Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

You don’t get there by being awesome. I got there by being terrible. The story I had told myself, of being really good at my job? That story was over. The new story, the one that was waiting for me if I would just let go of the old one, was the story of a man about whom there was nothing special at all. I was slow. I made mistakes. I needed help. That person was named Steve, and the main thing he had going for him was that there were people who loved him and the persistent audacity to exist.

But now, when I heard people complain about Zoom meetings, about day drinking, about being bored, I felt something dark—not just jealousy, but hate. It never fully consumed me, but at times it burned very hot. For the first time as a father I was feeling genuine economic precarity. It scared the hell out of me.

the deconstruction had to be done on-site. If you genuinely wanted to fix things, between people, within yourself, then you could not run forever.

In psychologist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl says that even when everything has been taken from you, you can choose your attitude: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”