Ep 8 - A Series of Unplanned Detours w. L.T. Kirk

Jennie 0:05

Welcome to Traveling Companions Stories of Becoming. This is a podcast about the in-between. Those threshold moments when we can no longer go back to who we were and who we're becoming isn't yet clear. If you've ever stood in that space or find yourself there now, you're not alone. I'm your host, Jenny Snyder. A note before we begin. Kirk shared his story with real courage and vulnerability. And I want to honor him and his story by letting you know what's ahead. Parts of his journey touch on coming out and the conversion therapy that followed. He also shares his experience with suicide, a serious health crisis, and what it's meant to sit with his own mortality. If you're resonating with any of these experiences, there are people who have walked these paths. I've included resources in the show notes, including the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and the LGBT National Hotline. If you need to connect with someone, please reach out to one of them and know that you're not alone. Kirk, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, for your courage, your honesty, your authenticity. I am so grateful. And now, on to my conversation with Kirk. I am absolutely delighted to welcome my friend Kirk to the Traveling Companions Podcast. Kirk and I have known each other for the relatively short time, but it feels like a lifetime. And I mean that in the best possible way. I just like people that you meet in your life that you just feel an instant connection with. And Kirk is definitely one of those people for me. And so I'm really delighted. And Kirk also has the distinction of being my very first in-studio guest of the podcast. So Kirk, thank you for playing along in the sandbox.

Kirk 2:29

Thank you. This is fun. This is this is only the second podcast that I've ever participated in.

Jennie 2:34

So nice. So introduce yourself in whatever way you'd like.

Kirk 2:38

Okay. I'm LT Kirk. Um, everybody calls me by my last name. And um some of that was because for many, many years of my life I could not stand my given name. I've started coming to terms with it a little bit more. But yeah, just I hated people calling me Larry. So I started off with LT. And then when I was in ROTC in college, everybody is called by their last name. And that stuck for me. So it's always confusing when people are like, oh, wait a minute, Kirk's not your name, but yeah, yes, it is. I am a coming just at my one-year mark as an immigrant here in Portugal and figuring out a new life, as you can well attest.

Jennie 3:32

So, Kirk, we usually kick these conversations off with a framing question. And the question is, what was a moment in your life when you could no longer go back to who you were and who you were becoming wasn't yet clear?

Kirk 3:50

Yeah, I've been sitting with this one. And there's there's several, um several moments, really. Many of them actually centered around my sexual orientation and my upbringing in the Christian circles in very, very staunch fundamentalist Christian circles. And that's probably the most prevalent, still the most impactful today, even though I'm in the middle of one right now. Yeah, having left the US and no longer feel like that is my home, but not quite certain that Portugal is yet. But yeah, there have been several of those. Even there was one with my heart where that one made the most dramatic change in my life because it ended two careers almost immediately, and so forth. But like I said, it's really hard for me to focus in on just one.

Jennie 4:48

I think as I shared with you, it is hard because these moments are just depending on our age, depending on where we find ourselves in different situations, and sometimes they queue up. Yeah.

Kirk 5:01

Well, it's also I find it interesting that for a certain period of time after one of those moments, you find yourself kind of defined by that previous moment. And then the next moment happens, and then for a while you're defining yourself by that. And so now that I'm back in a moment of transition, I don't really know what the definition of me is.

Jennie 5:32

Yeah. As you think about those different moments and where you find yourself now, is there one that stands out for you?

