The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams

It's very strange to see how our life experiences build on one another. On one hand, it seems only natural that we learn from one experience and apply those lessons to new experiences. But when the experiences--the big, life-changing ones, the ones that set your world sideways--when they are so inextricably linked on a fundamental level, as though one was explicitly tailored to prepare you for the next, it strains the bounds of credulity to think it's all happenstance, a cosmic roll of the dice.

Such games of chance sound odd coming from someone with such a strong and long religious background (mind you, I was never into religion, I was into a relationship with Jesus, exactly as all good Christians are supposed to be).  But talking about losing my religionship is a bit premature; you should probably know what set the framework for coming to that point. Pyramids. The money-making kind. You know, those schemes where you invite your friends over to a BBQ and ambush them with "the plan". The one we were in wasn't a pyramid (those are illegal you know, and ours had been deemed by the Federal Trade Commission as a legal, not-a-pyramid scheme), and we tried our best to not ambush people. All of the things you think you know about these types of things--almost all of them are false, yet at the same time almost wholly accurate. In many ways it was like a cult. They suck you in with promises and dreams, they get you into the support system, feed you a constant supply of books, audio tapes, seminars and personal counseling sessions. One dares not question the system, or he is labeled a Dream Stealer, the most wretched type of scoundrel known. When one grows wary and can't find it in himself to keep faking it until he makes it, a sort of intervention is held. You're told you have to hang on. You can't see what's around the next corner in the road. It may just be your big breakthrough. If you give up now, you're throwing your life, and the life of your children away. How can you look your children--your poor, innocent children, who believe in you and look to you for life guidance--in the eye and tell them that the trip to Disneyland you've been promising for years isn't going to happen? How can you be such a failure in your children's eyes? You're setting a pattern of failure that will be passed onto your children, and they will live miserable lives of abject failure just like their parents. So goes the mantra.

It took us 10 years of  being "just on the cusp of success", thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollar before we were forced to face the harsh reality: it wasn't going to happen. I DID in fact have to be a salesman to make it work, no matter how many times they told me (and I parroted) that I didn't. Not just a salesman, but a top-notch, high-pressure, slimy salesman. And I'm a dismal salesman. It's just not in me. If I have to convince you of something, what I'm selling isn't worth having. It was an extraordinarily difficult realization. Not only were we facing the reality that all the dreams we'd dreamt--the freedom, the houses, the cars, the vacations--were never going to happen, we had to admit that we'd been duped. Worst of all, we had been willing accomplices, we had duped ourselves. We had to admit that we had effectively wasted the most opportune decade of our life--put careers on hold, passed up opportunities, given up evenings and weekends to pursue this one thing. For naught. It was all in vain, with nothing to show for it other than a shell of the life that should have been at that point. But we had no choice. We couldn't live the charade any longer.

Little did we know that this difficult juncture, the painful process of forcing ourselves to see things as they are, rather than continuing to convince ourselves things were as we wanted them to be, was the trailhead of a path that lead to being helplessly in love with a married couple and questioning everything about our 25-year relationship.