13 de Julio
[A Stream of Consciousness Essay.]
I have this constant and crazy voice in my head telling me that it’s too late, that I’ve missed my boat, and that I should just give up right now. In writing this down I don’t know if I’m hoping to solve that problem so much as have a clearer understanding of it, and where it really comes from.
Here’s the thing about irrational voices, you almost always know that they are irrational. Or at least I tend to. In my heart of hearts, I can hear my inner desires pretty loudly, and when I get a voice in my head screaming “Twenty Four is so Old you creep! Grow up and give up! You’re basically at the grave!” Logic has no problem stepping in and saying “Woah hold the fucking phone for just one minute there buddy.”
But it’s not logic that I’m worried about, because a lot of times logic isn’t in the driver seat. It’s my emotions. And that fear is an emotional one, more than anything else. There are some pretty easy treatises that have been offered up against it. The first is that youth is a mindset and that if I take care of my body and my spirit, then I can do the things that I love about my youth for years and years to come.
That’s something I keep reminding myself whenever I start to have some crazy freakouts about this. “Youth is just a mindset!” another one is a Spanish translation of T.S. Elliot: “La Vida es muy larga,” or “Life is very long.” I just tend to like it better in Spanish.
One of the most interesting things to me about this fear (and any other irrational idea that takes hold of my reality) is how counter-intuitive it is. I’m so afraid that I’ve already wasted my youth and now I’m out of time to do all the things that I want to do, that I feel terrible, which in turn drains me of energy and leads to me sleeping on the couch another three hours in depression or fear, and so fulfilling the role that I have created for myself as “someone who has wasted his life.”
If nothing else, that whole process of manifestation is grimly fascinating. Because at first it really does sound hippy-dippy. Your thoughts create your reality? OK, whatever. But seeing something like that happen over and over again (and I think I’ve compiled enough data at this point to start making judgments on the process) really provides a nice punch in the face to what I thought was real.
Another thing that fascinates me is the fact that we are really only limited by our beliefs. One of the most fascinating things about that to me is the fact that it’s shown itself to be true over and over and over again, and still, I slip back into this habit of fear and overwhelm. I slip into despair and a panic that my subconscious disguises as laziness and I end up huddled up in my little corner again so afraid that I’m wasting my life away that I actually end up wasting my life away.
When something like that happens it feels like you have a film over your eyes, doesn’t it? But when your that far into your illusion (that life is hard, that you are lost, that you don’t know what to do, that you have no skills, whatever) ripping that film off your eyes and seeing the world for what it is just plain undesirable. Because it’s sooooo comfortable to lay on that couch and kind of hate myself. To just sit there and soak in the boiling water of it. To make a depression stew of myself and rob the world of all the cool things I can share with it.
A thought that just popped into my head, and I don’t know exactly where this is going, is the idea that you can do almost anything if you come at it with 100% confidence. This is something I’ve heard versions of before for most of my life, I’m sure that most of us have. But hearing it that way really stuck with me. Probably because of the way that I heard it. You’ll hear about this in more detail when I get to my story about Atlanta, but while I was doing an overnight drive, my buddy texted me a podcast about this girl who was a meth head who had lost all of her teeth and would still steal men away from their very attractive girlfriends. “You can do anything if you approach it with 100% confidence,” she said. And I had to pull the car over on a Georgia freeway at 2 am and just say “Damn.”
I think the reason that popped into my head is because I know it to be true, but many times I don’t feel it to be true. And like I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, this is an emotional problem, not a logical problem. Because I see people all the time making huge exponential leaps in their life, in their careers, whatever. The human mind is amazing, we know this, no need to get into it here.
But feeling that this is true, on a level where I don’t need to rationalize or explain it to myself. Because as I’ve learned, there is a huge amount of power in my emotions. And when I feel good about the reality of something, when I feel really good about it, it usually manifests for me. But when I feel terrible about something, when I feel in despair, that things are too late, that I’ve wasting half of my twenties by even going to college then that becomes true.
So maybe in writing this essay I am trying to give myself the feeling that none of that is true. One thing I’ve been trying to realize is the way that we all (and of course more specifically, me) write the stories of our lives. There is an infinite data pool to pull from when it comes from selecting the way you view your life and how it has been thus far. But there is only a finite amount of ideas you can hold about yourself and your reality in your head. I think that when you focus on your most embarrassing or lowest moments, you give them this insane power over the narrative of your life. If you are so ashamed, as I am, of how much you sleep in, how disorganized you are, how messy you are, how you always feel underprepared and overwhelmed, then that is going to show up more and more in your life.
But when I’m thinking about how much credence I give those above ideas of myself, and when I think about changing them to more positive ideas about myself, I cringe. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it sounds true when I say it about you, the reader, but it sounds all Koombaya my lord when I say it about myself. Maybe it’s because I’ve bought into this idea that all true art comes from suffering and so I must create this suffering from myself. Maybe it’s because I really do love that euphoric feeling of coming up with a new idea, or not even coming up with a new idea, just getting in the flow with the muse and letting her use your body to make something, that I’m afraid if I get happy, then I won’t be able to create more? Not sure.
