Lessons from 30 years of living

The introduction to this article series can be found using this link;

Who am I to write this book anyway?

Honestly, I’m an average guy, with a pretty common life. I grew up in Scotland as a third child to a single mother after my father passed away when I was only a few months old. My mother, and role model in my life, worked her ass off to provide a wonderful life for her children, and she did just that. I have the benefits of always knowing her love, always feeling her support, and she made a great dad too, let’s just say, she has teeth. I made a ton of mistakes in my teens, I was a chaotic, selfish, wild young boy that always got into fights, didn’t finish high school, didn’t finish college, consumed way too many drugs at a young age and was slinging drinks behind a bar at 18. I didn’t go a single day for several years without at least a black eye.

As a kid, my friends and I would get into all sorts of trouble. We would set things on fire, break into houses, steal from stores, the kind of stuff kids get up to when no one is looking. One time my friends and I, around age 15, managed to hotwire a tractor and drive it into the local University. Another time we snuck into the RAF base (Royal Air Force) which I must say has exceedingly bad security. We broke into one of the common rooms on the base where there was a drum kit and stayed up until 4 am drumming away and drinking. In the early hours of the morning, we crept into the barracks and stole some stuff from the lockers, I still remember the bowie knife my friend found. We nearly got caught on the way out but managed to climb on a roof and hurl ourselves over the electric fence with the barbed wire on top.

At school I ran a little black market selling goods I stole from the local stores, chewing gum was the most popular item but booze had its place on the list too. I even taught myself how to manipulate images using photoshop and would scan IDs, edit the age, reprint and laminate them to produce working quality fakes, these I would sell for 5 pounds to anyone that wanted one.

By age 16 I was on the way out of school, at this point, a popular movie by the name of Green Street had managed to poison the minds of us young and influenceable youth. Green Street is a movie about the football firms of Britain, basically gangs of morons that are so patriotic to a specific football club that they wait until after a game is finished and have huge, dangerous fights with the other club’s gang. Within a few days of the movie circulating in our high school, we had created the MFE, a group of about 50 or so psycho kids that were hell-bent on mayhem. We used to fight other high school gangs, one time someone brought medieval weaponry to a fight, it was mayhem. We would have 100-person brawls on the beach on Friday nights against other groups from neighbouring towns, I had my head stomped on excessively one night and looked like something from a zombie movie.

On my 16th birthday, my friend gifted me a 9 bar of razorfish hash, that was how I got into dealing. I still remember the day my mum’s house got drug busted and I had to watch as she was put in handcuffs along with one of my friends, Paul, and myself. I have spent more than a few nights locked up behind bars. Several times I was chased by groups of 30 or more 30-year-olds, one time it was across some rooftops and I ended up falling through the roof and then another subsequent level of the town’s garden centre. I managed to hobble away down the back alleys out of sight of the chaos.

A smaller group of about 10 of us spent around two years high on every substance you can imagine, one night I consumed 28 tabs of ecstasy, I can still remember the feeling it produced, I don’t necessarily recommend it but that was maybe the first experience I ever had of life-altering drugs, the moment allowed me to understand what love truly was, it was blissful at the very least. I ended up looking like a zombie a lot of times, like on Christmas eve when I was 18, my friends and I were partying in a local bar and someone smashed a pint glass, rim first through my face, I was extremely lucky not to lose any of my eyes and when the police came to figure out what happened, I told them what everyone I knew told the police, that nothing happened. After all, I was brought up with the fact that snitches got stitches.

Within the next 6 months or so I had been banned from pretty much every bar in town, the doormen knew my rebellious nature well, considering I had rolled down multiple flights of stairs with several of them on more than one occasion. They stopped letting me in and I took a social hit, I was the guy that would walk into a bar, order 100 shots of tequila and hand them out to anyone interested in joining the wild night. I couldn’t hang out with my friends anymore so I decided to get serious about bartending and my life trajectory. I started working at a new bar that opened up in town that didn’t know my past and I was extremely lucky to be taken under the wing of some men that were professional, and at times even respectable.

At age 19, my grandmother passed away. This was the third death in my family that I experienced, the first being my father when I was just young. I didn’t exactly know my father, or at least I don’t have any memories of him, and I find it hard to miss what you never had. I’m sure there are repercussions to growing up fatherless, but as I mentioned before, my mother made a great mum, and she substituted damn well as a great dad too. When I was 16, I got into a tricky situation with what was my group at school, some issues arose and I turned out to be the target, I can remember fine well the day some of the toughest kids in school chased me all the way home, and I remember exactly how furious my mum was when she found out, she stormed out of the house and confronted them with about as much rage as anyone could muster.

The other death I experienced was just a few years earlier when my grandfather on my mum’s side passed away. The first two deaths I experienced didn’t shape me that much, I was still a little too young to understand, and I was too busy being preoccupied with surviving the psychotic nature of the world around me that I didn’t take a moment to process it. However, when my grandmother passed away, it hit me hard and I decided I needed to get out of town, it’s difficult to break habits when you are in the same environment that helped produce them. I left all my friends and my mum and moved to Edinburgh, the country’s capital city, and I decided to create a new life for myself.

