Rainman on a Jukebox

The soundtrack of becoming who I was supposed to be—then figuring out who I actually am

I have this weird ability to hear a song and immediately remember where I was, who I was with, what I was drinking, what I was wearing and, depending on the year, probably what cologne I had practically bathed in. It’s like Rainman on a jukebox. Play the right song and suddenly I’m seventeen again: Polo cologne, Tommy Hilfiger, Wilson Phillips, Shania Twain, Bone, Thugs & Harmony… maybe some Beyonce, Lady Gaga… too much confidence in some areas and absolutely none in others.

Another song comes on and I’m in my twenties, working my ass off, partying too much, living alone, trying to figure out who the hell I was while simultaneously doing everything possible to make sure nobody realized I hadn’t figured it out yet. Then another song and I’m somewhere completely different. Michigan. A restaurant. A first date. A funeral. Moving to Metro Detroit. Getting Married. Buying a House with PROPERTY??? In therapy? Contemplating the purchase of depends… (Don’t ask about that last one!)

That’s the funny thing about getting older. You don’t really leave all those versions of yourself behind. They’re still in there somewhere, tucked away with the music, smells, places and people that belonged to them. Sometimes all it takes is one song to bring one of them back to the surface. And after 48 years, I’ve accumulated a lot of songs.

Track One: The Kid Who Talked Too Much

I was an effervescent kid. That’s probably the best word for it. I was outgoing, social and very, very talkative. If you dug through my old report cards, I’m pretty sure “talks too much” appeared often enough that it could have qualified as my academic concentration. I wasn’t the kid hiding in the corner. I was the kid who’s desk was purposefully placed in the corner away from everyone… (4th grade, Mrs. McNanny’s Class) I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to be involved. I wanted to tell you what I thought about it and then probably tell you what I thought about three other things before you had a chance to respond. Some things haven’t changed.

By most standards of growing up in the 1980s and early ’90s, I’d say I had a pretty All-American childhood. Technology meant a television, a VCR, maybe a camcorder if somebody’s family was fancy, and a microwave that still felt slightly futuristic. We went outside. We disappeared for hours. We drank out of a water hose and yeah I tricked my sister into eating dog food. I even taught her to pee like a boy… I caught hell for that one. Save that one for another blog. We entertained ourselves. Nobody could track us on an app, and somehow we all managed to survive.

From my perspective, I had a great childhood. Mostly. There were also things that happened that forced me to grow up earlier than I probably should have. There are parts of that story I still don’t talk about very much. It took me decades to talk about some of it at all, and I’m okay leaving it that way. Not every piece of your life has to become public property simply because you decide to tell your story.

What I can say is that I learned independence very early. I learned how to keep moving and how to take care of myself emotionally. I also learned how to build walls. I became extremely good at fortifying Tyson. When something got too close, there was another wall. When something hurt, another brick. When vulnerability felt dangerous, add another layer. Eventually you become so good at protecting yourself that people stop realizing there’s anything behind the protection. They just see the fortress.

I also spent a lot of my childhood trying to please my father. I wanted to prove myself to him. Even now, I’m not entirely sure why I felt that need so strongly. There wasn’t some little voice in my head saying, “Tyson, today we’re going to spend eight hours seeking paternal approval.” It was just there. Be impressive. Do well. Stand out. Accomplish something. Maybe that’s where some of my drive came from, or maybe some of it was always in me. Probably both. Looking back, he was jealous of me. The circles that I ran in and knew from my affiliations through various school programs were the circles he wanted to be a part of so badly. He took that out on me. He took that out on my mother. Again, another blog entry… or therapy session.

Back then I thought I’d eventually go into politics. Seriously. I figured that was where my life was headed. I liked leadership. I liked people. I liked getting things done. I liked convincing people that my idea was the correct one, and clearly I already had the talking part down. Politics seemed like a natural fit.

Life, apparently, disagreed.

