Chapter 04: Differences

Being a teenager is confusing and frustrating. Your whole world flips upside-down and you don’t have any idea how to fix it. I don’t want to write about adolescence, because everyone is already familiar with it. Everyone has struggles at that point — some more than others. It’s because those struggles are so common that I feel I must write about them. I went through it like everyone else. I didn’t know who or what to believe, and I didn’t know how to find the answers.

My mom had a phrase.

Rule #1:

Mom is always right

Rule #2:

If Mom is ever wrong, refer to Rule #1

My dad didn’t need that phrase. He was always right. No matter what I was confused about, I could always go to him. He had answers for math, mechanics, philosophy, chemistry, and electronics. Dad would tell me who the good people were and who the bad people were. Who to trust, and who to be careful around. It was comfortable and peaceful.

On occasion, my dad would make strong statements which seemed made-up. Things like explaining that hot water freezes faster than cold water. It was pointless to argue with him because he would stick to his point regardless of what you threw at him. For a while I thought that I was just really dumb, so I did my best to stay out of these types of conversations with him. One day things changed, though.

“If you light a firework in your front yard you’ll go to jail.” He asserted.

If I what?

I thought.

There’s no way this can be true.

“If you light a firework?”

“In your front yard.”

“What if you light it and then throw it in water before it explodes?” I asked.

“You’ll still go to jail.”

I was perplexed. Anyone could see he was wrong. Obviously that rule isn’t a global rule around the world. It’s not even the same everywhere in the United States.

In the past I figured I was too dumb to understand. This time I knew he was wrong, because my friend lit a firework in HIS front yard. An interesting thing DIDN’T happen. He DIDN’T go to jail. It seemed like my dad was saying that the mere act of lighting a firework would teleport you into prison.

The most frustrating thing wasn’t that my dad was being irrational. It was that until this moment I didn’t think he could be wrong. This time I knew for a fact that he was wrong. I wondered what else he made up. As I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t even know that he’s my dad at this point. The only evidence was that he said he was.

That was the first day of an emotional battle that raged on for years. I don’t know how old I was at the time. Probably fifteen. After that whenever a teacher said something, I would ask two or three other adults what they thought. That made things even more frustrating. I would get information that several adults agreed to, then come home and my dad would shut it down.

I was sad and I was confused. I didn’t know how to move forward since I realized that my dad was every bit as human as me. He had always been the one I went to when I had problems. Suddenly I realized that he wasn’t always going to be right, and that was frustrating.

I decided to try to talk it through with him. Perhaps he can still help me solve this problem. I didn’t know how to have the conversation, but I needed to start somewhere. I asked if we could talk, and he said yes.

“Dad, I’m sad. I used to think you were a superhero, but I realize you’re normal. I thought you knew everything, and now I realize you can be wrong.”

He turned red and stared at me. His eyes bored holes through my skull. “I’m still your father” he replied.

I just stood up and walked out. That didn’t work. My dad used to be my litmus test. I would hold everything I heard or read up to his opinion and move forward from there.

Now that I know he can be wrong, I don’t know what to do. Where do I go for answers?

I didn’t even know what I believed about God anymore. Now that I realize that everything I know comes from my dad. What if he’s wrong about religion? I had to figure out how to get solid answers.

I started talking to other people about religion and spirituality. I was amazed at how many beliefs there were. Some people were quite successful and didn’t believe in a god at all. Others believed in God, but in a different way. Many of them seemed happy and secure.

I started telling my Dad about what I found. It was cool! He will be excited to hear that there are other world views out there!

“Be careful of who you listen to” was his only response. “It’s dangerous to talk to people who believe different than you.”

“What could happen?” I asked.

“You could get pulled away from God and Christianity.”

End of conversation. It didn’t make sense again, and I didn’t want to upset him. I’m trying to find the truth, not trying to prove Christianity. If I find out that Christianity isn’t real, then why would I want to stick with it? I want to know the truth, not re-validate my own beliefs.

My relationship with everyone started to deteriorate. My brothers and sisters thought I was wrong to question my dad. My friends thought my dad was crazy. My teachers said I had to listen to my dad, but they also said things that conflicted with what he said.

