On thinking that I’m going deaf, and confrontation

I almost always cut the first paragraph out of each blog post. I do this because my first paragraph rarely accomplishes anything other than self absorption. Writer’s masturbation, if you will.

I’m telling you this because you might spend a lot of time beating around the bush, too. Sometimes we end up hurting ourselves when we indulge in such tomfoolery.

I spent two days in Tulum, Mexico convinced that I was going deaf. I went diving through a bunch of reefs and caves. I was convinced that all the pressure changes knocked something loose. It’s stupid, but these are the kinds of neurotic thoughts I’ll do back flips over on a daily basis.

It took me two days of blue funk to pony up and go to a Mexican doctor. I barely understood his broken English, but he squirted a syringe of what looked like club soda into my ear, then ten minutes later pulled out a ball of wax. He showed me the dime-sized wad before tossing it down the drain and writing me a bill for 1,299 pesos.

The money didn’t matter. The time I spent worrying about the outcome cost me two days of vacation, and that did matter. I could have been sipping tequila on the Riviera Maya—not a care in the world—but I spent two days comatose from my own angst instead.

I want to learn to be better at confronting things early. I want to axe out the stage of fear where I let hours decay while I think about ungodly outcomes. I think if we all learned to do that a little better, we’d be a lot happier with our lives.

Sure, it’s quite possible that you’re the ass-kicking lord of confrontation—by god you better be blogging and sharing some of that wealth—but I’m not. And if you’re anything like me, please raise your glasses, then go schedule some time to reflect on the things you’ve been brooding over for way too long.

Like maybe there’s tension at work and you’ve been avoiding butting heads because it’s unnerving. Confront that.

Or maybe you just haven’t been blogging because you’re afraid that what you say will suck. Confront that, too.

Whatever it is that’s holding you back from living life, unabridged, confront that shit and move on. Once you’re done, you’ll feel stupid for not doing it sooner, but relieved that you finally did.