The Pause
Sitting on top of a wooden fence that cornered off the end of a bridge on the outskirts of Fort William, Scotland, I put my phone in my pocket and sat at a loss for words or intention. Beneath me, water flowed away from Neptune’s Staircase, the lock system at the end of the Caledonian Canal, then streamed along until it poured out into Loch Linnhe. Above it, were the railroad tracks that took the Jacobite steam train (aka the Hogwarts Express) from Fort William to Mallaig, a town on the western coast of the highlands. Five months had passed since I had moved to Scotland. Five days had passed since, for the first time in my life, I was completely alone, the only company being strangers in a new town and my decision to be among them. In that moment, I was deciding if I wanted to stay or leave Scotland, to give up on physical therapy school, and to change the direction of my life.
Five Days Prior to the Breakdown
Putting off finding a place, I took the train from where my university was in Aberdeen up to Inverness then hopped on the bus to Fort William from there. Most of the four-hour journey was spent trying to find a house or flat to call home for the next two months during my first rotational placement in PT school. The day before leaving for Fort William, I had just returned from a week-long trip to London with some classmates and told myself that “future Logan” could deal with finding a place on the way.
He didn’t.
I landed in Fort William without anywhere to stay on a misty summer day with a bag filled with an ambitious number of books to read and a week’s worth of clothes. Walking down the sidewalk in the rain, I started for a hostel on the edge of town called Chase the Wild Goose, hoping they had a bed available for at least the first few nights of my placement until I found somewhere more permanent.
As the rain started coming down harder, I took a break in a bus stop stall to wait it out. Across the street I could see the lower half of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the United Kingdom, sinking into the ground beneath the clouds. Something about being alone and seeing it brought me peace, it made me feel as if it were there to keep me company, cheering me on.
Pulling up to the side of the road, an elderly man in a small tan car rolled his window down and called out to me.
“Ye needing a lift somewhere, lad?” he said.
“Just heading to the hostel,” I said, “I can walk the rest of the way though, thanks.”
“Nonsense,” he said, getting out of the car and opening his trunk. “It’s not for another three miles, you’ll be all drookit by the time yer there. Go ahead and put yer bag in the boot and I’ll give ye a ride.”
I think there comes a time when you’re interacting with people that you can sense their intentions, or at least if they have good or bad ones, and this man was there to help me.
Conceding, I slid my bag into the trunk and got into the passenger side.
Driving through town, I looked out the window as the man pointed out different places and told me a bit about the history and sites to see during my time there. In its entirety, the ride lasted about ten minutes, and I would never see the man again, but I’d never forget the impact that he made on me.
Pulling up to the front of the hostel, I got out and pulled my bag from his trunk.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Nae worries,” he said. “Enjoy your time here, I think you’ll grow to like it.”
It felt good having someone on my side when anyone else that would be was nowhere I could reach.
Walking in the front door of the small cottage hostel, I was greeted with the good news of a vacant four bunk room. After leaving by bag upstairs, I went down to the community kitchen hoping to find some leftover food supplies from previous guests. In most hostels they leave a cabinet or shelf in the fridge open for people to leave food that they don’t end up eating during their stay. In luck, I found half a loaf a bread, jam, oats, a box of dry noodles and a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce in the fridge—an empty-handed traveler’s dream. Boiling a pot of noodles, I emptied the tomato sauce on top then poured it all into a bowl and headed back up to my room.
Sitting on one of the other bunks, a middle-aged man sat rummaging through his bag. He looked up to give me a tired smile and introduced himself as John. An Australian traveler, he had just finished the West Highland Way, a trail that ran from just north of Glasgow and ended in Fort William. It took him a week and a day to complete the walk and this hostel was the place he was staying to end it, and to sleep. After talking for a bit about his journey, he drifted off to sleep and I found myself envious of this man that was on the go. The next morning, I was due to report to the first day of my placement, for him it would be another day to travel. I didn’t doubt that somewhere in the world he too had obligations, but something about mine made me feel unsettled.
The next few days flew by in a flurry. I still don’t know that I have been more mentally fatigued than that first week in the clinic. It wasn’t that I was doing much from a clinical standpoint, in fact, I can look back at it and laugh at how little I was actually responsible for. No, reflecting on that week, I think the physical exhaustion I was feeling was a reflection of my identity and my soul pounding against my being so that they could finally emerge. The essence of my being, the guy that other’s call Logan was demanding recognition, and he wouldn’t settle until I called him by name.
The Breakdown
Sitting on the bridge, I looked around at the world and the reality that held me. Before leaving for Scotland and for PT school, I contemplated pursuing a master’s in creative writing. My decision came down to two quotes that I told myself:
- You don’t need a degree to write a book.
- If you’re miserable in PT school, at least you’ll be miserable in Scotland.
They both came true. I had finished my first attempt at a book, one that will probably
never see the light of day (not my current and upcoming debut novel, but the one I refer to as my ‘practice round’). And I was miserable.
