Nervous Exhaustion, An Excerpt.

In the immortal words of Penny Lane, "It's All Happening"

Hello, Friends, it’s been a while.

I realize that this publication has not been regular in quite some time, and I’m aware regular readers are aware of all the obstacles I’ve thrown in my way, so I’m not going to focus on that with this final post of 2023. Instead, I’m here to provide you with something a little different.

The stars have aligned to the point where I have no reservations about telling you that my memoir, Nervous Exhaustion, is on pace to come to market in 2024. I will, of course, share more specifics as they become formalized. At the moment, I believe that you should be able to pre-order it from the Kindle Store by Father’s Day, but there are many variables that can alter that timeline.

As for what you can expect, I’m sharing the manuscript’s Forward. I hope this paints a picture of what NE will be covering, and I hope it strikes your fancy to the point that you’ll be interested in reading it and putting in a good word in your book club for me.

Above all else, my greatest wish for 2024 is that you and your loved ones enjoy much-needed peace. You don’t need me to tell you how disruptive modern times have been (though, that’s probably why many of you subscribe ;))

Without further adieu, the Forward to my life’s work. Happy New Year, friends…

-Ed

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When I started this memoir in 2009, it had the working title “Losing My Religion: My Spiritual Journey from Altar Boy to atheist.” I had it relatively mapped out. I was going to use it as a vehicle to deliver my very personal and painful truth about growing up in the Catholic Faith in Northern New Jersey in the 1980s. I had always known my experience wasn’t “quite right,” to put it lightly. However, I still lacked the psychological maturity to understand how wrong it was and how it had painted just about every decision I had made to that point.

As would become thematic throughout my life, I picked up “LMR” often over two years and dropped it just as quickly each time. I focused on how so much external noise beyond personal experience drove me from the entire notion of faith and poisoned my belief in community. Religion was at the epicenter of the Middle East conflict that was beamed onto my television screen for my whole life. The 9/11 hijackers believed themselves to be martyrs. Fundamentalist Christians were bombing abortion clinics. Religion was at the backbone of archaic notions like not eating meat on Friday, not eating baby back ribs ever, or even drinking coffee in the more contemporarily created faiths.  

David Koresh and Charles Manson both had followings not that different than those of Joseph Smith or Jesus Christ if we want to be honest. What was so good about religion?

You didn’t need faith to be a good person. History has countless examples of that truism. Plus, faith and religion are two entirely different paradigms. Faith is an internal belief, a personal connection between a human and whatever that human finds purpose or solace in. Religion is a manufactured construct with manufactured rules and, most often, a manufactured power structure. It’s a structured system of people with shared ideas behaving within a hierarchy.  It’s Amway, but you don’t get your kickback till after you die.

I somehow thought this was both self-evident and a novel, unique thought.

As I realized there was nothing extraordinary about an overall disdain towards religion – at least when you’re not Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hichens – I put the pen down for a few years, chasing other literary tails. I had outgrown my narrative, so to speak. I was no longer the angry young man with an axe to grind against religion for reasons he wasn’t fully aware of yet.

But if I thought I was done with the story, the story wasn’t done with me by any stretch. It remained at the heart of every wrong or destructive decision I’ve ever made. Every drink I poured, every Marlboro I lit, line I snorted, check I bounced, triple cheeseburger I inhaled, relationship I ended, help I declined, and advice I ignored. (It also led to an awful lot of cannabis usage, but I’m not holding that against it just yet.)

As I migrated my career toward political journalism, the demons simmering below the surface began to boil. Covering both the #MeToo movement and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on Clergy Abuse made it impossible to wait any longer; I had to come forward about my abuse at the hands of Father Gerry Sudol.

And I came forward with ferocity.

My story was published at 9 AM on a Sunday. By noon, I had heard from dozens of names I hadn’t thought of in thirty years. By Monday, the church where Sudol was in residence was identified and inundated with calls alerting parish staff to the fact that a predator lived on site. Before Friday, he was removed from the ministry and sent into hiding, where he chooses to remain today.

There was finally a purpose to the pain I had been suffering.

I believed I had the third act to “Losing My Religion,” though, with this hyper-personal focus, the working title shifted to “Nervous Exhaustion” for reasons that will be exhaustively discussed in the following pages. I was suddenly at the epicenter of a media hurricane.

Northern New Jersey has been a Catholic bastion for centuries. The immigrant groups that settled here in the late 19^th century pooled resources to build elaborate churches in their community. When I was growing up, every single town in Bergen County had its own Catholic Church. St. Francis and Ridgefield Park were no different.

So, this story resonated in ways I never could have imagined. With that came a sense of responsibility. I pursued a Survivor’s Bill of Rights through the New Jersey legislature. I gave interviews to outlets across the nation. I recounted my experience in my voice for major news sites. I had, in short, the coda to my journey into and away from Catholicism.

With an intimate look inside one of the most wide-reaching scandals of the 21^st Century in the New York City area, I knew I had a story to tell: beginning, middle, happy ending.

One small problem existed, though: my healing journey was only beginning. And it would become uglier and darker than it had been at any point in my life to that point.

When the spotlight dimmed and my proverbial fifteen minutes were up, I was left to confront that my identity had undergone a metamorphosis. My nascent psychological journey – having received a Complex PTSD Diagnosis - was uncovering how my entire life since I began puberty in the George H.W. Bush administration was painted by acute and repeated childhood sexual abuse.

