cianaf

[cianaf]

I’ve never had a reason to be bitter before. But over the last month that’s what I’ve been. If you’ve followed my tweets at all you’ll have noticed the tone changed, it’s been undeniable since I unfollowed everyone. I really dislike being this way. It’s not something I can just switch off though. There’s a level of stress that I’ve been under the past month that has made it so I can’t sleep and I’m just mad all the time for 10 different reasons I can’t fully get into.

I’ve never been bitter before because I’ve always been the source of my own problems or I haven’t had anyone specific to blame. When I couldn’t walk or had to do months of rehab I got depressed, but not bitter because there was nobody to be mad at. I was just unlucky for years.

When I do something wrong I own it. It’s on me so I don’t have a reason to be bitter. I don’t lie about it and I don’t deflect blame. When I do something wrong I want to pay for it. I want to redeem myself and fix relationships/apologize to anyone I did anything wrong to. I’m proactive. I literally flew across an ocean once just to fix something with someone. I’m bad with guilt so I always want to fix relationships rather than get mad at someone.

So when someone tells me I did something wrong I listen.

But when someone tries to blame me for something I didn’t do or punish me for something I’ve already paid excessively for, I’m not going to just take that and eat it. That’s what happened a month ago. I haven’t done anything wrong since ESPN, but a person(/people) involved in that want to keep punishing me for it and portraying me as something I’m not. And people who weren’t involved in that incident want to appease those people for their own benefit while lying to me.

It’s easy to paint me as the problem because of my public profile, a public profile that is very different to the reality of who I am.

I have not argued for myself at all over the last 15 months. I was too busy hating myself and didn’t feel like I should defend myself to anyone that mattered because I had done something wrong so everything that came my way I deserved. I wanted to do everything right, I wanted to be the person who could act as a guide to how to own your own failings. I stayed caring about other people and was functional without being mad at anyone else because every negative could be traced back to me and my failings. I wasn’t bitter. I had no reason to be bitter.

But the past month I’ve been bitter. I haven’t done anything wrong and I’m being ostracized/punished again. I’m treated like I’m a leper, like I’m poison and contagious. Anyone who deals with me is tainted. That’s confirmed as much by the people who want my career to be over and are actively trying to make that happen as it is by the people who privately support me but publicly keep a distance.

There’s really no way for me to fight that. I can’t unlock a door that is bolted shut with someone else's key.

I’ve given up trying to fix my relationships/career, I’m moving on. But now I want to actually defend myself, my character and my integrity. I would understand if one encounter was enough to make me evil if I had raped someone or sexually harassed/assaulted someone or said something racist or attacked someone, but I didn’t do any of that, so I have to start believing in myself as a person again because otherwise, this bitterness is going to continue to prevent me from sleeping. I don’t like who I’ve been the past month, I really liked who I was the prior 13 months.

Here’s a list of things I did over that 13 months that make me feel good about who I am as a human being:

- I had and still have no memory of the night I got in trouble. It’s why I don’t have any specifics to tell people. I only know what I was told. When the HR person called me on the phone and told me I’d made someone uncomfortable, I resigned before he could finish the sentence. The HR person tried to talk me out of it “It’s not like this was something sexual” but I said it didn’t matter. I had made someone uncomfortable and I needed to pay for that with my job because I was out of control. I was the first person to say I should lose my job. That’s fucking powerful. Everything hit me like a tonne of bricks and I didn’t try to escape it, I stood there and encouraged it. That doesn’t matter to a lot of people, but the number of people who would do that is minimal. I’m glad to be in that minority because I’d rather be a good person without a dream job than a shitty person holding onto a job I didn’t deserve.

- After that phone call, I immediately contacted my agent, told him what happened and told him to publicly fire me because I didn’t want to drag anyone down with me or negatively impact his relationships with anyone else. He refused to.

-ESPN told me they weren’t going to say anything publicly. I could keep this hidden and pretend it never happened if I wanted to. I chose to acknowledge my ignorance, own it and apologize publicly. That was the right thing to do and the honest thing to do. I couldn’t remember anything to give specific details but I was also encouraged not to because that would drag other people into it and some people noted that media coverage websites tend to sensationalize things for clicks because, like normal media, it’s a dying industry.