A clear evening, Ben Nevis was in full view southeast of town and the late summer sun was beginning to set. I had just gotten off the phone with my parents and my sister, my life’s three sages, and broken the news to them separately that I didn’t think I could do it anymore, I didn’t think I could keep going with PT school and I laid out my plans to leave and fly back home. Their responses were hard to hear. Rather than disagreeing with my decision and encouraging me not to quit, they gave me the space to take ownership of a life I didn’t recognize: my own.
My mother told me that I needed to do what would make me happy, whatever that meant, and if giving up on this was going to do it then I needed to follow through with it.
My father, who was working in Shanghai at the time, told me that if that’s what I thought was best, then it was ultimately up to me, but to be in the moment, then allow that to guide the decision.
My sister told me to envision what my life would look like if I came home. “What would be your next step?” she said.
What they gave me, whether they knew it or not, was the hardest advice and the best gift I’ve ever been given. They gave me back absolute and complete ownership of my life and all the decisions, good and bad, that I had made to get there. They gave me permission to start leading my life in the direction that I wanted it to go because I chose it, not because anyone else had.
For someone who felt that he had made the majority of his decisions based off of other people, it was a sobering moment. I felt as if I had just been handed a life and that my next move, whatever it would be, was going to decide its trajectory. I felt free, overwhelmed, and more uncertain than I ever had, and so there, on that small bridge in Scotland, I broke. I lost my identity and found it all in the same place.
For the entirety of my life up until that moment, I was a people pleaser. I did things because I thought people wanted me to do them and I made decisions based off of what I felt people expected of me. I filled my life with titles so that I could understand my place in other people’s lives and then I took ownership of them. The ‘nice guy,’ ‘son,’ ‘brother,’ ‘loyal friend,’ ‘dependable,’ ‘christian,’ ‘the class president type,’ ‘partier,’ ‘outgoing,’ ‘deep,’ ‘personable,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘too moral,’ ‘religious,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘difficult to get to know,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘talkative,’ ‘too extroverted,’ ‘too quiet,’ ‘the guy who doesn’t date,’ ‘f*** boy,’ ‘virgin,’ ‘good student,’ ‘smart,’ ‘ambitious,’ ‘annoying,’ ‘closeted,’ ‘douche bag,’ ‘decent looking,’ ‘good looking but without much of a personality,’ ‘overbearing,’ ‘overachiever,’ ‘physical therapist,’ ‘writer,’ ‘white guy,’ ‘American,’ ‘man.’ I wore every title from every person, then I stopped recognizing the human underneath all of them. For two decades, I went through the motions of life, feeding off of other people’s excitement of having me as a character in their life’s story to the point that I forgot about my own. I grew up in a small town, one that I loved, and fell into a character role, then I went to an undergrad college where I knew people and the role continued.
The Moment
Sitting alone on the bridge, the only sound I heard was the stream beneath my feet and my breath. It was in that moment that, for the first time, I saw and heard myself separate from the voices that had tried to define me. The desire I felt in wanting to leave PT school wasn’t because I didn’t want to be a PT, it was because I feared that becoming a PT would give others another label and box to throw on my life. I was about to make another decision, not because it was what I thought people expected from me, but purely out of defiance of what I assumed they did. I was about to make another decision based off other people.
The defining moment: I was sitting alone on a bridge far away from those people, and it took a pause like that to realize that the Logan I wanted to be didn’t give a shit how I fit into those people’s lives, and they didn’t really give a shit about who I wanted to be either, they were too busy giving shits about themselves and trying to figure out their own identities, which is what people should be doing.
I think we put too much pressure on ourselves as humans. I think we’re born into a world where we try grabbing at any sort of identity and we eventually just start choosing some then allow those choices to turn into the essence of our being. I think when we’re young, by no one’s fault in particular, we hear adjectives about our personalities, then we allow those adjectives to formulate into how we perceive ourselves. Then I think that builds, and those adjectives start to become our personalities, then our social circles, then our careers, then our lives. I think at some point we get comfortable falling into a title and we become afraid of breaking the mold that the world, or ourselves, has put us in.
But I also don’t think it has to be this way. I think we all go through a moment, or move to a place, where we sit with ourselves and realize that the person beneath all the titles has more to give.
Sometimes it takes complete isolation for this to happen. Sometimes it takes a profound sense of loneliness to meet the person you actually are rather than continuing to listen to the voices that told you who you needed to be. When you get to that place, once you start hearing the breath beneath the voices, the world starts to expand with you. And once that happens, nothing can ever reduce you to a title or a label that was never meant to be big enough for who you can be.
I will forever look back on Fort William as the town that saved me. It shook me to the core and forced me to pause and look at my life through my own eyes. It was the place that gave me the permission to start living and making decisions for myself. I hope everyone gets that. I hope they have the moment when they’re completely alone, whether on the other side of town or the earth, where they’re forced to recognize their true self against the backdrop of the box that the world has placed them in. Then I hope they have the moment that I did, where I stood and made a decision that would start a long line of decisions in what has become the life that I chose and will continue to choose every day that the sun rises. One that makes the term Logan an expansive one, rather than a title to fit into. One that comes with a lot of different pieces that can never, on their own, define the whole of my life.