Kirk 5:44

Yes, it's um it's so hard to think of where to take this. Um I really think that um it's probably it's probably more important to maybe go back to the beginning, to that first one that that I encountered. Um, and that was uh the time period in which I had to come to terms with who I am as a gay man and how that impacted my relationships, especially with my family. That was a really, really tough time. And I can't say that I always handled it the right way. Um, but you know, there was nobody there with a manual for me. And you know, and dealing with a family that it was very difficult, but at the same time, I was I was one of the more fortunate um of the you know the LGBT community, um, because so many just got ridden off, you know, and disowned and so forth. And my father was inclined to do that. Um, my mother stepped in and was just not having that. Um, you know, basically she said something to him to the effect of, you know, I don't like this any more than you, but if you drive my son away, I will divorce you. And you think having a gay son is bad for your ministry, wait till your wife leaves you. So um so my family chose to just stay in it and battle with me over it to, you know, eventually come to some kind of detente that that really didn't happen. It's so funny how I'm starting, just as we're talking, I'm starting to see how all the moments are connected to each other because the first time that my father started getting a little more understanding, a little more respectful, was when I went into the Exodus ministry um to try to uh do conversion therapy, imperative therapy, which is a horrible, horrible thing. But it was the only time in my life that my father was focused on me. And I'm 30 years old, and he's finally made his relationship with me a priority, and he witnessed what I went through, um, the suicide attempts and the you know the horrific parts of it and so forth, but that made a huge difference in pushing our relationship forward, which was really interesting, you know, obviously did not become straight, um, even though I graduated from the program. Um and my family still didn't agree with it, but um, I had at least earned a level of respect that, you know, look, I've been through it all now. And so I'm who I am, and you can either accept that or not, but I'm not jumping through these hoops anymore. Um, but it wasn't until the third major uh time period like that in my life, which was with my heart, um, that I collapsed at the gym. I contracted a virus and it destroyed over half my heart. And um, I collapsed at the gym, and my primary doctor disagreed with what the emergency room doctor concluded. He was saying that I was just having an anxiety attack. Yes, my heart was enlarged, but he didn't see that as a problem. Never understood that part. Um, but my primary doctor, who was at the same hospital, he calls over and he's like, No, I want him admitted, and I want a nuclear stress test run. And um, and so then after the nuclear stress test revealed that there was a problem, then they did a heart cath, and um I went into shock on the table. And um, when they woke me up, they told me that if I didn't get a heart transplant, I'd be dead in a week. And um, and so that was that was definitely a there's no going back, but is there even a going forward? But what it did um in relation to um my my life as a gay man and my relationship with my family, um was they got the opportunity to realize that you could be without me. And also it opened their eyes because my now husband, you know, we've been together for 20 plus years, and um at the time that all this happened, we had only been together for eight months, and my mother just assumed that he wouldn't stay and that I was gonna have to sell my house and move to Florida and live with them. And I was like, no, this one's for real. Um, that's not gonna happen. And over the next couple of years, they got to witness that and see that it even got to the point that um there was one night we were down visiting them in Florida, and um I stopped breathing. And my parents, of course, just fell apart, which was something that obviously happened with age because my parents had never been that way. They were both always great in crisis. Um, but to see their son unconscious and not breathing, that just was more than they could take. Um, and Donald just jumped right in and he started calling out commands, and he was like, you know, Helen, call 911, Willis, go get the office chair because they're not gonna be able to get the gurney back here. And he's just Johnny on the spot. And after I got treated and so forth, and then got released and came back to their house. My father asked Donald to go outside and join him at the fire pit and basically just said to him, I don't understand, but I see a true loving relationship between you and my son. And I'm grateful. So my mother's passed on now. My father is in the later stages, he's in hospice care now, but it was just encouraging for them to finally embrace in their apartment. There was a picture of Donald and I together up beside all my siblings and their spouses. Um, I heard my mother one time refer to Donald as my husband. Only once, but that's all I needed. So um, and there was quite a few times um, you know, over the last 20 years that uh quite frankly, I think they liked him better than they liked me. I'd go down to visit without him, and it was the first question. Where's Donald? Why didn't he really come? Yeah, so all of them, each moment has fueled into, and maybe even led to the next one, which then leads to the decision to move out of our home country. And there were a lot of reasons, lots of stuff. The political environment, and you know, no longer feeling safe and so forth, etc. But also, when I was younger, I'd always dreamed of living in Europe, but never even put any steps in place to try to do it. I'd come and visited, and you know, in college, I came over with one of my best friends and backpacked through Italy for two weeks, but um never even tried to make living here a reality. But it was funny that some of the catalyst had to do still with the sexual orientation, and that has been the overarching theme, it seems, in my life.

