What does it mean to have black circles under your eyes? In my life it was tied to lack of sleep, dehydration, inflammation and stress. Bald spots (alopecia) and back spasms I have tied to my subconscious brain creating physical pain and blemishes to deal with the internal fire that was burning me down. What was this internal fire – fatherhood. The weight of being responsible for another human being lit my internal systems on fire and I was not doing anything physically to put out the fire. I just worked, ate bad and didn’t sleep enough – I was desperate to provide, to not let this beautiful little guy down. Being a parent for the first time was a huge change in my hedonistic, narcissistic existence. Thank God my wife was born to be a mother, even though, like many first time parents, I assume, we didn’t exactly know what we were doing. We made judgements on the right way to do things and tried to stick with those principles, but many times they got thrown out the window as they were unrealistic in the chaos of life. Being pliable is valuable to progress and we were pliable enough to know that we were rookies and that made every veteran in the parenting game give us advise and many times it countered other veteran advice. Come to find out – you should expose your kid to peanuts early – the whole reason the US has an epidemic of peanut allergies is because we followed our own bad advice for years without having any science to back it up. Almost every detail of life itself is objectionable – is breast feeding the best for a child, we believed it was, but what we didn’t know was that the milk didn’t come in as well as it could of for our first child and he was a hungry little fella who my wife struggled to keep full. We fought through the first four months of parenthood with a hungry, screaming (colicky) kid and I had started a professional job where I had luckily been given a chance to represent an automotive paint company even though I was a felon and was on probation. I felt like I had one chance on the employment front and that I could not mess it up – yet I still got so drunk on the first night traveling with my new boss that I threw up four times while traveling to see our customers the next day. I guess my prison rehab didn’t take.
Granted, my new boss demanded that I drink with him as he was an addict himself and we connected on the inner child level – or the inner demon level. When I was cast out to sell the products alone in the central Pennsylvania territory, I did give it everything I had. I used my time wisely and developed a hell of a territory that paid me handsomely, direct commission. The convicted felon, salesman, father, husband was my architype and I did everything in my power to excel at the last three and bury the first one. I managed to stay away from an addiction to alcohol at this stage as the importance of being a father and husband drove me, but when you put me with my coworkers, I found myself rolling the dice, gambling with everything that I was building.
The stress that applied to myself to succeed was extreme and relentless. The back spasms started on the day that we baptized our son. I was hopping around on one leg trying to pull on my second sock when a lower back spasm knocked me to the ground and left me there needing help. There was all kinds of family and friends that had travelled from far and wide to celebrate this day with us and I was upstairs laid out on the floor asking my nephew to go retrieve my wife so she could help me put on my sock. My whole body tilted to one side as we held our little guy in front of the congregation, my back clenched in a mind bending pain that stayed with me for days after that first episode. I still cooked chicken on the grill and carried my little guy around like a football at the party – but I was crooked and suffering as I let the weight of the situation crush me. I had no idea that my mind was doing this to me – I thought I had just destroyed my body to the point where it was breaking down in my mid thirties.
I wasn’t extremely unhealthy, but I wasn’t healthy either. I did not have a regular exercise regimen as the only real exercise I participated in was going on walks with my wife and children quite often and maybe going to the gym once on the weekends. I did not prioritize my body over my work though as I believed that success in my job was everything that kept us going forward. The dark circles came from putting the wrong stuff in my body and not drinking enough water. If I was going to have one sage piece of advice to others, it would be to start each day with heavy hydration, it effects everything. I was working extremely hard, not sleeping enough and not drinking enough water. I would also fall off the wagon anytime we were around a rowdy crowd, which included some of our family, my coworkers and many of my customers. I started to realize over a five year period that if I drank more than three drinks, I paid a mighty price the next day – I would get a migraine headache for several hours that included vomiting. I’m pretty sure that a higher power took me by the balls and said, “Stop you dipshit”. I did stop drinking and replaced it with weed – then my higher power said, “no dopamine floods” , as I always had a huge down after I got high. So there is an angel on my shoulder steering me and I have to let her take the wheel.
My angel allows me to be a sober contributor to my community, a husband, a father and a hard working professional that prioritizes physical and mental well being. Sometimes I still want to let my demons run wild, but mostly, I let the angel drive – she wants me to be free, happy, healthy and she never complains if I get laid, I just can’t play poker or sneak some molly.
Full Blooded American 
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