Tag: mental-health

This Is Him

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I had a grown man’s voice by the time I was fifteen. On the phone nobody ever knew.

One afternoon somebody from a radio station called the house asking for my dad. He’d won something. All he had to do was be the one to claim it.

Three words. This is him. Nobody in the world would have known — not the station, not my father, not anybody. And I stood there holding the phone and couldn’t make my mouth do it.

I have no idea what the prize was. 1993, some station, some giveaway. We lost out on it.

Years later I walked into a car dealership with I’m a moron written across my face.

The salesman read it in about four seconds and sold me a car I didn’t need for considerably more than it was worth. Six months on I sold it back at a three or four thousand dollar loss. That part was expensive and completely ordinary. Everybody buys the wrong car once.

What I actually remember is the phone call before I gave the car up, when I was broke and couldn’t make the payment and a creditor got me on the line.

He was friendly. Asked about my situation, got me talking, and I told him things — I was young and scared and he was the first person who’d sounded like he cared. Then somewhere in the middle he turned it around and used every bit of it on me. Told me I’d lost the car. Hung up.

He didn’t want the money. If he’d wanted the money he’d have worked out a payment with me. He wanted me frightened enough to find some, and he had a script for producing that.

I made myself a promise after that call. Not at either end of that again. Not that end, and not his.

I’ve been listening to Chris Voss’s book about hostage negotiation, which is a good book, and every time I read one of these I run into the same discomfort. The creditor was a skilled negotiator. He used real techniques competently. He just used them on a kid to take something.

So where’s the line.

Here’s what twenty years of work has shown me, and it’s not what I expected. I’m a data guy. Almost nothing I negotiate involves money. I negotiate for understanding — what gets fixed first, what can wait, what was never actually broken, who owns it. Nobody calls that negotiating. We call it getting things done. It’s two people holding different pictures of the same problem and trying to end up with one.

And in twenty years of that, the people who reach for manipulation are the people who have nothing else to reach for.

I interviewed someone a while back and asked what an acronym stood for. He guessed. Confident, fluent, completely wrong. The next candidate said she hadn’t run into that one, so she’d looked it up, because she was curious. He answered the question and failed it. She couldn’t answer it and got the job.

I wasn’t testing the term. I was testing what happens when they don’t know something.

Same thing runs the other direction. I’ve broken things at work — real things, with consequences. What has always kept me whole is walking in and saying: here’s what’s wrong, here’s what caused it, that was my call and I got it wrong, here’s the fix. People let you back in after that. They keep believing you, and believing you is the only asset in the room that can’t be rebuilt from scratch.

Somebody who actually knows their material doesn’t need a technique. Their standing does the work. Manipulation is what gets installed where credibility should have been — the salesman and the creditor reached for pressure because they had nothing true to offer me.

Except that only explains the part with witnesses.

The fifteen-year-old had no credibility to protect. No boss, no team, no reputation, nobody in the room. A phone, an easy lie, and a prize on the other side of it. Every incentive pointed one direction and there was no cost to lying.

I’ve told that story like it says something good about me, and I’m not sure it does. I didn’t weigh it. I didn’t decide. I stood there and my mouth wouldn’t form the sentence, and I’ve never known whether that was character or just not having the nerve. Truthfully, it was me trying to be honest which is what I want to be. Even if it cost me a prize.

Learning the tools didn’t make me trust persuasive people less. It changed what I listen to. I spend a lot less attention now on how well someone is making their case and a lot more on what’s actually under it — whether there’s anything there when you take the technique away.

The books will hand you every tool in the kit. What they can’t tell you is what you’ll do with them on an afternoon when nobody’s home.

He Fell Forward

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I  started a project at the beginning of this year called Bible Pictures 365. I started making the pictures so I’d actually read the Bible.

That was the whole design. I’ve got a plan that takes you through the entire thing in a year, and I know myself well enough to know that a plan alone doesn’t do it. So I gave myself a job: one image per chapter, every chapter, posted. Miss the reading and there’s nothing to post, and the empty slot is the accountability.

