OVER50survivor.

By OVER50badass Chuck Paone

To start with I have a confession, while I am north of 50 I really do not think of myself as one of the Over50badassess of the masthead. No, I see myself more of a Over50survivor than a badass. For my accomplishments are more acts of survival than the truly bad ass achievements of my dear friend Scott O’Leary and the others who have shared their stories. There are no buckles or medals earned by me, nor a resume of Spartan Races or marathons.

My accomplishments are more of the finding my way out of bed on a day when that is the great battle I face.

It’s the notification on my Fitbit that I have reached 10,000 steps before 5am. Small victories are my bread and butter; pushing to a new high mile walked number, 17.2 is my current high-water mark. 

Scott and I have been friends since the wonders of the alphabetic seating chart that put us next to each other in first grade in September of 1970. We grew up together, Scott was always a runner, I was always the fat kid on the bike finding a way to keep up. We played baseball in the summer, street hockey in the fall and ice hockey in the winter. Real ice hockey, outside on ponds and a little slice of heaven called the Sugar Bowl, which was an odd crater of sorts between the railroad tracks and access road. The local fire fighters would fill it with water in the winter to keep the neighborhood kids off the never safe ice of the Merrimack River. 

There were never any parents involved in these games, just street kids spending time in a “Lord of The Flies” free for all. Fights would break out, taunts of “your dead”, slurs against what ever group you belonged to and constant reminders of whatever difference you might have. We thought nothing of jumping off roofs, building impossible wooden jumps for bicycles, roller skates or skateboards. We did things daily that our parents never knew about and probably explains why our generation grew up to be helicopter parents. It was a different time, of sticks and stones mentality, one where a thick skin was needed, the ability to take a punch, roll with the situation, live to see another day, in short not to be a badass as much as be a survivor.  

Survive I did, not without scars, deep ones that I carry to this day.

Scars that I never really knew I had for far too many years. You grow up experiencing everything through eyes that saw what was happening as normal. It was all you knew. Then one day you discover your point of view of normal, is not normal. Not even remotely close to normal. And when this happens the revelation can break you or make you. Sometimes you end up with a little of both, in other words you survive. I own my life, I own the choices I have made, good or bad, I grew up without some basic tools that a normal upbringing would have provided. My parents each had deep emotional issues and addictions that hindered their abilities. There story is their own, my story is my own. Long ago I replaced anger with understanding, they simply did the best they could with what they had. They survived as did I. Survivor not a badass.

Over the years Scott and I lost contact, no rift, just life, we attended different high schools, we each moved away from our hometown. I moved across a single state boarder. Scott moved half a country away. We started families, set down roots, built lives and did the best we could with what we had. Good lives, married to good women, raising good children. Life was good. So, I thought, but was it really good? The demons from the past kept finding me, the less than normal seeping into my life. 

Addiction, unchecked running wild, always there, vowing rock bottom was hit, only to discover a new rock bottom was crumbling beneath me.

My drug of choice was food. There is damn little sympathy in this world for any addiction; being addicted to food brings zero. Can’t you just stop? No, not really. With all the 12 step programs out there the key is abstinence, the act of not using, not taking a drink, not using the drug, 100% abstinence. I’m not diminishing in any way how hard that is to do for those who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, but food is something you cannot truly abstain from. Humans must eat.

So, I would diet, crash, binge, repeat in an endless cycle. 

Then I doubled down into a new development. Panic attacks started after my father’s death in 2006. There was a box of his papers in my basement, when I opened the box a smell would rise, ginger ale on the brain would start and my heart felt like it would burst from my chest. I thought I was dying just as he had done from a massive heart attack, but I did not die, I survived. I also then wasted years of my life not seeking help. Instead I read, I studied, I problem solved like the engineer that I am. I pretty much had what could be called a working nervous breakdown. I started applying nonwestern medicine techniques and thought I survived. 

We humans survive by lying to ourselves, is it really lying if we believe it? I believed it and would loose another decade of my life.

Then Scott reentered my life. My oldest son was heading to college in 2009, part of my condition for paying for his education was that I wanted to know he was alive daily. Yet at the same time I did not want to intrude on his life too much, a phone call each day was an intrusion, but being able to see him on this new thing, to me it was new, Facebook. He was posting something daily, that fit my helicopter parenting style perfectly. Shortly after I joined this Facebook thing, Scott found me, friend requested me and then let me into his online neighborhood called the “Third Eye”. This private companion to the “Over50badasses”, finally pushed me into finding people to help me work on my addiction, mental and physical health issues. Scott and the group have been my strength and source of emotional, mental, and physical wellness. It has been one of great blessings of my life to reconnect with Scott and forever I will be grateful.

Since our reunion my life has completely changed. I have survived. I have gone on a great journey of self-discovery. Finding a path to recovery. A path with challenges great and small. One of them has been confronting the reality of my addiction, I struggle every day with it, it is a beast of a thousand heads. Always ready to return. Somedays it wins, most days I survive. Starting in true earnestness in 2018 I took on my addiction, wrestled with it into a form of abstinence. Not a drug taken, not a name brand diet, not a fad of the moment or even an operation, just changing my lifestyle, looking for the trigger foods, avoiding sugar refined and hidden, it started to work. Walking was my chief exercise. Bad joints, bad knee from football and the weight all limited my abilities at first. The first time I tried walking a mile along the Hampton Beach sea wall, I had to stop repeatedly, could not even complete an end to end walk.

Gave up, went back to my car, and cried at the failure.

The next time I did a little bit better. I kept going back, spending the time at the beach walking, stopping, reading, walking some more, repeat. I survived.  

My walks along the New Hampshire seacoast now stretch to touch 4 towns in a single one way journey, the round trip of 17.2 mentioned at the start of this is the current record holder. My goal is to be able to walk a round trip marathon distance in a single session. My other goal was to get my weight down to 220 pounds, I accomplished that and some more. The only problem with that accomplishment is that in doing so I have to reveal that I lost over 100lbs, and of course the problem is the shame that comes with admitting one was so out of control that they needed to lose over 100 pounds It is a great double edge sword. People always ask me about feeling better now, and truthfully, I do not. I never really felt bad.

Yes there were times when I was winded, or moments of despair, like that failed first attempt, but I never actually felt anything other than being me, a person who over 50 survived, not a badass. 

Afterword: Chuck is as badass as any badass I know. Badassery is not simply defined by thriving but mostly forged in survival. My deepest thanks and admiration for his vulnerability and bravery to write this for this platform.