Continuing where I left off…
Above is a picture of me, planking the Marcus Aurelius statue in Tuln, Austria. I was reading the Meditations at the time and although my views of stoicism and what it meant to be 'masculine' were warped and misguided, I did find a strange sense of solace in his writings. I fell off the statue to the concrete below, dislocating my knee which required surgery to remove cartilage that sheered off the two condyles of my femur. I was drunk at the time. I was grounded for a couple of months as I couldn't cycle to my friend's houses anymore and was forced into the beginnings of some self-reflection. It wasn't until just recently that I learned Marcus Aurelius's writings together with stoic philosophy as a whole were the inspiration for cognitive-behavior therapy, the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. I should note that I am not at all familiar with either stoicism or CBT beyond a surface-level understanding, although I believe I managed to develop my own understanding of what it means 'stoic' as my life continued to unfold from that point on.
A few months later was my 18th birthday, after my injury the gang and I were eager to make up for lost time. About 20 guys came to my place absolutely loaded with every type of gear you could imagine. I don't remember much of the night, except a few moments where 'Peter' was dishing out liquid MDMA with an eyedropper, 'Pat' was munching on dry shrooms in a corner with some of the other lads who were tossing up between the shrooms or succulent brownies baked to perfection, 'Patrick' was definitely smelling his keys with a little too much enthusiasm, and EVERYBODY was drinking as dubstep blared into voids that our souls had vacated for the night. I woke up at the bottom of a staircase amid a sea of bodies to the faint smell of vomit which penetrated my spitting headache and summoned me back into the land of the living. As my eyes slowly focused I could see the spew next to my head in a small puddle, but oddly it wasn't mine. I traced its origins to the step above, and then the one above that, and then the one above that to the top of the staircase where 'Peter' was laying.
At this stage of my life, I had developed a compulsion to put everybody who was passed out onto their sides with their legs and arms in a particular pattern that I had learned to stabilize them in that position. I had learned somewhere that the majority of alcohol/drug-related deaths stem from people vomiting when passed out on their backs and then suffocating on it. With the fear this might have happened to 'Peter' I hauled myself up the steps and shook him with some frustration, after doing this for a while I realized he wasn't breathing, or at least my dulled senses couldn't detect any signs of breath. With a surge of adrenalin, I called an ambulance and rode with him to the local hospital, where I found out that 'Paul' had been admitted the night before with alcohol poisoning and had had his stomach pumped, totally outside of my awareness. It turns out 'Peter' was suffering from a touch of serotonin syndrome, brought about by his mix of antidepressant SSRIs and the MDMA he was lovingly dishing out the night before.
My first day as a legal adult was probably one of the most shameful of my entire life. Two of my friends could easily have died and I became a scapegoat 'drug kid' to most of the adults around me from that point on. I felt trapped in an impossible conflict, either keep abusing substances to dull the pain of my deepening ostricasion and its consequences … an ever-worsening future which admittedly was already feeling quite bleak for me at that point as I had my own version of a doomer mentality kicking around my skull, or forgo all substances altogether and have absolutely no pleasure or joy in my life and nothing to really live for.
A few weeks later I was at Pauls for the weekend, and we were having a few quiet beers and some green when he stumbled on his rocky movie collection. We decided to watch the first one. The film was very boring and predictable from the start, but both of us were captivated by it. Eventually, it crescendoed to the final fight leaving us both full of cathartic emotion that drove us to watch the next one. The pattern repeated with the second film; a dull storyline that almost lulled us to sleep before the most epic finale that left us drenched with the energy and enthusiasm needed to watch the next … and the next. After a few rounds of this in the early hours of the morning, our sleep-deprived minds required a little help as our resolve to finish all 6 films back to back was now set in stone. Paul decided to make us coffee. He left to go to the kitchen for what felt like an eternity and he returned with some of the strongest caffeinated soup I've ever had the misfortune of consuming. My teaspoon could almost stand up in it! We drank it and ended up pulling an all-nighter finishing all the films.
