On a childhood canoe trip, 12-year-old Brad Wetzler and his dad were thrown from their boat right into a raging Kansas river.
Wetzler’s father swam to safety, but his son was swept away.
When Brad got stuck on a submerged tree and believed he was drowning, he could see his father standing onshore, doing nothing.
After Brad was rescued and returned to safety by one other boater, his father dismissed all the things. “Stand up, son. You’re fantastic.”
Wetzler disagreed, seeing the incident as representative of a complete childhood of neglect and abuse. “And there’s a possible way I’d never be fantastic from that day forward,” he writes in “Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing” (Hachette Go).
A straight-A student and captain of the basketball team, young Wetzler appeared to have all of it.
In point of fact, he was “a thin, lonely preteen affected by anorexia, insomnia, and depression.” It didn’t help that Wetzler’s father often drank a lot the boy had to assist him to bed.
After college, Brad landed his dream job at Outside magazine and eventually launched a profession as an adventure author.
He traveled to exotic locales like Greenland and Russia and was published in periodicals including GQ, George, Men’s Journal, and The Latest York Times.
But all the time, Wetzler struggled with what he called “The Abyss,” the depression that periodically haunted him.
He took greater than 20 prescription pills a day, including Lithium, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Dexedrine, Fluvoxamine, Lorazepam, and Trazodone.
None of it helped, and shortly he began sleeping his days away and missing deadlines. His profession eventually waned, then ended.
He bought a shotgun, for what he called “obvious reasons.”
Wetzler searched for assist in the ways of Christ, even going to Israel to hike the 40-mile Jesus Trail.
He writes he was on “the trail out of Nazareth and into the following chapter of my life.”
But a PTSD flashback to seeing the “cold, blue body” of a friend who’d committed suicide sucked Brad right back into the darkness. “I used to be trapped in what David Foster Wallace called ‘our little skull-shaped kingdom.’”
Wetzler eventually found solace in Eastern traditions, which recognize life is “rife with suffering.” He became a yoga teacher and in India was given a rap on the pinnacle by a 100-year-old yogi, a blow that unleashed a waterfall of tears.
That might be explained when a therapist eventually diagnosed Wetzler with undiagnosed, complex PTSD which resulted from his emotionally barren childhood.
He continues to try to search out peace in his world, but perhaps the very best advice he received got here not from a swami but from a Boulder yoga teacher. She advised him to take control, saying “if someone hands you a steaming bag of dogs–t, hand it right back to them.”
