On the foundation for the light
Bob Ross and his coke nail spreading some truth
Hello friend.
Hello friend?
That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name? But that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head. We have to remember that.
Shit. It’s actually happened. I’m talking to an imaginary person.
~ Mr. Robot, TV Series, Episode 1
How are you?
No, really, how are you?
Are you doing okay?
Hanging in there?
Any chance you feel like your mental stability is teetering between the fine line of "everything is just fine” and a total and complete mental breakdown?
No?
Just me?
I have to admit, if I’m going to be open, honest, and vulnerable with this writing space, as I intended to be, this winter has been very hard. It’s been hard not only for me but for everyone I know. In the state that I live in, it’s been a never-ending winter with record amounts of snowfall, endless dark days, and absolutely zero hope for everyone getting out alive. It’s snowing right now as I type this, and it’s freaking April, man. Seriously? We were roasting in 80-degree weather at this time last year, pleading for cooler weather.
Maybe by the time this is released—if it ever is—things will be vastly different. Maybe we’ll all feel alive again. We feel it starting to happen: everyone slowly coming out of their dark caves, wincing at the blindingly bright light, and feeling a gentle tickle of hope flow past us like a split-second breeze—a fart in the wind.
It’s during these times that everyone’s mental health plummets and reaches new depths. I’ve watched it happen to others and to yours truly. Or do I just become aware of the state that always is? I don’t know. Good question. But lately, I’ve felt that everything is collapsing. Maybe “collapsing” is too strong a word and gives the wrong idea. Imploding? Pressurizing? Sucking my soul dry like a grape in the sun? Becoming trapped in a never-ending snow-based hell of misery and dread? And I don’t even know what “everything” is, and that’s part of why it feels so loud and heavy.
I blame the winter, but I’ll just free-write for a minute here and just flow with whatever comes up. Get out your violins… we’re going deep…
Everything just feels like it's all going wrong or that my ability to handle things is slipping right through my fingers. Or maybe it’s been wrong for a very long time, and the pressure is just reaching a new level. Am I losing my grip on everything? Does it just feel like everything is off? Is it just the never-ending winter that we are experiencing in my state? Is it just me?
Sometimes I feel that I'm a good person and that I’m doing good in the world. Other times, it's the opposite, and I feel like I'm not succeeding or doing anything right. And it feels like I'm in a constant state of getting direct feedback about all the errors, annoyances, irritations, and unhappiness I cause others. It feels like all of that is being pointed out to me all the time. Or really, that I'm getting punched in the face constantly by a “metaphorical Mike Tyson” in the boxing ring of truth. Everywhere I go, I seem to be irritating someone or pissing someone off, and I get these looks that just make me feel like my existence is just in the way of everything. If being an asshole is a skill, then I'm apparently a master with several PhDs.
Sometimes I feel like I don't belong anywhere. Ugh. Bloody hell. Yeah, I said it. Get the violin and start playing, will you? It's an easy thing to say—cliche even—but when you feel that you are running out of places to run to and no longer feel that you have a safe place to rest, recharge, recuperate, relax, or any other word that starts with the letter R, it can really make you start to feel a little panicky within. But the space within might just be the source of all of that. It's just pressure, everywhere; just an overwhelming presence saturating everything. I feel like I'm absorbing it all constantly. I'm not sure where to go or how to not feel that. I think everyone is feeling it and picking it up from others. That only makes us all feel it even more, and we feel it more from others.
Plus, here’s the main deal: I’m a people-pleaser and have been my whole life. I’m in a constant state of feeling that I need to do something in order for another person to be content and happy. And for whatever reason, I believe that others have to be happy before I can finally feel at peace and focus on myself. But the catch is, it often feels like no one can be fuggin’ happy. There’s always some problem or request that comes up, and usually, I get dragged into it or feel that I have to jump in to take care of things.
Horrible, I know. And yes, I’m working on it. But it’s there. That’s one of the many things I use this blog for too. An instant feedback view of myself, where I have to look at my own filth and go, “Eww,” and then toss it aside, make changes, and become a better person.
