hit the nail on the head. Her comment made me remember something my brother once said about me that fit perfectly with my idea for this book: “You step into shit and it turns to gold.”
I’d stepped into shit, figuratively speaking, many times in my life and found the gold eventually. It was never obvious how the shit got transformed into something good, but it always did. Not as financial gains but as spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and psychological ones.
That was the kind of shit I really wanted to write about! I want to write about the truly bad or difficult experiences I had that turned into something really good in my life. Transforming the idea of having a shitty experience into something positive can drastically help us for the better.
About five months after I set out to write this memoir, a patient-friend offered to read what I’d written and give me feedback. She only knew me as her osteopath at that point and had no knowledge of the personal details of my life. After reading my manuscript, she said to me, “We can be such experts in some ways and such, such . . .” She paused, trying to find an appropriate word, then said, “such learners in other ways.”
I smiled at her kind choice of words, knowing what a mess I was in so many ways in my personal life. “Yes, I do have a lot to learn,” I told her, “and I’m not afraid to admit it.” I was a family doctor. I had become an expert on pain. In some ways. But when it came to relationships, I was a royal fuck-up. I could never get it right, and I had no qualms about owning that truth.
I had another close friend from college who had wanted to date back then and never understood why we didn’t get together. After he read my manuscript, he finally got it. “You had no chance with relationships,” he told me. “You were set up for failure from the start.”
While I like to think I’ve grown a lot even in the last year, there’s always more to learn. We never do it perfectly even when we aren’t destined for failure, and none of us is ever 100 percent what we want to be. We have to accept compromise in some form if we want to be in relationships with others, but we always have that option to linger in a place of non-commitment, of never being with anyone, or just playing around with no ties binding us. As you will discover, I have tried both options.
Here is a bit of my journey in trying to figure out what I want in my life coming from an unstable base, one that didn’t set me up for great success in love and partnership, but one of learning and evolution. Stumble with me on this journey of self-discovery. Maybe you can find some bits of gleaming gold among my own mistakes that will help you on your own path.
“You should talk to my friend Nelly!” she told me. Kayla and Nelly had gone to Harvard together over twenty years ago. Nelly, who had grown up on a hog farm in Tennessee, was currently living in Guatemala working as a ghost writer and editor.
I sent Nelly an email about my project and we instantly planned a time to talk it over. The big idea of my book, I told her, was feces! My idea revolved around the concept of shit as a friend or a foe. I talked about the idea of shit being our enemy and all the ways in which it can be transformed to something positive.
I was grappling with how to pull my ideas together in an entertaining yet educational way. As I explained all this to Nelly, I then noted that I’d had a hard life. Her tart reply was: “Have you really had a hard life or do you just think you did?”
That was a valid question. “Compared to many people in the world,” I said, “I’ve had a very easy life. But relative to others, I’ve had a very hard life.”
It bothers me when patients or friends express guilt for complaining about their seemingly trivial life circumstances and hardships in light of all the death and abuse and trauma going on elsewhere in the world. When we compare our small challenges with the major life catastrophes others struggle with, we might want to suppress what feels trivial. But if we don’t express and validate our feelings, they will interfere internally with our health. Part of my purpose in writing this book is to validate any feeling its readers may have had about the shit that has happened to them. Instead of wallowing in pity on one hand or ignoring our issues on the other, how can we evaluate those hardships and then transform them to something valuable and good?
Speaking to Nelly, I mentioned the death of my father, my mother’s partnering with an abusive man, and my own wanderings around the world lost and in search of understanding—but understanding of what, I did not know.
“Some of those really hard experiences turn out to be the most transformative for us,” Nelly said.
She had hit the nail on the head. Her comment made me remember something my brother once said about me that fit perfectly with my idea for this book: “You step into shit and it turns to gold.”
I’d stepped into shit, figuratively speaking, many times in my life and found the gold eventually. It was never obvious how the shit got transformed into something good, but it always did. Not as financial gains but as spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and psychological ones.
That was the kind of shit I really wanted to write about! I want to write about the truly bad or difficult experiences I had that turned into something really good in my life. Transforming the idea of having a shitty experience into something positive can drastically help us for the better.
About five months after I set out to write this memoir, a patient-friend offered to read what I’d written and give me feedback. She only knew me as her osteopath at that point and had no knowledge of the personal details of my life. After reading my manuscript, she said to me, “We can be such experts in some ways and such, such . . .” She paused, trying to find an appropriate word, then said, “such learners in other ways.”
I smiled at her kind choice of words, knowing what a mess I was in so many ways in my personal life. “Yes, I do have a lot to learn,” I told her, “and I’m not afraid to admit it.” I was a family doctor. I had become an expert on pain. In some ways. But when it came to relationships, I was a royal fuck-up. I could never get it right, and I had no qualms about owning that truth.
I had another close friend from college who had wanted to date back then and never understood why we didn’t get together. After he read my manuscript, he finally got it. “You had no chance with relationships,” he told me. “You were set up for failure from the start.”
While I like to think I’ve grown a lot even in the last year, there’s always more to learn. We never do it perfectly even when we aren’t destined for failure, and none of us is ever 100 percent what we want to be. We have to accept compromise in some form if we want to be in relationships with others, but we always have that option to linger in a place of non-commitment, of never being with anyone, or just playing around with no ties binding us. As you will discover, I have tried both options.
Here is a bit of my journey in trying to figure out what I want in my life coming from an unstable base, one that didn’t set me up for great success in love and partnership, but one of learning and evolution. Stumble with me on this journey of self-discovery. Maybe you can find some bits of gleaming gold among my own mistakes that will help you on your own path.