I started getting very sad. I didn’t know who I was, who I wanted to be, and I didn’t know where to get answers. I continued to talk to everyone. My dad and I continued to try to work together, but something was definitely off, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

My dad pulled some strings and got me a job working at the same company where he worked: Nortel Networks. I was only seventeen, so I needed to have special permission to work there, but he somehow managed to make it happen. I was so proud of being in the same place as him. All my life I wanted to go to work with him, and now I wasn’t just hanging out with him — it was my job too!

I started talking to his coworkers and bringing up issues that I was confused about. If I ever disagreed with my dad on a topic, I’d see what his peers thought. Most of them respected my dad, but a handful would say he was crazy.

There were two people there that would turn me to studies and research to get my answers. This felt very reassuring. Data was something that I could sink my teeth into. They would help me find information about the topics I could read to get answers. Unfortunately they moved to other departments and I was no longer able to keep in touch.

[Need transition]

I started realizing that something was really wrong with me. I was too dumb to understand concepts, and I was upsetting people when I tried to get to the truth. Something was broken with me, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

At home, I started bringing up the concept of psychologists. I wanted to get a pulse for what my family would say about professional help. My dad said that psychologists were dangerous. They could change the way you think without your permission. “And besides,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with you.”

After a year of struggling, I finally decided I needed to see someone. A girl that was studying to be a doctor agreed to meet with me. I was in the middle of a lot of conflict. On one hand, I was pretty sure I was broken. My Dad said that there was nothing wrong with me, but I felt certain that something was wrong.

I sat down and wrote a two-page essay explaining why I needed professional help. It boiled down to this:

If a person think’s they have a problem and they do, then they have a problem. If a person thinks that they have a problem and they don’t, then they have a problem. Either way if a person thinks they have a problem, then they should seek help.

I met with her and turned in the essay, hoping she would read it and agree with me. She set it on her desk and said “let’s talk about you.”

Um… Ok.

I thought. We talked a while, and she gave me some literature that explained feelings. She also said that we should meet regularly until I felt better.

I didn’t.

What I did do is sit in my room and cry. I developed a lot of unhealthy behavior. For example, I would go outside and punch bricks until my hands bled. I was willing to do anything to distract myself from the pain inside me. I wondered if I was going to get in trouble for hurting myself, but I managed to evade conversation with my parents.

I sought out another pastor in a local church. I was running out of answers, and I was confused. This church was old-fashioned, and I generally felt safe when I was in there. The pastor was a straightforward kinda guy, and I felt like he would have simple and clean answers. I went to the church, but he was unavailable, so they set me up with the youth pastor.

I went in and sat down on their overstuffed leather couch. It was comfortable and cozy if I wanted to take a nap, but I didn’t want to take a nap. I wanted to talk. So I pulled up a folding chair and scooted up to his desk. I told the pastor that I had a lot of conflict that I didn’t know how to resolve. I felt bad and believed bad things about myself in my core. Yet the Bible says that those things aren’t true. Still, in spite of the truth of the Bible, I felt awful.

• I felt like trash, but the Bible says “I am wonderfully made” in Psalm 139.
• I felt sad all the time, in spite of the fact that Nehemiah 8 says “The joy of the Lord is my strength”.
• I cry to God on my knees with no consolation, though Philippians 4 says “Do not be anxious […] but […] present your requests to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
• Perhaps I wasn’t saved, I told him. Since the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, and patience according to Galatians 5.
• Yet, Romans 10 says that if I confess with my mouth and believe in my heart that Jesus Christ is Lord I will be saved.

The pastor looked at me in silence for a few seconds and then said “I don’t know what to say. Everything I would have told you, you just quoted to me.” I sat there staring at him. Perhaps if I waited long enough some revelation would come to him. “I wish I could do more to help you. I really do.” He concluded.

I stood up, put the chair away, and walked out of his office. As I left the building, someone said some sort of “goodbye” to me, but I never looked up long enough to know who they were. I sat in my car now completely hopeless and depleted. How was I going to move forward?

My dad started leaning into my life more. Every time I went out and came home he would ask me what I did. At first, I was excited to share stories with him. Every time I left home was an adventure, and I wanted to tell someone how interesting they were. Unfortunately Dad started to change his tone. To this day I don’t know if it was my perspective that changed, or his tone. Perhaps it was a little of both.

“Where did you go?” Dad asked.

“I went to Josiah’s house.”

“What did you do there?”

