 Hi everybody, it's my name is Bondo, and this is the story of the gap that made me save my life. So I gave this version, or a version of this talk to my mobile, Austin Arales. Austin Arales? And I didn't put my name or Twitter or anything like that because it's, they're my folks, right? Which you guys don't know me, so I want to sort of appear and give this talk. I figure I should put some stuff in there, right? So yes, I put my Twitter handle and GitHub links. And by the way, we can do quite a great talk and thank you for finding out. Thanks for GitHub, it has made my life so much better. It's a steal at ten times the price. But so yeah, I was, I was putting this together and I didn't know where to stop, right? Do I put my email address? Do I put it like a link to my blog? But is that it, right? I mean is that who I am, right? Like I said, sign happens, there's nothing more. And he's not actually holding it in the way. But yeah, maybe it was Hemingway who said it best, right? That's what we do, right? We look at things. And he actually does drink up bitches. All this led me to the question that I think, who am I? We'll get to who I am in a minute, about 20 minutes. Let's start at the beginning with who I was. I used to be a husband, right? And this is what it used to be. I was actually a pretty shitty husband, you know. I worked too hard, right? I worked too late. I wasn't home enough. I demanded too much from everybody and gave back too little. I was a dad, or again, I am a dad. I was a pretty shitty dad, in fact. I'm like getting some pimes, right? Well, they didn't deserve it, right? Because they never deserve for you to be hard. They were hard enough, right? So I was complaining that I was too tired to play with my kids. They actually didn't believe it, right? I was complaining that I was too tired to be with them, so please. I went to bed. I yelled at them when they had spilled their milk, right? I could go on and on and on about my failures as a father. But I just believe in what I say. I was not a great guy. I would love to fulfill my ex-wife and say that it was your fault that I was a shitty dad. That's not the truth, right? I mean, don't be wrong. She's got problems. But, uh... But it was a little lie. It was a little lie. The biggest guy I don't know. I mean, she's not watching this, but... Yeah, no, that's a good song. I'm gonna say it. No, but it's true. We both had our problems. It's nice to say, about two years ago, I found myself in this big giant house. I worked so hard in this house. My whole family lived somewhere else. Well, not my whole family, right? There was still this guy. This is Haas. And Haas never stops moving. So that's the least blurry picture I've ever taken of him. That's actually life-sized. He's an enormous beast of a dog, right? And what's great is that he thinks he's about this big. He thinks he's like Chihuahua-sized, right? So he loved his favorite thing in the world, is to try and climb in your lap. He does it kind of ninja-style, right? We're gonna just take the one giant paw, like put it up on your leg, right? And then look away. You don't notice there's like a 30-pound foot on you. And then this goes over for the next five minutes, since he's actually sitting up on top of you. So, yeah, so Haas and I, we're sitting there, with him, kind of, on my lap, uncomfortably. And we were just staring at each other. Well, Haas was staring, right? I was sobbing, just incoherently sobbing. I did that a lot. It was really, really hard. I never see you through all this. But I didn't want to be dead, right? I mean, even with kind of the echoes of my children running through the house, infirmerating in my head, right? I was always doing the chicken shit to actually commit suicide and kill myself. But God, I wanted to, right? I just wanted to rest, quiet, something. Just stop, just stop. You get caught up in that darkness, right? You get caught up in this, it's like a terrible feedback, right? You feel awful about what's going on, right? And you want to try to fix it, but you realize it's all your boom time and all. So that makes you feel even worse, right? So then you want to just fix that one little piece and it just circles in and out itself. So I was stuck, I was stuck bad. I was on a program, right? Like, we fix shit. That's what we do, we fix shit for everything. So I figured, I can fix this, right? I mean, maybe I can fix my marriage, but I can fix where I'm at now, right? I'm going to do it natural style, right? I'm going to go through these quick little iterations. I'm going to make things better, right? So, yeah, so the first iteration. I call this the tequila iteration. I tried this for a while, but that's actually a bit tequila. It's a thing. You know, I felt terrible, so I would drink. And then I would feel bad about drinking, which would make me drink some more. And it would just keep going and going and going and going. And the worst thing was, I would have to take my kids to school every morning. I would go to my wife's house and take them up to school. So I couldn't even get like really good, like sick blackout, you know, wake up with no pants on, throw them away. Because I had to be mostly sober to