The ’90s

Jesus, I miss the ’90s. Polo cologne. Wednesday night church groups. Wilson Phillips. Shania Twain. Tommy Hilfiger. Aftershock liqueur. Malibu Rum. Coors Light. Some of those things aged considerably better than others.

During my teenage years I excelled in Boy Scouts and the Explorer Post with the Kwahadi Indian Dancers. It gave me the opportunity to travel all over the country and experience things a lot of kids my age never got to experience. It also made me grow up quickly, although by then I had already gotten a head start on that.

I wasn’t someone who sat around waiting to be invited into a group. If there was somewhere I wanted to belong, I found a way in. Sometimes I forced my way in. Not literally. Usually. I wanted people to believe I could do anything. I wanted to be seen as a leader—a good one, a fair one, someone capable and dependable. More than anything, I wanted to excel at everything. EVERYTHING.

My biggest insecurity was my weight, and that stayed with me for a long time. Decades, really. But I refused to let it stop me from doing anything. If I wasn’t going to feel confident about how I looked, then I was damn sure going to give people ten other reasons to notice me. I’d achieve. I’d lead. I’d perform. I’d talk. I’d make people laugh. I’d do whatever needed to be done.

Somewhere underneath all of that, I already knew I was different. I knew it long before I was a teenager. It’s hard to describe that feeling because there isn’t always some dramatic moment where the sky opens and everything suddenly becomes clear. Sometimes you just know. There’s everybody else, and then there’s you.

I was friends with everyone, or at least I could talk to everyone. But being friendly with everyone and belonging somewhere are two completely different things. There were the people I wanted to belong to, the people I thought I belonged to, and then there were a few people I knew I belonged with.

I didn’t understand that distinction then.

I do now.

The Survival Years

My twenties weren’t really about success. They were about survival. My parents were getting divorced. My mom moved to Michigan. I wasn’t literally abandoned or completely on my own, but emotionally it felt like something underneath my feet had shifted. Most of my twenties I lived alone.

I worked. I partied. Then I worked some more so I could afford to keep partying. I had landed in hospitality while I was in college, and it turned out I was good at it. Really good. Restaurants made sense to me. Chaos made sense to me. People made sense to me. The pressure, the moving pieces, trying to accomplish one hundred things at once while making it appear that everything was completely under control—that worked for me.

Politics slowly disappeared from the plan. Hospitality became the plan I never planned.

My twenties were also when I came out. Really came out. I started discovering that part of myself and what life looked like when I stopped pretending it wasn’t there. I had my first gay love during those years too. Looking back, I’d probably call it puppy love, but puppy love feels pretty serious when you’re the puppy.

There was a lot happening during those years. A lot of working, partying, experimenting, figuring myself out and occasionally making decisions that were spectacularly stupid. Eventually the partying got to a point where moving to Michigan was probably one of the better things I could have done.

There are pieces of that time that could probably become an entire blog by themselves. Maybe a book. Maybe several chapters that should remain sealed until everybody involved is dead. We’ll see.

I also made one decision during that period that I genuinely thought would define me forever. It was bad, and for a while I believed that one mistake was going to become the thing people saw when they looked at me. Eventually, I decided I wasn’t going to allow that.

People love saying things like, “I wouldn’t change my mistakes because my mistakes made me who I am.” I don’t buy it. There are mistakes I would absolutely erase if I could. That doesn’t mean I hate the person I became. It means I don’t believe every shitty thing that happens has to secretly be a gift from the universe. Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. Own it. Learn from it. Apologize when an apology is deserved. Move on.

What I absolutely would not do back then was let anyone see vulnerability. Vulnerability was weakness, and weakness was dangerous. If people knew where you were vulnerable, they knew where to hurt you. So I showed confidence, capability, humor, energy and leadership. Party Tyson. Hospitality Tyson. I’ve-got-this Tyson.

Meanwhile, the guy underneath stayed behind the wall.

