Chris Fifty
By: Chris Fifty
Tags: Introduction, First Post, Introspection, Life, Beginning

It seems pretty sensible to me that the best way to start anything, is to get everyone on the same page, so that we can move forward together; together towards establishing a medium for an accepting & productive discussion around controversial issues. As I sit here, staring at the pure white screen, the task of boiling who I am down to typeface seems like an alarmingly daunting task. I’ll do my best to get it out as short & succinct as I possibly can, but I can make no promises.

As the title suggests, my name’s Chris Fifty, and I’ve spent almost every moment in my life in a small state tucked away in the northeastern United States called New Hampshire. Despite having a rather isolated geographic experience, I’ve been lucky enough to accrue what I’ve come to hold as a pretty eclectic human experience.

I was born with a growth abnormality that influenced a lot of how I’d go on to see the world, with one leg longer than the other (and a heart a little larger than it should be), I suppose I saw myself as different, and strived from a young age to fit in. It’s kind of funny, because I don’t know that I saw it this way at the time, but the metaphor of a square block trying to fit in a triangular hole comes to mind; and if you can imagine a toddler aggressively smashing the square into the triangular hole, I’d say that would characterize more of my adolescence (and early adulthood) than I‘d like to admit.

I got the imbalance in my legs corrected at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2002, with a procedure that scraped my growth plates down in my knees, so that as I went through puberty — the two sort of, well, evened out. My junior year in high school was when I bought my first pair of shoes without a lift (and got my first job at the local Wendy’s). I went out for Track and Field and ended up finding a group of guys that were really accepting, and made the most significant friendships that I’d made in the five years prior.

College remains an interesting topic (I’m still enrolled in classes at the moment, some fourteen years after taking my first undergraduate class), I earned a degree in English Language and Literature in 2012 (after hopping between majors in Criminal Justice, Education, and History). With two teachers for parents, I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that I absolutely love to learn, and if my financial status allows for it, I think I’d love to take classes for the rest of my life.

After graduating, it’s hard to find a succinct way to put it, I guess you could say I stumbled (for lack of a better word). I struggled to find direction for the ideological answers I was looking for: “what is all of this for”, “how can I make a difference”. My best friend bought a house around this time, and in order to lift my spirits (and I’d imagine help a bit on his mortgage payment) he asked if I wanted to move in.

The next five years were a whirlwind, but I’d say the impetus for what followed started with getting a job with a large corporate gym chain. I was hired as an overnight cleaner, and worked with a Marine that had just gotten back stateside (it’s because of this Marine that I know not to say former Marine). Working nights, and chatting with someone who had seen so much of the world, worked to open up my eyes to how much I’d gotten the world wrong. I’d stick with this gym chain, working just about every position (from ‘Operations Manager’ (alright so there’s a little self-aggrandizement here, but that’s what the business card said) to ‘Trainer’, and almost every position in between).

While this raised philosophical questions, there was still a big part of me that enjoyed playing around with ideas, more than marshalling effort towards influencing them. Though it seems like a negative appraisal, the concept of thought (and not action), would become a bit of a theme through the next five years of my life.

One thing however, that I was not shy about acting on, was working out. I think there’s something innate about humanity’s draw towards progress, and wanting to finish the day, in some way, better than we started it. The gym filled this need for me, I could go into the gym, grab a dumbbell, and see that I could do more than I could the last time (the fact that it also made me look a bit better, was an added bonus).

I found myself in a relationship in 2016 that I’ll forever be grateful for, not because it went well, or ended any better (to be fair to her, I was a psychologist’s wet dream at this point). It was the first relationship I’d say I was serious about, and it taught me a lot about how we can be blind to the small things that others do, or otherwise take them for granted. She’s happy now, and though we don’t talk, I’m so happy that she’s found someone who’s made her happy.

Weed. Mostly because I feel like it deserves at the very least a mention. This period in my life had a lot of it. My time at the gym usurped most of my efforts outside of work, and even compromised my ability to perform at work (I was eating 5–7 meals, worked out 2–3 hours a day, and was really doing whatever I could to push the proverbial needle). Weed was a way to bond with others (something that I struggled with), and it made the wear & tear on my joints a little less cumbersome. At the same time, it’s something I hold myself responsible for doing, that (alright, so the lack of a therapist, and poor diet & lifestyle probably didn’t help either) compromised my ability to assess where I was (mentally and physically); and perhaps more importantly, to throttle change when I need to.

