A journey of growth, thanks to radio.

I am a peace-love-hippy type complete with the ponytail. Those that are new, you’ll figure it out soon enough :). From day one, we have been about acceptance, understanding, sharing knowledge, support, and learning that we are worth it. If you need someone to berate you, attack you, make you feel stupid\lazy\broken\failure, then you are in the wrong place. This club got started because we saw the ugly side and it wasn’t working for us. If it wasn’t working for us, it probably wasn’t working too well for a few other people. Yes, there’s a really nasty, cruel, demoralizing world out there. There’s also a part of it between our ears, thanks to a lifetime of conditioning us into thinking we are the problem. I’ve learned over many trips around the sun on this rock that being the peace-love-hippy isn’t a bad thing. I wasn’t always this way, I still get anxiety and guilt over who I was and presented to the world in the past. That anxiety and guilt keeps me grounded. I hate to paraphrase Nickelback but it is how I’m reminded of who really I am: a human work-in-progress. You know what is missing, though? Shame.

I grew up in a Cathoholic … errr … Catholic household. Now, I know Catholics didn’t invent shame, but I’m pretty sure they perfected the weaponization of it. And that is exactly what Shame is. An external weapon. A taught vs innate emotion. Shame is control. Shame is oppression. Shame. Is. SHIT. Other emotions are good and not good -I refuse to call an emotion “bad,” shame you are the exception, you suck – we either project out or lock inside. Shame is an emotion that comes from the thoughts we have about how someone else thinks of us. It might be inside, but it starts outside of us, usually a young age. When shame is weaponized, it is used to control us, to force us to punish ourselves. We know that no matter how mad the partner or parent or boss is, they cannot punish us nearly as well as we can do it to ourselves. They know it too. It is a double-barrel hit of punishment: we beat ourselves up and they get to be disappointed or mad at us so not only are we getting all this bullshit inside telling us we are garbage, but we get it full in the face, too. To compound this, shame we feel is based of a perception of what we believe someone else is thinking and feeling about us. We don’t know the reality, nor do we know the motivation. We cannot, we are not them.

Bear with me, I have some touchy-feely shit to get through and I promise, I will relate it to radio. See, there’s even a picture of one.

See what I did there? I don’t even know you yet I have already assumed I know what you are thinking. We do it all the time. There’s no way I can know what you are thinking, I just know how I think I would be thinking if I was you thinking. Too many thunks in that sentence, but that is the point. You are unique, just like everyone else, to everyone else. No one sees you the same as someone else or how you see yourself. They cannot. They are not you or the person next to them. They know what they see, what they feel, what they touch, what they smell, what they hear. Those are all “they,” not you. Some may say they “witness” you, but witnessing implies a relationship to truth. What is missing is the part of what they perceive that could separate truth from belief: motivation. Motivation is a slippery little bastard.

You are sitting outside on a lovely summer evening, staring at the most beautiful sunset of the year. Or, you spot a doe with her fawn across the road and you just cannot take your eyes off it. Does the sun care you are staring? How about Bambi’s mom? Is it creepy? Is it full of ill intent? Does the sun feel threatened by you? What if instead you were staring at your attractive neighbor? Different, right? I bet they would have a feeling one way or another. Maybe they are creeped out. Maybe they feel threatened. Maybe they are aroused. Their reaction is based off what they are guessing is your motivation, and those guesses are based off their life experiences and trauma, not yours. Your thoughts could be “damn, they are good looking but why in the hell are they wearing those ugly Crocs?” Awkwardly, you notice you got caught staring and all thoughts of the Crocs are gone, replaced by embarrassment – shame – for getting busted, even if why you were looking was innocent. Their perception of you, their thoughts around your motivation for staring could be “crap, where is my pepper spray!” Your belief that you know what THEY are thinking – and it isn’t good because staring is considered shameful – just turned innocence on its head. You made them uncomfortable. Or did you? You don’t know, you are not them. Stop selecting damaging validation from others. I’m not saying stare at everyone, that is kind of creepy :). I’m saying when you feel the need to punish yourself based off what you believe someone else is thinking, stop. Think about what YOU are thinking and be real with yourself. If you are in the wrong, admit it. Record it mentally. Do better next time. The moment is already gone, carrying it with you for the rest of your life is as useful as carrying the binky you had when you were an infant: it doesn’t make sense.