Jennie 14:34

Yeah, and when you kind of started to map out your journey, you said, wow, I'm seeing these moments connected. Yeah. And I'm curious, looking back over these moments, what are the connections that you see?

Kirk 14:53

One of the themes is always that that whole thing with my family and my sexual orientation. And in some ways, I hesitate to always harp on that because I'm more than just a gay man, but it seems to have been the predominant issue that I've had to come up against time and time and time and again in my life. Um but that first moment of realizing that I I can't keep pretending to be something that I'm not. Um, I have to be true to myself, I have to be authentic to myself. And and even at that moment, it was like, and if that damns me to eternity in hell, then so be it. But I just can't I'm living in hell right now. So I just couldn't keep going with that. But then that set me on a different course with my family, particularly with my parents. Um, but then then eventually, when I still had not, all I had done was rebelled and said, you know, I'm not doing this anymore. And I don't care what the Bible says, I don't care what you say, I'm gonna be who I am. But I had not resolved anything for me. And that's what led me into the conversion therapy. And basically, I had um, when I went into it, I had actually made a bargain. I put a fleece out, you know, as they would say from the old testament to God, and just said that look, I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna commit to the program, I'm gonna do what they say, and I'm gonna do the entire thing. But at the end, you either have to miraculously make me straight, and I'm not talking about where I've learned to modify my behavior. No, I need to truly desire relations with women and not with men. Or if that doesn't happen, then I am gonna take that as my as your stamp of approval that I am exactly who you made me to be. And this is never an issue again. I'm not dealing with this ever again. Um, and in so doing, it also empowered me to be able to say to my family that you no longer have the right to tell me that I'm wrong or living in sin or that I'm not who I was made to be. You do not have that right anymore. So it allowed me to finally take a sense of control and put up some boundaries that I didn't know I could put up. I grew up that your parents are your parents and they can say whatever they want to you anytime for their entire life. And so the one moment led to the next moment.

Jennie 17:55

And Kirk, as you're sharing that, just thinking about that bargain that you made and that declaration you made to yourself, this is who I am, to have walked through that. And you're just struck by the inner strength, or what was it that you had inside that got you through that?

Kirk 18:32

That's a good question. Um I think I think some of it came down to I I always had a strong sense of self. Um even when I was doubting myself or you know, so forth, I I just always felt like there's a purpose, there's a reason that I'm here. Um and I spent so much of my childhood trying to find that purpose in Christianity and religion and so forth. And you know, I've always been musical. Um, I think I was singing before I could actually talk, but but I was raised to be a music minister in a church. That was all I was raised to be. Um, and then of course the gay thing happened, and that went out the window. So, you know, trying to figure out, okay, well, then what else can I be? But I had reached a point that I knew I just had to put it to rest. I could not keep going through life unable to answer people when they're throwing scriptures at me, or um unable to gain my own peace, you know, in the light of so much of society opposing me just for being who I am. And um I guess there was a level of strength and so forth, but at the same time, I mean, I became so desperate, you know. I mean, I attempted suicide three times. And that was the first two times were not I won't say that they were more pleased for help. They weren't well thought out. The the third time should have worked, you know, but I can I can only say that that God intervened, you know, and because it it should have worked. And it didn't. And I used to tell the reason why it didn't, but I come to realize that, you know, if someone's listening and they are in a place like that, you you don't want to give them any ideas of how they might could go about something, you know. So I don't I don't discuss those methods anymore. Um, but you know, but I I I learned also when I was younger um that um if there's someone that wants to end their life, you will never get an opportunity to talk them out of it. If they've made that decision, you don't get to talk them out of it. Um, and that was why I also knew that my third attempt at it was was uh really intended to end my life because I made sure that there was no one that could rescue me. Um, I told no one that there I was even in that kind of state. I made sure that even from all the counselors and everybody that, you know, had a hand in getting me to this place. Um I made sure that I gave no indications to anyone. And when you go back to the strength of how did you get through it, it was a strength that I didn't know I had. Um, and it was, I can't even say that it was all my strength. It was it was a strength that came from somewhere else. So God, the universe, whatever, you know, whatever is out there, there was, like I said, I always had that sense that there was a purpose for me being here. Um, and obviously that purpose had not been fulfilled. Uh has it been fulfilled yet? Or am I fulfilling it now? I have no clue.