Somewhere in My Thirties

I don’t think I became truly comfortable being myself until my mid-to-late thirties. That’s a strange thing to admit because I had always been confident. Sometimes almost absurdly confident. But confidence and self-love aren’t the same thing.

Eventually, I had to learn how to fall in love with myself. All of myself. Not the résumé. Not what I could accomplish. Not the version of me who could work eighty hours and still say yes to another assignment. Not the guy who made people laugh. Me.

That takes longer.

At least it did for me.

I’ve never felt like I needed to apologize for existing. I’ll apologize for something I’ve done when an apology is warranted, but who I am? No. I’m not apologizing for that.

One thing that still feels strangely unresolved, though, is friendship. I’ve always wanted real friendship. That best-friend kind of friendship people talk about. I’ve had people I cared about deeply. I’ve had people who were incredibly important to me. I’ve had friendships I thought would last forever.

Most didn’t.

People drift. Lives change. Sometimes there’s no fight, no betrayal and no dramatic ending. One day you just realize the person who used to know everything about your life now knows almost nothing about it. That’s a strange kind of loss.

I’m slowly coming to terms with the possibility that maybe the “best friend” relationship I’ve always imagined isn’t something I’m going to have. I don’t say that for sympathy. It’s simply something I’ve started accepting.

I’d like to be wrong about it.

I’d still like a friend or two when I’m sixty, preferably someone who enjoys good brewed iced tea and doesn’t turn out to be an asshole.

At this age, standards are important.

Valentine’s Day, 2014

Now cue a completely different song.

Valentine’s Day. 2014. I had just been dumped. Again. Things were going swimmingly.

So naturally I did what any emotionally mature adult would do and announced that I was NEVER DATING AGAIN. Very dramatic. Very final. I deleted all my dating apps.

Well…almost all of them.

Apparently even when I make sweeping declarations, I leave myself an escape hatch.

That night, I got a message from some guy ten years younger than me. Jonathan Winn. He messaged because we both had roots in Texas. We talked, and eventually we planned a date.

I showed up two hours late.

Two hours.

Nothing screams “future husband” like making somebody wonder whether you’ve died somewhere along the highway.

And yet, we’ve basically been together every day since.

Marriage taught me what sharing a life actually means. Not just sharing a house. Everything. Space, money, plans, fear, success, bathrooms, farts, conversations about farts, open bathroom doors, very little personal space and enough indecisiveness to test the limits of marital devotion.

You learn how deep an argument can go, but you also learn how deep forgiveness can go. Jon has seen me through some of my lowest moments. He’s watched me change careers. He’s watched me walk away from things I once believed defined success. He’s seen parts of me almost nobody else gets to see.

We’ve also had moments where forgiveness mattered. Real forgiveness. That’s something nobody puts on the wedding invitations. Marriage isn’t never hurting each other. It’s deciding what’s worth repairing.

We’re a team. That’s how I think of us. When something happens, it isn’t me versus him. It’s us versus whatever happened. And there is something incredibly powerful in knowing you have someone to come home to. Someone who loves you as much as you love him.

For somebody who spent years constructing walls, that’s a hell of a thing.

The Career Track

My career could have gone somewhere completely different.

At The Cheesecake Factory, I worked my way up through the ranks incredibly fast. I became part of the group that rewrote the server training program, and I was on a fast track toward leadership. The philosophy behind much of it was simple: the word NO did not exist.

Need something? Yes. Another shift? Yes. New responsibility? Absolutely. Seventy hours? Sure. Ninety? Why the hell not?

I loved it. For a while.

Then I became an uncle. I fell in love. Suddenly success wasn’t as simple as climbing whatever ladder someone put in front of me. I had to decide whether I wanted to keep climbing or whether I wanted to build a life that actually had room for the people I loved.

The company even offered me a management position in Shanghai as an incentive to stay.

Shanghai.

Younger Tyson would have grabbed that opportunity before the sentence was finished. Instead, I chose home. I chose love. I chose a life that had room for something besides work.

Eventually that led me to CJ’s Brewing Company.