It also solved something else. I wanted to see it. Not a painting somebody made in 1840 with everyone dressed like Europeans, but a guess at what the room actually looked like. Dirt, heat, the right kind of bread.

And I wanted it to reach somebody. That part was in the plan too — I’ve had a number in my head all year, a thousand people, and this was one of the ways I meant to get there. Two accounts started from zero, posting into the dark and hoping.

What I didn’t plan for was being graded.

Early on I did David and Goliath. Stone hits the giant in the head, giant goes down. In my version he falls backward, which is what you’d expect and what looks right on a screen.

The text says he fell on his face.

I have gotten, conservatively, twenty comments about it. Probably more. People still find that one and tell me.

The first few stung a little. Then I understood what I was actually looking at. Twenty people knew that verse well enough to notice the direction a man falls in a sentence most people skim. They didn’t scroll past a nice picture. They checked it against scripture and found it wanting, and then cared enough to say so.

That’s the whole thing working. I set out to build accountability for myself and accidentally handed it to a few thousand strangers.

The messages come from everywhere. Corrections, mostly kind. Questions about how I make them. People telling me a specific image landed on them in a way they wanted me to know about.

Somebody once asked me to make one on request. It’s the scene where an enemy commander runs from a battle, hides in a woman’s tent, falls asleep exhausted, and she drives a tent peg through his temple. That’s in there. That’s in the Bible.

I got it to where you understand exactly what happened and it’s still fit for a phone screen. I’m oddly proud of that one.

Judges gave me more trouble than I expected, and not the parts people assume.

What sat with me was how fast it repeats. Sodom gets destroyed, and not many pages later the same wickedness turns up in a town belonging to Benjamin, and it ends with a woman cut into pieces and sent across the country as a message. The tribes nearly wipe Benjamin off the map over it.

I couldn’t make an image for most of that, and I didn’t try. But I read it, which was the point. Every generation in that book thinks it’s different from the last one and none of them are.

Job was harder in a quieter way. You know from the start he didn’t do anything wrong — you’re told, the reader gets to see the ledger. Then you sit there for thirty-some chapters while his friends explain his sin to him. And Job holds up, and holds up, and then eventually gets a little too big for his britches and God has to take him apart.

The part I keep coming back to isn’t the suffering. It’s that his friends were the first ones to throw him under the bus.

Eight months in, I’ve changed almost nothing about how I do it.

Same format. Generate the scene, put music behind it, post it with the verse. It started as a six-second video because that’s what the app gave me, then it became ten seconds because that’s what the app gave me. Every choice in the process was made once, at the beginning, mostly by whatever was available that week.

I want to be honest about what that is and isn’t. It isn’t boredom. I still like doing it, most nights it takes me twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m not white-knuckling anything.

It’s that nothing has broken. The posts land a few hundred views, occasionally a thousand, and the number has been about the same for a long time. Which is exactly the condition where you don’t change anything — nothing hurts enough to make you.

If I started tomorrow I’d probably put myself on camera. Read the verse out loud, say what it did to me that morning. I’ve never once done that on those accounts. I don’t have a good reason.

I’m into August now. Still going.

When the year ends I don’t think I’ll shut it down — maybe it becomes one picture a day instead of one per chapter, whatever actually hit me that morning. I haven’t decided.

What I do know is that some man in another country is going to open his phone, look at a picture of Goliath, and check which way he fell.

Eight O’clock

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Friday I slept until after eight.

I’ve done that maybe twice in ten years. I’m up at 5:30 every day, not because anyone makes me — I like it, it’s the quietest part of the day and it belongs to me. But Friday I woke up at some point, looked at the clock, and went back under.

It took two weekends of practice to get there. First one I made myself stay in bed until seven and it felt like being late for something. Did it again the next day. Then Friday, eight.

What finally landed it wasn’t discipline. My wife looked at me and said, “You’re exhausted. Sleep in.”

Our team just brought a project across the line at work. Ten months of build, a go-live date that wouldn’t stick, the whole thing.

I want to be careful how I describe this, because I liked it. I’ve spent twelve years doing large project work and I’d take that kind of pressure any day — you plan a thing, you build it, and then people use it. That’s about as satisfying as work gets.

