I feel like I have two lives; life before Biggest Loser and life after Biggest Loser. Life before Biggest Loser consisted of poor choices and dissapointment. Life after has been filled with joy and excitement. Of course there have been struggles, mainly with my weight, but things are so much different.
After the show I began a new life. A life with a beautiful and loving wife and two amazing little boys that I can’t get enough of even though I am with them everyday.
My life is so drastically different that I was completely caught off gaurd when my past came back to haunt me in a big way.
I have been offered a posiiton with a large company. These days, one of the conditions of employment is a thorough background check. After filling out all of the paper work, accepting the position, and even having a start date, I was shocked when I got a letter telling me that the offer was put on hold because of an issue in my background check. It was reported on the report that I hadn’t received my degree. Most of you know that I was so excited to announce that I had in fact graduated form the University of Iowa this past May so I was devastated to see that according to this background check, I had lied about it.
After finding out what had happened, I was reminded of how past choices can still affect us today even if we have moved on.
My journey to earn my degree has taken 16 years. At oone point in my education life, I just quit school and left. I had a whole semester of F’s for grades. At the time I felt sorry for myself and chose to quit and run off. I had no idea just how much that decision would haunt me. In short, when I re-enrolled at the University of Iowa on academic probation I needed to earn nearly straight A’s. I did that. I went through graduation and thought everything had been squared away.
Fast forward to last week. Part of the background check is checking education references. When the company doing the investigation contacted the National Clearing House that list those who have earned degrees, my name wasn’t there. According to the investigation company, I had lied about having a degree. As you can probably imagine, that is not a good thing for a perspective employer to see.
I’ll spare the details, but I needed to file a dispute because I knew that I had completed the requirements to earn my degree. In one quick phone call I found out what had happened.
Although I had completed my coursework, there was an unreported grade from when I quit school over 15 years ago. Having the unreported grade on my transcript meant that the University of Iowa could not report that I had officially graduated. After one more phone call and what seemed like the longest day of waiting in my life, it was taken care of and the university was able to report that I had in fact met all requirements and did, in fact, earn my degree.
It has been heart-wrenching to have to wait through all of this but it is an excellent lesson to learn. Just because we hope something goes away doesn’t mean it will. If I had taken the proper steps before just up and quitting school, all of this could have been avoided. At that point in my life I felt sorry for myself and that I had it so bad, the only option was for me to leave school.
That was BS! Things were bad because I had made them bad and rather than think through my actions and how it could affect me long term, I chose the easy way out and ran. You can only run so long from the rough things in your life before they will eventually catch up to you. It took 16 years for mine to catch up with me, but last week they finally did.
The point of today’s blog isn’t to whine about my situation right now, it’s to drive home the point of the lesson I learned this week. Things that are left unresolved, be it yesterday or years ago, are still unresolved today. The only way to keep those unresolved issues from catching up with you is to face them and deal with them. Running from them won’t fix them, hiding from them won’t fix them, and for damn sure just ignoring them won’t fix them. The only way to truly put those things in the past is to do everything you can to resolve them.
It may be a conversation that needs to be had, a phone call that needs to be made, or some self examination that needs to be done, but I can promise you that by taking the action, a weight will be lifted. Only then can we be free from the past that we may not want to remember.
Remember, if it was unresolved yesterday, it is unresolved today. We can’t wish it or hope it away, we need to face it head on so that we can move forward. Let me reassure you that dealing with the things that we have been afraid to is much less painful than carrying them around.
See you later… -Matt