“He showed me a bunch of things on his computer. We looked at the new version of Windows that came out, and he hacked into the pentagon.”

“Be careful what you do, or you’ll get put in jail.”

“I didn’t do it. Josiah did” I argued

“It doesn’t matter. Everyone in the room will go to jail.”

“Yes sir.”

That was the end of our conversation. Did he say anything positive or share in a bonding moment with me? Perhaps, but all I remember is that my friends and I are going to jail. Why is it that the only thing I could remember was the negative thing he said?

The reason is because of our friend the hippocampus. It’s a medium-sized mass near the center of the brain. It plays a major role in the way that we learn and remember things. However, it gets neutralized by stress or anxiety.

Mark G. Parkard, a professor at Texas A&M University, did a study regarding stress and the hippocampus. They built a maze and sent rats through it. They would rate the rat’s spatial memory ability by timing it and seeing if they beat it faster the second time through. Another set of rats was sent through the maze, but they were shocked or restrained prior to testing. This raised their anxiety levels prior to entering the maze. The rats with higher levels of anxiety retained less information about the maze. In some cases they did worse the second time through, which could indicate that they remembered things wrongly.

The stress in these situations makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened, but what I remembered was reality for me. I wanted to continue engaging with my father, but his doom predictions continued. I saw them as flyover attacks launched by a fatherly helicopter. I wanted out.

The next time he asked me about my outing I told the most boring part of the story I could think of. I wanted him to lose interest and cease his line of questioning.

“You were gone for two hours” he noted. “What else did y’all do?”

I tried to think of anything I could that would make this conversation stop. I looked into his eyes looking into my eyes. Every time I shifted he shifted too. He suspected something was up, and no matter what I said at this point, he was going to see it as wrong. The thing is that we didn’t really do anything interesting this time. My friend talked about some video games that were coming out that I wouldn’t be able to buy, he played with his cat, and we talked to his dad. That was it.

I told him as much as I could, and he dug through my stories like he was searching for gold. I started crying, because I knew he was trying to find something to use to hold against me. If he really wanted to know all about my adventures, why didn’t he come and hang out with my friends instead of putting me on trial for being a child?

I finally figured out how to get past everything. Whenever I hung out with friends, I would pause before I went home. I would think of one “safe” element of our time. I would spend several minutes recalling details about it so that I would be able to talk in depth about it. I would also psych myself up — making myself as excited as possible. That way I could spend an hour talking to him about one detail.

It worked. He asked me what happened, and I told him about that one activity. I told him so much detail about it that he eventually started looking around the room for something else more interesting than me. I didn’t let up. I dug in and provided more details and depth. If the story was about playing checkers, I would tell him what shade of red the pieces were, and how many squares were on the board. Finally he said he had to go, and I was relieved.

That got me through the interrogation regarding my friends. But in other areas the helicopter strafing continued. He would ask me about what I did in my room, at church, and with friends. He asked me what I did in the bathroom and in the backyard. Sometimes I would mess up and provide too much detail, and he would make sure I knew that it was wrong.

I felt like a marionette puppet. I’m not sure what was behind this need to control. I remember him telling me that when he died he would leave nothing behind except me. He wouldn’t be remembered for anything that he did. He wouldn’t be famous for anything he made. But he would go on living through me. Perhaps he was afraid that after he died I would somehow taint his good reputation by not being as good as he was. Whatever the case may be, I felt like a failure.

As I was writing this book, I talked with my dad about things that happened. He was sad that I had to go through such a difficult experience. He had tried his hardest to provide me a solid foundation to build upon. Still, the experience was difficult for both of us. Looking for a way to share his side of the story, I asked him to write a letter to the old me.

I want to share his letter with you. Maybe it can help you.