But if any of that is true, then I know it’s absolutely bonkers. Because while yes, great art is related to suffering it’s not a one to one exchange. I think all great art is about truth because so much of our lives we are either forced to perform or we choose too. So when Led Zeplin Wails or Van Gogh swirls, their accessing this deeper primal part of us that we have chosen to cover up with our performances. And sometimes, the process of learning about these truths is painful. Or the world or some external forces has put the artists through a painful process of metamorphoses. It’s a burning, a light.
But all of that kind of pain is not the same thing as the darkness, as the self-pity and depression sadness that I think myself and a lot of artists allow themselves to slip into.
Right now I’m reading a book on alchemy right now and what’s interesting to me is that I don’t think any of it is actually about turning a rock into gold. It’s just a metaphor for the way all of us sublimate. Alchemy is about purity and getting rid of the impure earthly elements of stone so that it can reach absolute golden purity. And I think all of this fear, this fake laziness, this self pity, these negative thoughts, they are all shedding off of me in this part of my life as I am in that Alchemical oven (the “retort”) and turning into gold.
Maybe that’s a little too cheesy for you but I have one more thing to say from Alchemy. They focus a lot on the Tetragrammaton. Those four sacred Hebrew letters “YHWH” that are unsayable, unpronounceable, and created the world. They talk about the music of the spheres and how all of the universes is actually vibrating in a song (something string theory seems to be working on proving to be true). Now I don’t know about the outside universe but I do know about the universe of our minds and I know that those really start with words. That all of what we call our life starts with the ability to define things, label, and understand them. Maybe that’s why letting these things go in practices like meditation is so hard for us, it’s scary to let go and leave the universe.
But that’s caused me to think about my own Tetragrammaton, and wonder what am I creating? At first, if I’m at all dissatisfied with my life that’s a little bit of a bummer because it means that this is all my fault. But I know the best response would be to just get excited about that fact and realize that I can change my entire reality.
This is basically a daily process for me at the moment. Waking up feeling very low and slowly turning into gold before having to go back to sleep again. This is probably a sign of how deep a lot of these limiting beliefs go if they are so present after waking up from my subconscious state, but even that is a little exciting. It makes just sitting in a room like this and writing kind of like an exploration into my own subconscious.
I think I need to shed the idea that I know myself at all. I think I’ve been telling myself a lot of crazy things, things that I know are untrue and not very nice. But up until now haven’t had the balls to say “Hey, stop talking fucking crazy talk, guy. We’re doing great, lets’ just keep doing great.”
Another thing I can realize is that freaking out about being too old is my brains excuse for not doing any of the things that I really want to do. Because the life I have in my head and the life I’m building right now is kind of a scary one. It involves constantly changing the definition I’ve had of myself for years.
It’s really sad to think about how badly I thought of myself in the past. And I’m not saying that to get any kind of pity. No, I’m more trying to notice just how sneaky those bad thoughts were. And most of these thoughts start with the phrase “I’m not”. and you can connect that to a lot of little thoughts that would bubble up into my consciousness and the fizzle back down into the dark unknown waters: “good at sports, good at dating, a business person, an artist, a musician.” So many authors have described this it’s clear that these are limiting beliefs.
But it’s all well and good to know about limiting beliefs in the objective. “Yeah, yeah, we’re all mean to ourselves a little because we’re afraid that we actually can make our dreams come true, I get it.” But knowing these things in the subjective, knowing them personally and connecting them to memories of you singing to yourself while all the other boys are watching the puberty video and you’re in your fifth-grade classroom with all the girls and one of them looks back at you and says “Can you stop? You’re a terrible singer.” Then that’s an entirely different experience.
Something to remember is that then when I was a fifth grader and now I am invincible. That words are really powerful things but I can choose how they affect me. And I really need to learn to watch my mouth about what I say to myself. Something that’s been helpful is to do the opposite of how I’m feeling and that usually is pretty good therapy when the thought is so irrational and powerful that I want to lay down in a puddle and die.
If I’m afraid that I’m too late as an artist and that seeing all these artists younger than me and doing really amazing work on the internet means that I really have missed my boat, then sitting down and making a song or writing a story or drawing usually helps nip that thought in the bud. If I feel like I’m too old to have fun (yes, I realize how stupid it sounds when you put it down in writing) then I usually go out and try to dance.
This is day two of stream of consciousness writing for the public and it’s surprisingly helpful. If you’re reading this far, I love you and I hope you’re having a nice day. It’s all thunder and rain storms here in North Carolina (actually, not metaphorically) and my window won’t roll up so I get to learn how to fix that now. If the rain lets up I’m going to go Salsa dancing tonight so, here’s hoping.
