Josh Goldberg at BIF2019: The 10 Truths About Struggle

Because how I grew up as a child was as an indoor Jew. And people will ask what an indoor Jew is. An indoor Jew is someone who’s taught to use their head and not their hands—who doesn’t camp, hunt, fish, or know how to fix anything. And I really don’t understand why anyone would sleep in a tent outside when you can sleep in a bed inside. But the main point of saying that I grew up as an indoor Jew is that the purpose of my life and the focus of my existence was designed to achieve ease and comfort. I was trying to live an easy life—outsource the hard stuff and be comfortable.

And that worked really well for a really long period of time. Until it didn’t. In 2012 and 2013, a bunch of bad things happened basically at the same time. I got divorced. My mom’s cancer spread to her brain. I lost a lot of friends. I had a soul-crushing job. It was all too much. And I began to struggle mightily, and I felt like I was trapped in this impenetrable fog, and nothing I did would make any difference. I tried medication—both pharmaceutical and recreational. I went to a therapist. I read all the books I could get. I tried to do different to get different. And nothing helped.

And I got to the point where I fundamentally believed with as clear a mind as I had that tomorrow would be at least as bad as yesterday, if not worse. And I was done. I was exhausted. I was despairing. And I was done. And I made plans to take my life. And I worked for a man who had lost his son at my age. And Mort gave me a book. And he could see that I wasn’t doing okay. And he said, “Before you make any decisions”—and he didn’t know what I was up to—he said, “Read this.” And it was a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And I took one thing away from that book. It punctured the fog ever so briefly, and that was that if I wanted to feel okay, I should serve a cause greater than my own.

And so I went into the world with this idea: I’m going to help somebody. And lo and behold, it turns out that I get introduced to somebody, they’re working with veterans, they ask if I can help. I start helping that group, then I get asked to do another group, and this whole one door opens, all these other ones open after. And that’s where I ran into this badass. That is Dusty Baxley. Dusty is what I describe as a modern-day Spartan. He’s a retired 82nd Airborne Ranger who’s fought in Panama, in Gulf War I. And as you can see, he’s a very large human being.

One of the things that I’ve learned about the military and veteran community is, while you may get a guest pass to hang out with them for a little while, you don’t get to stay until you go through extensive vetting. And what I experienced when I met Dusty was 20 minutes of extensive vetting, which he might call military police-style interrogation tactics. And so Dusty started to ask me a bunch of questions about what I was doing and why I was there. And after 20 minutes, it seemed like the conversation was in a good place. And he looked at me, and he put his giant paw onto my shoulder with a bit of force—because he didn’t need much to make a dent—and he said, “Josh, you seem like a well-meaning young man. You seem like somebody who can help so many of my brothers and sisters who are struggling. But before you do anything for anyone else, you’re going to do one thing for me.” And I was like, “What’s that, Dusty?” And he said, “You’re going to unf*ck yourself.”

Now indoor Jews—we don’t know what the hell that means. So I’m like, “I don’t know, Dusty. How does the unf*cking process begin?” And he said, “Do what I do, and do what I say.” And over the course of the next week—and this was six years ago this very week—and over the course of the next week, and then over the course of the succeeding weeks and months, not only did these men and women help me figure out reasons to stay, but they taught me what it means to live a meaningful life—a life that’s filled with passion and purpose and growth and connection and service.

And what I took away from all of it was that so often, people look at veterans and they think they are patients and beneficiaries and recipients of mental health care services and all of these other things. But I don’t see that. Because what I know is that these men and women are our leaders and our teachers and our innovators and our pioneers. Because they know things about mental health that the rest of us don’t know. Because the world of mental health is the world of the indoor Jew. It is designed to help you feel comfortable—to manage and mitigate the distress associated with the symptoms you feel.

But the world of the warrior, the world of the veteran, is a world that is very, very different. And what I want to share with you today, in true Jewish fashion, are—they’re not commandments—but 10 truths that I’ve learned about how to live a meaningful life and how to struggle well from my veteran friends and brothers at this point.

The first is this: Struggle has value.

You see, I spent the majority of my existence trying to avoid struggle. But what they taught me—in the words of a friend of ours, Charlie Plumb, who spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton as a POW—is that struggle is a terrible thing to waste.

You see, the main differentiator between the world of civilians and indoor Jews and the world of warriors is that warriors are people who sublimate their own need for self-preservation to serve a cause greater than their own. And yes, more important than that—they are people who proactively seek out adversity, struggle, and in fact trauma, because they realize at some level it will reveal parts of themselves they will know in no other way.

And what they gain in the process, primarily, is strength and courage. Strength and courage is what they gain.

That’s why at basic training and boot camp and all the advanced military schools, it is a process of forging—that tears people down only to build them back up stronger and better than ever.

This quote from Thucydides comes from 500 BC—Thucydides being a father of war history and an Athenian general—and what he recognized was that all people are more or less the same. But what he realized is that his soldiers, when they returned from the battlefield back into their community, were better—because they had learned lessons in the “severe school” about what actually matters in life. They were wise in ways that the community wasn’t. And their job was to implement and to share those lessons with the rest of the community.