So how does this all relate to radio? Where am I going with this? Toxicity in the hobby and the damage it does. We’ve seen it, some of us more than others. It can anger us, depress us, shame us. I’m early GenX, I was an awkward, weird, annoying boy at the height of the 70’s CB craze. I had two friends in the neighborhood, Robbie Baker who would camp out with me in the front yard summer nights in my little pup tent, talking about BJ and the Bear, Smoky and the Bandit, The Dukes of Hazzard, Convoy and pouring through Heathkit catalogs by flashlight with our little Channel 14 RadioShack walkie-talkies. The other friend, Ricky Thompson, his dad had a CB base station with a massive vertical antenna in the front yard. His dad? Not a friendly guy. Looking back, I realize that his issues probably started with serial abuse as a child (passed on to my friend on the daily), fleshed out someplace in Southeast Asia from things no one should have ever seen, and piled on by coming back with no marketable skills but a whole shitload of trauma. When I was 9, he just scared the shit out of me. We’d listen to Ricky’s dad talk to other men when they moved from Channel 19 over to 14. I remember his handle was “Ipana.” If you are boomer or early GenX, you might recall that was a toothpaste brand. Always thought it was a stupid handle, especially since Ricky’s dad had no teeth. One night, full of Reese’s cups, grape soda, and more courage than self-awareness, we – and by “we” I mean “I” – keyed up when they were talking.

That went as well as you are probably assuming. He shredded me. Ripped three new openings in my backside so I could take a dump in four directions at once and proceeded to point out every single thing about me that was weird, awkward, and annoying. The list was long. Most was accurate, I’ll admit now. At the time it scared the shit out of me. I would still listen, but I never touched the PPT again, even when the guys and I played war out in the woods and brought the radios with us.

My obsession with radio was shelved when I got my first dirt bike a year or so later. The experience with Ricky’s dad pushed aside for a KX-125 and a Bell helmet. Motorcycles stuck with me until I became and EMT, but that is a story for another time. What I didn’t realize is that fearful, demoralizing experience with Ricky’s dad was still there decades later, but now it brought its friend Shame with it. Those two bastards came very close to me leaving the hobby days after my callsign posted in the ULS.

It was March 2020. We all know what was going on then. I was a volunteer EMT with a rural ambulance service. There was talk about things maybe getting locked down. Everyone was stocking up on things they never thought they’d need a metric ton of (and probably didn’t need a metric ton of but humans are flawed). The world – as least those who had critical thinking skills – was concerned, but not yet scared. My wife only watches horror movies, with zombies being the genre of choice. Yeh, we knew where this could be going. We prepped early and better than most. With that came the thought of comms. Being an EMT, I was tapped into the county, but not the world around me. I thought about those Heathkit catalogs and was saddened to find out they shut down decades ago. So like any intelligent person, I got a Baofeng UV5R (hold on while I get my tongue out of my cheek) and prepped for my Tech exam. A week of memorization and I passed it. I was on the radio all the time with the rescue squad, getting on the air with 2m was in the bag. Problem was, that bag was wet and what was in it was heavy. I have ADHD. My brain works faster than my mouth and my ears. I struggle with annunciation and retaining audio information. To make that bag a little heavier, the county used Able Baker phonetics from WW2, not NATO. Shame ripped that bag wide open the first time I keyed the mic. I went to say “KC1MUR – KILO CHARLIE ONE MIKE UNIFORM ROMEO” and what came out was “KC1MUR KING CHARLIE ONE MIKE UNCLE ROGER” sounding like it was spoken by a mouth full of Novocain and gauze. The immediate response was “Whoever is calling that doesn’t know how to talk, stay off the radio. Stupid mush mouth retard.” That night in the tent in the yard hit me with a force I wasn’t expecting. Though I was alone in my car, no one could see me, the shame I felt was overwhelming. I shut off the radio, got out of the car, and just stared at the woods for a while. I collected myself eventually, got back in the car, and thought “I’ll just turn it on and listen, no harm in that.” Ever notice when you say “no harm in that,” it’s a lie? The conversation on the repeater was about how newbies need to stay off the air and let the adults talk until they get out of Special Ed. Off went the radio. When I got home, it went in a box. It stayed there for 3 years. I still wanted to be involved in radio. I bought more. I programmed them. I turned them on. And off. I made antennas. I built interfaces. I spun up a dedicated computer and a dedicated laptop just for radio work. I spent money and time towards a hobby I was petrified to be a part of.

