Tag: mental-health

Day Three

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere on day three I started itching to get back after it.

Nothing was wrong. That’s the strange part. We’d eaten well and slept in and laid around and seen genuinely beautiful things, and I was lying there feeling lethargic and vaguely dissatisfied about something I couldn’t point at.

It took me a while to name it. It’s an expectation not being met — a low gnawing one, running in the background, that says a day is supposed to have something accomplished in it.

I miss the gym. I miss the feeling of making progress. Mostly I miss having my hands around what’s going on, guiding things where they’re supposed to go, knowing what today is for.

Here’s what I don’t miss, and it stopped me when I noticed it.

I have not been stressed in about five days.

Not lower stress. None. And that is such an unusual condition for me that I had to sit with it a minute to identify what I was even feeling. I’ve been running on some level of pressure for so long that its absence didn’t register as relief. It registered as something’s off.

Which tells me the itch on day three might not be about productivity at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I didn’t actually stop.

I called this a full pause. I said the seven habits were coming off for the week and I meant it.

Except I’ve read my Bible every single day out here. I’ve written a blog post every day. The Bible pictures have gone out every day. Three of the seven have run the entire trip and I never once decided to do them — they just happened, the way brushing your teeth happens.

And I’ve gotten my steps every day without trying, because when you’re on one end of a ship and everything you want is on the other end, the geometry does it for you. Add an island where you don’t know where anything is and you’ll walk five miles looking for a shop.

What actually stopped was the gym and the counting. The two that need equipment and structure and a decision.

So the week has sorted my habits into two piles for me, which I did not ask it to do. Some of them are mine now. Some of them are still scaffolding.

There’s a list waiting when I get home. Lifting, the eating and water, walking, creative time. The rest of the music that needs to go up. Social platform work I’ve been putting off for months.

And this is where I catch myself, because I could write that list a lot longer and it would feel productive to do it. The truth is I don’t need a longer list. I need to know which two or three things on it actually matter, and I still haven’t done that work.

I’m saving the mid-year review for day six. There’s a sea day coming and the family will be occupied, and I’d rather take that time from the ocean than from them.

I thought this week would tell me that taking a vacation was a good idea.

It has told me that considerably more emphatically than I was expecting.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

What I’m Taking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Friday I get on a plane, and for the first time in two and a half years I’m going somewhere with nothing to do.

I want to be precise about that, because I’ve taken time off. Plenty of it. Days with family, weeks around the house. But those weeks still had a kitchen in them, and a yard, and a list of things I’d been meaning to get to that I finally had time to get to.

This one has none of that. I don’t cook. I don’t drive. There is no list. Whatever needs doing, somebody else is doing it, and I’ve paid them to.

I’ve never been much good at that.

The seven habits I’ve run every day since January are going on pause.

Not all of them. I’ll drink the water, because it’ll be hot and I’d be stupid not to. I’ll read my Bible, because that’s not a habit anymore, it’s just a thing I do in the mornings and I’d have to work to stop. The pictures keep going out.

The rest of it — the tracking, the counting, the lifting, the whole apparatus — stays home. I’m calling it a Sabbath and I mean it that way. There’s a difference between resting and taking a break from something, and I’d like to find out if I know what it is.

The writing goes with me.

Not the laptop. Phone, iPad, and a notebook in case I want to do it the old way. The ship has internet and I’ve already paid for it, more of it than any one man needs.

I’ve written something here every single day since January 1st. Two hundred and twenty-some days. There are a hundred and forty left in the year and I’m not going to miss one now over a vacation, which would be an idiotic place to break a streak I’ve carried this far.

But I’m not planning to be deep about it.

For most of this year the posts have gone inward — old jobs, old wounds, patterns I’ve caught in myself. Some of that’s been useful and a couple of them cost me something to write. Next week I’d like to just tell you what I saw. A meal. A person. Something beautiful I stood in front of for a while. Human interest, light on the interior.

There’ll be plenty. New places make material without you having to dig for it. That’s most of what a new place is for.

Here’s the part that surprised me when I sat down to think about it.

I’m not worried I’ll quit. Nothing about this is fragile anymore — I could put the whole thing down for eight days and it would all be waiting Monday, and I know that now in a way I wouldn’t have in February.

What I’m curious about is the other direction. I’m bringing my mid-year review with me, and I’ll open it somewhere around day four when my head has cleared out. I’ve got a real suspicion that some of what I’ve been building this year is going to look different from a deck chair a long way from home.

I might come back and change direction entirely.

I don’t think I will. But I like knowing I could, and I don’t think I’ve been in a position to know that in a very long time.

I write this thing for me. On a good day twenty or twenty-five people come by and I am so grateful for that. The one person who’d actually ask me why there is a gap is my wife. She’s is with me and won’t ask.

So there’s no obligation here. It’s time to unwind.

I’m bringing the notebook anyway.

A Grown Man On The Phone

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My voice dropped when I was thirteen and it dropped all the way.

There was a girl named Misty I’d met at camp. Louisiana, thick bayou accent, and we were friends — not dating, nothing like that, just a long-distance friend I thought was about the coolest person I knew. I called her house one night and her father picked up.

Hello sir, may I speak to Misty please.

She got on the line and the first thing she said was, you just freaked my daddy out. I asked why. She said, my daddy wants to know why there’s a grown man on the phone for me.

I was thirteen. I weighed about a buck fifty. And there was no version of me that could have gotten on that phone and convinced that man otherwise, because everything he needed to know had already happened in seven words.

