I’ve been wanting to write this post for, believe it or not, a few years. I started this one as a draft a couple years back and it’s been on my to-do list for 2-3 years.
I think I’ve always loved music and how certain songs seem to be sung for me or about my life. Here are a few of my favorites:
“there goes my life” by Kenny Chesney. One listen and you will know why, its about a young man, who says “I’m just a kid myself, How am I gonna raise one?”.
“unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield. I just always liked that philosophy in life. No matter what is written on your previous pages, whatever story is written so far, the next page is blank and can be whatever you choose it to be.
There are many more, including “damn it feels good to be a gangster”, lol.
This Ashley McBryde song is one that I feel applies. I look at my life and I would guess that the odds of me “making it” in life were pretty low. I was a self-admitted slacker through high school. I wasn’t blessed with a head start on adult life. Less than a year after graduation I had a child on the way, even though I was still a kid myself. Doing what I thought was the right thing to do, I married my “baby momma”. So here I am at 19, with a beautiful baby daughter, a wife, barely 2 nickels to rub together and not a clue how to navigate adult life. I worked 2 jobs most all the time. I tried going to college for a semester, thinking I wanted to try law enforcement. Luckily I realized that wasn’t a good path for me.
So the story of “girl goin’ nowhere” (Ashley McBryde), if you don’t know the song (I suggest you give it a listen, she has an amazing voice and way of story-telling), is about herself and her dreams of being a musician. She didn’t receive any support. In fact the people in town mock her as “not the first, won’t be the last” of people trying this path. And that they’ll be there when she “comes crawling back”.
While I didn’t have a town of people saying I couldn’t be someone, I remember some co-workers at American TV laughing when I said my goal was to retire at 40. I didn’t make it, obviously. But 50 is in play, which would still be a pretty damn good time to make retirement.
Even though I didn’t have the people in town saying I would fail, I always felt my parents expected me to fail. I think my mom wanted nothing more than for me to call and say I was lost, that I couldn’t find my way and that I needed help.
I think that the feeling that people were against me, or at least not expecting much of me, has given me motivation in life to always push harder, if for no other reason than to prove people wrong.
I am proud of where I am. I have a lot I can do better. I can be a better father, grandfather, husband, boss, friend and man. We all wrestle with our demons, the things we’ve done we regret, the things we wish we had done but didn’t, the chances we didn’t take that we should have, the chances we took that would have been better off not taking.
But through it all I think what I’ve done was partially motivated by the lack of support, the perceived negative expectations of what I could become, to prove people wrong.
I like playing the role of someone who was supposed to be “goin’ nowhere” but did.
doing it different 