A Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self

Letters from Exile #7. Things are hard and will get harder - but it's worth persevering

Dear 13-year-old Me,

First of all - I’m proud of you. You played football in a junior high school where you were one of the smallest kids and even though those huge corn-fed kids often crushed you, you never showed them when it hurt and you managed to find your own niche (a fast line breaker that could make quarterback sack after sack.) And you’re not even a sports guy. You kept reasonably good grades, dealt with becoming a teenager, and all while dealing with a homelife that sounds like a horror movie. Your dog got killed with a shotgun. Your mom’s almost 7-foot-tall ex-husband broke her back and you stood up to him, faced him down (with a gun) to make him leave, and made sure your mom got an ambulance and taken to the hospital. You have the heart of a lion, dude!

And I know that you feel guilty for ‘abandoning’ your mom and sister and for not pulling the trigger on that monster, but honestly, you would have ruined your life if you had killed him. And there was no way that you could stay there after that - you had to leave. You carried that guilt for most of your life and never had anyone tell you that you made the right decision, so let me tell you right now - you did great. You made the right call. I know that’s why you started drinking - because it made that guilt go away. That was the wrong decision and you caused a huge amount of trauma and problems for yourself with it - but I forgive you. You didn’t have anyone to guide you.

By the way, the monster your mom was married to is dead, he put the bullet in his own brain so you don’t have to feel guilty about letting him live. It wasn’t your call to make - and you made the right one. The guilt you carried for decades was misplaced. You did nothing wrong in that situation. In fact, you were a hero even though no one ever told you that.

Your father should have gotten you a therapist after the nightmare of living as white trash in an alcoholic, drug abuse, violent home for almost half a decade. No child should see as much blood as you did. It was only when you begged and pleaded and cried (finally) that he agreed to let you come live with him - and once you were there - his wealthy, playboy lifestyle was all that he gave you. Instead of therapy he let you do lines of coke, help yourself to the bar, and use the boat that was parked outside at the private dock. He would disappear for days on drug and alcohol fueled binges and would return to ‘do his duty’ as a parent by giving you lectures about how you needed to find better friends and spend more time on your homework before wandering off to some job site (or Vegas) and then returning with a new girlfriend or wife.

I want to tell you now, dude. You didn’t fail as a son. You tried again and again to reach out to him, to communicate, to build a better relationship - but you can’t do that with a narcissist and your dad was one - probably actually bordering on sociopath. You tried sharing your successes and failures with him, you reached out to him repeatedly only wanting to have him approve or be proud of you or keep some of the wine-drunk or coke-fueled promises he made to you - but guess what? He probably didn’t even remember them, it wasn’t a problem with you that kept him from helping you with college entrance exams, building a canoe with you, or taking a motorcycle road trip - it was him. He simply wasn’t interested in being a father. And yes, he’s gone now too. He lived to almost ninety and you never stopped trying to build that relationship with him and it never worked. After his death, he didn’t even leave you a letter or a treasured family heirloom or anything meaningful at all - let alone an inheritance. But I don’t think all those years of trying to fix the relationship with him were wasted - they made you a better man. They made you a great father. They made you resilient.

You’re going to run away from his house, multiple times. I can’t stop you. You’ll live in campgrounds, crash with friends, and have physical altercations with him, but the year that you live with him will be one you will survive. Could you do it better? With hindsight, sure, but you are a thirteen-year-old survivor of horrors with PTSD and probably undiagnosed ADHD. Even with the continued trauma you will keep your grades relatively high and manage to make the world think you are living a ‘normal life’. You’re a survivor, dude.

I wish I could stop you from the drugs and alcohol. As an adult there might be a place for them but as a teenager - it was your biggest mistake. Again though, you’ll survive. You’re a smart guy - smart enough that you learned that you didn’t have to try to do much at all. You can score higher than most sober people on any kind of test even when you are blind drunk. The alcohol though, it directly leads to so many mistakes - not the least of which is joining the Marines. Just like football, you wanted to prove you were tough enough, that you were a badass but guess what? Everyone already knew you were a badass. You didn’t need to prove anything. You should have done those college entrance exams and gone to Stanford - but instead you did four active years and four reserve years in the Marines and did it while staying intoxicated almost the entire time. You didn’t even need your full functioning brain to do it - but the damage you caused to yourself. I won’t lie - those years are going to be your hardest. You’ll get promotions and letters of commendation - but you will be miserable. The most miserable in your life.

But you will survive.

