Life Excerpt ktcom

Five Life-Changing Ideas:
A life workbook

by Dr. Ken Tangen

Here's how the first chapter starts:

I stood on the deck of the ferry considering suicide.

We had left Seattle a few minutes earlier and were about halfway across Puget Sound. It was raining lightly from heavy clouds that almost touched the water. The city’s lights flickered across the black waves, and I was lost in thought.

Death seemed like a good solution. I would get freedom. I wouldn’t have to face those questions again. I’d escape the prying looks and condescending tones of friends, relatives, and strangers. Relatives were the worst. Friends could be avoided and strangers ignored but I couldn’t get away from the relatives. Family gatherings, like the one to which I was headed, made it impossible for me to escape. I was stuck, and there was little I could do to defend myself.

No one understood. They didn’t realize that it wasn’t my fault. They blamed me for my trouble. I was unemployed and the more I searched the less I found. But it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know whose fault it was but I was sure it wasn’t mine.

I hadn’t made me blind. I hadn’t made me an albino or given my brother Down’s Syndrome. I wasn’t to blame for my father’s death. It was nature, God, the universe. Someone other than me should take the blame.

Yet I blamed myself for it all. Life was out of control and I was at fault. Not for anything in particular; I was to blame for everything. I felt very alone. It was as if everything was tumbling and there was no one there to protect me. There I stood at the rail. My heart felt as cold as the steel rail I tightly grasped.

I felt like the words above: melodramatic. "Heart as cold as the steel rail"-give me a break. Who talks like that? But when we’re in the middle of trouble we feel as if we’re in a soap opera. We feel everything deeply. I felt overwhelmingly hopeless. It’s how I saw life.