My father was a big man in just about every sense of the word.
He was a big, redheaded Irishman who weighed well over 200 pounds and had played professional football for the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the leather-helmet days.
Then he had me.
I topped out at about five-foot-nine and, for much of my life, weighed around 135 pounds. Physically, I certainly wasn’t the son I believed my father had pictured for himself.
But the differences went much deeper than size.
For a good part of my life, I measured myself by my father’s yardstick. Whatever I pursued, somehow I came away feeling that I hadn’t quite measured up. I wanted his approval more than I probably understood at the time, and when I didn’t feel I was getting it, I didn’t question his expectations.
If I wasn’t succeeding in his eyes, I must be failing.
There was a period of my life that I eventually came to call my “slow suicide.” I wasn’t trying to end my life. It was something far more gradual. Day after day, I was tearing down the person I was because I couldn’t become the person I thought somebody else wanted me to be.
I wasn’t taking care of myself. I made choices that were destructive. But perhaps the greatest damage was...