A Thousand Roads to Nowhere

A post-Thanksgiving ramble about maladaptive daydreaming.

Inside a carro público in Santo Domingo with Mickey and Patty Shakedown on Thanksgiving Day in 2016.

I have a serious condition with no homemade remedy or miracle cure offered up by the internet. I’m a maladapted daydreamer, someone who spends most of the day imagining I’m a thousand other people living a thousand different lives¹.

To many of you fellow weirdos, that news is not shocking. But the Normals in the crowd may wonder: “How could you not want the life you currently have?” My beloved wife, a Normal herself, has spent thousands of hours since I tricked her into believing I was just a smart dude who loved CrossFit and knew how to talk to women debating this question with me. Obviously, people want out of their jobs, homes, clothes, and cities. If not, men wouldn’t collect war memorabilia; women wouldn’t read hockey romances and watch Hallmark Christmas flicks. I’m stereotyping, of course. But what I mean to say is that we all consume stories, in whatever form, and wonder, “If only that were me…” or “Man, I would’ve liked to…”

But an actual alternative life?

If you knew me before 2017, you know that besides traveling the world and writing my stories, or planting churches, or training soccer players in the hood to become Premier League superstars (and pocketing part of the proceeds from their transfers), what I’d most wanted was a wife and kids. When my first one left, one of the things I felt most aggrieved about was that she’d taken the dream of having children by 26 from me. I was furious at having to start over.

And then not only did God introduce me to a pretty girl who loved sports, didn’t care about political parties, believed in the correct version of Christianity, and would put up with my incessant blabbering to her family and strangers about topics I know close to nothing about, but who also wanted to pass on my last name. The core dream I had of being someone who started their “real life” young—a desire that comes naturally to bozos who listened to their grandfathers and read Hemingway and blogs like The Art of Manliness—instead of extending their adolescence forever (or until their parents kicked them out of the basement), was not fulfilled in the timeline I wished. But, at 35, I have a wife, three kids, and a standard of living I would’ve envied if I were a Normal person with normal-people ambitions.

One of my favorite films, which explores the medical condition I suffer from at length, was dissected by the best film essayist on YouTube.²

That’s a very confusing way of saying I’m happy.

I have no interest in trading in what I’ve got for what I don’t. Only the shallow-minded and the dead (in the Ephesians 2 sense, not the dead dead) spurn their families to satisfy the selfish desires of their hearts. I have friends who envy my broke but growing family, just as I envy their disposable income and colored-up passports. I have friends whose bodies were decimated by illnesses and addictions by 35, and despite the awful way I eat and treat my body, my heart’s still pumping, and my brain is still, at least partly, functioning.

But, despite this awareness, I’ve struggled to rein in what has been a feature of my personality—and thus, very likely, a severe medical condition—since puberty, when I imagined I’d be a punk-rock superstar traveling the country playing sold-out shows and having my pick of girlfriends. For younger kids, like my nearly 5-year-old daughter, there is a stage when magical thinking is expected, even encouraged (at least by me). She should want to be a ballerina, a fiddle player in a bluegrass band, the next Alex Morgan. But there will come a time when this kind of imagining is expected to stop.