-From there I didn’t know what to do. In Ireland if you have a problem you try to resolve it with the people involved. So I did that. That was apparently a bad decision. But I didn’t know so I tried to apologize and mend the relationship with the only person I knew of who complained. We had a back-and-forth where that person said it wasn’t a big deal and they didn’t want me to lose my job.

-After that I spent my time explaining myself to anyone in the industry who had associated with me. I explained what I had been told about what I did and how it was my fault. Every single response (some people didn’t respond at all) said it wasn’t a big deal and that they were good with me.

-Multiple friends in the industry who I reached out to offered to help fix the relationships with the people who had a problem with me. I told them not to. I didn’t want to bother the people involved any more than I already had nor did I want to drag anyone else into something that could negatively impact them.

-The only thing left to do was to leave people alone. I stopped tweeting/DMing/emailing people I previously had relationships with/thought were my friends. I only interacted with the people who approached me for the most part. After a couple months, I deactivated my account for the offseason so as to not inadvertently bother anyone. At this point, I had no idea what to do so leaving made the most sense to me.

-When I came back I started a podcast with people I considered friends at the time. I told them on multiple occasions to tell me if anyone had an issue with me being associated with the show. I told them that if anyone had a problem that I would drop off the podcast or not attend the live show. All I wanted to do was flip the narrative on me personally while focusing on my work. They lied to me and told me nobody had any issue with me until last month when they claimed guests had refused to do shows because of me and I made people uncomfortable. That’s fine, but I didn’t do anything wrong this time. They didn’t even ask me about anything I did, they didn’t even tell me I did anything but tried to sell it as if I’d been a problem. If I had that’s on other people because I didn’t do anything this time even though it’s easier to blame me by default.

-Over the last 13 months, whenever I’ve met anyone new in the industry and developed any kind of relationship with them I’ve explained to them what had happened and what I did. It was a weird way to start relationships with people but it meant I was coming from a place of candour and nobody could accuse me of misrepresenting myself.

-I’ve had opportunities to leverage information against other people to help myself and I haven’t done it. I don’t use people. Anyone in this industry who I was good with I treated them and saw them as a friend who I actually cared about. Unfortunately, using people is a personality trait for success in this industry. I’m glad that it’s not something I ever did. I never asked someone to put me on their show or used the information I have to take other people down, something I can still do, but have no desire to do.

This is how I reacted to being told I did something that I didn’t even remember. Who else has done anything close to this level of accountability? Especially for something that isn’t even scandalous or newsworthy. Maybe the reaction is irrelevant, I actually said that to colleagues who reached out to me after this happened. They told me they respected me more for my response, I discounted that because I didn’t want to have any reason to feel better about myself at that point. But it’s true.

I have done nothing but be honest with people and hold myself accountable for my wrongdoings. It’s frustrating to watch truly bad people being celebrated/protected by the same people who take the moral high ground on me, but I’m proud of who I am at this point and I can only control me so I’m gonna get over that. From what I can tell, pretty much everyone who is ever accused of doing something wrong goes on the attack or gets defensive/denies doing anything. 

That wasn’t me. 

From day one, this was me:

I’ve taken responsibility for things I don’t even remember and had no control over. That’s enough. I’m not going to let other people determine the narrative of who I am anymore. They don’t know me. They just had one bad experience with me at a point when I was struggling more than I ever had.

Have I been perfect since? Of course not. But who is. The only real drama I’ve encountered has come from me standing up for friends and I’ll do that every day of the week.

Good people do bad things and they feel bad about them. Bad people do bad things and they keep moving. They don’t carry that weight with them for months. They don’t learn from it or suffer it at all. The fact that I’ve spent this long processing this and doing everything I can to fix it tells me that I’m a good person. But it’s also going to turn me into someone I don’t want to be if I keep living like this. There’s value in moving on from your mistakes too, I’ve tried for long enough to rectify mine. I’ve spent enough time examining my conscience to know who I really am.

