DADVICE: Getting Through Difficult Times

Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and can you do me a favor?

Can you release the tension in your shoulders? Can you relax your jaw? And can you close your eyes and take a nice, deep breath? Hold it for sec, and release. Wanna give me one more? Long, slow breath, hold it for a beat or two, long slow release. Nice. Real nice.

So let’s just put the tiger on the table: a lot of stuff is REALLY bad for a lot of people right now. My trans siblings are going through the ringer. My unhoused neighbors are under attack. My Jewish friends, my Black friends, my immigrant friends, my disabled friends… everyone is on the absolute edge right now.

And everyone wants to know what to do about it. How do we fight back? How do we stop this? How do we survive?

I wish I could sit here and give you the five point plan… First we do this, then we do that, and bing bang boom, we’ll be home in time for Severance. Unfortunately, I’m as grief-stricken and anxious as everyone else and there is no silver bullet that’s gonna fix this. Thousands of activists and organizers and agitators all have suggestions and while I think a diversity of tactics is necessary for the road ahead, I’m not here to compare and contrast those tactics tonight.

Instead, I want to step back a little and offer my perspective on the broader question: how the hell do you get through a difficult season? There are as many answers to that as people who’ve lived through ‘em, but I want to share what works for me. Maybe it’ll help you too.

To start, I want to talk to you about the police academy. I’ve talked about it at length numerous times on this channel, but I don’t think I’ve talked much about the actual physical and mental hardship that came from literally just finishing the course, absent all the extra political issues.

My police academy was a part-time academy for people who hadn’t yet been hired by an agency. I paid $5000 out of my own pocket to enroll in a 40 week course that met Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evenings for around 6 hours, and Saturdays & Sundays for about 10-12 hours.

And I remember that first week. All the yelling, the humiliation, the push-ups, the laps, the laps, ohhhhh the laps we ran… and I remember thinking… 39 more weeks of this? Can I really do that?

So that first week, on the inside of my binder for the class, I drew a 4 by 10 grid and I colored in the upper left box. One down. And the next sunday? I colored in the next box. Two down. I don’t know why, but somehow watching that grid fill up slowly week by week helped me see and internalize that this was finite. This had an end date that I could predict. This, too, shall pass.

More than that though, it got me into the mental habit of breaking up big problems into small chunks. I didn’t have to survive 40 weeks of gruelling stress, I had to survive ONE week, 40 times. Maybe that doesn’t feel different to you but it feels different to me. If I can survive something once, I can survive it again. Every sunday just added to that mental pathway.

I remember when I finally got to Sunday, Week 10. One entire row filled in. It was like “Holy shit! I just survived 10 weeks of punishment. What’s another 10?” And then one day I opened up that binder and over half the squares were colored in. Well shit, if I can do half an academy, what’s one more?

This mental pathway helped me out big time on one very special day in the police academy, the day of the Pride Run.

The Pride Run was a 10 mile run through the north Orange County hill country. Up, down, and all around. And let me be clear, I’ve never been a runner. I hate running. I hated running laps, I hated running the mile and a half applying for cop jobs, I hated the three mile runs around the college, so you know I was dreading the big 10. I was in the best shape of my life in the academy but even so, I was never NOT among the last ten people to cross the finish line.

So, the day arrived, we jog over to the starting area, get a safety briefing, exchange nervous glances, and then the whistle blew. 90 seconds later, I tripped over a tree root and tore a bloody gash in my knee and cut up my palms. “Nice one, shitbird. Get going!” came the helpful encouragement from my instructors. And so, covered in dirt and blood, I got going.

Unlike the police academy as a whole, the run did not have a predictable finish line. I just knew the route was “about 10 miles” but beyond that, we were to follow the instructor until he said we were done. No mile markers, no stopwatch, no grid of boxes to color in. We just had to survive until it was over.

Despite my oafish beginning, the first mile wasn’t too bad, a level trail through a southern California greenbelt at the edge of suburbia, slight elevation changes but nothing I couldn’t weather. And then we hit hills. And suddenly my legs felt like iron and my palms were stinging and my breath tumbled into my lungs like hot coals. And this was only the beginning.