The size came later.

I was six foot and a hundred and ninety pounds when I graduated high school. Slim, decent shape. Then I went to a summer arts institute that year, caught poison ivy, and got put on prednisone at the clinic.

Prednisone at a camp with three meals a day and all you care to eat. I gained twenty pounds in two weeks. By the end of that summer I was two-twenty, some of it water, some of it a late growth spurt, and some of it just the thing my family does.

Because we are not small people. I had a cousin, gone now, who was a mountain of a man — my dad watched him pick a car engine up off the ground with the headers still on it and set it in a truck bed by himself. His little brother is built the same way. My dad is thick through the chest and shoulders and always has been.

I’m six foot and built like a barrel. Forty pounds down would put me in the best shape of my life, and I would still not look like a man you’d want to startle in a parking lot.

Add a resting face that reads as annoyed when I’m thinking about nothing at all.

So this is the arrangement.

Nobody messes with me. That’s not nothing — I’ve walked through my whole adult life without ever once having to worry about a situation getting physical, and I know exactly what that’s worth and that not everybody gets it.

The cost is that the friendly part of me has a longer trip to make than it does for most people. I have to work to get it out where somebody can see it. There’s a distance to close before anyone finds out I’m not what the packaging says, and it’s on me to close it, every time, with everyone.

The stupid part is that I am the friendly one. That’s not a strategy or a thing I put on. It’s who I actually am, and I have to prove it for a living.

In 2022 I played Maurice in Beauty and the Beast.

The director told me later why he cast me. The young man playing the Beast was six-two and around three-fifty, and he wanted Belle to have been raised by a large, strong father — so that standing up to something enormous would be the most natural thing in the world for her. My size wasn’t incidental to the part. It was the reason for the part.

Somewhere in the run, one of the dancers rolled her ankle badly. She ended up sitting on the stairs outside the stage door with a half circle of people around her, everybody looking at everybody else, nobody moving.

I said hang on. Then I picked her up and carried her down two flights of stairs to where somebody could look at her.

That’s the other half of the arrangement, and it doesn’t come up nearly as often as the parking lot version.

I’ve thought about what I did with all that.

I sang bass. I joined Toastmasters and stayed thirteen years. I’ve spent most of my adult life in front of rooms, and the thing I’ve cared most about the whole time is communicating well.

A guy could look at that and call it compensation, and maybe some of it is. But I think it’s simpler. I got handed an instrument that arrives before I do and says something about me that isn’t true. So I learned to use it on purpose.

My son and I lift together, three nights a week.

Forty-seven years old and I am stronger right now than I have ever been in my life. That’s part of why I’m as thick as I am, and I’ve made peace with the trade.

He’s eighteen and he’s catching me. That’s the whole point of it.

Actually he is 6’2”. He already passed me.

Left Click Or Right Click

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug.

Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code.

I could do that by hand. It would take days. Instead I put an AI tool on it, worked through it with the thing, and had the answer before my coffee got cold.

In 2003 I did not know what SQL stood for. I could not have told you what a data pipeline was, because the phrase wasn’t in general use. Artificial intelligence was something from The Matrix — machines that were coming to take over, not something that would help you find a dropped record on a Tuesday.

My title has the word “data” in it. The job is mostly defining the rules for how a system is supposed to work and then governing it by building consensus with people — running the state of the data about the way you’d run the state of a country. It is not a glamorous line of work. I’d have to look up when a job like it first existed anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of this year saying nobody ever laid the path out for me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not in the wilderness stretch after.

But I don’t think anybody could have laid this one out.

There was no one in 2003 who could have looked at a twenty-five-year-old with a sociology degree and pointed him at a job that didn’t exist, using tools nobody had built, in a role that wouldn’t exist for another decade. The people around me then couldn’t have gotten here either. It wasn’t a place yet.

A map to a known destination is geography. A map to an unknown one is prognostication, and nobody owed me that.

Except I keep thinking about Randy.

Randy was an adjuster at a place I worked in my twenties. He’s the reason I got that job — he knew they needed somebody and he put my name in.

I was the most computer-literate person in that building, which tells you more about the building than about me. So Randy would come to me with questions. Do I left click or right click? I’d tell him. Next time, same question.

I was still answering that question ten years later.

I loved that old man. He was good people, and I mean that. But somewhere in there I remember thinking, buddy, at some point you have to learn how to click your mouse.

He had the thing I say I never got. Somebody right there, patient, glad to help, for ten years. He just never asked a question big enough to take him anywhere.

So it’s two things at once, and I’ve been saying one of them.

Nobody could have mapped me to this job. That part is true and I’m going to stop treating it as a grievance.

But the terrain under my feet was always well understood by somebody. Why a gallery calls the people who already bought from it. What the volunteers at that church were actually offering me. What an editor does. None of that required foresight. It was ordinary knowledge, sitting in the room, that I either wasn’t given or didn’t know how to ask for.

I don’t know how to tell which of those it was, from here.

The twenty-five-year-old wanted to write songs for a living.

He’d be disappointed by the office. Not by the problem-solving — he’d have liked that part, he always liked figuring out what was broken. But the fact of an office, every day, doing something with a title he couldn’t have parsed.

He’d have been wrong about the songs, though. I’ve got an album out. Eleven tracks, written and recorded and released, in a year when the day job was going fine.

Nobody mapped that either.