Life on the one yard line

When everything has been going downhill for years and you have almost nothing left to lose.

Sometimes folks write me and tell me a bit about their lives.

Some folks are really in a very difficult situation after many years of suffering.

They spent their savings on treatments that they had high hopes for, which let them down.

They were unable to work for stretches of time because of health limitations and when they did it was at a fraction of their capability. Which in turn limited their earning potential.

And so now they are in a position that I like to think of as “life on the one yard line.”

They are just living to survive.

Most of their hope has been crushed by past promises made by dentists and medical practitioners. Promises that always turned out to be false.

Today’s article is dedicated to these folks.

I had a glimpse into what that life looks like… and it honestly scared the hell out of me.

We all start out thinking life is gonna be good

When life first starts out and we’re kids we like to think we all have a pretty good shot in life.

Study hard, work hard, do right by people… and life should work out ok.

We can all potentially be the President one day. Or found a great company. Or at least make a difference and be happy.

That is kind of what we’re brainwashed to think in most developed countries.

So we all start off with this amazing hope and plan for our lives.

We think of the achievements we’re going to have in our career. The amazing family we’re gonna have. etc.

But for some folks things head downhill quite early

For many folks these days things start heading downhill quite early.

There are so many people i’ve met through our community and various DM’s who were already experiencing major health issues in their teens.

Often triggered by extractions, orthodontics, etc.

And all of a sudden they had to stop thinking about the future because they were having too many problems right now.

They were already on defense.

Going to doctors, taking various pharmaceuticals (eg. antidepressants, etc), and making excuses for why they weren’t able to push ahead.

They probably thought there was something wrong with them.

Perhaps it was genetic?

Perhaps they attribute it to some bad event or stress that happened in their lives.

Usually everyone comes up with some type of strategy to attribute their problems to logical reasons that make sense to them.

And it’s rarely things like dental work.

Things just continue to trend down for years

The problems for a lot of these folks i’m talking about don’t seem to go away.

Rather they get worse and compound.

They never get out of the blocks and perhaps need to continue living with their parents.

Some are not able to hold down real jobs.

Inside they perhaps feel like they’ve let their parents down. Like it’s their fault. They tried their best but it wasn’t good enough.

I honestly did not know what that felt like in the first couple of decades of my life. As I worked hard, got good grades, got a good job and generally got out of the blocks in life pretty well.

It wasn’t until 2014 when I was 37 years old that my big problems started because a TMJ dentist in Vietnam had filed down my back teeth and everything started to spiral down.

After awhile i was in the thick of it. My health was going up and down for the next 7 years and it was impacting all aspects of my life.

I needed to start coming up with excuses to justify why I’d all of a sudden seemingly turned into a loser who couldn’t hold down a job.

That was the situation I was in when this pic above was taken around 2018.

After moving my family to Boston in 2017 I already needed to move again in mid 2018. Because my health made it very difficult to sustain a relatively senior position in a political, US company.

And then I found myself struggling soon after I arrived in Moscow in 2018. Turns out dealing with politics and high pressure bosses in a foreign language isn’t any easier than doing it in your own language lol.

Each night I came home and looked at my son. And thought to myself how I was glad he wasn’t yet old enough to understand how his father had essentially become a loser.

Instead he looked at me like the hero.

And that gave me hope on those dark days to keep pushing forward.

Finally you’re at your own one yard line making your last stand

I consider mid-2020 my one yard line stand.

My health had been going up and down since 2014 (7 whole years).

My parents were tired of hearing me talk about teeth. My mother’s husband literally banned from talking about it in their house.

My marriage had a lot of issues as my wife was frustrated at what was happening with me and our lives as a result.

My now 6-year old son still wasn’t developing correctly and had major sleep issues despite ~5 years of trying lots of things.

And it was with this backdrop that I found myself in Bangkok, Thailand in a job that was completely the wrong fit for me (at least for the state I was in).

I’d done it again… moved my family into a situation that was not going to work out.

I’d already leveraged pretty much all of the contacts and goodwill I had left the past seven years to keep my career going. And now there was nowhere to turn.

And with all this happening I was probably in the worst shape i’d been healthwise since 2014 (the year all of this stuff had kicked off.)

I wanted to cry but there were no tears left.

There was no empathy to turn to. Nobody who understood that I’d just expended more effort the past 7 years than i had my entire life to essentially just go downhill anyway. And I was exhausted from it all.

When I left my job in Thailand in late 2020 I decided I was going to figure this “teeth thing” out once and for all and wasn’t going to take another job till I had.

So that’s what I did. I reviewed all my journals and writings from the past and started retesting everything.

Sometimes you throw a 99-yard touchdown

From late 2020 to late 2021 I iterated on all of the stuff I’d done in the past.

I got out my old tools like the ‘tracking splint’, the clipons, my trusty dental drill, articulating paper, etc.

I reviewed all my old notes about the curve of spee, a lingual bite, etc.

And it all started to make sense again.

It’s like i’d been in a haze for years since 2017 or so. Because everything I was concluding from my experiments were things i’d concluded before (back around 2016).

But I’d forgotten it because of all of the dentists i’d gone to in those intervening years (I particularly consider that I went in circles with ALF from about 2017-2020).

This time I was gonna leave all dentists out of it. I was gonna leave the thoughts of my old friend, Marcello, out of it. I was gonna do this purely based on logic. The Ken way.

And I was gonna derive the true rules to this game once and for all… or honestly I was done for.

And that’s exactly what i’d done by Fall 2021.

I threw a touchdown from the one yard line after having taken a lot of hard hits for about seven years.

Closing thoughts

My story today is about hope.

Because I know there are a lot of people out there that have either started this process or are about to start this process and probably feel like their lives are at the one yard line.

Many of them have probably even been through a lot more than I have.

Some of them never even had a chance to get out of the blocks in life and rather feel like they’ve been treading water since their teenage years.

I want you folks on that one yard line to look up and look downfield one last time. And throw for that end zone with everything you got.

Because this journey is not easy…

…but at least in my experience it is so very worth it.