If my efforts to do the right thing are received poorly, then there’s little more I can do but try and do it right the next time.

The past year and a half has made me want to stop believing in people and trusting people. When you see (former) friends talking about you behind your back and lying to your face or just completely dismissing you, it changes your outlook on people. There’s probably a lot of naivety on my part in those relationships, but I’d rather be naive not using people than cynical and using people.

Naive with good intentions is a lot better than angry and bitter, so I’m gonna take some time to get back to being that person. And part of being that person is standing up for yourself. Something I need to do more of.

[cianaf]

Airport Nonsense

Sat in this chair. It’s the same chair I was sat in 15 months ago in the departures lounge of JFK. Back then it felt great. I had just finished 10 days in New York, one of those days I had spent in Bristol where I had six meetings in three hours that laid out the plan for my career at ESPN. Starting with the podcast and radio and working my way up into a bigger role.

Everything from that week was great.

This week wasn’t bad either. It was my mother’s birthday, a milestone, and she hadn’t ever been to NYC so we came here for a while. There was a dinner with fancy plates and small portions. She’s gone on to do some travelling, the rest of the family is already gone home and I timed my departure to fit with the NFL Game Week, more out of habit than necessity these days.

(Sidenote: Don’t ever stay in Midtown in NYC. If you do, stay as far away as possible from Times Square.)

I can’t recall the last time I wrote one of these. I’ve generally done one every six months over the last few years. I think the last one was 12 months after my surgeries, not sure though. Since then I’ve learned that Teddy Bridgewater’s surgeries lasted five hours total and he had two sittings. Teddy’s knee injury was supposedly the most devastating since Shaun Livingston’s. That put mine in perspective. One of my sittings lasted 14 hours and had four procedures. If Bridgewater’s was the worst since Livingston, do I have to go back to the Dark Ages? Sawing people open with a jagged blade while they were still awake.

My memory isn’t great at the best of times and the lack of structure over the past year has meant it’s hard to piece together the timeline of when I did what. I’ve travelled a lot this year too.

That brings me to the point of this I guess.

Quite a few of you noticed my twitter bio. Some of you freaked out, some of you wished me well and some of you didn’t really understand. It’s fairly simple. I haven’t worked properly since December 2017. I’ve been living off my life savings since then. (One of the silver linings of having to live at home and not being able to leave your house much is that you save up a lot of money.)

There were conversations about work in August but those were fairly quickly shut down. I have enough money to survive until February without needing to get a ‘real person’ job. In February I’ll have to get a ‘real person’ job and football will be on the backburner for the foreseeable future (probably permanently).

I get a lot of encouragement and positive messages from you guys and I appreciate the sentiment but I think you need to understand this isn’t something I have any control over anymore. It used to be about me proving my work but I don’t need to prove my work anymore and even if I do great work it’s not going to change anything. This also isn’t about me having issues with colleagues or anything like that, as far as I know I had solid working relationships with the people I did shows with and I’ve also addressed/apologized to the people I needed to address and apologize to from last year’s shit. None of them have specifically told me they have issues with me but that might be something they save for HR/bosses/other people. 

I can’t and don’t want to speak for other people.

So because it’s not about me working harder or me working on specific people, there’s nothing really for me to do. What’s happening at this point is I’m being defined by a mistake. Which might be perfectly fair. I’m not the one to determine that. I can’t be the one to change that perception no matter how hard I try at it. Like, you can’t sell yourself as a good person, why would anyone trust someone who does that? You need other people to do that. And I live on the other side of an ocean so nobody in this industry knows me well enough to vouch for me like that.

What I don’t want to do is wind up being resentful and bitter. And I’ve felt that coming into my thought process recently. It’s important for me to explain that.

I’m not resentful at a particular person or at ESPN. I owned all my shit and was the first one to suggest the punishment I ultimately got for it. Although at the time I also didn’t really think it would be a career-ending thing (fwiw: literally everyone who knows the specific details of this and who has talked to me says the same thing and most think I didn’t deserve to lose my job in the first place but they are all peers or former colleagues not bosses who actually make the decisions at these companies).