All this time, I watched the world burn. I watched our President belittle people like me. Belittle people not like me but struggling like me. People who didn’t deserve this shit. People who were just trying to get to the next day. Anyone that wasn’t him. And something broke inside. I realized my avoidance was self-medicating. Self-medicating with anything is at best a fleeting solution. No one wakes up one day and says “you know, I don’t want to be happy, successful, and at peace. Nope, I really want to just watch shit go sideways.” Yet we do it anyway. Self-preservation is a powerful instinct, but it can cloud our judgement. We draw the link between our present days’ emotional triggers and painful past experiences. We are confronted with a painful gap between our intellectual understanding of our situation and how we continue to feel and react to life. We live in a culture that encourages fixing things as quickly as possible, the fallout be damned, and we desperately try to make the flaws and holes go away. There’s a line in the Shinedown song “Symptom of Being Human” that goes “pack up all your baggage\place it in the attic\where you hope it disappears.”
TRUTH.
We react with what we know has given us relief – if only temporarily – in the past. The primal part of our brain isn’t all that up on the whole planning for the future or long-term ramifications thing, it just cares about getting through this current crisis. The more we try, the more we do, the more frustrated we get. We continue to cycle back and forth between resenting our past and fearing our future. In the quest to calm the demons, we end up creating more of them. I needed to stop beating myself up for my lack progress, my death grip on shame. It didn’t matter if I could have done something different or made better choices sooner. Both of those were false, a shameful illusion. The truth is, I could not change until I could.
Neither can you.

Every single moment of our lives, we are doing the very best out of what we know, what we’ve experienced, and what we have just to survive to the next moment. The resentment, depression, despair, addiction, the destructive eating, the dysfunctional relationships with people and objects, are all serving a necessary – usually with unhealthy ramifications – function and have a reason to be there. They are our survival strategies; without them, we would not have been able to keep going. Saying in bed all day because you just can’t get outside of your head sucks, but you made it through the day on this side of the grass. That’s a win. This may sound like an excuse or enablement, but our resistance is nothing but a result of years of conditioning that had led us to believe pushing hard and being self-critical is the only way to improve anything. Just because that was how we got to where we are, doesn’t mean that’s how we need to stay here. There is a way out, it just doesn’t always appear with big arrows pointing at it. It can take time to slow down, wipe the crap away, and see it.

You might have seen this before: be the person your dog thinks you are. That’s wrong. You are the person your dog thinks you are. You just don’t see that person. To your dog, you are the center of their world. You are the most important human on the planet. You are the core of all they trust, all they love, all they depend on. You are already that person, you just need to see it too. Of all the perverted, malignant manipulation of this planet humans have done, dogs just might be one of the few things we almost got right. They trust you even when you don’t trust yourself. Cat people, I’m sorry. Your tiny terrorists are different. When humans tried to domesticate them, they looked as us and said “THE HELL YOU WILL” and proceeded to domesticate us. Don’t look at me like that, you know it is true. :).

The more we learn to accept, forgive, trust, depend on, and understand ourselves, the closer we come to peace. That means we need to cut ourselves some slack when we make a mistake. We need to look at ourselves and recognize that one poor choice can lead to many, but no matter how many we make, what we do is not who we are. What people think we are is not our reality. We matter, not despite all our flaws and inconsistencies, but because by having them, they are our force to move forward. We can learn just because what we did today wasn’t successful, it is over, in the past, and other chances to do things different are in front of us. We can look at ourselves each day with compassion for ourselves instead of despair. We need to learn growth is not linear, that peace cannot exist without first recognizing discomfort, if there was nothing ever wrong, there’d be nothing ever right. Find the simple successes in each day and bask in them.

When I finally accepted that it was shame – not some impossible personal failing – that put that radio in a box, I moved forward. This is where digital data and digital voice modes became my vehicle on the road to internal redemption. I started first communicating with Winlink and APRS bots. At first it felt lame, then I recognized that while I was talking to a bot, I was also getting used to syntax, operation, and actually using my radios for something beyond sitting on chargers. I moved to APRS\Winlink email and SMS messages – mostly to my wife as one would do with their best friend – until I had several different setups capable of doing so in just about any situation. I should mention that I’m an introvert – ISFP – and this does tilt how I use radio. I have no desire to DX, collect contacts, contest, or do activations. I don’t find it enjoyable. I rarely speak in any situation without a purpose that means something to me. Others are not built that way which is why the hobby is so great. After tackling data, I discovered DMR. This was huge for me. No, I still won’t rag chew with a stranger on the other side of the world, but I will check in on nets now. Having the name and the callsign right there in front of me on the screen, holding it with my eyeballs, removed half of my key fright. I no longer have to stress about trying to understand, retain, and recite a callsign that my brain is hellbent against while formulating what I’m going to say. I will even respond to a CQ if someone is doing SOTA\POTA, but only if no one else is keying up. I’m getting there. I’m perfectly aware of being imperfect. Oh, and I use the NATO phonetic now :).

All of the above is why helping Todd get AARN off the ground became a mission for me. I hope that I can use this community of like-minded hams to help me go the next step: having a conversation on the radio with someone. We both hope you know just how much it means for each of you to have come here.

KC1MUR – Scott