My twenties started with a bang. I was winning cocktail competitions in the big city, making lots of friends, and experiencing real city life. I had managed to shape my image of myself into a winner, I did this by pretty much just lying to everyone and telling them I was a winner. Within a short period, the lies became the truth. It turns out you can just pretend your way to success. This was my first experience creating my own fate, and it happened because I was granted a very supportive upbringing that allowed me to think for myself and feel able to choose to be confident. Even through all the garbage I handed out in my teens, my family still loved me and believed in me. I think it was this unwavering support that allowed me to feel safe enough to stick my neck out. I’m not a unique person, I don’t have any specific skills that allow me to cut it above the average kid, but I do have one thing going for me, I’m nice.

My mum taught me that manners were very important in life and that you should treat everyone as kindly as you can. I was still wild inside, but I understood now more than ever that life is a complex myriad of different shades of grey. Part of growing up is coming to terms with your mistakes and growing from them, part of life is also continuing to make mistakes. At 21 I woke up in a random man’s apartment in Havana, Cuba, halfway through my first tattoo. The night before, I had asked one of the local Cubans if they knew anyone that could ink me and they had taken me to a friend’s house. I left in the early hours of the morning with a pineapple ¾’s completed on my right shoulder, a moment I can hardly remember but one I will never forget.

At the age of 22, I immigrated to Canada to follow the first real love of my life. Travelling across the country and building a new life in a new place is a culture shock for reasons that you usually don’t expect. Back then I was hopelessly in love and my perception of what love is was all screwed up. I wanted so badly to be loved by someone, that the first person to say it to me was the person I thought I would end up with for the rest of my life. A few years later when I caught her having an affair with another man, I was completely broken.

We put a lot of pressure and weight on other people, we often expect a lot, and we think that other people know what we know. I thought that love was simple, you find the right person and bang, that’s love. I was naïve. It wasn’t because love isn’t simple, it was because I had forgotten or hadn’t yet realized how much can change in such a short time when we are young. We think everything stays the same when we have only spent 20 years on the earth, we often think when something bad happens it is the end of the world or there is no way out, and when good things are happening, we pretend that they are never going to stop. We put our energy into the right things at the wrong times.

When things took a turn for the worse, and my life started unravelling before my eyes, I had to figure out how to build myself back up again. I think of it like a table with four legs as our foundation, often we give so much to other people, to jobs, to money, to success, that we end up relying on other people to keep us upright. When these things collapse inwards, which inevitably they do, we crash to the ground. It is in this moment that you get to build yourself back up again, one leg at a time. This is how I started building resiliency in my life, one step at a time, feeling the emotions, moving with them and focusing on improving.

I took up BJJ classes, I built a photography business, and I tried to give back to my friends. In our moments of despair, we realize what is of most importance to us. In our moments of despair, we realize what we are made out of. I started to seek out difficult things, and I began to pursue things that would break people. My rationale was that the more shit I went through, the tougher I could get. The more trauma I felt, the bigger my fire burned. In times of doubt, when you need to call on yourself to be the best you can be, it helps to know you have gone through some tough tests and came out the other side better than you were before.

When my house got broken into and robbed, I didn’t get upset and wallow, I laughed and went searching for the sickos that did it. When I worked hard enough to get a job with a solid title, a big pay cheque and a fancy office, only to be laid off because of company downsizing, I didn’t complain, I took it as it was, accepted it and moved on to greener pastures. When I found a new person to love and they did the same thing to me as the first, I phoned my friends, I asked for their advice and I listened to what they had to say. It turns out everyone is capable of unimaginable acts of forgiveness.

One of the most fundamental things I learned throughout the last 30 years is that suffering is essential to human growth. It is the stone that allows us to sharpen ourselves into better people. Only through our suffering do we realize what we are capable of, only through our suffering do we realize what is important to us and only through our suffering are we able to build the necessary resources required to move through this life and learn how to truly love. It is through our suffering that we relinquish our fears, through our suffering that we propel ourselves into a new stage of maturity, and through our suffering that we learn how to truly be happy.

Do I have all the answers? No. Am I going to experience trials and tribulations that are challenging? Yes. Have I built what I consider to be a solid foundation to tackle whatever new problem comes up? Yes. It isn’t simple, it’s a big mix of searching for what is difficult, sacrificing for what is important, acknowledging your weaknesses and being open to teachings. It is navigating your ego, balancing your rollercoaster ride of life, and learning how to appropriately deal with every wave as it comes. It is a constant, never-ending cycle of up and down, until your last day. There are ways to be happier, there are ways to be calmer, and there are ways to have more love for yourself and the people around you.

That has been my focus for the last 10 years, and I want to share with you what I learned so that you can get there quicker and have more time in this short existence to focus on the right things.