Regardless of whether I was writing this now, at 32, or in fifty years: I think I’ll hold the first half of 2019 as one of the most paradigm shifting periods of my life.

It started in January when one of my best friends teetered on the precipice of mental & physical collapse, due to a long silent history of substance use disorder. Whenever I retell the story, there’s a moment that I try to capture. How, in the middle of an otherwise normal day at work, I got a text message from that friend explaining that some battles are not worth fighting, and thanking me for how he’d felt I’d always done right by him. Grabbing his roommate, getting in the car, and driving to his apartment where we found him nursing a half empty bottle of Vodka and an open prescription bottle of Zoloft was how we found him.

He quickly moved to the bathroom, where I followed him in, believing that by removing the bottle from his hands, it’d somehow cure the condition. This resulted in a rather violent exchange (while I was big & muscular, this friend was bigger, and threw me against the wall in a force grip around my neck like something Darth Vader would have done in Star Wars). As my eyes met his, and my consciousness started to wane, my grip on the battle loosened, and it fell to the bathroom floor. A moment later I found myself falling to the ground, someplace between lucidity and sleep, when I looked up it was like something had changed in his eyes; he was offering me a hand, and asking if he could help me get up.

I vowed that day that I’d work to understand what needs to happen biologically, psychologically, for something like that to happen.

Later that month I got a new boss, one who wasn’t blind to the dull “simply getting by” dynamic that my work had taken on. He pushed me towards reading, something that I’d fallen off with since I graduated; and fostered an environment that would allow me to begin to question my place & my path through life.

Three months later, I turned 30, and got out of a three year relationship. It hurt, perhaps more so because of the culmination of everything that was going on in my life, but it fueled something truly amazing that followed.

Trauma’s a tricky thing, there’s a part of me that believes that the way that we handle trauma is genetic, where some of us can really succumb to the wounds that we incur, most especially when they’re deep & complicated; conversely, I think that others are able to realize they’re wounded, and suddenly seek out the opportunity to mend not only that cut, but all wounds, no matter how shallow (this post is something I’ve been meaning to do for months, and the calendar reads two weeks and a day since my most recent romantic breakup).

I started reading some self help books. Alright, a lot of self-help books. From the good (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) to the not so good (not trying to fire shots but The 5AM Club was not a personal favorite — maybe because I have no problem being up at 5AM).

In October of that year, in part due to work growing more socially & politically complicated, and in part due to a growing distaste for what I did, I chose to evaluate next steps. Next steps started with a Buddhist Monastery.

A trip to the monastery came mostly from an evaluation of “what comes next”, this profound evaluation & self-search boiled down to the internal conscious equivalent of jelly beans (while delicious, I don’t know that I enjoy them any more than as a rare seasonal treat). While there’s a lot I learned here (far more than I have room to convey), it embedded a meditation practice in my life that I’ve carried on every day since (something that I think that most everyone could benefit from, in some shape or form).

And with that, I settled on re-attending school for Neuropsychology. Admittedly I had about two science courses in my entire academic portfolio (out of pure shame, I’ll avoid talking about just how many credits I’ve attained), so I decided that I needed to re-enroll in undergraduate courses to make up for the lack of principle understanding needed for graduate work.

I’m now three courses off graduating with another undergraduate degree in Neuropsychology, and in December expect to have applied to clinical programs (bar another paradigm shift — something that, to be fair, really doesn’t scare me anymore).

Where I’m at professionally is a bit weird to explain, currently my 30 day job portfolio reads: (1) receptionist, (2) executive consultant, (3) student researcher for an NIH funded project.

Thanks for those of you who’ve been committed enough to read through this, I suppose I’ll end this expose with a couple small things that I believe with every fiber of my being:

(1): Very few people, if any, believe themselves to be truly bad people.

(2): There is an inherent benefit to all of us, in everything that we do.

(3): Our contextual experience has established supposed norms through which we evaluate our worldly experience. Many of us fear what’s different, or that which we don’t understand.

“Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

(From HAMLET: Act 2 Scene 2)