Jennie 22:56

But I'm just sitting here listening to you share that experience and just feeling the heaviness of it.

Kirk 23:08

It still makes me want to cry.

Jennie 23:10

Yeah, I see that.

Kirk 23:13

Donald Um couldn't understand for the longest time in our relationship. And then after I got sick, um, he was um well, he was still packing up my house because we I had an old house that needed lots and lots of work that I was trying to rehab, and I was never gonna be able to finish that. So we were gonna put it up for sale. He found um he found a journal that I was keeping during that time period, and um he uh he showed up in the hospital room, he had ripped one of the pages out, and I think he still has it in his wallet today. I'm not positive, but I think he does. Um, but he was like, You wrote this? This is this is what you went through, and yeah, and it was just it was just dark. And at first I was really upset with him. I was like, why would you rip the page out, you know? And um now I realize he needed that, he needed that understanding because it was an experience that he never had to go through, and your paths crossed beyond that. Yeah, it was interesting. I went um almost immediately from Exodus uh into an extremely abusive relationship with a man, and um and I stayed in that relationship for five years, and it was four and a half years too long, and um and oddly enough, it ended with him trying to stab me. Oh my god, so you know, and yet again, there was that strength from wherever came out, and I only one other time in my life been in a physical altercation with someone, and now I've got a person who is high on drugs and is coming at me with an iron cross and trying to lunge it into my chest, and next thing I know, the incredible hulk has just come out of me, and I came very close to killing him with my bare hands. Um, fortunately, my best friend got there and calmed me down and so forth, but I just went into fight or flight mode and it was fight. And then it was about three years after I sent him packing for the final time that my best friend picked me up from all day Saturday rehearsal and said, uh, we're going to a birthday party. Okay, sure, whatever. Whose party are we going to? Um, I was not invited to this party. You know, he hates me. And he was like, Yeah, I wasn't invited either, but we're crashing. Like, okay. Did I mention that he hates me? We get there and we're standing in one corner. I'm trying to be as just inconspicuous as possible.

Jennie 26:36

Exactly. Blending in.

Kirk 26:39

And the door opens, the front door opens, and in walks two men, and one of them was Donald. And I looked over at my best friend and it was like, I cannot meet that man. I was like, why? If I meet him, I will never be single again. And honestly, that terrifies me. So I spent about two hours avoiding him, and then there was a little series of events and so forth, and he and I kept making eyes at each other across the room, and at one point, um, the guy that he was there with, he was being fixed up by the birthday boy, who again hated me. And um anyway, something happened where I was standing, we were all looking at um some pictures on the computer, and um Donald was standing behind me, and someone came in and asked me um uh to move my vehicle, which they had already asked me like four or five different times. I kept blocking people in, you know, and so finally um the the guy that was supposed to be being fixed up with Donald, um, he reaches out in front and grabs my chest and just shoves me backwards into Donald and just says, move this. And Donald's arms went around me and I laid my head over onto his arm, and I literally said out loud that I'm never leaving. And we then went outside um underneath the deck and started talking, and it started raining, and we stood out in the rain for over an hour just talking, and I knew the moment from that moment I knew this is it, this is my person.