What wears on you isn’t the hours. It’s carrying, for ten months, the awareness that if this doesn’t hold, it doesn’t fail quietly. It fails at enterprise scale, in front of everyone, on Monday. You don’t put that down at 5 p.m. You just carry it at a lower volume.

And then it launches, and you’re still braced, because your body didn’t attend the meeting where we decided it was over.

I wrote something years ago about being in a current.

The idea was that most of the time being busy feels like water moving you along — responsibility, deadlines, the list, everyone counting on you. You put your head down and paddle to keep up, and after a while you stop noticing anything except the water.

And the current isn’t deep. That was the whole point of it. You can put your feet down and stand up in the middle of it any time you decide to. You can walk to the bank and watch it go by. It was never actually in charge.

I still believe that. What I’d add now is that standing up is not a thing I do by myself. Twice this month it took my wife on the bank telling me the water wasn’t as deep as I thought.

There’s an old Alabama song about being in a hurry and not knowing why.

I’ve had it stuck in my head, and not because it describes me. I’m not in a hurry to get my life over with. I like my life — I like being married to her, I like being my son’s dad, I like building things. When I catch myself rushing and can’t say what for, that’s not a mood. That’s information.

Because hurry and performance are not the same animal. When I’m performing I know the goal and I know why it matters and I can tell you which things don’t. Hurry is what shows up when I haven’t decided any of that, so everything arrives equally urgent and I just thrash. One is chosen. The other is drift wearing a productivity costume.

Here’s the bill.

I’m not dissatisfied with my life. But when I think honestly about what I’d want back, it isn’t projects and it isn’t time. It’s people. There are friendships I’d have built more deliberately. There are people I liked who I let drift because I was in the water with my head down and I’d have told you, sincerely, that I’d get to it.

Nobody isolates on purpose. You just stay busy long enough and the number of people you’re actually close to gets smaller, and no single week is when it happened.

That’s the real cost of the current. It doesn’t take your hours. It takes your people, slowly, while you’re being responsible.

Tomorrow morning it’s supposed to be sixty-eight degrees, which in Oklahoma on the second of August is close to a miracle.

I’m going to put headphones on and mow the yard before church. Listen to a book and drive around the lawn like it’s a go-kart. Same chore either way. The grass doesn’t care.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. Head up, feet down, and somebody on the bank who’ll tell me when I’ve stopped noticing the water.

Falling More

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I was standing at the stove making my son’s eggs. I’d already fixed my wife’s breakfast and she was sitting there eating it, doing something on her phone, not paying any attention to me.

I stopped cooking and just watched her.

My son looked over. “Dad, what are you grinning at?”

“Your mama, boy.”

That happens at my house. It’s not a special occasion. I’ve been married twenty-seven years and she is still, to me, the most interesting thing in any room she’s in, and every so often I lose track of what I was doing.

The song came out of that morning, though not directly.

What actually started it was a sliding riff I’d been messing with on the guitar — nothing planned, just something I liked the sound of and kept playing. Somewhere in the middle of it I said two words out loud.

Falling more.

And the rest of it showed up. Not all at once, but fast, because I finally had the thing everything else could hang on.

I keep falling more
Like there’s no floor to this thing
There’s never been a floor
I still watch her like a sunset, scared to even blink
I haven’t found the bottom yet
Falling more

Here’s the part I’ve come to love about writing songs.

The chorus is your thesis, and you get to sing it. One idea, stated plainly, repeated until the repetition itself starts making the argument. Then the verses are your evidence — the specific things that prove the claim you keep making.

I keep falling more. That’s the claim. And the first piece of evidence is a man who forgot he was cooking eggs.

Once you notice the structure you can’t stop seeing it. “Hotel California” gives you the whole mood in the chorus and then walks you through the story underneath. “The Thunder Rolls” — the chorus is the storm, the verses are what’s happening while it breaks. You’re not decorating a hook. You’re arguing a case, and you happen to be singing it.

Which is why the hard part is never the chorus. The hard part is finding the idea, and the idea is almost always just a phrase you stumble into while doing something else.