The second is somewhat related, which is: in life we can’t reach what we cannot see. We pathologize struggle as a country. We traffic in labels and diagnoses, and the net effect of those is they make people feel diminished in some permanent sense. We are led to believe that bad things in our life equal a bad life. I had this sense when I was told that I had chronic depression, that the rest of my life was going to be a fraction of what it once was. We call this learned hopelessness—the idea that the sooner I get accustomed to the fact that my life is going to be shitty, the easier it will be for me to live a life because I won’t fight what I’ll never get anyway. And what these men and women taught me that when people challenge you, when people tell you what you can’t do—right—not only do you do that, but you do it even better. And there are countless examples from people who’ve stood on this stage who realize that. But as an indoor Jew, that’s not how I was wired. I was very susceptible to the limitations that other people put on me.

This idea—the idea that struggle has value, the idea that people put limits on us—the opposite of that is Posttraumatic Growth. It’s the recognition in our lives that the struggle we experience because of trauma, because of difficulty, often leads us to change our lives in ways that we report—that those lives become more authentic and fulfilling and purposeful than they were before. And we heard those on the stage yesterday, in particular when Mike talked about the way it changed his perspective on humanity. And I had another conversation last night with someone who lost their child, who spoke about the ways in which it helped them realize how amazing other human beings were. And it’s the sad truth of life that only when we go through bad stuff do we wake up to the fact that the life we’re living isn’t really the life that’s fulfilling and the life we want to be living.

The third is the Paradox of struggle. You see—and to steal a bit of Frankl’s wisdom—struggle is the single most universal aspect of the human condition. If you are human, you will experience struggle. You will experience adversity, and you will experience trauma in your life, no matter who you are. And despite the fact that that is the single most universal component of the human condition, it is also the singularly most isolating part of that same condition. Because when we struggle—when I struggled—I had three thoughts. One, something is wrong with me. Two, I may never be right again. And three, no one will understand what I’m experiencing. And those things are not true, but those are the things we tell ourselves.

And the myth about veterans is they don’t want to talk about stuff. That’s not true. They don’t want to talk about stuff with people that they don’t trust, who can’t understand their experiences. That’s who they don’t want to talk about. But what these men and women did was liberate me to realize that my story had to be told and had to be confronted. And they helped me find the strength and the courage to be willing to do that.

Four. They taught me about why it is that we as human beings struggle so poorly when we’re dealing with things. Now, military people believe fundamentally in one thing: that human beings are malleable and designed to grow and evolve. I work for a bomb disposal technician that is widely considered to be the world’s most dangerous job. And that’s before you count the fact that while they’re disarming bombs, people are still trying to kill them by shooting them. They believe fundamentally—if you ask Ken Faul, who I work for—right? That with good training, it’s very easy to disarm a bomb. That people can be trained to do anything under any circumstances with the right kind of training.

The problem is, no one teaches us how to live. No one teaches us how to struggle until and unless we reach such times as we try to seek such help when we are at our most compromised. So what they taught me is that we need to train people—not necessarily just when they’re struggling—but before they even start to, to learn how to live life and navigate our existence.

Along the lines of training, they also told me that all of my training and my experiences matter. You see, when I was struggling in 2012 and 2013, all I could see was the real-time events that were overwhelming me. But what they told me was that I needed to back up and look broader. Because the ways in which I thought about myself—limitations and opportunities and potential—the ways in which I thought about other people, the ways in which I thought about the world and my future, were shaped not in 2012 but in 1980 when I was 2 years old. This is the science of adverse childhood experiences that has a direct correlation to the way in which we as adults struggle. We have to understand all of our struggle.

Six. This is one of my two favorites. They taught me that the best things in life can’t be purchased. You see, I grew up in a middle-class home with reasonable parents. But I became very susceptible to materialism. I married someone who had a ton of money, and I all of a sudden defined myself by the stuff I had—what I wore, what I drove, and what I did for a living. And what these men and women taught me was that none of that sh*t actually matters.

This quote is from James Stockdale. James Stockdale was the senior residing officer at the Hanoi Hilton. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war being treated as a war criminal. He was isolated, battered, starved, and tortured. I want you to look at the words on the screen. In the midst of going through this experience, Stockdale said that he knew that he would turn it into the defining event of his life, which in retrospect he would not trade. He held true to those words to his dying day. And the reason why Stockdale said that is because he learned what actually mattered in life when everything was taken from him—when, as they say, they went from king of the skies to scum of the earth in a heartbeat.

That was hope. The recognition that life never goes the way we think it is, but that doesn’t mean it can’t go in amazing ways. It was about deeper relationships—the connections we can establish with other people. It was about personal strength—the notion that when you go through horrible things and you still stand, nothing can knock you down permanently. It was about gratitude for the small things in life, small kindnesses. And lastly, it was about having a sense of mission and purpose and forward momentum.