take them to school. So most of my days would kind of start and end like this. That's also another real issue. That didn't work. So that's fine, right? One iteration, you know, scratch and go on. I tried meditation, right? On the advice of my therapist, right? She was a fantastic woman, and I really, really helped, and I don't give her nearly enough credit, but this was a really bad idea on her part. I'm sure meditation is wonderful for a lot of people. It probably would have been wonderful for me, but I was not in a place where it was helpful. Really all it did was show me how beautiful an asshole I was. I would, you know, I would sit there on the floor of a room, in those positions, kind of find her peace, and I would just get bombarded with these thoughts of failure and violence and arguments. It's almost as though a filter was removed, and I can see exactly how I had failed in all of these scenarios, right? It was really bad. So, yeah, it didn't work out so well. So now we have two failed iterations, right? What do you do? Richard Speckler, right? What went wrong, right? Well, none of those things worked, right? Things went from bad to worse quickly. Work was suffering awfully. I was seeking comfort in places that I should not and would probably do this in my life. I lost about 40 pounds due to serious depression. I couldn't eat, I just thought a few made me nauseous. It was awful. I was starting to hear voices, right? It actually got to a point where I had to go to sleep with headphones on and I would turn up the music as loud as it would go, right? Just because I had to have something drowning out, this craziness going on in my head. What went right, I was still alive, right? I haven't died yet and sometimes that's all you have. So what can we do to fix this, right? What way to improve the situation? That wasn't the question, right? Something had to be done as I wasn't going to make it. While all this was happening, you, my friends, tried to help. Each of you were in a unique way, right? Some of them were telling me that I was better off, right? I liked that Maio Speckler and I were good for each other and we were never good for each other which would have been a lot more helpful piece of advice than years prior to the course, but, you know, now was my chance to live the life that I wanted, live the life that I deserved and so I should be happy about that, right? The problem was that I kind of liked my whole life. I missed coming home to them and having them greet me at the door, right? I missed taking them to take baths and tucking them in and all this stuff that I would sometimes complain about. So some of my other friends didn't understand why I was having such a hard time, right? They never seen anybody go through divorce and be this affected, this negatively affected, right? I don't know. Maybe it's because I've never had a real true personal scratch in my life, right? I lost my grandfather when I was younger, right? And that was hard, but nothing like crazy that really kind of knocked me down. So maybe I just wasn't prepared for something like this, right? But not being able to be around my kids every day, right? That was about the worst thing that I could ever imagine. Some people gave this kind of advice, right? I call this the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else's advice, which actually sounds like really, really good advice as we try it. It's not. Please, if there's nothing else we can take away from this talk. The best way to get over someone is not to get under someone else. And never listen to anybody that looks like this guy. But they're my friends, right? And they love me, and they were trying to help. Slowly, just losing each other. They wanted things to be better for me. They wanted me to be better. They couldn't fix this thing, right? Strangely enough, that's where my community... See, back on slide three, the gun tequila slide, I was actually really irresponsible with my social media usage, right? I would post all kinds of, like, dramatic nonsense to Twitter and Facebook about how awful things were and about how hard my life had become. There's no real good excuse for that, right? Other than I was drunk and looking for attention. It was silly and it was stupid, but I was in a really bad way to suck on myself a little bit of the slide. But what happened because of that was actually truly remarkable. People began reaching out and began telling me their stories, telling me about how their voices sound and telling me about how much they missed their kids or telling me all kinds of other things, right? And people started sitting with me, finding me, asking me how I was doing. My acquaintances started to become friends. This is one guy who came out to me at the Stack Overflow Dev Days conference, right? Which is, I say the money, don't know. He introduced himself and said that he followed me on Twitter and he was really sorry that things were so shady. I had never met the guy before in my life. He just walked up and did that. It was amazing. Another guy introduced himself at a coffee shop that I worked at. And it kind of said the same thing, but he wanted to know how I was doing because he hadn't seen