Jennie 28:50

Why did you know?

Kirk 28:52

I don't know, I don't know. I was not looking. Um, I had just formed a plan to um sell my home and move to New York and try my hand back at a full-time music career. And um so this was not in the plan at all, and that's why I was terrified to meet him initially because I'm like, okay, well, these new plans just went out the window. And um I can tell you, at the risk of oversharing, I can tell you how I knew 100% that I had met the right one. Um I was a little bit of a slut. Okay. One of the ways that I dealt with the trauma that was in Exodus and so forth was I just I became a slut. I had a series of steady people that would come over just for nothing but sex. And um, and there was one scheduled for that night. And I called him on the way home and told him that he didn't need to come over. And I've not been with anyone else since. Now it was several months before Donald and I officially got together. But from that one meeting with him, yeah, all of that stopped. It wasn't an effort, it wasn't a decision. I no longer needed it.

Jennie 30:19

So it was just something in you knew. Yeah, I found my person. Yeah.

Kirk 30:23

It's like my second half just walked through the door. I didn't even know that there was a second half.

Jennie 30:31

So yeah. And I'm just struck with this path that you followed from the darkness and the desperation to somehow finding your way through that to finding your person.

Kirk 30:51

Yeah. You know, not too long after Donald and I uh moved in together, and you know, everything was official, and we're we're a couple now, um, I latched on to a country song by Rascal Flats. It's God Bless the Broken Road. And I realized that everything, including all that we've been talking about, you know, um, if I hadn't made that first choice to come out, if I hadn't fought through things with my parents, if I hadn't gone through what I went through in Exodus, I wouldn't have been the right person at the right time for him.

Jennie 31:34

Yeah.

Kirk 31:35

You know, and he had been in a horrible relationship for 17 years. And he kept, he often will say things like, But what if I had not left California? What if I had not stayed with this guy for so long and so forth? And I'm like, then you might not have met me. He's like, but I wished I'd have met you 17 years earlier. I'm like, you wouldn't have liked me. I was not your person 17 years ago. I still had a lot to experience and a lot of growing to do and becoming. I was like, yeah, I promise you, we would not still be together if we had met 17 years earlier.

Jennie 32:11

Yeah, the broken road. And uh I think there's a line in the song about kind of pointed me toward you.

Kirk 32:20

Yeah, the key line is God bless the broken road that led me straight to you.

Jennie 32:25

God I'm getting choked up here. Yeah, that song is incredibly powerful. And from where you are today, what do you make of that broken road?

Kirk 32:38

Wow. Never really thought about that. I don't think that I really see it as much as a broken road. I see it as a series of unplanned detours. You know, um because I'm I'm also I'm also starting to realize that, you know, in the the roller coaster that has been my life, and I know that that's not unique, that most people's lives are roller coasters, but what is it that makes a roller coaster thrilling? It's the ups and downs and the twists and turns and you know, the upside downs and the rollovers, and otherwise we're just on a train. I enjoy riding trains, uh, you know, here in Portugal. I love to take a train to Coimbra and places, but that's just going one direction and it's just you know, it's pretty scenery, but it's not thrilling, you know. Um the roller coaster is thrilling, but it's you know, it's also can be very frightening and scary. And so when you're when you're in the midst of a new twist or turn, it's not necessarily thrilling, but when I look back, the majority of things that I do define my life by were those toughest or weirdest or most unexpected times, those big detours.

Jennie 34:11

And how would you say those detours have shaped who you are today?