Whereas I was once the boisterous, larger-than-life alpha of all conversation and organizer of life’s fun and pleasure, I had reverted to a hurt and scared eleven-year-old trapped in the deteriorating body of an overweight dude amid a midlife crisis.

Then, when I finally felt like I found a path toward closure and moving forward, every last rule of society was changed seemingly overnight.

Eighteen months after I came forward with my experience, the world suddenly stopped. The COVID-19 pandemic forced me inside, alone with my wife, my dog, and my intrusive thoughts for what to this day can still feel like an eternity. My healing path was abruptly disrupted as even mental health professionals were unsure how to feel safe and secure when you’re being told the air you breathe can kill you or your loved ones.

The pandemic itself was a veritable Hall of Fame of my PTSD triggers: A failure of authority to protect its most vulnerable, impending feelings of doom, uncertainty, loss of control, betrayal. Through it all, a perfect boogeyman for the transference of my anger from The Catholic Church and their abusive priests.

In Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, I found a modern-day representation of everything I felt was responsible for the disappointments and failures that I had experienced in my life. They were easy and justifiable connections, and I took full advantage.

My demons manifested throughout the pandemic in ways that turned me into a shell of the confident speaker lobbying for victims to have their day in court before the New Jersey State Senate. Instead of that poised and centered man speaking to the leading local news correspondents of the area, I was a feral and bitter misanthrope on social media. No longer interested in putting my best self forward, I devolved into a scruffy, unkempt, binge-drinking caricature of every negative internal voice I’ve ever given credence to.

As time went on, nothing got better, only worse. Life-changing traumas seemed to arrive as often as the Prime Delivery sprinters. Losses of respect, jobs, teeth, dignity, sanity, and even life were the norm. I found myself alone, altered, and in an unfamiliar place, more than once, contemplating if it was still worth it.   

All the while, my trauma-twisted receptors were taking the knowledge of how PTSD impacted my life and using it to excuse away demons and behaviors rather than proactively working to build my life around accepting this.

To say I saved myself in the bottom of the ninth would be an understatement. I was well into extra innings when I began to put the pieces together. Five years of multiple therapeutic outlets, from the traditional to the experimental, with my cooperation ambling between all-in and pure lip service, finally began to click as I surpassed the half-decade anniversary of the first-person article that changed my life for good.

I finally began to understand that knowing why I behaved the way I did throughout 35 did not mean accepting that it would always be my lot in life. It meant that I could forgive myself for those manifestations and rage as long as I did the work to keep them at bay. More importantly, I accepted that there was never going to be a “The End, Exclamation Point” to my healing, that it would be a lifelong process like managing cholesterol or blood sugar or a bank account (three other things I need professional help for, but that’s beside the point).

And while I’ll never honestly know if I’m entirely “healed,” I’ve learned to accept tangible proof that my life is getting back on track and that train is finally moving forward. Being able to bring my life’s work that began as “Losing My Religion” decades ago is just that type of tangible evidence.

I have only two motivations for publishing this work. The first is unapologetically selfish – it’s become increasingly evident throughout my therapeutic journey that I will not be able to fully move forward before I give myself a transparent and honest accounting in black and white about the depths of my trauma. But the second one is a genuine desire to help.

I want to help anyone who may have reached this point in life, wondering why they can’t get out of their own way. To help those who beat themselves up for not being able to function in ways that society demands they do. Likewise, I want to raise awareness for those who love someone who has PTSD, to help them see that their loved one is more than the manifestations of their diagnosis – that the real them is in there, searching for a way to be heard and, in turn, accepted. And their path will not be linear. My only hope is that it’s more precise than mine was.

Finally, as I learned more about the bigger picture of widespread clergy abuse and the environment in which my peers and I were targeted – not just in New Jersey but in every Archdiocese in the US and beyond -  I couldn’t help but notice so many concurrent themes with the perception and lived experience of Generation X, of which having been born in 1977, I fit squarely in.

There’s a popular meme that we’re “The only generation who was 30 at the age of 10 and is still 30 at the age of 50”. It’s funny for a reason. Growing up in the shadow of the Baby Boomer generation, we were left to fend for ourselves in the fight for attention and attention. We were the victims of misguided marketing about drugs that sent us straight to the street corners and “Stranger Danger” that led us to believe our teachers, scout leaders, coaches, and priests were the ones to “trust” instead.

But you don’t see many revelations decades later about experiences in a “Free Candy Van.”

Yet the resiliency of our “whatever” mores gave us the knowledge and ability to call a spade a spade and flag bullshit the minute we see it. Whereas many Boomers were shocked and saddened at my revelation – understandable and appreciated responses – Gen X got to work. Sudol is never removed with the swiftness and fierceness he was without an army of Mama Bears who grew up with his many other victims and me.

They weren’t beholden to their parents or their parents’ parents' well-intended but clearly toxic fealty to beliefs deemed irrelevant and implausible centuries ago. They lived the experience. They knew boys like me. They dated boys like me. Some believe they were aggressively treated by St Francis altar boys and long suspected their premature sexual aggression was tied to the Reverend Gerard E. Sudol.

You can’t bullshit Gen X. Father Gerry fucked around in the 1980s, but he found out before it was too late.

So much of my story is the story of my generation. Understanding how my cohorts sandwiched between the oxygen-devouring Boomers and larger-in-numbers Millennials and our distinct environment and unique circumstances growing up post-Vietnam/pre-tech boom is not unrelated to the way clergy abuse was allowed to flourish.  

I hope that by the end of this book, that will be understood, and our overlooked age group can finally get the respect it deserves.