My most frequently asked question: “How’d you get into that?”
I’ve always been the “interesting” guy that has done a “unique” experience or who seems “different” than most people. Both relatively specific labels. I can say that has mostly come from my need to be different and unique. To try and justify my double fisherman’s knot of an aimless life in hopes that, for God’s sake, I’d be worth paying attention to.
After years of meditation, transcendent spiritual experiences, a psychedelic micro-dose, and countless times saying “I’m sorry” to my wife, I finally realized after sitting down to write this that, all this time, it’s been the painful and sorrowful situations in my life that have led me to try the things I’ve done. It’s common advice to think of yourself as a lifelong learner and that you never arrive. That sounds good on a poster but if you want to be curious and open, you must befriend your pain and let it guide you through an abyss of darkness that holds infinite possibilities.
I remember as a child, I was always curious and explorative. I tried a variety of activities. From creating art to playing sports to singing and learning how to read, I had many interests. I was always happy and very social. It was the two-year period where my dad was sick and eventually passed away from cancer that was most transformational during my childhood though. A trauma that wouldn’t be unearthed until years later and something I am still healing from. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia: a conservative, white, middle to upper-class bubble where the definition of the world lived in the Disney world of conservatism: zip code 30215.
Like many freshmen going to college, this was the first time I would be exposed to new ways of thinking, different cultures, and corrupt behaviors that became a sort of rite of passage in getting your degree. I became interested in playing music, thrift shopping, and breaking every unsaid but deeply defined boundary I was shaped by during my 4 years of school: drinking too much, hooking up, living off Taco Bell, and contemplating why I was in Business School. Partway through college, I dropped out due to the existential crisis of what I wanted to do with my life. This led to a downward spiral of getting kicked out of a house, failing classes, asking for money, and a painful move back home to live with my parents. After college, a relationship gone wrong showed me that my past hurt and trauma (cue losing my dad) would only perpetuate a traumatic cycle.
“we transmit what we don’t transform”, as the Franciscan Catholic Friar Richard Rohr says.
This led me to live in a monastery for 6 weeks: one of my most life-changing experiences. Silence and solitude were my greatest teachers then and still are today.
This eventually sent me on a new trajectory of moving to NYC in 2018 to pursue fashion. 10 months in, broke, lonely, and ready to move home, I decided to stick it out. 3 years later and a lifetime of memories, life was good until the summer of 2020 when I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life that almost cost me my relationship with my now wife. Depression, meaninglessness, and isolation led to the dark place of being unfaithful to myself and her.
It was at that low point of being furloughed from my dead-end job, experiencing depression and isolation, and not having meaning in my life, that I decided things needed to change. I started getting up at 5 am to run 5 miles in the Boston winter which led me to start training for and completing a half-distance Ironman triathlon. It also led to applying for graduate school to become a mental health counselor, applying to a spiritual guidance program to become a spiritual director, studying integrative health, specifically neuroscience and psychedelics, and committing my life to my partner.
As a child, one’s innocence protects the heart to allow a safe enough place to start exploring different subjects and experiences to find both what one is good at and enjoys doing. As we get older, that safe place slowly dissolves, and “real life” starts to subtly penetrate the sacred curiosity of the soul in a way that often causes most people to close off, get comfortable and become cynical.
It’s actually these very painful moments and situations that open us up to new possibilities and perspectives. For me, it wasn’t until life turned off the lights that I learned to see in the dark. To see things as they are, not what I wish they were. It was in this honest place that I found the deeper truths of who I am and the actions to express that. To answer the question of, “how I got into that?” is to be present to the brokenness of my life and failures which led me to those things.
Like a million grains of sand refined into glass through excruciatingly high heat, to reflect on my life in a way that reveals my interests and curiosity is to stand in front of a mirror and accept what I see, even if I wish the mirror was a self-portrait that only sees what it wishes it was. To “get into that” is to get into yourself and beyond yourself at the same time. It’s to feel safe enough to explore and be open yet hurt enough to see what was always there, just painfully staring at you in plain sight. From losing my dad, to breakups to failures to moving, it’s all the answer to this question. So, what will you get into?
