Reaching thirty-four is not a momentous occasion. It’s not mundane, but it’s far less remarkable than getting out of my teens or becoming old enough to order a beer. It seems the only milestone I have left to look forward to is an AARP card. For the most part, another year is just another trip around the sun. For me though, each reset of my 365 day personal clock is a reminder that I’m winning against the worst of myself.

There was a time when I never thought I’d see twenty-five. The world was too overwhelming and my thoughts of dying were so powerful that I figured dying by my own hands a foregone conclusion. Fortunately, I endured. My family, my friends, my co-workers rallied on my behalf even when I despised them for it. My twenties were a mass of confusion as I lurched from one depressive episode to another, one hospital to the next. All throughout these treatments one thing was constant — I had friends.

They saw worth when I insisted I was worthless.

They gave me encouragement even while I told them they were wasting their breath.

They told me good things about myself when all I saw was an ever-growing catastrophe of errors.

I’m not sure I would notice the significant changes in myself at thirty-four if I wasn’t so connected to younger people. In my day job, I’m the oldest groundman by a kilometer. We’re all new to the utility industry, but most of these eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year-olds punish themselves for mistakes to a degree that honestly impresses the depressed part of me. What I get is a stark contrast of how I’ve trained myself to think versus how I used to be.

It wasn’t just depression and anxiety that led me to focus on the worst parts of myself and my perceived mistakes. Everything growing up was for a result. Grades were the primary metric of predicted success. Wins, the secondary metric. All mistakes were never to be repeated otherwise I’d either degrade future success or reinforce that I was inherently not good enough. The former meant that every mistake was permanent and the latter proved the negative story about myself that I published daily. Part of that was my mental illness, but the other part was cultural.

My German girlfriend is astonished that nearly everything in school here is for a grade. Her students on this side of the pond were unable to process ungraded assignments. As if learning absent some tally on a permanent record invalidated the learning. Some younger groundmen on my crews use everyday mistakes to beat themselves up. Phrases like: “I’ll never get this,” or “I’m an [insert pejorative here],” are common, as is a shut-down in communication. A withdrawal into themselves, which I empathize with because the easiest way to psychologically hurt yourself is to talk to yourself like your worst enemy.

Speaking with these younger individuals on my crews or in front of teams with The Complete Athlete Foundation, I ask them to begin building an awareness of how they speak to themselves. Only with that awareness can they begin to change their internal monologue. Teams would implode if each time a player subbed off the rest of the team berated them with insults and piled on observations about how terribly they played.

In my twenties I did not challenge the terrible voice inside my head that told me I was more worthless with every mistake. At thirty-four, I do that automatically for myself, and I take every opportunity I can to break younger people out of their mental BS. It’s possible, I’m living proof. I regularly beat my inner-opponent whose sole occupation is convincing me that I need to die. I didn’t have the tools in my youth, and I nearly lost that battle. I didn’t know that I could train myself out of thinking patterns, and it’s become my life’s work to demonstrate that when it comes to improved mental health there is “no such thing as tough; there’s trained and there’s untrained.”