Episode 33 — When I Had Nowhere Left to Hide

A broken heel took Bob out of work for eight months and stripped away almost everything he used to measure his value.

Then came burnout, grief, therapy, and a lot of time with nowhere to hide.

In Episode 33, Bob talks about the difference between usefulness and worth, the ways we hide behind constant motion, and what happens when life finally forces us to sit with ourselves.

Sometimes the thing that stops you is the thing that finally makes you look.

Take what’s useful. Leave what’s not. Choose—and keep moving.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

A few years ago, I broke my heel. Specifically the the calcaneous bone. That's that big mass of bone that you heel that makes it round. And I was out of work for about eight months. Breaking my heel sucked. It was painful, and that sucked. I wasn't allowed to put any weight on my foot for most of that eight months, and that sucked.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Everything about that injury sucked. And yet, it might have been one of the best things that's ever happened to me. At the time, it it messed with me pretty bad.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

I lost my usefulness. I couldn't work. Had no income.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Couldn't produce. Couldn't provide for my family. Couldn't get up and go do shit. Equating my usefulness with my worth. And then all that got taken away. I didn't know what was left. I think that's what we're going to talk about today.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Welcome to the Man in Motion Podcast, episode 33. What are you worth when you can't produce? I'm Bob. This is a show about what it means to be a man in today's world. We talk about life. We talk about stuff. I don't know. I didn't. I didn't do a lot of scripting for today. I gotta be honest with you. It's been a hell of a week for me. Uh a lot of things happening. Good things. Don't don't get it twisted. They're all good things, but I've been just very busy. My my one daughter, we moved her into college for the first time. Um, so that was big. Uh, there was some fundraising activity for my uh my youngest daughter's uh wrestling team, and that took up a huge amount of time yesterday. Um made the mistake of switching cell phone carriers, and that has been its own personal brand of hell. So I didn't I didn't get a lot of time to work on today's episode. So most of this is just me talking off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Um so it just meanders a bit. I apologize in advance.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I was at work and through circumstances that for legal reasons I'm not going to go into specifics, but slipped and broke my calcaneous bone, which is the hugest bone in your foot. It's it's ridiculously big. And it hurt, it hurt a lot. Went, got it x-rayed. Uh, where the break was, the Achilles tendon was in danger of rupturing because of it. And the doctor at the urgent care that I went to uh told me I needed to go immediately to see an orthopedist. Basically said, uh, yeah, we're putting you in this big old boot, and you should use crutches. That's how he said it. You should use crutches. Um got in with an orthopedist in a couple days, and he basically told me, Yeah, no weight on that foot at all. Do not come out of that boot for at least uh, I want to say it was 10 weeks before I could take the boot off at all. I had to sleep in it, everything. And then after 10 weeks, I was allowed to take it off, shower, and put it right back on. Oh, and I could sleep without it. But if I got out of bed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, he wanted me to put it back on.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

So, yeah, that that sucked, but I I couldn't I couldn't do anything. I couldn't walk, could barely take care of myself. And it was not fun. But at the time, I had been. I don't know how else to say it except just to say that I was I was flirting with burnout. I say it that way because I was aware that I was burnt out, but I couldn't get away from it.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

I didn't have the time, I didn't have the energy, I didn't have the ability to do the things I needed to do to recover from burnout. Because burnout is not uh something you recover from, you know, with a guy's weekend away or a fishing trip over three days or something. You know, we all we all have this idea that we can recover from burnout in you know, just a short stretch. And the the reality is burnout is something it takes months, if not years, to recover from. So, yeah, basically everything, everything that I was, everything that I did, everything that I could provide got taken from me for eight months.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

And it was hard. Like starting out, it was not it was not fun.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

When you're constantly on the go like that, like I was, when you're constantly chasing, constantly working, constantly building, and then it all gets taken away. It's all gone, nothing's left. I think for the first three weeks, I wasn't even allowed out of bed unless I had to use the bathroom.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Not a lot of productivity like that. None, in fact. Um nothing left but time. Nothing left but time to sit there and think and look at myself.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

And what what do I do? Where do I go? What what am I what am I worth now? Because society's taught me that as a man, my value comes from that which I provide.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Well, right now, all I'm providing is dirty sheets in the bed from being in them constantly. So I doubled down on my therapy.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

I was going, I had I had been going, I think, once a month at that point. I bumped it up to once a week. Why not? I had the time.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

And I started really working at things. Now, so that was uh August.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Beginning of August. I want to say it was actually the day after my wedding anniversary. Um, when I when I broke my foot. So at the end of September, I received a phone call from an uncle who I hadn't spoken to in oh, probably close to 30 years. And that's a whole nother family dynamic that just isn't healthy.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

But spoke to an uncle, called me out of the blue, and told me that my brother was dead.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

My brother, who was a junkie, had been for at least 20 years, maybe more. Um, can't say exactly when, but long time drug use. Hard drugs, not I'm not just talking like weed or something.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