any updates in a while and wanted to know that I was okay. The same guy led me in a power depper from my laptop and I met him at his house and we sat there and just talked about stuff for like powers, right? It was amazing. Over and over and over again this happened. And I started to realize that maybe I wasn't going from this alone, like no matter how much it felt like I was going through it, I really wasn't, right? And that maybe I couldn't do it alone, right? And then maybe that was okay, right? That little step, that small little realization was kind of the nudge and impetus to get me started on something, right? Righteous cat, right? The next step was exchanging notes with CrossFit. This is my CrossFit gym, we're at CrossFit in Austin, Texas. CrossFit, for those of you who don't know, is a, and I wrote this one down specifically so I wouldn't mess it up, it's a cross disciplinary style of exercise that combines things like oblique weightlifting, body weight exercises, abuse and torture in ways that are very, very unique. You do things like this, right? Which is climbing ropes, I mean like who does that to you, right? And this, he's not being serious here, right? He's trying to not die. You can see the guy in the back, right? I think he's throwing up. It's what happens at CrossFit. You also do a lot of these, right? These are burpees. A burpee is kind of a combination of a squad like this guy over here, a push-up and a jumping jack, right? And sometimes that's all you do for your workout, right? They're an amazing exercise, right? When you're done doing, say, 100 of these in a row, right? There isn't a single thing on your body that doesn't hurt, right? Like your toenails hurt. Everything just ridiculously hurts. It hurts to think about how much you hurt, right? It's all a home. We have the same written on a whiteboard at our CrossFit channel. So failure happens at the edge of our experience, right? It's actually not there anymore, but just pretend it wasn't there. But yeah, so failure happens at the edge of our experience, right? I think that's true, right? It's easy to succeed at things you've done successfully in the past. That's not where failure is. For example, if I did 100 burpees in a row yesterday and you're asking me to do 100 burpees in a row tomorrow, I could probably do that, right? If you ask me to do 200 past the edge of my experience, I would most likely fail at that. I'm not a very polished presenter, and I'm not a very experienced presenter, so I looked up a lot of stuff on the Internet about making presentations. And the one thing that the Internet said is make sure that I point out my central point in a very obvious manner. So this is the idea of my central points in a very obvious manner. In my life, right, my life had turned into this feedback of failure is what I realized. My girlfriend, who became my wife, who then subsequently became my S.Y., she and I got pregnant while I was still in school. So planning, staying in school, with bus ads that were provided for the family that I had, I was super early home. My husband, who we've already discussed, father, I had quite literally become a friend and seen that everything that I touched just turned to shit about this house, right? But I couldn't really afford to leave my house, so we got things for upper, right? Within their eight years, there's still projects in that house that are undone, right? So handyman, failure. And the funny thing about failing, right, is that it's so easy. You fail enough and you start to convince yourself that you're going to fail at everything you try, right? So you don't try anything anymore, right? And when you do try something, it's been so long since you've actually tried to move you, right? You really can't help but fail at it, right? Which, again, just kind of reinforces your failure. There it is. And then you've all been sitting patient waiting. The amazing thing is that success. Same thing, right? When you succeed at something, it causes this positive feedback loop to start, right? And you can't help but get caught up in it, right? And that's what helps it. And the coaches gave me, right? They gave me something that I could succeed at and then helped me to succeed, right? So across the workout, it is very short and usually very short and intense. A typical workout is Fran. Oh, sweet Fran. This means that you do 25 pull-ups and then 25 thrusters, which is kind of like an Olympic lift kind of thing. And then you do 15 pull-ups, 15 thrusters and nine, right? And you time it, right? Crossfitters keep track of their Fran time, kind of like we keep track of our test coverage numbers, right? It's a big deal. And the first time you do a workout like Fran, you reach a point that's somewhere in the workout where you know that you're not going to finish the workout. You think you're not going to finish, or you're not going to do well, or you're not going to have a great time, like you know you're not going to finish, and you're going to die, and they're going to have to bury you out behind the gym, right? But that's what the coaches, along with another crossfit, say. Everybody finishes, nobody wins. They wouldn't let me quit myself. Matt, Aaron