Do I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I stayed on that other path? Of course I do. Maybe I’d be some huge hospitality executive now. Maybe I’d have lived all over the world. Maybe I’d have some impressive title and more money.

Maybe I’d also be completely fucking miserable.

There’s no way to know.

What I do know is that I don’t regret CJ’s for one minute. I love what I do. It became home. There is something incredibly satisfying about building systems, developing people, taking an idea and watching it become something real. I love watching a place run like clockwork.

Working with the public will also teach you some things about humanity. People can be mean. Really mean. But they can also be extraordinary.

At some point, you accept that you can’t make everyone happy. Do your job. Do it well. Take care of people. Give them your best. Ninety percent will be happy.

That’s what matters.

CJ’s gave me something I never expected: a sense of ownership in something I don’t technically own. I’m proud of it because part of me lives there.

The People Attached to the Songs

Then there are certain people who will forever be attached to particular periods of my life.

Carolyn Waters in junior high taught me to be who I wanted to be and do what I wanted to do. I entered history competitions with her and won them, because apparently even as a child I couldn’t just participate.

Linda Lowe in high school let me be me.

That’s a bigger gift than it sounds.

And then my mom. Her unconditional love and unwavering support have followed me through every version of myself. I’m 48 years old and I still feel it.

You don’t outgrow that.

There are other people whose names I don’t need to put here. Some people belong inside the story without needing to become part of the publication.

And then there are the people I’ve lost.

Chris.

Mikael.

Two close friends. Both to suicide.

I still don’t know what lesson I’m supposed to pull from that. Maybe there isn’t one. I think about them. I miss them. And there will probably always be that question somewhere in my head: could I have been there another time? Could I have said something? Could I have called?

Grief loves questions it refuses to answer.

So I’m not going to turn their deaths into some inspirational paragraph about appreciating every moment. Sometimes the truth is much simpler.

I wish they were here.

That’s it.

Family, Time and the Parts That Fade Out

I’ve never had a huge family, and I’ve always wished I did. There’s something about those enormous families that fill a house at the holidays. People everywhere. Too much food. Children running around. Three simultaneous arguments. Someone still pissed off about something that happened in 1987.

Part of me has always wanted that.

The older I get, the more I worry about the family I do have drifting apart. I don’t like thinking about it. Maybe because I’ve watched friendships do the same thing.

Someone goes from being part of your daily life to someone you talk to every few weeks. Then birthdays. Then Christmas. Then maybe nothing.

Time does that quietly. And at 48, I’m much more conscious of time than I used to be. I’m not old, though. Let’s make that very clear. Actually, I think I’ve become pretty damn good-looking. I genuinely think I’ve gotten better with age. That’s not arrogance.

Well, maybe a little.

If somebody who knew me at ten, seventeen, twenty-five or thirty-five saw me today, their first reaction might be, “Holy shit, Tyson isn’t fat anymore.”

Their second would obviously be, “Still devastatingly handsome.” My personality hasn’t changed that much. My body has.

My eyesight is getting worse. Hair has started appearing in places where nobody requested it. Hair that is supposed to be there keeps changing color. My sex drive occasionally appears to be working part-time. And my ability to fart has apparently entered its Renaissance period.

Aging is elegant. But strangely, I feel younger.

I think it’s because I finally feel comfortable in my body. For most of my life, weight and appearance took up far too much space in my head. Losing weight didn’t magically fix everything, but it showed me I could do it. It also made me appreciate myself differently.

I’m not afraid of my body anymore.

That’s a pretty good feeling.

The Current Playlist

The things that matter to me now are different.

Large crowds? I’m good.

Trying to make a name for myself? Don’t care.

Trying to impress everybody? Sounds exhausting.

My seven-year-old Doberman matters. My quail matter. If you’d told twenty-five-year-old Tyson that forty-eight-year-old Tyson would become emotionally invested in a covey of quail, he probably would have laughed at you.

And yet here we are.