Redemption keeps showing up in everything I write, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a coincidence. I live a redeemed life. God saved me from myself, and once you’ve been on the receiving end of that, you start recognizing the shape of it in other places.

Marriage is one of those places. Two people who are not finished, staying, and covering for each other’s worst material long enough that both of them come out better than they went in. Twenty-seven years of somebody choosing to keep doing that for me.

So the love song isn’t only a love song. I don’t set out to write about grace. It just turns out to be underneath the thing I was writing about anyway.

Songwriting also makes me find out what I think.

You’re either writing from your own view or you’re inside somebody else’s, and the second one has a habit of changing your mind. I’ve walked into a song feeling one way about a situation and walked out of it feeling differently, because I had to sit inside a perspective long enough to make it sing. That’s not a technique. It’s just what happens when you have to say a thing well enough to repeat it.

Mostly I do it because I like it. I’ve spent this year making things, and this is the one that reminds me I’m not only the guy who writes about frameworks.

She’s heard it. She loved it.

She still doesn’t notice when I’m watching her, though — not that morning, not most mornings. The recording is finished, verses and bridge and all. The case it makes keeps building anyway, in the kitchen, while the eggs go cold.

The Song Came Out Wrong

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I set out to write an angry song.

The idea was a defiance anthem. When hard weather comes for you, you’ve got two options — you can be a candle the wind puts out, or you can be the thing the wind feeds until it’s a firestorm nobody can stop. That was the whole concept, and I had the sound in my head before I had the words. Gritty. Driving. Distorted guitars low in the mix, something with dirt on it.

That is not what came out.

The lyrics were exactly what I wanted. The music underneath them landed somewhere around 2000s pop-rock — clean, bright, more anthemic than mean. Radio, not garage.

My first instinct was that I’d failed at it. I sat with it a while longer and realized it was better than what I’d been aiming for. Defiant words over bright music does something that defiant words over angry music can’t: the anger is already in the lyrics, and doubling it just makes it heavy. Putting them over something bright made the defiance sound like it was winning.

I never would have arrived at that on purpose. I arrived at it by missing.

I’m doing a version of the same thing right now with a book.

It’s a 1920s mob story. Fedoras, tommy guns, a city being carved up. It’s also, structurally, the Book of Esther.

If you’d asked me why before I started, I couldn’t have told you. It just felt right, which is not a defensible answer. It took getting into the actual writing to see the reason: the bones are identical. A woman with a hidden identity, in proximity to a man with absolute power, who has to decide whether saying the true thing out loud is worth what it will cost her. That’s Esther and it’s also every good mob story ever told, and the fact that one has a palace and the other has a speakeasy is a costume decision.

The collision only works because of what’s underneath it. Throw two random things together and you usually get oil and water — they sit there, refusing to mix, and you’ve wasted an afternoon. What makes an unlikely pairing land is when the same human problem is already running under both of them and you’re the one who noticed.

That’s not invention. It’s recognition.

Here’s what I’ve come to think the actual opposite of creating is.

It isn’t failure. Failure is fine; failure is a song that came out pop instead of rock and turned out to be right. The opposite of creating is segmenting — keeping the parts of your life in separate rooms and never letting them meet.

Work in one drawer. Faith in another. The thing you love in a third, opened on weekends if there’s time. Nobody who lives that way fails at anything. They just never find out what any of it would have become in contact with the rest.

I did that for twenty years. Data work here, music there, church over in its own compartment, writing as a thing I’d get to eventually. Every one of those drawers was full and none of them knew about each other. The most useful thing that’s happened to me recently is that they started leaking into each other, and it turns out I’d been carrying the raw material for all of it the entire time.

The first thing the Bible tells you about God is that He makes something. Before you learn anything else about Him, you watch Him create. A few verses later you’re told you were made in His image.

I take that literally in the practical sense. Not that everyone’s supposed to be an artist — that’s the small version of the word, and it’s the version that lets most people opt out. But that the impulse to look at what’s in front of you and imagine it arranged differently is part of the equipment, standard issue, not a gift handed to a lucky few.

Which means the question was never whether I had it.

The question was what I was still keeping in separate drawers.