So… I did the only thing I knew how to do, I broke up a big problem into small chunks. When I felt my strength start to leave me, I said (out loud) to myself “Alright, all you gotta do is get to that street sign up there. Just get to the street sign, that’s it. You can get to the street sign.” And I would trot my way up to the street sign and then say “Nice, now you just need to get to that big tree. Look, it’s even got a some shade, that’s gonna be your reward. Get to the tree.” And I would trot to the tree. And then we’d hit a ravine. “Okay, just get to the bottom, it’s downhill, it’s easy, this is a break. You can coast to the bottom, easy.” And I would.

And I did this for about an hour and 40 minutes of hill running. Every five minutes, I picked a new finish line. And each time I hit it, I picked a new one. And suddenly the forest got thinner, suddenly the trail gave way to sidewalk, suddenly… the college was in view. And suddenly… it was over.

Those of you who were in the military might scoff at a piddly ten miles, but for me, that was the hardest thing I had ever done and the hardest I had ever pushed myself in my life at that point. If you’d asked me a year prior, can you run ten miles, I would’ve laughed in your face. But I did it. Because I didn’t run 10 miles. I ran a half-mile 20 times.

Since then, I’ve carried this mental pathway with me, for similar situations like difficult exercises or testing days in martial arts, but also for nearly anything life throws at me.

When my daughter was a baby, there were days… oh brother were there days when I’d had no sleep, my partner was working weekends, and it was my job to keep a baby alive for 8 hours, alone, on the freakin’ razor’s edge of sanity.

Okay, all I gotta do is get her to noon. That’s lunch time, that’s our reward. A succulent chinese meal! Okay, now all I gotta do is get her to 3. That’s when I have my coffee. Mm mm that’s gonna taste so good and look, it’s already 1:17 we’re practically there already.

When I was trying to move my family from KY to MN while selling one house and buying another all within about 6 weeks total, trying to picture the entire process made my brain shit itself.

Okay, all I gotta do is get my bedroom packed. Just gotta get my nonessentials in boxes tomorrow. Okay, done, now all I gotta do is get the pots and pans packed.That’s it. Okay now all I gotta do is schedule the termite guy for my house. Friday is a success if I get that on the calendar. Okay, it’s saturday now, all we need to do to call today a Win is box up the books. And when we’re done, sushi.

And that’s basically how I live my life, one micro achievement at a time. When going from A to Z, I consider hitting B a victory worthy of a tasty treat.

So yeah, I don’t know what to do about The Horrors. I have a few ideas, some of them involve cooking meals for unhoused neighbors, some of them involve Mario’s brother. But, as I find my strength leaving me, as I find my breath tumbling into my soul like hot coals, right now, all I gotta do is make it to Valentine’s Day so I can get my partner and my daughter something sweet. 2 weeks. I can make it two weeks easy. I just survived the LAST two weeks, what’s two more.

I don’t know your life. I don’t know your situation, your unique hardships, your special circumstances. I don’t know how you’re gonna survive the next 4 years of United States naziism or Keir Starmer’s austerity violence or Germany’s fascist rekindling or Israeli state terror or whatever political tsunami is bearing down on you.

So howabout this? Let’s you and me make it to Valentine’s Day. And we’re gonna reward ourselves by doing something sweet for someone we love. Doesn’t have to be romantic love either. We’re gonna show someone we love ‘em on February 14th. And then after that, all we gotta do is make it to March. February is the shortest month, in fact, by the time you listen to this, it’s practically over. ANYONE can gut it out through February, this is easy mode.

And once March 1st hits, all we gotta do is make it March 8th. Why? That’s international Women’s Day, dummy! You HAVE to make it to International Women’s Day, you’re not a misogynist are you? Of course not, you’ll be there. And then after that, all we gotta do is make it to April 3rd, National Burrito Day. That’s our reward, one of the 7 Perfect Foods bestowed upon us by the Lord. Isn’t that burrito gonna taste so good? They’ll even let you make it vegan!

And after that… you get the picture.

You don’t have to survive the Trump administration. You just have to survive tomorrow.

You survived yesterday. You’re finishing strong today. And you can do tomorrow. Give yourself a little reward at the end, cuz you’ve earned it after this piece of shit week behind us. We’re just gonna keep putting one foot in front of the other, again and again, even if you don’t know the destination, you know where your feet are, so just put the one in front of the other. Every step is progress. Every inch is a subset of victory. There is a finish line, and you are getting closer with every footfall.

All we gotta do is get around this next bend.

Further Reading:

Poems of Hope and Resilience

Dealing With Anti-Trans Hate from Squid Tips