No, where this resentment is growing from is the fact that this wasn’t something I controlled. I still don’t even remember any of it to this day. I doubt I would want to at this stage. You have that PTSD and it manifests itself in depression, that depression is cured with an alcohol dependence that takes away who you are. You no longer show off your actual personality, you’re a bag of bones and skin stumbling around loosely, acting like nothing you would ever be outside of that influence. To me the people who met me while I was in that state still haven’t actually met me because that wasn’t me, that wasn’t anything that resembled me.

My nature is to own my own shit and I didn’t look after my illness properly. I was happy to pay for that because that was on me. But I fear that the longer I’m outcasted and the longer I’m not working full time the greater that resentment grows. That’s not who I want to be. There’s no fun or happiness with other people when you’re *that* guy in the industry.

So that’s a long convoluted way of saying that February is just when I switch into an even more part-time football analyst than I already am. I can’t focus so much on a career path that has a locked gate in front of it. I’ll still be doing the Patreon as much as I can and I’m not going to be able to find a job quickly so there’ll definitely still be content early in the offseason. It’s a change of direction and you might not even notice it.

But regardless, it’s better to be healthy and functioning properly than to be falling apart privately but together in the public eye. I’m not happy all this happened but I’m happy it didn’t continue on that path and turn into something serious. Who knows where it would have gone surpassed last year if I never woke up from that haze.

There are people to highlight/thank who I can’t point to because they are public figures and I don’t know if they want to be associated with me or not, but I do have to note the CTD guys (Zach, Tom, Jade and Amin especially) for embracing me the past year. Hot Take Route may not be the biggest deal in football coverage but it’s helped me laugh and enjoy my work again while also just giving me a sense of inclusion with people at a time when everyone else has pushed me away.

If 25 people reached out to me last year then 12 of them were CTDers. None of them have brushed past me being an idiot but they’ve all accepted that I wasn’t right at the time and been as good to me as I could have hoped for.

I’m not sure if I’ve publicly explained this before, I know I have privately to a bunch of people, but there were different groups of people who could be sorted by their reactions to me after I became a “scandal.”

1. People who used me for the purposes of their own careers. People who were higher up in the food chain than you but wanted to take from your work to make their work better or people who were lower on the food chain than you who were only dealing with you in the hopes you’d help pull them up. That group just cuts you out instantly. They are the business is everything types. You are tainted to them and only represent potential problems. Which is fine if that’s the way you live.

2. People who recognized that you can make a mistake without it defining you. Most of this group said things along the lines of “I don’t know what you did but I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t have done anything wrong on purpose.” I really appreciated those people. It’s a rational line of thinking regardless of whether they were right or wrong about me specifically.

3. People who simply didn’t care. “I don’t care what you did and nobody else will in a week.” My problem with that group is that I still care 12 months ago and people should care what you do because if you do something shitty it matters. You can’t just brush those things aside because while one doesn’t define who you are the culmination of the things you do does define you.

Some people made no effort, some people made an initial effort and a very small group of people made efforts that lasted months. And it led to some great conversations about life and the way in which it should be lived. I was baffled initially by the people who said their respect for me grew but looking back with hindsight I understand why they said that now. The line that sticks with me from those conversations is “Everyone makes mistakes but how you react to them is what actually matters.”

I should have moved on from this by now but I think it’s a good reflection of who I am that I haven’t. Because the person who does something wrong and just moves on is someone who doesn’t care that they did something wrong.

That’s the beauty of sitting in an airport for eight hours. It gives you time to sit down and throw all of this crap out of your head. It’s like that Harry Potter thing where he pulls the strings out of his head but instead of putting them into a pensive to remember them I throw them onto whoever is crazy enough to read these life posts of mine.

(He says “Harry Potter thing” to try and pretend he’s not a major Harry Potter nerd! Because you know *that* would be the embarrassing part of this post.)