There Are Lots of Us
Sometime in the mid-90s, after I graduated from college but before I went to law school, there was this in-between running around Hollywood time in my 20s where what I was doing and my aspirations briefly - briefly - seemed to mesh with each other. The feeling of being in the right place, doing the right thing, and being “on track” for an appropriate, properly-fitting future, for me, kept me for nearly a decade in a kind of hypnotic trance while I worked my way “up” some kind of “ladder” — or so I thought.
And then one day, all of a sudden, well probably over months, but Monday morning quarterbacking it looks sudden, I decided that what I was doing wasn’t okay, was not leading me where I wanted to go, at least not fast enough or on a path that pleased me enough (the same path that had seemed magical and exciting the days and years prior) and I cut bait, took off, left town, and started over. I thought it was my soul but it might have been my ego. I needed more than I was getting and rather than seeking it where I was I changed ships looking for greener grass.
“Shit man,” I said to my friend Penelope while we wrote my law school application in my converted one-car garage apartment off Sunset. “By the time I effing graduate I’ll be thirty! Is it even worth it? That is so old! I’ve invested so much in this whole identity, this whole career, town, people. But I can’t go on like this! I’m dying!” I wasn’t dying, I was paying my dues, but it wasn’t fun anymore so I left.
And I made what felt like a Big Change, moved across the Country, hit the books, told my friends to pretend I’d gone to a foreign country with bad cell service for three years and nosed to grindstone’d it. Graduated, then worked long enough to make a slight financial profit depending on how you run the numbers, then found myself, nearly a decade later, fifteen stories up in my doorman building looking out over Greenwich Village, with the exact same thoughts — suddenly the life that I’d worked so hard for, which felt at times heart-thumpingly perfect for me and like it was on a path to somewhere I wanted to go, person I wanted to be - had become completely intolerable — a maddeningly unbearable soul prison from which I had to escape.
And so I did it again — I left, months maybe years in the making on the inside but suddenly, mysteriously even, from the perspective of those who thought they knew me. After it was done and the bridge was burned people called me brave (to my face). And maybe I was, I didn’t feel like I had a choice because the daily-ness of how I was living seemed, to me, to be accelerating towards oblivion if I didn’t get out. No words to ask for help staying in, just enough oxygen to get the eff out.
And then there were years of thrashing, Goldilocks but with jobs, dudes, real estate. Some looked okay, some didn’t. Some were “productive” some were so closed off from everyone I could not tell you a single thing that happened other than work, gig work, bills.
And then seventeen years ago the soulmate who became the husband, then the kid, another mental crisis, and now something that looks like sustainable stability. I can do this life, this way, today. I have learned how to make small adjustments, request experiments, see that my thoughts and my feelings are not the boss of me. That I am more than that and I get to be more than some metric based on where I live, what I do, who I love, and what I look like. It’s effing awesome.
I have had days and months and years during this current wife/mother phase of life that felt like if I didn’t run I would die. But I didn’t run, I stayed. I complained loudly enough to be heard. I asked for help. I was told to open my heart. I was told to look at my part in it. I was told many things, some helpful, some not. I was told to take exquisite care of my inner landscape so that I could be more useful to others.
I learned that my perspective is not truth and that my life gets to be about more than just me, my thrills and comforts. And when I’m there, curious, in service, not seeking, really being with what is and willing to get creative with it — willing to give and receive help feeling better more of the time, I can hang in a kind of contentment that I get to share with other complicated deep-thinkers like myself.
There are lots of us. We need each other, at least, I need you. So thanks for reading and TGI almost 2022. I’m gonna keep going.
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