Hello, dear reader! I’d like to warn you ahead of time, if it’s not apparent, that this is a beast of a writing. Remember how I told you I was thinking about writing again? It’s almost as if all of the ideas and writings I would’ve written amalgamated themselves into the hulking mass below. That being said, this piece feels like some of the most vulnerable and deepest truths I’ve encountered over the past year, and therefore in my life. If you decide to take the leap and read, I hope you find something meaningful in them or, at the very least, they give you pause to think. That being said, onward!
Last year was one of the more remarkable of my short time on this planet. It was a year of transition. Into adulthood. Into self. A year of shedding childlike attachments and embracing true self. Throughout the year I let go of entire systems of beliefs I had been operating on for the entirety of my life, watching mental structures collapse like skyscrapers falling from the sky.
There is little that is more painful than finding oneself living according to a set of principles one finds false. It’s a pain that resonates subconsciously at the very core of a person’s being, capable of staying hidden for years until called out into the light. Perhaps even more painful is finding that these principles conflict with an entirely different set of values inside oneself. At the core, this is indicative of a lack of knowing who or what one is at a fundamental level.
This is exactly the situation that many people on the precipice of adulthood find themselves in, operating on fully-formed belief systems and perhaps none of them constructed by themselves. These beliefs were embedded and influenced by friends, family, and cultures they grew up with and, while the individual certainly has an influence over these beliefs, rarely are they constructed by a person from the ground up.
I see many young people around me wrestling with this beast (sometimes whether or not they realize it). A lack of clear direction, driven by a lack of clarity around what they want, caused by the fact that they’d never been given the opportunity, hardly the mentorship, to go deep and determine what that thing they want actually is. The end result of this is often nihilism. When one can’t determine what they want the easy way to search is with the intellect, and logic dictates a continual zooming out until one sees that, at a universal level, none of this matters. At all. It’s quite the pit to find oneself in, and if you’ve never experienced this reality (note that I didn’t say “follow this chain of logic” but “experienced this reality”,a logical understanding of it and the experience of it are not even close to the same thing) you should be grateful.
There is one piece of hope when staring this meaninglessness in the face, and that is that we are still here. Nearly everyone I know who has encountered this truth has opted to remain and has a desire to- they find something meaningful in their own existence despite it’s cosmic insignificance. And from there, a person can build.
This deconstruction and construction is the hard work that is coming into oneself. There is no shortcut or silver bullet. It is the process of waking up day in and day out and picking up where you left off yesterday, continuing to pull on current threads while asking more questions at the end of the discoveries. While initially it feels hopeless, one eventually can find solace in their work, this is the first time in your life your are constructing something entirely real inside of yourself, a beautiful discovery of your truth.
It is from the place of this deconstruction and reconstruction that I write this. Not a completed reconstruction — I see now that the construction will be my life’s work. It’s all of our lives work, whether or not we realize it. Maria Popova once said:
“Life is the continual process of arrival into who we are.”
I can’t help but agree with her assessment.
So here I sit. What’s changed? There’s much I could write, but here is a fairly disorganized dump of those things I find to be profoundly different in myself—
I end this year with a profound respect and understanding of all that which I do not and cannot know.Having moved to New York City, I see there are a near infinite number of experiences to be had in this city alone, hardly the infinite spectrum of experiences, both internal and external, that one can have across the globe and potentially across the cosmos, soon.
This has led me to a deep hunger for new and diverse experiences and perspectives. I see so many who are lost and don’t know what they want and beat themselves up over it. What arrogance! There are billions upon billions of experiences to be had- what makes you think you ought to be so fortunate as to have discovered those experiences you would like to build a life around in the first portion of your life?! So when you feel stuck, go and expose yourself to something radically new. Pickup a book you think you’ll hate, go try something that doesn’t sound like it’s for you. I now find the regular ingestion and experience of diverse and high-quality ideas and experiences as imperative for growth and a beautiful life. There is nothing so exhilarating as encountering something entirely new that shakes up the very foundations of what you believe to be true and, if you’ve gone through the deconstruction and reconstruction previously described, your new mental structures are more than flexible enough to adapt and integrate.
I have an entirely different conception of love- not necessarily something to give or receive, but possibly something to be. Something to be cultivated and manifested at the core of ones very being. One loves by being love. Much like the white knight or archangel, one can radiate love in a blinding and joyous aura. Perhaps this is Love in actuality. I haven’t fully constructed my thoughts on this, though I do believe that striving to be Love is an effective solution to most worldly ailments.
Though, allow for me to tread on my own toes and say that I don’t know that love as a constant is possible, or even desirable. I think more importantly than being love, one should strive to be precisely what one is. To be fluid.
Be like water. So much pain comes from our fleeing whatever we are. Our darkest truths torture us, but only because we attempt to rip them out from the core of our being instead of accepting them. This darkness, the moments we cannot manifest love, are precisely what makes love such a beautiful and joyous occasion. It makes the love itself possible. Be fluid. Be honestly you and explore that thing which you are. That doesn’t mean not to want to or go about changing what you are, but to first accept, embrace, and understand. Only then can you truly do the work of patiently and meaningfully changing yourself, just as water patiently chips away at the boulder in its way, never beating itself up for going too slow, but operating from an understanding that, over time, it will overcome.
Yet I have so much more to be working on. I want to expose myself to radically new ideas and experiences. These things are scary. I’m working to regularly expose myself to the things that I fear, opening up the doors to grander and more profound experiences.
I’m still developing an understanding of how to be fluidly you in a moment while also planning for the long-term, how to balance honesty and compassion, and how to appreciate my suffering as a source of meaning in my life.
The single beautiful thing is I’ve now done the work to understand those things which I want to cultivate and manifest as both internal and external experiences (for now, at least). These things act as a guiding light, as balances operating in my subconscious, keeping me balanced. When confronted with any decision I can ask myself — is this a new experience that will expose me to new ideas and understanding about life? Will this contribute to meaningful work or help develop a meaningful relationship? Is this play? Does this go against the internal experience I want to cultivate? One can also morph this into a more powerful question, namely: How can I make this moment one which goes deeper, which manifests the internal experience I seek to cultivate or has elements of those external experiences which I seek? Our experience of a moment is far more malleable than we know, we are capable of transforming the most dark and mundane into that which is beautiful and profound.
And from this I have found my life’s work. Despite my lack of belief in a grand “cosmic” meaning and significance to things, I find meaning in spreading beauty, light, and that which is good, and specifically starting with my most immediate impact— the here and now. To be human is suffering and it is joy, and we are all capable of being vehicles of beauty and light for one another. The world needs more people on the path, more people spreading good, more heroes. And while sometimes the hero marches into war fighting for the greater cause, often times heroism comes as simplicity. All it takes to be a hero is to be light, a lantern in the darkness, to spread warmth and understanding and to lift people up rather than putting them down. That is the most important work a person can do.
I hope that this letter has left you better off than it found you. I hope it has given you hope, made you feel, or at the very least given you something to chew on. For those of you who have felt darkness and currently carry it, I hope it has at least given you belief that there is light at the end of the tunnel. For those of you who haven’t, I hope you stay light, but remember this if the time comes when you need it.
Much love,
Justin