The Heart of Tenth Grade

I can still remember those early performances in the Northern Cambria High School auditorium—the sneers and the laughter.

We all have years that stand out in our lives, years filled with transformation and significance. And if we’re realistic, that’s to be expected. Life is full of change, the constant swirl of a universe in flux. We swirl with it. Some years toss us around more than others, though. Tenth grade was a big year for me, but I don’t know that I walked into Northern Cambria High School with any expectations.

It was the fall of 1977, and I was one of those people in the middle—sort of faceless—recognized by some, but not popular. I left organized sports behind that fall. I’d joined the basketball team the previous year, in ninth grade, and as I write this, I can’t imagine why.

I sat the bench as our team went undefeated in seventeen games, and rightly so. The five starters rarely left the floor, and I wasn’t really an athlete. Rather, I was a kid who didn’t know himself that well, a kid who wanted to fit in somehow, so I joined and watched. Occasionally I’d get to play the last minute or so, after the opposing team had already been destroyed. Once or twice, I made a basket. They gave me a jacket—we were champs, seventeen wins and no losses—when the season ended. But basketball felt like a waste of time after my freshman year, largely because I wasn’t interested in it, and secondarily because I knew I had nothing to do with that jacket. I wore it, but it wasn’t really mine. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this. Tenth grade was transformative because I discovered a few things about myself.

To be clear, this tenth grade business isn’t a random exercise. My oldest daughter is about to embark on her own tenth grade journey, and I suppose I wonder about the transformations that lie in wait for her. In the last two years, she’s gone through a lot of changes, mostly in the growth department. I’m talking physical growth, but the more important kind is emotional growth. To put it simply, she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s a young woman, and sometimes I sit back and wonder how that happened. And then I remember the universe in flux. Nothing is static.

I suppose the real question as we grow comes back to that idea of interest. It also spins around the idea of decision. Tenth grade was important to me because I decided to focus on the things that interested me. It didn’t really matter what anyone else said or thought about those decisions. So, I started a band. It seemed inconsequential at the time, a hobby, and a diversion from what we might call real life. The thing that’s important to recognize is that I ultimately made decisions that would guide my life that year. Starting a band was real life.

Guidance counselors and parents could tell (and teach) me a lot of things, but they didn’t know about my heart. I don’t know how to articulate this properly, except to say that my heart has guided most of my life. I’ve never made a lot of money, but I’ve been fortunate, for the most part, to do work that interests me. Work that urges me on to excellence.

When we started that band in tenth grade, people made fun of us. I can still remember those early performances in the Northern Cambria High School auditorium—the sneers and the laughter. It might have hurt some, but it never made me do anything differently. I wasn’t going to quit because of the hecklers down front.

In fact, the hecklers pushed me to be better.

By 1991, I was in a band that had a video on MTV. My daughters were surprised when I told them about that the other day, but there was some vindication that year. We have an article from Rolling Stone magazine on the wall here, too. Gerry Stanek pictured in a national magazine. The guy in that picture is a Gerry Stanek my daughters don’t know, and they hate his long hair. Most of the time, I don’t notice the framed article on the wall. When I do, it seems like ancient history—another world, the Gerry Stanek of thirty years ago.

My point here isn’t to brag about MTV exploits, though. Instead, I’m trying to say something that can best be illustrated by a long-ago conversation—one that sticks with me. A friend asked, “How’d you do it, Gerry? How’d you go and get yourself on MTV?” And I clearly remember my answer, which was something along the lines of, “I just did it. I did what I wanted to do. I did the thing that interested me the most.”

I listened to a long interview with Kevin Costner recently. He told the story of being twenty and aimless. By chance, he saw an ad for auditions, a play at the college he attended, a college full of classes that didn’t interest him. Something about the ad sparked a dream in Costner, a thing he hadn’t felt before, and if you’ve ever seen Dances with Wolves or Open Range, you know the rest of the story. Costner suffered through seven years of rejection, but he never stopped being interested in acting; he never swayed from that interest or the quest to get better, even while he worked shit jobs to support his family.

I can recall another conversation here in my kitchen when someone brought up Mikayla’s school choices. She’s the one who’s going into tenth grade this fall. The crux of the conversation was that idea of interest, at least for me. “I want her to pursue the thing that interests her the most,” I said. “Look, I got to travel all around the world because of my interest in the guitar.”

The person on the other side of the table said, “Yeah, but where’d that get you?”

Maybe that other person didn’t want to hear my answer since they clearly thought I had failed. I didn’t exit that experience with a lot of money, and that’s all they could see. But the answer to what should I do with my life comes down to fulfillment and happiness. We can grasp at all kinds of things in this world—the stuff we think is going to make us happy, including money. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that immersing yourself in work that interests you is happiness. It’s a different kind of happiness than you might imagine because that work involves struggle and failure. The idea is to put your nose to the grindstone and make that struggle your own, to struggle and fail for the thing that interests you the most.

That struggle is the only one that’s worthwhile because it’s the one that gives life meaning. And somehow, as a fifteen-year-old kid, I started to see a glimmer of that idea. The struggle to get good at something gave my life meaning and purpose. And it’s no accident that I’ve thrown myself into that struggle more and more in the past few years. I’m doing the things that fulfill me, even if no one listens. Even if they laugh at me. I’m a complete person when I sit down to do that stuff.

There’s potential in the things we want to do—the things that drive us to get up in the morning. You might call it kinetic energy. Tenth grade is creeping closer for Mikayla. I guess my most sincere hope is that she leaves the metaphorical basketball team behind, just like I did. I hope she finds the thing that pushes her in a satisfying direction, where the work makes her happy, even when another person doesn’t see the value in it.

We’ll all have failures in this life; that’s a big part of learning how to be successful. I figure the failures might as well live in service to the things we love. Why fail for someone else’s dream? I hope Mikayla gets the message.