Honesty Comes Through Being Humbled
My friend Niko and I go back to 2004 when worked for the same company and would hang out after work because we lived nearby. He is one of the very few people in my life I can pick up the phone and talk to after several years and it will be like everything was yesterday, even though our lives are so very different as they were before we met.
Niko is uber-tattooed and his music taste is very different compared to mine, and we even partied very differently in our 20s. I remember driving him to work one morning (he didn’t have a car and I did) and his face was covered in glitter from a cocaine bender the night before. A friend of mine had been in and out of rehab a few times for cocaine so it was never something I was going to touch. But we would frequent the Space Room on Hawthorne which is one of many faux-dive bars that serve as great places to get shitfaced.
Niko left Portland, Oregon in 2005 to go back to San Jose to live with his sister with whom he didn’t have the greatest relationship but if I remember right her marriage was rocky and they probably needed each other more such that it offset their own interpersonal challenges. It wasn’t just difficult on the home front for Niko — he managed to get not one, but two DUI’s while he lived in San Jose and had to do community service. But all was not lost for Niko.
He enrolled in an IT-focused program at Heald College in San Jose (one of the infamous Corinthian College schools — infamous for advertising guaranteed careers that didn’t materialize) that happened to be in concert with a tech company on the rise…called Google. You may have heard of it? When I went to visit him in 2007, before the San Francisco Bay Area EXPLODED he was living in Palo Alto in a bedroom and a partitioned part of another room of a house his girlfriend owned and he was working as a contractor for Google in Mountain View.
He has always been effusive in talking about the shit he’s been through in life with myself and others. Telling me about the breath thing he had in his car in order to drive it and his various rounds of aforementioned community service. In spite of his diametrically opposed appearance compared to mine he was always, and still is down-to-Earth and no different now as a Google jet-setter than he was when I was driving him to work covered in glitter.
I’ve been through my own humbling experiences. In 2002 I moved to Portland spending $1500 to rent a 10ft moving truck and drive it 1700 miles with all my stuff with a job waiting for me that was going to pay me *half* what I’d been making in Chicagoland working for the same company. I asked all of the right questions and was simply lied to. I told the person what I’d been making with commissions and I was squarely told I could make the same amount of money. When I landed in Portland the die was cast and I put myself on a track to Chapter 13 bankruptcy in June of 2009.
My low point was in July of 2006 — living in this shitty house in NE Portland where the rent for the whole thing was $750 a month and there were three of us. The $275/month was an extravagance! I’d accelerated my path by making a series of mistakes: quitting my job in 2005 with nothing lined up (everyone said, don’t do it! But damn the torpedoes!) and spending the next year living on credit. In July of ’06 I talked to my parents and told them what was up and they said it wouldn’t be ideal but if I had to move back home I could. Yes, that was a Portland several Portlands ago.
Two months later I landed a steady-but-didn’t-pay-well job that amounted to being handed a parachute toward bankruptcy, but I held on almost another 3 years before the collectors started calling at work and that’s when I talked to everyone I knew (who’d been through it) about bankruptcy and I talked to the president of the credit union I was shortly to become a customer of. She had me bring her my credit report and she said “The hole in your credit is so big you might as well knock the entire wall down and start over.” After my hearing which took all of 10 minutes due to the simplicity of my case, the perpetual thunderstorm above (which people could see — they wouldn’t line up in back of me in grocery store lines!) my head was gone.
This was the turning point for me where I could own everything. And because I could own everything and take responsibility for everything I could be much more honest than I had been. I did not have a great track record for being honest. Part of that was because I’d developed into an awkward fat kid in school people didn’t understand (I got along much better with teachers than kids my age) and it was my best defense mechanism. I made up an elaborate story to play bass in a rock band when I was 15 that was completely unnecessary!
Bankruptcy was the pinnacle of my own self-dishonesty. Trying to date anyone when you’re financial house is so out of order is not only impossible, it’s not honest. It’s a different flavor of emotional unavailability compared to say, being divorced or just expecting someone to revolve around your needs, which is more like your typical provincial city dweller over 40. How could I possibly be honest with people when I’m in denial about something that is dragging me into the ground?
Americans don’t seem to be humbled anymore, but we need to be humbled more. Our republic is crumbling under the strain of white supremacists overtly infiltrating our democracy and not being kept at bay while white people continue to believe they have a Get Out Of White Privilege Free card without knowing it. They think that they will never lose their income and that anyone who has lost their income did so because they didn’t work hard enough. If the worst thing about the pandemic is not being able to consume the world or go out to restaurants like you did in a provincial capital city somewhere you are one of these people, and you are not honest. And it’s OK. You just need to be humbled. And that’s OK, too.
