Life is the process of doing and undoing

Good morning Nighthawk,

Life is the process of doing and undoing, raveling and unraveling.

It’s circular in its nature.

You are circular in your nature.

I sat down to write this morning with the intention of writing about two things.

1. My experience moving into a place I am calling home (I’ve been searching for a while now)

2. The biggest publishing flub I’ve made so far

If you’ve read The Courage Method, you may remember this moment I recounted from about 5 or 6 years ago.

I had just moved to Vermont after graduating college, I had barely any money and no job. Worst of all, it was winter and I was severely depressed. I was living in a studio apartment for $1000 a month, but it wasn’t just any studio. It was slum housing owned by a very nice man in a red pick-up truck. He had generously turned an old motel into an apartment complex—I was living in a motel.

One night, I found myself laying in my bedroom, which was also my kitchen and living room with Law and Order playing in the background—just staring at the ceiling. I was thinking about how my life had gotten to that point. The trauma I had endured. The general hardship and confusion of my life. The suffocating darkness of depression. And my incessant need to “do something with my life.” And not just do anything, but to be shamelessly honest, to get fucking famous.

Can you imagine?

Being in that whole situation and your mind being so focused on such a shallow endeavor?

Fast-forward 5 or 6 years…

I am sitting my porch at the start of Spring with this view:

Just a week ago, my fiancé (and 3 dogs) just moved into a home that is a dream. The depression has been gone for 2 years now, I’ve published my book, I just released an audiobook, I’ve found community and family in Western North Carolina, and I’ve got a damn good job.

There was a lot of undoing and doing that brought me here.

There was undoing the trauma that lived in my body. Taking the time to understand the responses I had to certain situations and learning to heal that pain. Part of it was undoing what had been done to me and the other part of it was doing.

I had to fight the apathy that I was living in. I had to actively seek out ways to heal through various therapies and practices. I had to DO in my relationship: have hard conversations, be flexible, and the most healing of all, allow myself to be vulnerable and heard.

It was a process that I was deeply entrenched in for several years.

It wasn’t the quick “5-STEP SOLUTION TO DEPRESSION”

Because that is not real… we know that is not real… we do right?

Those kind of summations are only a facade to advertise something—a book, a course, or a product. But we’ve been lulled into the sense that those are real, we’ve been convinced that life and being human is something that it isn’t.

That our pain can be fixed in a snap of a finger without actually feeling it. That life is this predictable path from high school, to college, to marriage, then kids, and retirement. It’s these ideas that make life confusing.

What is modeled is far from the truth.

It’s the commercials of the “regular American family” who are laughing and joking about the tomato sauce stain and the Tide they use to clean it.

That’s not reality.

Reality is in the impoverished family living in a trailer.

Reality is the bomb that detonated a Gaza hospital.

Reality is the 10 years it took me to get through depression, thinking that there was something wrong about my human experience because it didn’t match the pretty little picture I was comparing my life to.

I am not saying all of reality is bad, and you’re not so naive to believe that. But what we often compare our lives to is a fantasy. Whether it’s the endless stream of commercials, tv shows, blogs, your favorite influencers, or the deeply ingrained cultural ideal called “The American Dream”.

As George Carlin said: “You have to be asleep to believe it.”

…and we’re now confronted with a choice.

Do we continue to buy into false superficial narrative that is based on numbness, consumption, and our own dehumanization?

Or do we sink deeper into our own humanity?

Deeper into the true messiness that it is to be human?

Deeper into our own compassion and our own heart?

Deeper into the soil, the roots, and the Earth?

It takes a lot of undoing and doing, but that is your nature, and it’s mine too. The journey I went on over the last decade of my life… it was not easy in the least.

But I had this vision of what my life could look like. I am mostly surprised that I have brought it into reality. Much of the time in getting here I didn’t believe it could happen, or understand all of my own actions.

But I’m here.

Where ever you’re at in your life, whether you’re in your mountain home, or slum motel, go forward with a sense that you are where you are supposed to be. That you have to power to make change happen. That life can happen in your wake. And that whatever you’ve been modeled, whatever you’ve be taught that your life should look like, it’s false, it’s an illusion, and it’s a dream that you can buy into or not.

Fight like hell my friend,
Dylan

P.S. I’ll save the publishing flub for next week.