Seven. We have to have a personal philosophy about life. And what was talked about earlier—subject and object—is the perfect way to describe this. I was all object. Struggle consumed me. It overwhelmed me like a tsunami. I couldn’t see beyond it. But what these veterans told me is, just like in the fog of war, you’ve got to zoom out. You’ve got to step back. You have to have a way of thinking about how you think about this stuff. You have to think about your philosophy. And it has to integrate the fact that struggle will darken all of our doorsteps at some point or another.

And I love this quote by Charles C. Colton because he gives us pathways to do this. One is religion. A second—my favorite, because I’m an existentialist—is philosophy. And the third is far too common: it’s indifference. And the thing is, if you can’t make sense of why bad things happen to good people—if you can’t assimilate and integrate the experiences you have in your life—they will continually knock you over, like one earthquake after the next after the next. In order to endure, in order to be truly resistant—or what people call resilient—you have to make sense of the experiences you have.

The Eighth. The one that causes me to get on my high horse: language matters. The way we talk about people—and I include myself as someone who was being talked about—when people struggle with mental health challenges is demeaning. It’s dehumanizing. And quite frankly, it’s disgusting. We do not respect people who go through times of struggle when it comes to mental health. And we act as though experts need to tell these poor, pitiable creatures what’s wrong with them. We treat people like machines who need to be fixed. And it’s not true. And it’s not accurate.

And I’m proud to be part of the work around Posttraumatic Growth that is very user-centered. It’s about what people have experienced and learned. And the best way I can explain this is: we had a guy—which is very rare for us—named Jim Rendon, who’s the author of a book called Upside, which is a book about Posttraumatic Growth. And we invited Jim to observe a female program of seven female combat veterans. And Jim got to sit through the whole thing. And at the end he said, “Josh, can I address the group?” Because I told him he wasn’t allowed to talk the whole time. And I said, “Sure.”

And he said, “You know, those of us in the journalism community, we almost broke our arms patting ourselves on the back about the fact that we stopped calling people trauma victims and started calling them trauma survivors. But you all are neither victim nor survivor. You are simply remarkable and capable and incredible and fierce human beings who’ve earned my lifelong admiration.”

We have to be careful about the language we use. If we treat people as they are, we will make them worse. And on that front—and I don’t know if Valerie is here—what “unf*ck yourself” means, translated into Indoor Jew, is: I see you. It means, I see you. I see who you are. I see where you are. But more importantly, I see who you can become. And I will walk alongside you and help you get to that place. What I love about military folk is they don’t see people as static. They see people as they can be. And they know with training and hard work—and speaking to the strongest part of a human being, which sometimes doesn’t sound that nice—you can actually deliver the goods for people and allow them to live amazing lives.

Nine. Nine. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. At the Hanoi Hilton, when new shootdowns would arrive, they would use a tap code—where they tapped along the wall—and send a message to Stockdale as the senior residing officer. And say, “Sir, what is our highest duty in this prison?” And his response would always be the same: “The man next door. The man next door.”

We have outsourced mental health in our world to a small group of people—estimated to be about 500,000 to 600,000 people—who are incredibly difficult to access and even harder to relate to. We have outsourced mental health in our country. Dr. Vikram Patel, who’s an amazing psychiatrist who’s doing work—when we talk about necessity being the mother of invention—in the developing world, where they don’t have so many mental health professionals, has done amazing work training people who are peer-based to do basic interventions with tremendous success.

What I fundamentally believe is that in order to solve what is a massive mental health crisis in our world, we need to do what a lot of people have talked about—and Mark’s talk was amazing on that front—but we need to bring expertise into communities where trust and connection exist. Not try to convince people to go to where expertise exists where there is no trust or connection. It is why you get dropout rates for veterans in the civilian mental health world of 40 to 90%, because they cannot relate to the people they’re talking to.

And last but not least is ten: there are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts. People who are not well cannot help other people get well. Dusty stopped me from spiritual bypass with all 250 lbs of muscle and will. He stopped me from taking the ultimate shortcut—which was thinking that I could help other people in order to help myself. We cannot help other people be well unless we are well ourselves. We know that hurt people hurt people. And we cannot be part of those people unless institutions are well. Unless the people within those institutions are well, they cannot help people achieve well-being.

As you can tell, this entire talk is my ode—my six-year anniversary ode—to veterans. When I struggled the most, the cavalry came—literally. Green Berets and Airborne Rangers and Marines and Soldiers and Sailors and EOD techs. They came, and they rescued me from the darkness. And I don’t know that that will happen to anybody else. I can tell you that my life’s mission is to train these men and women to go out into the world and use their strength and their courage and their understanding of what a real life looks like—a meaningful life looks like—and to help, to save and assist and support and train other human beings.

And that is my wish. That is my wish for all of you: that you get the opportunity, like I have, to find a tribe that is so filled with character and integrity and love and kindness. And to think about how you think about the military and Veteran community. Because the one thing I do think—we talk a lot about it, and Mark talked a lot about it—is we shouldn’t use “us/them” language. But I hear it all the time when it comes to veterans. And these people are now my brothers and my sisters. And I will tell you that they are the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met. And they embody every quality I was ever taught as a little Indoor Jew to possess. And I never saw it in our world.

So to them, I am eternally grateful. And to you all—thank you so much for the opportunity to share that with you.