The Fortytellers

“Hitting rock bottom” was a memorable line from my guest in this episode of The Fortytellers. He apologetically called that line “a cliché”, which is certainly is not! After battling years of depression, loneliness, debt, and an addiction to gambling, Chesty Kemper spent a long period of time where every day he talked himself out of suicide. He finally made it through one fateful day where he could have ended his life and instead decided to live. Now what? Chesty began a long period of self-reflection. “Rewiring his brain”, he calls it. The fifth episode of The Fortytellers is a meditation on life, imperfection, expectations, self-awareness and renewal all at once. Chesty’s story is not much different from that of so many others. People struggle – both publicly and privately – with their lives, careers, relationships, money, direction. It is hard to find the time to reflect on what is important to us and even harder to talk about it in depth with someone else. In fact, I ran into Chesty, a high school friend, in Las Vegas in the fall of 2015. As I was there with a group of my girlfriends, we chatted only on that fun, lightheaded level that Vegas invites people to do. In this episode however we dig deep. Now in his forties, Chesty looks at his past with maturity, wisdom and a clearer sense of purpose about where he is now and how he fits into the world. Fittingly, Chesty and I struggled with some technical issues during this recording and the sound quality ebbs and flows more than I would have liked. And yet… if you listen past the imperfect sound of this episode, you will hear a compelling story that makes you think of your own story too. Perfect in all its imperfections.

Who would have thought that sneaking out of your parents’ house on a snowy winter night and running across a major interstate freeway might not be a great idea? Perhaps the only thing that provokes more anxiety is having to tell your parents about it. Unless, of course, you are in your forties. The perspective you get in your forties is unlike any other. Let’s not call it “midlife” which seems so structured and final. Our forties are a time for looking backward and looking forward with fresh new eyes and without many of the burdens, stresses, fears and anxieties that followed through life up until now. In the fourth episode of The Forty Tellers, I talk with my long-time friend Lora Budd. Even though we have known each other since the first grade, our conversation covers ground that neither one of us expected and reveals things that I never knew: things about her life, about our friendship and about the choices we have made over time that define who we are. After growing up in Olympia, Washington, Lora joined the United States Air Force found herself working at the Pentagon at the rank of Second Lieutenant. She talks about lunching with military generals, meeting her husband, losing a pregnancy, and returning back to Olympia shortly before 9/11. Now Lora is in her forties, well-established in the software industry with her and her husband’s business, and raising three children. She sits in her Olympia home with birds chirping happily outside as she talks with surprising candor about monitoring her kids’ access to social media and telling them with complete frankness about the risk and realities of adolescent life in the post-iPhone world. Did Lora’s past experience inform her parenting style? Clearly. How will it influence her kids? We may never know, at least until they reach their forties too.

In this third installment of The Fortytellers, we hear Mike’s story pick up from where we left off after high school: The growing relationship with Chris, now his husband, and the nail-biting and emotional journey that started with their desire to have kids and led them through their decision to work with a surrogate and welcome into the world their beautiful twins, Sean and Maggie.

In the second episode of The Fortytellers, I talk with Nyla Fritz, the principal of a middle school near Seattle. Much of Nyla’s teaching career – in fact, much of her life – was irreversibly impacted by the death of her younger brother, who lost his life in a school shooting 20 years ago at the age of 14.