My Orange Duffel Bag Video #8:
Sam Bracken: Not Like Them
As a young person, I was big for my age, and I used to love to run everywhere. My parents used to call it nervous energy. Today, they call it “generalized anxiety”, and they give you medication for it. It was the way that I handled all the stress at home, was I just ran everywhere. I’d run to my friends house, run to the 7-11, run to school, I just ran everywhere. I also was exposed to sports. Football, basketball, track, baseball, and I excelled primarily in football and track because, I was big for my age, and I could go to football practice and try to knock the snot out of people and really hurt somebody and be rewarded for it, you know? It was a way for me to take out my frustrations and anxieties at home in a way that was productive. Of course, running everywhere helped me in track.
I’ll never forget the spring of 1976, at Woodbury Junior High School. I was in eighth grade. I was one of those kind of invisible kids, you know, with long hair, sort of a dope smoking little hippy kid, barely passing from grade to grade to grade. I’d managed to start excelling in two areas in my life, football and track. That spring I was on the track team. I ran the 880, the 440, threw the shot-put and discus, and I was the best one on our team. I was very proud of that and very excited. I worked hard to get in that position.
One day after school, my step brother drove up in his mustard yellow Gremlin and picked me up and took me to an abandoned construction site. You didn’t say no to him, you just sort of did what he told you to. At that place, he basically shared with me all manner of drugs and it was not a good situation. I used a lot of different drugs, and I was pretty high, to the point where I was probably in trouble. I got home, went straight to bed — my parents didn’t notice, didn’t care, and slept for two days. Got up, went back to school, not many people noticed, nor cared, and then I remember going to track practice, went down to this field. I’ll never forget, it was this dirt field, a dirt track, west of Woodbury Junior High. I stretched out, got all warmed up, proceeded to run a warm-up lap, and about halfway through that lap, I felt this crushing pain in my chest and I collapsed on the track. I was in the dirt, heaving for breath. I had this amazing epiphany, this amazing experience in the dirt. I knew, somehow, someway, I learned in my head that if I kept doing what my family was doing, my brother, my sister, my parents, that I was going to be just like them. And I didn’t want to be like them. It was a miserable place, my home. They were miserable people. I didn’t want to be like them. Somehow, someway, I knew in my heart I could change. I didn’t know how I was going to change, but I knew I could. On that day, on that track, at Woodbury Junior High, I made a decision to be different, to change, not to be like them.
What gets in the way of change?
- First, a stuck mindset. We feel like we don’t need to change or that we can’t change. Living in the comfort zone, or locked up, paralyzed with fear, is a dangerous place.
- Number two, we can’t see what to change. Lack of clarity, or living in a fog. What makes us weary is not hard work. What makes us weary is living in a fog. Not having a vision or a long view.
- Third, we don’t know how to change. We have no proven process for change.
- Fourth, we have no compelling reason to change. No motivation to change. And finally, we have no accountability to change, from ourselves and from people who really love us.