Dear Samuel,You’re going through a difficult and confusing phase. You’re hurt, and I get that. You have every right to be. Please know that I’m trying my hardest, and I know you are too.Right now you’re seeing life through different eyes than you used to, and it can take a while to adjust. I’m trying to guide you the best I can. I see you making mistakes that I’ve already made, so I try to warn you. You seem to be struggling with that advice, and I’m sorry. I wish I knew how to take this difficult time from you and live it myself, but this is something you have to live through. I just want to ask you for two things.Your patience. This will take time, but you’ll get through it and things will start to make sense again in ten years, give or take a few. Please try to be patient with others as you go through this time where everyone seems like your enemy. Also be patient with yourself as you fumble through this period.Your forgiveness. I want to be a perfect dad, but honestly I don’t know how. Today I see things that I could have done better. But I know that even if I had a million lifetimes, I still wouldn’t get it perfect. This is the best I have to offer, and I know it’s less than you deserve, but I hope you’ll learn to accept it.Please know that I love you. I always have and I always will — regardless of wherever life takes you. I’m proud of you.Your father

It’s been many years since those days. My life has changed a lot, and I’m proud of some of the things. My father’s guidance had a role in the things I’m most proud of. One thing he said was particularly impactful: “Sam, I wish I had done better in a lot of areas, but I didn’t have a good upbringing. Today I just hope that you do better than I did.” I make it my reverent goal in life to do better than him in everything I can, and I wouldn’t be able to if he hadn’t given me a good start.

If there were one pill, book, phrase, or other gimmick to cure adolescence, it would be constantly sold out. Both teenagers and parents alike want to get through this phase as easily as possible. Unfortunately the world is complex and ever-evolving. The crises that teenagers face are different for everyone. You must discover your specific solution, which is unique to your crisis.

Marshall Brain is an author and a speaker. He works hard to try to help people solve complex problems. He wrote a book called

The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World

. It’s a good read. He makes one point that resonates with me today. We have something called the Teenage Illusion Module. When we are in our adolescence, it turns on. While active, it distorts our perception of reality.

Why would we have such a problematic thing as the Teenage Illusion Module? He explains this by comparing us to birds. A parent bird feeds the child bird, and the child never has to leave the nest. If the bird stayed in the nest their whole life, their parents would die and the children would starve. Nature knows this, so the Teenage Illusion Module kicks on. It tells them that they could find better food and make a nicer looking house. So they do.

The little birds don’t have a fraction of the experience that their parents have. That means that they will not be as successful without a significant amount of help. They may have better ideas, but execution is where it’s at. Never lose your ideas — they’re what make you unique and essential. However, we’re going to have to get there as a team, so don’t burn bridges with anyone, whether they’re your friend or not.

I can tell you something that I learned. It may be of some help to you.

A friend of mine from the Air Force went to New Orleans to save people who were drowning in a flood. His detachment flew a helicopter into floodwaters. His job was to load up as many people as the helicopter could safely carry. People were floating in the water, holding onto debris and trying not to drown.

When the helicopter was at capacity he had to look those people in the face and say “no more.” Sometimes they would try to force themselves on board, and he would push them back into the water. If they were still there when he returned, then he would save them. If not, perhaps another detachment would.

He had troubles dealing with this when he returned. There was no way to know if he had condemned people to die. If he picked one of two people, he didn’t have a way to know that he made the right choice. What if he saved a mother and not a father? Was he right, or wrong? Is he a bad person?

Trying to sort out who is good and who is bad is impossible. Some people do bad things and believe that they are doing good. I choose to believe that bad people don’t exist. Sometimes people hurt other people. That makes them dangerous, but not bad. At some point, everyone can be dangerous, so I use a phrase I heard from a mentor of mine. “Your time is limited. Give every person a slice proportionate to their alignment with your vision.”

Trying to sort out who is right and who is wrong is subjective, and also impossible. He was standing at the floodwaters and loading people up on the helicopter. He didn’t know if the person he saved would become a murderer or a surgeon. He had to do the best he could with what was available at the time.

This world is small and getting smaller every day. We have to share it with everyone — good and bad, right and wrong.

I don’t worry about who is good or bad, right or wrong. Most of the time it doesn’t amount to a great enough difference to warrant taking time away from my purpose.

I choose to focus on how to get along with everyone. We can do great things when we work together. I have strong religious and moral views that some people oppose in force. Instead of worrying about our differences, I try to focus on what unites us.

If someone is helping me fix a neighbor’s tire we don’t need to agree on heaven and hell. We only need to agree on who’s holding the tire and who’s turning the wrench.

Find a way to love everyone, and spare your time in proportion to their investment in your calling.

I didn’t always have this view. I used to be arrogant and think that I was better than whole groups of people. It made me more enemies than friends, and set me back many years. However, that same pride and arrogance would eventually catapult me into a world that would open my eyes and help me start to see the good in everyone.