You aren’t tall or Brad Pitt handsome and you will spend much of your life beating yourself up over that. You’ll see other guys using some god-given tallness cheat code. They will will get promoted or make some of the women you desire swoon over them while those women don’t even notice you but here’s the rub - somehow you always end up with smart, beautiful, funny girlfriends. And you’ll be so busy fueling anger at the ones who don’t want you that you’ll miss many opportunities with amazing beautiful women who do. And when you somehow end up with those amazing women, you’ll convince yourself that there is something wrong with them for being attracted to you (instead of landing some tall model looking dude - which they were all capable of). This is the second thing I wish I could warn you about. You are awesome. Women see that. You are brave, smart, caring, loving, strong, talented, and not terrible to look at. Yet, you spend most of your life thinking you are a troll and also judging the women who truly see you for being willing to be in a relationship with a troll.

Those women who didn’t see you and had their head turned by some (always tall) adonis - sure, some of them were pretty great - but I wish you wouldn’t sweat it so much. It created a sort of ugly cycle in you that you’re going to suffer from for decades. You’re going to hate yourself for being short for decades - even while you date models, marry a woman who looks like a princess, and have relationships with women from around the world that would be the envy of any man. The good news is, you’ll finally wake up. You’ll finally see it. The bad news for you is - you’re never going to get taller, you are going to lose that beautiful hair, you are always going to be built more like a polar bear than a wolf, and at least at the time of writing this - you’ll never be the guy who crowds of women chase after. None of that matters though - trust me - you’ll always have the company of amazing women. I don’t know exactly why, but you punch far above your weight class in that regard - or maybe I still don’t quite recognize what these beautiful women see - even while it is undeniable. So stop worrying about that, okay?

I’m sorry to tell you, that as of this writing, you never become wealthy. You will have people your whole life tell you that they are sure you are going to become wealthy, rich, famous, powerful. Not in this life - at least not yet - and I’m not sure how much of it is even left.

Four decades later though - you’ll have a life that is amazing. You live in Japan. You own a super-bitchin house. You’ve traveled to more countries than you have lived years. You’ve flown in hot air balloons over Turkey, sailed in the Mediterranean, gotten married in the Sahara Desert, trekked across Canada, and done so much more that you won’t believe it. You’ve lived so many of those adventures you used to pore over in your grandmother’s National Geographic Magazines. You’ve written more than twenty books. You’ve created worlds. You have godlike powers of creation. You have an amazing daughter and you are a fantastic father.

You’ll make mistakes, you’ll mess up relationships, you’ll make money mistakes, you’ll deal with the dot-com crash, 9-11, the Great Recession, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the bizarre changes taking place in the United States. I won’t go into any of that, but let me put it like this - you and the entire Gen X generation get passed over for the American Dream. Some of them make it, but mostly, your generation just has bad timing.

And that brings me to the next thing, the most important thing. The thing your father never said.

I’m proud of you and the life you will lead. You choose to live your life on your own terms. That Frank Sinatra song your dad used to sing “My Way” - you actually will do it. People won’t understand how you do it. It’s easy for you and you simply won’t be able to explain it because for some reason they can’t get it through their heads that while they are hoarding money, you are hoarding time.

Keep doing that. Time is not renewable. Money is.

Again, I wish I could get you to stop giving so much of your time to drugs, alcohol, self-loathing, the Marines, and chasing the wrong kind of women - but what’s done is done. You’ll have to deal with the depression, the heartbreak, the. poverty, and the loss of self-power - but you’ll come through it and you’ll be me. You’ve always been me.

I had a new friend recently express something to me after we’d drank a few beers together. He’s a couple of decades younger than me and looking at his life, I was thinking “This guy really has it all” and after those beers he says “I hope I can find my way to living a life like yours.” This young guy whose life looked pretty great to me wanted to live my adventures and find himself where I am in life today.

It surprised the hell out of me.

I’ve learned recently that there are more people who feel like that. People whose lives I look at and have felt some small regret for not being the path I led. Such a trip - so I can imagine you - where you are now, looking at my life and thinking to yourself - “I hope my life is as awesome as that guy’s” - because guess what - my life so far has been so freaking amazing. Great adventures, great love, great sex, great friends, great relationships and great creations. And it is yours.

If by some miracle you are ever able to read this, please take my advice. Stop the drinking, stop the comparisons with other people (comparison really is the thief of joy), and stop trying to get validated by your father. Those three things will make your life even better than mine.

Be Happy My Dude,

53-Year-Old You.