Hello everyone, and thank you for checking out my new blog. To start, I’ll introduce myself to those who may not know who I am. My name is Max LaPlante, and I am a 25 year old guy from Rhode Island, currently living in Massachusetts. On the surface, I am a simple dude. I like to work out. I like to watch and play sports. I like to listen and play music. I wish I could say I have more complex interests, but I would honestly be lying.
However, I do have a story. Up until I entered college, I had a pretty normal, happy life. I was raised with two loving parents, and two younger sisters. I grew up in a small town in Rhode Island where everyone knew each other, and I had plenty of friends. I was a decent athlete, my best sport being golf. I got pretty good grades all throughout school, and I was able to choose a college that I thought suited my interest and future plans the best. My freshmen year of college is when things began to change, in my opinion, in a negative fashion.
My freshmen year, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily for her and our family, it was a very minor case and was very treatable. Even with this positive outlook on the diagnosis, this was the first time in my life that anything even remotely like it had happened to me. As a sheltered kid, I grew up thinking that bad things would never happen to me, until they did. Now, like I said, this was a very treatable case, and my mom was able to successfully treat the cancer, as well as protect herself from it ever returning. The reason it was so significant though, was because it seemed to begin a domino effect of difficult life events for me.
Not too long after, my first long term relationship ended. While this is certainly something that the majority of people go through, for me it brought to light a larger challenge: the realization of a mental illness. I knew that going through a breakup, especially your first, wasn’t easy. But for me, it left me in a constant loop of self analysis, rumination, and anxiety. This began to affect every aspect of my life. My concentration in school was going out the window, anxiety was almost always prevalent, and I stopped feeling happy. This began my first journey into counseling and therapy. I soon realized that I suffered from a condition called Pure-O OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a mental illness where the sufferer believes the only way to relieve themselves of an anxiety is to perform a compulsion. In Pure-O OCD, the compulsions are strictly mental (reassurance, fact checking, going through thoughts over and over). This for me became debilitating, and it didn’t go away. To this day, I suffer from OCD, but have thankfully learned how to manage it more effectively (through therapy and medicine).
The last major part of my story was probably the most significant event of my life so far, the loss of my dad. When I was a sophomore in college, my dad suffered from a completely random, vicious heart virus called myocarditis. This virus acted quickly on my dad, and he passed after complications that arose while he was awaiting a heart transplant. My dad was a huge role model in my life and played a huge role in shaping who I am as a man today. Losing him was a challenge I never expected to face this early in my life. Six years removed, I have learned to live with the loss, but there’s not a day I don’t wonder how things may have been different if he was still around.
As you can see, I have had a few challenges to deal with and learn from over the past eight or so years. One thing I have enjoyed from all of the adversity has been being able to share with others ways to navigate some of life’s greater challenges. I have always thought about starting a blog or something similar to document the things that I learn as I get older and gain more experiences. I want this blog to serve as just that, a documentation of my lessons learned, and thoughts on things that come up in my life. This blog will have a little bit of everything. I’d like to discuss mental health, specifically in men, as well as physical fitness. I also think it would be cool to talk about different aspects of being a better man everyday, whether it’s through nutrition, health, relationships, hygiene, or even fashion. I hope that those who read the blog find some things in here that they can relate to, and that can be helpful in their everyday lives. I’m excited to get this going!
The Mental Weight Room 