Turning 60, My Writing Sabbatical and Deep, Dark Secrets

In case you didn't get the memo or were not tipped off by the subject line, I turned 60 last Thursday. Over the last couple of weeks, I have repeatedly been asked how I feel about turning 60. My individual answers get nuanced depending on who it is that I am responding to and how much information I feel like sharing at the time, but all of my answers include two common words:

"I'm grateful"

The sheer fact that I have made it to this stage in life is somewhat miraculous to me. Now you may be thinking to yourself, "That Jim Herbert...he takes really good care of himself, he has a positive outlook on life and he is full of energy! Why in the world would he think it is miraculous that he has made it to the stage of life where he turns 60?" 

Indeed I do take care of myself. In fact I would say that I have taken better care of myself over the last couple of years than I have at any other stage in my life. I definitely do see the world as a place of possibility and potential which helps me keep a positive mindset. I tend to gravitate towards people who see their own lives for what they are instead of for what they are not. Even in my worst of times, I have had the ability to push forward with determination. The strong work ethic that I learned from my parents and other ancestors along with my God given powerfully defined will center have kept the whole of me going in life, even when some of the individual parts of me might have otherwise chosen to quit. 

Overall, I am not a quitter. I have a tendency to eventually return to everything that matters to me and push through the obstacles, even if I have to take a break for a little while. Look at this weekly reflection writing piece for example. I have not made a new post in over a month now, which is by far the longest sabbatical I have had in ten years. It's not that I haven't been writing at all. I published a piece titled Embracing the Hero Within for the MenLiving weekly newsletter last week and I have been trying to bring my ghostwriting project for my client to the finish line for a couple of months now. One part of my personal writing sabbatical has been fueled by other writing distractions, and another part is that I knew that this particular post that I am publishing today has been looming on the horizon for a while now, so I have approached it with a bit of hesitation. 

As I sit here this morning, a little bit more than a week removed from my 60th birthday, I feel an immense sense of protection and Divine guidance that has delivered me to the beginning of the decade of my life which I am now referring to as my Decade of Legacy. With gratitude and humility, I have every intention of seizing the reins of my life with both hands, holding just tightly enough to maintain a course, but not so tightly that I don't allow the currents of life to carry me to places I might otherwise not find when my focus is fixed on a single, specific destination. It is in that mystery and magical serendipity that I will continue to discover who it is that I came here to be in this lifetime. 

So what's the story behind the story this time?

Well that's a longer tale than I can tell in one blog post, even if it is one of my multi-thousand word tomes. For now, I can give you a CliffsNotes version and over the next year or so I will tell/write the whole tale. I can't help but think that when this particular story is fully told that it will be my opus. After decades of crafting speeches, stories and countless other writing projects, it seems fitting to me that I begin the process of crafting my opus in the first full week of my decade of legacy. 

So here it is...

Two years ago in the early summer of 2022, I started to see a picture in my mind. It was a picture I had seen countless times in the past, but every time I had seen it previously, I immediate looked away. It was as if I had spent my entire life with my hands symbolically cupped around my eyebrows ready to cover my eyeballs if the image started to become more defined. It was an image that I did not want to face, yet it somehow managed to quietly haunt the deep, dark crevices of my mind for almost fifty years, waiting for the right time to unveil itself. I'll save you the graphic depictions of anything specific, but what I was starting to see was the possibility that my long standing belief that I had a trauma free, extraordinarily vanilla childhood might not be the whole story. 

Over the next few months the memory of this image emerged from my brain like the alien fetus pushing its way out through Sigourney Weaver's chest cavity in the 1979 film classic Alien. My wife Christiana watched this whole thing unfold with concern for my mental well being, while at the same time never forcing me to share more than I was ready to share about what was causing my debilitating anxiety. I was afraid, overwhelmed and confused. I was also busily gaslighting myself every minute about the reality of what this image represented and at many points was no more than a hair away from a complete and total nervous breakdown. I never watched the movie Alien when I was a kid because it was way too scary for me. Fear has been an overarching theme in my life and now I understand why better than ever. 

It was early August back in the summer of 2022 when the memory finally broke all the way through the surface. It happened while I was riding my bike to the health club a couple of miles south of our Chicago home. I literally fell off my bike into the grass next to the bike path when it happened. I remember lying in the grass physically unable to move as I wept uncontrollably for a period of time that I have no way of defining. It might have been a few minutes. It might have been a half an hour. It might have been all day. When I finally got up to move there was only one thing that I knew for certain. I knew that my life was never going to be the same.

The next few months are a blur of hazy depression and anxiety as I gradually shared my new life story with my wife, my mother, a few close friends and members of my wellness team. It has taken me almost two years to fully embrace the truth that childhood sexual trauma has influenced every single aspect of my life for over 50 years now. Of the many things that I have learned about myself in this healing process it is that being sexually abused as a nine year old boy is a part of my life story, but it is in no way who I am.  

During this healing process I have leaned heavily on the countless number of people who love me for support and guidance. It would be impossible to name all of those who have stood beside me and held me, but you all know who you are and to say that I am grateful is the understatement of the millennia. I have had the great good fortune of working with two extraordinary men's communities that have helped me rebuild my trust in being around men. I have also immersed myself in IFS parts work and EMDR therapy. One of the beautiful aspects of EMDR in particular is that it allows the participant to release from unprocessed trauma without having to be able to "see" the entire memory that is tied to the trauma, which has been critical for me because the majority of the memories from my years around the trauma had been wiped out. I can picture every corner of my Ms. Hill's 4th grade classroom, whereas I can't even remember the name of my 5th grade teacher. Our brains are truly amazing. In many ways, I feel like my brain has protected me from calling these memories back from the recesses of my subconsciousness until I was fully ready to face the pain and the challenges of the healing process. Once again, I'm grateful. 

As I said earlier, I will make no attempt to tell this entire tale in one post. In truth I am not even ready to do so, but I am getting close. I do want to clarify a few very important details right away though: 

• Nobody from my family was involved in or knew about this truth in any way. My childhood was in every other way idyllic. I shudder to think what my outcome might have been without an extraordinarily loving and present mother and father.
• No adults were involved in my abuse. I was coerced/peer pressured/bullied into participating in games of sexual curiosity with some older teenage boys. What was age appropriate curiosity for them was not appropriate for a 9 year old. 
• I seek no vengeance or retribution. My sole purpose in coming forward with my truth is to continue my own healing and to let others who have had similar experiences know that they are not alone and that it is never too late to undo the damage that has been caused by previous trauma. 
• While I welcome your loving compassion, my ask is that you do not pity me. It would be a stretch to say that I am grateful that this happened to me in my childhood, but I do fully believe that what I have the potential to make of what happened to me will completely change the trajectory of my life and the lives of those who I love. 

So about that turning 60 thing? I truly feel like the day after my 60th was the first day of the rest of my life. The opportunities that lie ahead on my current path of life create a world of infinite possibilities for me. Everything I have done up until this exact moment has prepared me for the best decade of my life. Wouldn't it be nice if I chose to approach every day with the same energy and intention that I did on the first day of my sixties? I think I can and will do that exact thing. Stay tuned my friends, the best is yet to come! 

With infinite love and gratitude, 

Jim