The funny thing about middle age is that you don’t necessarily become boring. You become selective. There’s a difference. You stop asking whether something looks impressive and start asking whether you actually enjoy it.

I’ve learned that happiness is something you’re responsible for. Other people can add to it. Other people can absolutely damage it. But ultimately, you’re in charge.

Success? Hard work, but achievable.

Love? Hard to find, worth finding.

Loyalty? More valuable than gold.

Money? Necessary, but nowhere near as important as I once believed.

At twenty-five, I thought one day I’d be rich. Now? Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.

I want to be comfortable. I want to travel. I want my home. I want Jon. I want my mom. I want my dog. I want my ridiculous birds. I want a friend or two.

And I want considerably fewer fake people.

That’s starting to sound like wealth to me.

The Song Keeps Playing

Getting older scares me. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. It’s coming faster than I’m ready for. The thought of losing my mom scares me. The thought of losing Jon scares me. Losing my relevance scares me. The speed of time scares me.

But aging has also become strangely freeing.

Every year, I care slightly less about things that never deserved so much of my attention in the first place.

That’s a pretty good trade.

And every now and then, a song comes on and suddenly I’m back somewhere. I’m a teenager again. A twenty-something. A guy sitting alone in an apartment. A guy partying too much. A guy working too much. A guy desperately wanting to belong. A guy falling in love. A guy losing somebody. A guy choosing home over Shanghai. A guy standing in a brewery looking around and realizing that somehow this became part of his life.

Then I’m 48 again, looking in the mirror and thinking, you know what? I actually like him.

Not tolerate him.

Not manage him.

Like him.

That’s probably one of the bigger accomplishments of my life.

If Sixteen-Year-Old Tyson Were Sitting Here

If I could sit across from sixteen-year-old Tyson for five minutes, I’m not convinced he’d listen. He’d probably be talking.

Again, some things never change.

But if I could somehow get him to shut the hell up for sixty seconds, I’d tell him that he’s going to become really good at building walls. He’s going to convince himself they’re necessary, and sometimes they will be. But I’d tell him not to mistake protection for living.

I’d tell him to learn how to talk about himself. Tell somebody when you’re hurting. Tell somebody when you’re scared. Tell people when you love them. Tell them when you need them. Not everyone deserves access to you, but somebody has to get through the gate.

I’d tell him he’s going to lose people. He’s going to make mistakes, and some of those mistakes he’ll wish he could erase. Some friendships he thinks are permanent won’t be. Some people will change his life and then disappear from it.

I’d also tell him that he’s going to discover love immediately after announcing that he’s never dating again. He’s going to walk away from opportunities that younger him thought were the definition of success. He’s going to become an uncle, a husband, a hospitality guy instead of a politician, a guy who helps run a brewery and, inexplicably, a guy who raises quail.

His life isn’t going to follow the plan.

Thank God.

Because somewhere along the way, he’s finally going to figure out something much more important than how to impress people.

He’s going to learn how to like himself.

Maybe that’s what getting older really is. You don’t erase the old versions of yourself. You don’t pretend the bad tracks never happened, and you don’t rewrite the playlist until everything sounds perfect. You let all of it exist.

The loud kid. The insecure teenager. The guy desperate to belong. The twenty-something who thought vulnerability was weakness. The ambitious guy who couldn’t say no. The man who fell in love. The man who learned forgiveness. The man who lost people. The man who finally decided his own happiness mattered.

They’re all still in there.

Sometimes a song comes on and one of them shows up. I let him stay for a while. Sometimes I laugh at him. Sometimes I’m embarrassed for him. Sometimes I’m proud of him. Sometimes I miss him.

And sometimes I wish I could reach back through the years and tell him that he’s going to be okay. Not because everything works out perfectly. It doesn’t. He’ll be okay because eventually he’s going to stop spending so much time trying to become somebody else.

Then the song ends.

Another one starts.

And I keep going.

Rainman on a jukebox.

That’s probably me.