How to find independence on Independence Day
Get climbing
I never used be grateful for misery but I am today. In the later months of 2015, I was with my then girlfriend, now wife, Karen, and I would come home from work everyday day miserable. I can't count the amount of times I would drive home and remember barely being able to see the road, I was sobbing so hard. My life was in shambles. My son lived in another state, I had less than $10 in the bank, and the guy I worked with was the most evil, narcissistic prick I had ever run in to. When I went to work, I would get publicly humiliated, privately criticized, and completely defeated. That was everyday, 5 days a week.
I told Karen numerous times that radio was the only marketable skill that I had and I was just gonna have to suck it up and live for the weekends. The person I worked with had me convinced that I could never go anywhere else and that with him was the only place I would ever earn enough to make it, etc etc.
Karen decided otherwise. She asked me what I would do if I could do anything in the world. Anyone who really knew me would have told you that I have wanted to fly airplanes since I was a little boy. When I was a little man, I even tried to talk to a Delta pilot at the urinal in an airport bathroom, not understanding customary personal space bubbles at that age.
Karen told me that we needed to look in to it. I knew a married couple at my gym who were both Delta pilots and when I went to our gym Christmas party, I talked to them for hours about what I needed to do.
We did our research and realized that it was gonna be a lot of money, a lot of studying, a lot of effort, and even then, you never know if you are gonna have what it takes. From what I understand, less than 1% of 1% of the people on this earth are airline pilots. The curve is steep and mission is not easy.
I went to the local flight school and asked one of the owners if he had time to have lunch and talk about the path from zero to airline pilot. He did and my hunch was reassured that it was a LONG road with many obstacles.
I sat down with Jim Simon and Kevin Beardsley, who ran Rainier Flight Service, 2 days later and they helped me even more to lay the path to the goal.
January, 7th 2016, I sat down in a Cessna 162 Sky Catcher and started flying. I flew roughly 3 days a week. I was lucky I worked in morning radio as my daily schedule was as follows:
3:30am Wake up
4:30am Get to work at the radio station
12:30pm Head to the flight school
1:00pm Fly my lesson
3:30pm Head home from school
4:30pm Get home, eat dinner, and start studying
5:30pm-9:30pm Study and do all the miscellaneous work I had to do for my day job for the following day.
If I didn't have a flight that day, I would come home and study to be prepped for the next lesson.
I let people at my job know that I was flying but I never let them know why. The plan was in place but I had to stay quiet about it if it was going to work out the way I wanted it to.
Many times I would come home from a flight lesson defeated because it didn't go well or I would plateau and have long periods of not getting any better and it was soul crushing. I can't count the amount of times I asked myself if I was good enough to make it through training. How many times my mind told me that I just didn't have what it takes.
Moral: I found out that I am my own mountain. If I wanted the dream, my work had to be not only flying but finding a way to be good to myself. I had to find a way to take just one more step and then another and then another when everything in my head and in my world was telling me that it couldn't be done. My solution was always telling myself I had one more step in me. Even if I didn't have one more in me today, I would let myself rest and then make myself take one more step the next day.
There is so much more to this story but let's stop here for now and continue it next Thursday...until then...thanks for giving enough of a shit to read this far.
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