would literally get my face, and yell, come on, you're stronger than you think. Do it, one more, one more. And then I'd do it, and I'd have one more pull-up, and then I would know that I was going to die, and then they would yell at me again, and I had another one, and another one, and another one, right? And I walked in the gym, not being able to do a single pull-up. The gym workout was finished, right? I was sure I was going to die, but I felt wonderful, right? I had finished this thing that I knew, like I knew I couldn't do it, right? But here I was at the end, done, right? I felt like this guy, you know? I felt like the person that my kids think that I am. And that feeling, that feeling, it just couldn't help but spill over into other areas of my life, right? I started hearing Matt and Aaron in my head when things would go bad, and I would start to reach for Tequila. Come on, you're stronger than you think. It's become a bit of a monster to me. You're stronger than you think. I'm not really afraid to fail like I was, because I've seen my self-esteem, right? I've seen what I believe to be the edges of my experience, right? Other times I've seen that edge, right? And barely crossed over. And sometimes I've hit that edge, and had to be carried across it. These guys, and also not real, these guys coming up to me and asking me if I'm going to start coming back to me because they haven't seen me in a while and they're worried. Folks telling me that they read a tweet, or a Facebook post, and they're sorry, it's these cafe veterans, some group of folks who get together now and then to work on some stuff. Among these people here, some of my closest friends now, they reached out and took steps to help someone that was hurting. So my coworker, Charles, who has the greatest avatar ever, he and his wife invited me to their home when I started working with him. And they gave me lunch, and they gave me a feel of more than anything as a part of their family. This is the church I go to, and the pastor, when I was going through this stuff, sat down and listened to my story, right? And when I was done, he said, wow, that's fucked up. I'm really sorry. I should be not. So he said, you know, he mourned with me without judgment, and that's why I'm giving this talk. I couldn't find a decent nun, can't be in the language, right? But all of these difficult parts, you guys hold hands and see me cool my off, right? I mean, I'm sappy, but I'm not that sappy. I don't know what you're going through, right? But I do know, maybe your job sucks, do you think you're a failure? But I do know that at some level, it's all just feedback, right? And just like feedback can be an instrument of evil and torture, it can also be an instrument of awesomeness, right? Sometimes we just need a little kickstart. So we urge you to encourage the fake heart to help the weak. Sometimes it all takes. It's a little encouragement, a little help. Try to be that for each other. Help each other, be patient, encourage one another. Really? It's been about 20 minutes. So who am I? I'm still a father to these guys. These are, life are, the greatest children in the world. I apologize to all the other parents in the room, but it's true. These guys sing my life. In fact, they become my life in a way that the units sing more. They're the first and the last. And I love them more than life itself. They have a kick-ass job. And freedom to leave work early and pick up my kids after school and spend hours with them before their mom gets off the board and picks them up. And it's a math, and I realize that I spend more time with my children now after the divorce than I did before with them living in my house. That's kind of sad. But it's true. But in case there's this admin kind of down there, Adam, looks a little too serious. This is him rolling around the floor at a last-team meeting, playing their guitar. It's what we do. This is Kiki the Clown, who is the CrossFit mascot of the University of Nebraska. I've had this stuff away from CrossFit for a little bit, not because I impute every time I work out, but summer is kind of weird. Kids schedule is hard to keep going through the channel. But I'll never forget the lessons I learned and I'm going to get back there as soon as I can. It's like I'm here talking to you guys. I couldn't have done this a year ago. This is me on my birthday. And that's Lindsay Collins. My buddy Will got us like VIP passes to his show at Austin City Limits. And we made it up to the front row and then Bootsy Collins comes down into the crowd and he's actually holding my head. If you can see that on the side. And he might be trying to give me a kiss. I'm not sure but it was amazing and the entire audience loved it except for that guy. I don't know why he hates me so much but it was amazing and afterwards it seems to me having a birthday. Bootsy Collins saying he had a birthday. That's the most amazing show I've ever been to and it's my greatest birthday in my life. So this is me have a fantastic life wonderful kids key guys job and friends that would go heaven and earth to help me. Nothing else. And you're awesome too. Don't forget that. You're not alone either. We're all here to help.