20/08/2026
Remember to Breathe
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My timeline between 1999 and 2005 is a huge blur. Marriage to my high school girlfriend from Japan at age 19 (Spring 1994), becoming a father at age 21, moving to Japan shortly after, and then seeing my world fall apart...Too much change. Too much maladjustment. Too much criticism for things I had no control over (such as being myself). I knew I was different than most people in America and I was pretty much out of control because of it. Throwing a new country into the mix really messed things up.
Divorce at age 24. I was too different. That's the only reason I've ever been able to come up with. My child was kept from me overseas for 11 years—partly due to poverty and no means to travel, and partly due to the severed side of the family's unwillingness.
Engagement at age 26—Spring 2001. Whirlwind romance. I rode a huge wave. Engagement called off by my then fiancée by late summer the same year. When I focused on something, I went all the way. When that focus hit a brick wall, I had little to save me—at least not back then. I remember running back and forth from wall to wall in the apartment. Having self-harmful thoughts simply so I could stop the out-of-control racing mind, mania, and panic, and not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted the overwhelm to stop.
I remembered something from my past—I remembered to breathe. Several layers beneath the hypercharged nervous system was my rationale. That side of me calmly called for help—albeit with a few sobs and sniffles. After that call came a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with rapid cycling.
My mom had a history of rejecting the most invasive forms of medicine in favor of more holistic means to successfully battle her cancer. I looked up to her because of her success and her faith in God to achieve it, and I had the same attitude. I wasn't going to take medications.
(In hindsight, bipolar disorder and cancer are not the same thing, and I ought to have independently weighed the risks and benefits. However, I wasn't experienced enough to know, and what works for one person may not work for me because we're all unique despite our similarities. So I did my best to improvise and discover.)
A recovery spent living with my parents gave me enough footing (after a few hiccups) to rethink my life and to start slowly. I tried all kinds of things with my counselor/therapist to see what would work for me to get through my education, new relationships, and life. One thing was to take it slowly. Self-hypnosis-like techniques for sleep were also helpful, but the main thing was the most simple: remember to breathe! I had already done it. I just needed to focus more on it and apply it to all areas of my life. Slow focused breathing when anxiety and depression got out of hand. 8 seconds in—12 seconds out.
It's no accident that breathing spoke so deeply to me. Focused breathing had gotten me out of trouble several times in my childhood, and it even gave me success in music and sports.
Breathing in childhood: I was clumsy in youth (still am) and horrible at sports, but I could run like nobody else. I outran any bully that ever threatened me. I had intense singular focus on whatever I was doing, and running lent itself well to that type of focus.
Being a natural musician, I locked into the rhythm of my breaths and steps—focusing on smooth consistency and rolling rather than pounding and force. I could picture it like measured legato in music. Every breath and step had a subdivision and a precise measurement in my brain. There was a precise number of strides per breath. When the breathing became more difficult, I increased the quality of my breathing, kept my breaths the same length but deeper, and I kept the tempo the same. I became accustomed to prioritizing focus on tempo and consistency rather than pain and discomfort.
In neighborhood football, kids learned to hand me the ball and let me run. I was the secret weapon as long as I went the right direction (being neurodivergent, I didn't always catch which way we were going). I ran 400/440 and 800/880 in track & field. That was cool, but way too overwhelming. I didn't know why. I was just different from the other kids. I couldn't follow their conversations. I was completely lost in a group. So, I ran on my own. I did a 5K in 15:46. It felt great.
Back to post-divorce, diagnosis, recovery, and the rest of life, and what that has to do with remembering to breathe: I breathed my way into stability, and I think my breathing experience from my youth turned out to shape the rest of my life.
Most everyone knows I successfully auditioned for Army Bands with medical documentation of three stable years qualifying for a waiver, I remarried around the same time. Initial Army training was harder for me than for most. I melted down a few times during AIT, and my wife helped keep me going. Part of Army life was running. I ran and practiced breathing as I ran. Despite how broken I felt inside, I beat most everyone else in running, so I had at least something positive to focus on.
Army life didn't get much easier. It got harder. In 2009, it got “hospital psyche ward” hard. If I hadn't breathed, though, I wouldn't have even been coherent enough to seek help and admit myself to the hospital. The hospital psychiatrist said that I had a cycle of people-pleasing, eventually becoming overwhelmed by taking on too much, and then either exploding or crashing. He said it was one of the cluster C personality disorders. However, he had a brief moment where he hinted that that was the only "rehabilitatable” diagnosis he could give me that wouldn't get me kicked out of the Army. Who knows what he really thought my diagnosis was.
Anyway, the action plan was a bit of therapy, assertiveness training, and a reading assignment: “Feel the Way You Want to Feel, No Matter What”. It was all good stuff, but it was everything I had already learned and knew well. Years of being different taught me to study everything I could about how people work because it didn't come naturally to me.
Trust me, I could probably teach those topics to the therapist. I could also teach my religious leaders how God helps me. It doesn't mean everything is fabulous. It just means I'm still alive.
In the end, life was going to have some seriously sucky challenges, but at least I could breathe. Not even a year later, I was physically assaulted on the job. It turns out that being more assertive exposed how neurodivergent I was, and it caused hostility and even violence in others. I had hidden those parts of me in childhood for just that reason—to avoid bullying and trauma.
When I realized that being more myself caused more trouble and not less, I became overwhelmed at work. Suddenly I lost one of my previous masks of being able to tune out sensory and social overwhelm. Intense military activities caused me to have to go to sick-call due to just shutting down and not being able to think or to do anything. It wasn't a good look, and sick-call was the only recourse in a military scenario when people sensed something wasn't right with me. The only way I kept my head instead of panicking, and I knew when to go to sick-call, was by focusing on breathing. That gave me just enough clarity to make a decision rather than completely lose control.
Army life became so challenging that I had to leave. I didn't want to mess with medical boards for medical discharge. I just waited until the end of my enlistment and filed for VA disability. They gave me 100% disability because my previously stable bipolar disorder had been aggravated due to military service.
After that, life didn't get easier. I still had to figure out what to do for employment. Disability compensation only goes so far. Several times, I thought life was too hard to bear. Aside from my sweet wife and son, and my reliance on God, I remembered to breathe.
That was 11 years ago. I know more about my neurodivergent side than I knew back then. I was diagnosed last year as autistic (some people like to say “with” autism or ASD, but I claim it as my neurotype and part of who I am, so I was diagnosed as autistic and I *am* autistic and don't “have” autism). All of the challenges I previously described (and many more that I left out) are explained by me being an alternate type of person in a world that wasn't really made for me.
Life isn't getting any easier. Sometimes it gets even harder than I ever imagined it would. Do you know what, though? The very thing that caused me to focus so intensely on breathing when I would run, and now on breathing when I'm in distress, was my autistic brain and tendency towards intense focus. The world is brutal, but autism saves me and keeps me going. It's not a hindrance. It's who I am, and I'm still in the game because I find my autistic focus and remember to breathe.
[The picture is from my native prairie, which is a great place to go to remember to breathe]