I'm not entirely sure what happened to me that evening, but it's interesting that last month (nearly a decade later) after reaching out to Paul's brother for the first time in the hopes of reconnecting with him in light of recent events, this was the response I got…
I sensed within the Rocky stories a way out of my predicament. Even if I couldn't fully articulate what it was, how I knew it, or how I was actually going to execute it, I knew it was there buried somewhere in those simple stories of the supreme underdog going the distance and overcoming the obstacles in front of him. This was when I began visualizing my walk across Australia. In part, I felt like running away from everything, but I also sensed deep down that I was running towards something that I needed to learn and understand on a profound level if my life was to have any hope of going anywhere. There were a few other things that I was contemplating and realizing in parallel with all this during this phase of my life and during my subsequent attempts to walk the continent when I failed twice before my eventual success 3 years ago. I was captivated by David Goggins when I found out that the rocky movies also had a huge influence on his mindset in some capacity. Something that really resonated with me when I listened to his first JRE interview many years later where he discusses the rocky movies with the line 'I just wanted to feel something other than defeat.' and being able to visualize like nobody's business.
I found this edit somebody had made about this moment in the interview and I wanted to make some points about the subtleties of what I believe happened to him, his mindset, and what I can personally relate to. I noticed a lot of similarities to Cameron Hanes's story about how he began to run ultra marathons, starting from a similar place in life in his early 20s. In here Cam says something along the lines of 'I felt shitty all the time, there was just no success.' I don't mean to imply that I've reached a level of physical prowess that both these guys have... I'm mediocre athletically but I can certainly relate to both of their storylines on a level that I don't think people appreciate when they see someone engaging in physical challenges and calling them 'mental pursuits'.
I think one of the first things that has to happen that is critical to growing out of a place like this is some element of surrender, both to yourself and your present circumstances. I personally felt at this point that nothing really mattered anymore and not in a nihilistic defeatest sense. I was at a point where my behaviors and choices didn't matter, what people thought of me didn't matter because things couldn't really get much worse for me ... or at least that's how I felt. I'm recently revisited Mark Manson's book 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck', where he elaborates on this idea and its subtleties of it much more clearly. His opening exemplar of Charles Bukowski and his stories of his own troubled youth and his superhero disappointment panda made me laugh. You can't give a fuck anymore about what anyone thinks, or about the possibility of failure or of who you are relative to others.
This pain of comparison is something that is exacerbated in modern times with the advent of social media in a global attention economy where we have the 'tyranny of exceptionalism' (a good chapter in the book) haunting young people from the get-go by flooding their screens with subtle messages that they're not good enough in almost any domain in life. When you Google how to get better at something your browser is immediately bombarded with examples of people at the peak of success in their lives in that specific area, giving you a warped sense of what you should be able to accomplish and warped views about realistic expectations for yourself. If you haven't learned the art of surrender, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, and the art of accepting yourself in your present insufficiency you will be doomed to failure before you even begin trying to improve as the ideals you set for yourself will be so far removed from your present reality that you'll drown in thoughts and feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth during your first, tentative mediocre steps in the right direction. This skill becomes even more critical later on as you begin making actual progress and you begin to encounter haters, trolls, cynics, and the like online and out in the real world who won't hesitate to attack you, harass you and make every attempt they can to try and bring you down.
From this space of surrender and indifference to the opinions of others or from social validation as feedback for your inherent worth as a human being, it becomes possible to construct a vision for yourself that is meaningful to you from somewhere within yourself. In the case of David Goggins, he wanted to become the guy who could endure almost anything life threw his way. Cameron Hanes wanted to become a good father to his newly born child. For some ungodly reason, I wanted to walk from Sydney to Perth. This was a vision I kept to myself for a few years, guarding it like a life-sustaining secret, and every day I spent some time thinking about it, visualizing it, contemplating how to make it possible. When you focus on something for long enough, you begin to tap into mental and emotional resources you didn't know you had latent within you, and crucially, in your state of surrender and acceptance of the present moment you are able, to be honest with yourself, your shortcomings, the obstacles in your way and slowly discover what you can realistically expect to accomplish.
The first time David Goggins ran he made it a quarter of a mile before grabbing a milkshake and walking back home to cry on his couch. Cameron Hanes signed up for a 10k run and didn't have the drive to complete it, even poorly … dude just quit mid-race and walked away. The first time I secretly went out to see how far I could walk in a day, I made it about 15km before my legs turned to jelly and I had to catch a bus back home where I nursed some newly formed blisters. This is when your inner demons, insecurities, negative self-talk, and self-doubt will all start coming up to the surface to be dealt with. The beginning is always the most difficult and the most painful part of moving towards something you truly authentically value. The perks start coming in quick and fast though, everytime you make incremental progress towards that big vision of yours you get hit with a little dopamine kick, in the case of physical pursuits, every workout or run will leave you with an endorphin rush as a reward. You now begin heading down the path towards eudemonia.