I'm talking, you know, meth and and oxies and heroin. It hit me. It it hit me, because here I am, I'm already down, I'm already struggling. And now this. In hindsight, looking back, I can tell you that one of the greatest gifts in my life that God has ever given me was a broken heel.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

And I say that because it meant I had the time to work on myself. It meant I had the time to deal with the loss of my brother and all of that. Because I can tell you that when I found out he died, I was not okay. And it's it's hard losing a family member under any circumstances. I mean, just putting it out there. I can tell you unequivocally that the circumstances he died under and the circumstances of our relationship and the contention and the fact that we were estranged for me made it even worse. And it came at a time where my identity was already stripped raw because I I wasn't producing, I was, I was in therapy once a month once a week.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

And I still had, I still ended up being out for six months after my brother passed. So that was hard. But here's the thing. That downtime, I decided wasn't downtime. It doubled down on me.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Doubled down on healing, I doubled down on looking at myself and looking into all those places that that as guys we don't look. We don't question, we don't evaluate, we don't say, am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong? We don't do that. At least not enough. And not in the places where we stuff all that shit that we hide from. We don't look at. We have and you know exactly what I'm saying. We have that spot where we just we don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with something. We stuff it into that spot, that little dark corner in the back of our psyche, and we stomp it in there as tightly as we can, and we don't look at it.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

We'll say, I'll get to it, I'll get to it, I'll get to it.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

I had nothing but time, and I kept glancing in that corner. It's it's like when you need to clean out your garage or a shed or your room or whatever, whatever version of that applies to you, and you know you need to do it, you know you need to get to it, and you hit that point where there's nothing stopping you, you don't have an excuse to not do it anymore.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

You start cleaning out. Now I'm not saying I'm all better, I'm not saying I'm healed.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

I'm not even saying I am completely okay with everything that's stuffed in there. Because I did stuff some shit back in there. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that I that I worked it all out and I spent six months working on myself, and life is great now.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Because that's bullshit. We all know that. But with the time I had, I pulled some of that shit out of there. Just a few things.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

My relationship with my brother, my relationship with my family, because that's a whole dynamic. When you have a um a family member that's in active addiction, they're going to do and say whatever they have to do and say to keep in the good graces of their enablers. And if that means trashing someone else, they'll do it.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

They'll do it without a second thought. But that's a whole nother topic. That might even be an episode. So what's the moral of this story? I don't know. Uh I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

I I I usually have a vision of what each episode's going to be, a sh a general shape, and I know what I want to talk about. And this one's just kind of evolving as I talk here. So so.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

You know, maybe maybe maybe it's the fact that we hide behind motion. You know, we we we stuff shit down, we don't look at it, and we use the excuse of I'm busy as an excuse not to deal with it. Or maybe it's that your worth and your usefulness are not the same thing. Because they're not. What I did learn over the course of that eight months is that despite what I felt like, I had value still. You know, I still had daughters that loved me very much, a wife that didn't even flinch in supporting me while I was down. I had friends that showed up, I had family. Or maybe it's that my finances don't get to determine my self self-worth or my opinion of myself. Or maybe it's that the hardest lesson I had to learn was how to just sit with myself. Not distract myself from me. Eight months eight months to be down is a long damn time.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

And when the entire world is continuing on around you and you're stuck most of the time with nothing but a TV remote and a couple bottles of water by the bed to keep you company, it gets uncomfortable as hell.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

And it left me with no choice but to start fixing some of the shit that was going on in my head.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Or maybe it's that I just realized that I'm not trying to figure myself out. I'm just trying to be aware of who I am. And really, if I look back, that's where this idea was born. This specific show idea was born. I've been wanting to do a podcast on something for a while, and I had had several ideas.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Um none of them panned out. So here's here's what I want to close with. I challenge all of you.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Everyone who's listening to this. I'm not going to give you 10 steps. I'm not going to give you some convoluted, you know, 37 steps to fix your life.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Because it's bullshit. We know that. But here's what I want you to do. Tonight.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Sit somewhere without doing anything for 10 minutes. No phone, no work, no podcasts, no nothing.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Nobody needing anything from you. And just look at yourself. Maybe in a mirror, or maybe just sit there and think. And just become aware. Become aware of yourself.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Strip away all the lies that we tell ourselves. Strip away the things that we try to convince ourselves is true. And look at what really is.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

And don't listen to that little voice that's going to tell you you're not enough. That's your gremlin. We'll talk about our gremlin. I think I think I might do the next episode on our gremlin, actually. Don't listen to him. Don't listen to that voice. That voice is a lying asshole. Look at yourself with honesty. Give yourself credit for what you get right. Be honest and accept the things that you get wrong. Because that's where it starts. With honesty, with looking and seeing what's really there. That's it for today. Take what's useful, leave what's not. Choose. And keep moving.