Kirk 34:20

They have um they have completely I don't know if I would use the term shaped. Okay. Um it's more like they've unlocked. You know, they've they've unlocked the person that I'm becoming. They've unlocked the freedom, the ability to let that evolution take its course. I think about the um I guess irony of my health situation. So my cardiomyopathy was viral, but there's a genetic form, and it turns out that I have that gene, and I lost my grandmother and my great-grandmother. They both passed of sudden coronary death, and that is now believed to have been cardiomyopathy. And then my uncle was diagnosed six months after me with the genetic form, and he only lived for six more weeks. It's hard to know exactly what to make of all that. I remember when my mom was in her 50s, she was terrified that that was going to happen to her. Well, she didn't end up getting the gene, but her brother did. So who knows? But I'm not smart enough for all the genetic stuff. How did I get it? And then how did I survive it? And it kind of to me, it just goes back to that whole sense of purpose. There is some kind of a plan out there that, you know, or there is some kind of objective that I'm supposed to do here. Um, and I don't again, my spiritual beliefs are still so much in flux, but I don't know. Is it a master plan of stuff I'm supposed to do? Is it lessons that my spirit is supposed to learn so that I can move to something else? What I have no idea. All I'm confident of is that there's a reason somewhere, somehow, there's a reason, there's a plan. And I think in some ways that love has a lot to do with it because I don't know that I would have survived it had I not already met Donald. And having that confirmation, you know, that I mean, he came in after we got the news. He comes in and he's like, okay, so we got to do this and we've got to do that, and we've got to take care of this, and we've got to, but he just seamlessly rolled over from being just my spouse to being my caregiver. And yes, there was a time period in the first couple of years of my illness that he was much more caregiver than he was spouse, but he did it without any kind of complaint. He also he always seemed to have the right balance. He knew when to coddle me and make me slow down, and he knew when to kick me in the butt that you can do that yourself. And he's always had that sense of knowing what I can and can't do. Um, you know, I I've over the years I've had episodes and things, you've witnessed that. And Donald often sees it coming before I do. He'll pick up on minuscule changes in my complexion or in my demeanor or whatever. And I've learned he used to be like, you know, babe, you want to sit down? No, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. Now he's like, Babe, you want to sit down? Yeah, I think I will. Oh, you're seeing something here. Exactly. He's because he's rarely wrong. But he's also great with other people when they witness it. Because of course, everybody who knows that you have a bad heart, if you go to the ground, they're gonna call 911 or here in Portugal 112. We learned after the first year of way too many emergency room visits and ambulance rides. This is part of it. My body will go through spells where it just cannot sustain my blood pressure and I get faint or I get dizzy, or sometimes I do completely pass out. But Donald has learned that as long as I start showing signs of recovery within a certain period of time, this is not a hospital event, not a time you need to call 911. And I tell people that if you're with me alone, like we are now, if something like that happens, the best thing to do is put a damp, wet cloth on my forehead and then stand back and yell clear in case my device fires. Because it's going to treat me if my heart truly does go into a dangerous rhythm. This is going to treat me faster than you can dial 112. But fortunately, in 20 years, that's never happened. It paces a lot. And I did just recently find out that I have lost about four or five percent function since moving. Not expected, but not unexpected, because they've told me for years. I went from a ejection faction, that's how they gauge how well the heart's functioning. It's how much of the oxygenated blood in the left ventricle gets pushed out into the body when your heart contracts. So it's called an EF. My EF when I collapsed and went to the hospital was three. Three percent. But when they went in to do the catheter, they found out my heart wasn't beating, it was quivering. And they were literally like, you should not be alive, you should already be dead. So, but so now I got up to 35 to 50%, and I stayed there for probably about 10 years, and then I took a jump a few years ago, and I got up to almost 50%. Okay. 60% is considered normal. It's the low end, it's very low end of normal, but it's considered normal. And then just a couple weeks ago, I had a new echo done, and I am down to 41%. So I've lost some ground. But they told me in the very beginning that this would be the most likely arc that I would take, that I would slowly get a little better, and then I would peak, and then I would slowly start going back downhill. The real challenge was going to be how quickly, once the decline starts happening, how quickly would it happen? Would determine my survival outcome. Too quickly, there's no chance for a good intervention, a transplant, whatever. Slow enough, we can look at those alternatives, but also it still may not be necessary. We could just amp up what the device, things like that. So there's a lot of different options that are going on there. All of that just to say that it's all just part of this whole journey that okay, now I'm in this new place of in-between, and some of the old stuff is still with me, and it's still knocking on the door and saying, hello, we're still here.