I thought this video by Casey Zander did a pretty good job of explaining the difference between the pursuit of hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (joy), which begins to illustrate a reward pathway and approach to life that can begin competing with drugs and alcohol.
The keyword here is purpose. You want to become someone who is living on purpose, even if that purpose is an arbitrary and meaningless construct. I was fully conscious that hiking to the other side of Australia was a completely meaningless and useless endeavor in and of itself, but it didn't matter. I had something to get up for each day, I got the dopamine spikes as I progressed towards my goal. When my flaws, insufficiencies, and insecurities began surfacing and I slowly began to clean them up, I gradually became a stronger, more grounded, more honest man, rooted in 'reality'. Being vulnerable, step by step begins to incrementally make you stronger, you iron out the chinks in your armor one at a time. Was I always perfect? consistent? dedicated? on task? Hell NO! But two critical things began happening to me:
1. I started to view myself as a process, not a static entity that was doomed to remain in a particular state for the rest of my life, and
2. The progress that I made physically enabled me to self-reflect on all my erroneous beliefs and assumptions about myself mentally, who I was, and what I was truly capable of.
The first time I ever completed a double marathon within a day and reflected back on that first 15km dismally painful hike where I kept telling myself 'this is impossible, you're never going to do this, this is the dumbest idea in the world' I was forced to begin reconsidering all those other beliefs and assumptions I had about myself and what was and wasn't possible for me, because I had demonstrated to myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt that something I believed to be true about myself was wrong. I accomplished this first through my physicality, but at the time I was also contemplating beliefs themselves, language, thoughts, emotions, and how they connect with the body. I began to discover other examples of how a person could accomplish this without necessarily going out and having to do something physically strenuous.
As part of my process of combating my limiting beliefs, I began looking for inspirational examples of people who had already accomplished what I was hoping to achieve, or something similar. That's when I discovered the film 'The Rabbit-Proof Fence' which tells the absolutely insane true story of 3 girls aged 8-14 who escaped a missionary camp after being forcibly removed from their homes and walked 2400km through some of the harshest deserts in Western Australia while being hunted down by authorities without any outside support. That completely annihilated any doubts I had about the reasonability of my own success. While researching their story and during my other contemplations on language I found out that some Indigenous language groups in Australia have features like absolute direction baked into the language which in turn led me to realize that the very language you speak dictates to some extent what you are or aren't able to conceptualize and changes how you perceive reality.
My guy seems to have caught onto the radical implications of this:
Here he makes a critical point about emotions being real trained reactions to knowledge that you've accumulated. The knowledge you have is arbitrary and much of it is false. With this understanding, we can begin to understand what true stoicism is. To be a 'stoic' man is not about being able to suppress your emotions with willpower. It's about using your emotions as a source of information that can help you to adapt your beliefs, assumptions, and opinions about yourself and the world around you in a continuous process of refinement as you move towards your vision.
With this understanding you go full circle to realize that you were always enough, you can do anything you set your mind to within the laws of the universe and you can continuously align yourself closer and closer to them to reach greater and greater perfection. When you live in this way, naturally people will gravitate towards you and you won't ever be alone again. Critics are your allies as they can help you to eliminate errors in your thinking and reasoning to help you move closer to your vision, cynics can bring you no harm as you will know they are misguided or dealing with their own flawed perceptions of reality and the peace and joy that will naturally descend on you will mean there will be little pain and suffering left for you to dull with drugs and alcohol.
If you are an addict, and if you are a young man who is going through some of these difficulties. I don't mean to imply that your struggle is easy, that your pain isn't real, or that your problems aren't serious, but believe me when I say, there is a way out and on the other side of your pain are vistas beyond your wildest fantasies. Also, for people with serious addictions and traumatic backgrounds I recommend seeking professional medical advice if you decide to take the courageous first step to get sober. Effects of serious withdrawals are no joke and you may need medical supervision as you go through them. I also do not mean to imply that I am a perfect person who has moved beyond all this. I'm still very much a process, in the process of getting better. I've actually struggled these last 3 years from having a lack of purpose after completing the hike and I'm currently figuring out what my new 'big goal' is going to be. I hope that this could help someone out there avoid some of the mistakes I've made, and take away some of the wisdom I've gained through my own struggles and journey.
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