Revival at the river

Two years ago this month, I was driving to Trenton. I was going to the N.J. Department of Transportation to pick up some stuff for a story. My stomach was roiling. I could feel my headache through my left eye.

"What the hell am I doing?" I kept asking myself.

Here I was, 40 years old, with a daily schedule of teaching classes at Rutgers University, a full-time job at The Record, coaching my son's Little League team and - the big one - going to classes part-time at Columbia University.

Oh, yeah, and I am a father of three.

I was trying to make up for all those years of "plateauing," of working long hours at The Press of Atlantic City and The Delaware State News and never really accomplishing much. I felt like I was trying to make up for it all in just one day.

That day, I taught a class at Rutgers. I answered concerns about the Little League team via email. I had to uncover a potential scandal involving school bus safety. And, that night, I had to go class - the second session of my first class - at Columbia.

I got to the Trenton Thunder ballpark and pulled the car over. I stared at the Delaware River. "What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I doing" I kept asking myself, over and over.

I called my wife. She got me a doctor's appointment. I wouldn't go to class that night. But I would finally get help for this panicking, this recoiling I always did in the face of pressure. It was the kind of thing that prevented me from reaching my potential.

At first, I rejected the idea. I was my mother's child, and I rejected all forms of help that would help my brain as much as they would help my body. My mother's fear of medicine helped bring about her slow, but steady physical deterioration that led to her death, in 2003. I didn't want to head down that same path.

I got help, and I did my two years at Columbia. They were probably the best two years of life. I found clarity. I found things out about me that I never knew. I learned how to build websites from scratch. I learned how to shoot and cut video. I started a book on my family's history of mental illness as part of a bookwriting course, and I got honors for the class. I learned not only how to write a book, but READ a book.

But it wasn't medicine or doctors or teaching that really brought about the change. I think of that line from scripture that was quoted in an important scene in "The Shawshank Redemption." It was the line that guided me as I endured taking classes, teaching classes, parenting and everything else.

Salvation lies within.