Jennie 42:08

So it's like you feel like, okay, I've moved on and it's knocking again.

Kirk 42:13

Yeah, it's like, you know, you may have a new life here, and you may, in a lot of ways, feel a lot better, but guess what? So, how are you sitting with all of that? Honestly, from the terms of health, I'm okay. I'm okay with it. It's something that I've had 20 years to acclimate to, and I've been through the grieving cycles and the whole pattern of what I lost. And the fact that my heart, so my heart has been working double time and it's aging faster. Um, the last evaluation that I had before I left the US, um, my cardiologist told me that my heart is probably around 83. So, you know, it's 23 years older than I am. So in the aging factors. Um and so I'm like, okay, that's fine. And even in terms of people have asked me, would I still go through a heart transplant? And honestly, I can't say that I absolutely would. How come it's been a lot of struggle physically to be where I am now? But I've also been on that journey with other friends that did have transplants, and that's not an easy fix. It's a hard life. And it's a hard struggle. And I'm like, you know, okay, yeah, when I was 40, even when I was 50, now I'm 60. I've already had 20 years that they told me I wasn't gonna have. And for the most part, they've been 20 really good years. And I'm at a point. Point in my existence that if it's over tonight, I'm okay. I had a good life. Now that's not putting it out to the universe that I want it to be over. I'm not, I will stay as long as I can. But at the same time, I'm I'm okay. And like I told Donald this probably about 10 years ago, 10 years into all of this battle to survive and so forth, that I did tell him, I said, if I ever get something like cancer, I'm not doing heroics. I don't want to put my body through that. If they tell me that it's very early, we can fix it with a few rounds of chemo, all right, I will probably do something like that. But if they're like, you know, we got to do this aggressive, blah, blah, blah, and radiation, et cetera. Yeah, no thing. Give me those really good, feel good drugs and let me enjoy what I have left.

Jennie 44:52

Yeah. So looking at this journey that you have been on, what have you learned about yourself in that process?

Kirk 45:01

I've learned that, in a sense, kind of bringing this conversation full circle, I've learned that I never wanted to die. I always wanted to live. And I still do. And even though I'm okay with the fact that eventually I will die, I think back to that 30-year-old kid trying to end his own life over something now that I think is the most ridiculous thing in the world. And um I look at all that I would have missed out on. Heart disease included. I would have missed out on so much. I'd have never known true love. Ever. I've learned that I'm enough. Some people think I'm too much. That's okay. But I'm enough. And it's okay to be who I am. And it's okay to not be who I wish I was.

Jennie 46:09

I'm enough. You're enough. And a part of you that wanted so desperately to live. And that brought you to this moment. Jenny, you made me cry. And friend. I am so grateful that that part was there. Yeah, me too. That you heeded that voice. And that you are this incredibly heartfelt, caring, loving person that sits before me today.

Kirk 46:54

Thank you.

Jennie 46:58

Yeah. Thank you, Kirk.

Kirk 47:06

Thank you. Yeah. You know, at the beginning of this, not having any idea which direction to go. Yeah. That winding, detouring road. Mine has never been a straight path. All puns intended.

Jennie 47:23

Every single one of them. Yeah. Thank you, my friend.

Kirk 47:28

Thank you.

Jennie 47:28

I'm really honored that you you trusted me, that you shared your story with me with us.

Kirk 47:35

It's my pleasure.

Jennie 47:37

Thank you for being here with us in this space. If something in today's episode resonated for you, I'd love for you to pass it along to someone. That'll help others find their way here. And I'll see you on the next stretch of the journey.