Words From a True Friend

I was tumbling down the rabbit hole that is YouTube a few days ago and I watched some scenes from the movie, Good Will Hunting. One of the scenes that I really love is the scene where Ben Affleck’s Chuckie Sullivan tells Matt Damon’s Will Hunting that he dreams of the day that Will decides to leave town without a word and take advantage of his intellectual gifts to pursue something better in life. It is a truly powerful and heartfelt scene. And while I do not come close to possessing the intellectual abilities of Matt Damon’s titular character, I too was once chided to move along and get after something more in line with my abilities.

At the end of the 1997 spring semester at East Carolina University or ECU, I returned home for the summer. My love life, such as it was, was in the crapper following a painful breakup (for me anyway). I didn’t have a job for the summer, so I applied for a position with the parks and recreation department in my coastal hometown. I was hired and my boss was a gentleman that knew me from my days as a Boy Scout. His son and I had been in the Boy Scouts together and we hung out together on occasion in high school. Having previously worked for a few years as a light equipment operator and a maintenance mechanic for the local county parks and recreation department, I was very comfortable with my new duties. The money wasn’t great, but I wasn’t planning to make a career of it. It was just going to be a summer job.

Admittedly, it was tough coming home to a relationship that had ended. But aside from the opportunity to see my family and friends and being back at home in my beachside community, I had baseball and my teammates. This was to be my second season with my team, the Wilmington Braves. We had improved throughout our first season and we were a stronger team in 1997. Playing ball and hanging out with my teammates really helped me to get through that summer of 1997.

In addition to the breakup, my father and I had our struggles in getting along with each other. My mother had passed away a couple years prior. I am certain that I was probably more difficult to get along with than usual that particular summer. In addition to the breakup, I was also dealing with financial stress relating to school. It had taken some time for me to figure out what I wanted to do in school, I had attended a handful of schools before settling in at ECU, and I had used up my federal financial aid eligibility. I was unable to get federal financial aid for the upcoming school year. As I recall, I was approximately 18 credit hours shy of meeting my graduation requirements. I wanted to return to school to finish, but I didn’t see a path forward. And heartbroken as I was, I was kind of treading water at best. I wasn’t exactly feeling motivated and hopeful.

One day I was approached about transferring to the town’s sanitation department. I wasn’t planning on making it a career, so I agreed to the transfer. I had emptied plenty of trash containers and cleaned plenty of public restrooms in my working life, so I certainly didn’t feel that such duties were beneath me.

I wasn’t exactly flush with cash. As I told an attractive, young, middle school art teacher with whom I had a few dates, I wasn’t making the kind of money a union sanitation worker might earn in a big city. She was pretty cool about my financial situation. She once called me back and invited me to go with her to the county fair on her dime after I had previously begged off because I was broke. The relationship ultimately didn’t go too far. Truth be told, she would have been a rebound girlfriend had things continued between us, even though she was nice and very attractive. I actually had another young woman tell me earlier that summer after she kind of blew me off, that she knew that I wasn’t over my previous girlfriend. I guess I wasn’t fooling anyone.

Love life? Crap. Home life? Crap. Career life? Crap. I had fun during that summer, but I was hardly thriving.

One Saturday morning after Labor Day, I was getting ready to put in a half-day of work cleaning up around the Boardwalk. The gentleman that had hired me for the parks and recreation job asked me what I was doing. I said that I was working. He asked me why I wasn’t back in school. I kind of brushed him off and said that I needed to work. He responded to that statement with a declaration that I needed to return to school. He told me that there was no shame in the work that I was doing, but he said that I was capable of more. He concluded by informing me that if I was still there in a month, he would get on my case. True enough, he saw me working there approximately a month later and again let me know that he didn’t think that I belonged there.

Not long after that, a friend from college informed me that he needed someone as a teacher assistant in his Behavioral-Emotional Handicapped (BEH) classroom. I applied, was hired, and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina for my new job. The pay wasn’t much better, but it was more in line with my educational background and experiences at ECU. For a time, I also worked part time at a sporting goods store and I occasionally donated plasma for cash. I managed to take a few classes during a summer session at ECU. In the summer of 1999, I moved west to work construction in the Southern California desert east of San Diego. I dug out of the hole financially and saved up some money so that I could return to school in 2000. In 2001, after being on the “ten-year plan” at ECU, I finished my requirements for an undergraduate degree. Years later, I would earn a graduate degree via a distance learning program.

I currently drive a tractor-trailer for a living after holding a number of jobs including white-collar jobs and working as a manager. Considering that I live in a small, rural, Northern Illinois community, it is a good job. I couldn’t get the kind of money that I was earning in North Carolina before I left by continuing to work as a fitness and sports performance coach. Not without owning my own facility. And I couldn’t wait to make that happen. I needed to make a living.

I am grateful for that gentleman that encouraged me to move out of a dead end situation. Truth be told, I needed a nudge to get “unstuck.” My friend offered me a job, but without that nudge I don’t know if I would have pulled the trigger on leaving town and moving on to something else. I suspect I might have languished there on the coast for months or even years. And life is relatively short.

I strongly encourage you to check out this scene (click link below) from Good Will Hunting and maybe share it with someone that perhaps needs a nudge. And maybe watch or rewatch the film.

[NOTE: The original video is no longer available, as the account that posted it is closed. However, I have replaced it with a clip that contains additional scenes from the film that include Robin Williams and Minnie Driver.]

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“Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon that he has to move on | Good Will Hunting (1997) | Robin Williams”

https://youtu.be/nhWAlkqdmQo