I'm really curious on the full story. Hope you don't mind me asking.
. If that's too personal then please just ignore this.
I apologize for forgetting about this until just now. I'm prepared to tell you the "full" story now -- albeit as briefly as I can make it. It would take hours to relate the story in person, so this is necessarily a gloss.
As I mentioned, the first six months of my 37th year witnessed the lost of nearly everything I owned -- including nearly everything I had based my self-identity and my self-esteem on. Business, wife, house, books, etc. Almost all my material possessions. But also so much of my non-material "possessions", too: The love of my wife, my confidence in myself, my respect for myself as a breadwinner, etc, etc. There was no one to turn to either, because by an unusual stroke of bad luck, I happened to be partly estranged at the time from my family and wholly estranged from my friends.
I realized there was no longer anything tying me to Illinois and that I was free to go anywhere. So I set out with almost everything I owned in the world packed into my car with me. I had never been to the Southwest, and I wanted to see it, so I headed in that direction at first. But I didn't have any real goal. I would come to an intersection and make a snap decision to turn right or left based on my whim of the moment.
Eventually, I came to Colorado Springs. I noticed the local newspaper had plenty of help wanted ads, so I thought the economy must be good, and I decided to stay a while.
About the only thing I was qualified to do was run a business, so that's what I did for a year or so. Not my own business, but someone else's. Yet, I'd lost my enthusiasm for being the boss. As crazy as this might sound to you, I really wanted nothing more than a small garden, a small apartment, and a job that paid just enough to get by. I didn't even want friends. Just a garden, an apartment, and a modest source of income: As few "possessions" as possible. A religious person would have recognized in me at that time in my life the spirit of an acetic.
I quit my job and went to live alone in the mountains for a month.
When I came down, I decided to move into an old hotel that had been converted into flop house apartments because it didn't require a lease and I wasn't ready to commit to living in Colorado Springs. That's when the real life changes began.
The cheapest nearby coffee shop was also the town's most eclectic coffee shop. Everyone from the mayor to a small crowd of homeless people frequented it. I began to, also. I quickly discovered that the shop was the hang out of perhaps 400 kids from a close-by high school. Within a few months, I knew about 200 of them, and about 24-36 or so of the kids had actually befriended me to one degree or another.
Those kids took me everywhere with them. I was twice their age, but they would -- without any prompting on my part -- invite me to go with them to concerts, sleep-overs, movies, mountain hikes, rock climbs, road trips, nude resorts, restaurants, and of course, they'd hang out with me at the coffee shop. I once asked a few of them why they liked to hang with me. "Because you're such a non-judgmental adult, Phil." A few of the young women even offered themselves to me (although I never took any of them up on their offers). That struck me as subtly hilarious because at least four or five of the young women were in almost all ways more attractive to me than any young woman I'd been able to date 20 or so years before when I myself had been in high school. I was, "At last! I am desired by beautiful, kind, intelligent, witty young women and yet I am too damn old for them!"
In addition to those dozens of kids, I had one adult friend at the time. I mean a genuine friend, and not just acquaintances. But Becky was even more free spirited than the kids. She and I discovered we were sexually incompatible so we fell into a platonic friendship. Besides which -- after a few sexual encounters with other women -- I was beginning to feel a desire to be celibate. Although at first, I was not entirely aware that that was what I was feeling. It took a while for me to puzzle out why I wasn't enjoying sex.
Those kids -- and especially Becky -- began to change me.
For instance, my second wife -- after knowing me for fifteen years and after being married to me for more than five years -- had seriously summed me up as "no more than arrogant, aloof, taciturn, and stoic." And Becky, a month after she met me, observed, "Your feelings don't matter to you". Well, I kept the stoic, but only in certain senses. I wholly -- or at least as wholly as I could -- dropped the "arrogant, aloof, and taciturn". And I started making a conscious effort to figure out on a moment by moment basis what I was feeling -- for I had spent so many years of my life ignoring my feelings, my emotions, that I so often no longer knew what I was feeling (unless what I was feeling was beyond being merely obvious, was exceptionally pronounced).
In the end, it took about a decade, but I eventually discovered I was now living the happiest years of my life.
Now that's the story as fully as I can make it while remaining somewhat brief. I have told you only about 0.05% of the full story, but at least I've mentioned most of the overall themes: loss, transition, transformation, rebirth. What I have not mentioned where two other things going on through-out most of this: First, my battle with chronic depression, and second, the Weirdness.
I pretty much won the battle with depression, so that's easy to explain.
The "Weirdness" involves several different kinds of mystical experiences that occurred during that period of my life, and that I in no way have any rational explanation for. Lot's of people have such experiences and can tell you all about why they had them and what they mean, and so forth - or at least they firmly believe they can tell you all of that. But I can't tell you a dang thing about why I had them and what they meant, and so forth. I just don't know.
So that's pretty much the story now -- or at least a decent gloss of the major themes. Thank you so much for your curiosity about my life. If I had to sum it all up, I'd say, "With a few exceptions, it's been rather ordinary, but I have had the luck to have now and then met some extraordinary people."