Honestly, I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. I’m just sitting with my computer, listening to the sounds of rain in my awesome headphones, and feeling the weight of the snow burying our souls.
But one thing that I know for sure is that being human is tough sometimes.
Do you ever feel that way?
Is it just me?
I get that society says we’re not supposed to be honest about our feelings, and if we are, we should NEVER share them (and certainly not create public Substacks to use as a darkness-purging system). It will come back to bite you, no doubt.
But even with that, don’t you feel the urge to just be fucking honest? To just blurt out whatever it is you feel, even if you know it’s dark and depressing and probably not true except for in that little moment of feeling it? Even though you know it doesn’t fully represent you?
In a society where there is so much endless, fake, overwhelming, and overpowering bullshit being thrown at us constantly, don't you ever just crave honesty? Do you ever just crave something real?
The only time I can find that level of honesty and truth and realness is when I get away from society and get into nature.
I think if people were really honest, they'd probably say the same thing about how they’re feeling. It can be really hard to be human sometimes.
Our society is designed to create major detrimental consequences for our mental health and to maintain those effects. Maybe we are all psychos participating in a grand delusion that we call society, where compliance is mandatory. And so long as we participate in and play along with the mass hallucination, we’re called normal. Anyone attempting to get out of it is shunned and rejected, an outcast, and looked down upon as a sicko. When, really, the masses that willingly participate in a delusion may be the sick ones.
Maybe it's a gift to be the outcast.
Maybe it's essential to be weird.
Maybe it's worth rebelling against. Ever consider that?
But damn, I'm just fucking tired.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
~Terry Pratchett
I see suffering.
I see it in my family.
I see it in my friends.
I see it in my coworkers.
I see it in the faces of strangers when we're standing in line at the grocery store.
I see it within myself.
I see it everywhere, in everyone.
All the time.
And as someone that absorbs everything around me constantly at rapid rates, it's easy to consume vast amounts of those emotions and vibrations pretty quickly.
It can be easy to feel like that’s all there is.
But this is where I have to draw attention to a HUGE asterisk on this whole blog.
Journaling is a great tool, but it can become massively toxic.
It can easily become a hyper-focused view into a small percentage of truth, which can appear as though that's all there is. A vicious feedback loop can easily be created, for anyone. Here’s an example:
You feel sad, so you write about sadness. Then you feel sad, so you write about more sadness, feel sadder, and begin to feel that your entire life is just sad. So you write about how sad you feel, and it makes you sad, and on and on it goes. You believe that's all there is, and you become devoured by sadness. You see it everywhere. You feel it everywhere. You find every reason to believe it’s all true. And if someone were to read that journal, they’d think that’s all that existed within that person, too.
To use myself as an example, I intentionally and purposefully dive deep into the darker emotions, layers, and themes of my mind and life, and I write about them here. I pour it out of me like someone emptying a huge container of sludge, and it just goes everywhere. Then, when you, my dear friend, the reader, read these posts, it can easily make you assume and believe that I'm just a dark, depressed, messed-up, miserable person. But you don't realize that what you read here isn't what makes up my whole life. In fact, it might only make up 20%, where 80% is pure light, love, beauty, and hilarious dirty jokes. You encounter a focused, condensed, and concentrated form of a narrow perspective on things that have been enlarged to appear like the whole.
Now, having said that, don't let me fool you. I am a dark, depressed, and broken person who's mostly an asshole. Somehow I'm fooling the world into believing that I'm capable of functioning as an adult when really I'm just an immature child that is just as scared as anyone else and feels entirely alone and hopeless all the time. But at the same time, I’m the opposite of all those things. I'm full of light and love and compassion and beauty, and I’m a pretty rad dude that's done a tremendous amount of cool shit in life. I'm just trying to be a good person and help people.
The same duality goes for you. You have both light and dark within you. And depending on what you focus on, you may feel that one side is stronger or larger than the other at certain times. You may reveal some parts and hide the rest. Even within your own mind, what you focus on will quickly fill the space of your conscious life, and therefore, it becomes what you experience. What you think, you experience. It's a pretty simple idea. And sometimes we focus on a lot of negative things in our lives. And from that focus, we experience negativity as pain or suffering. And after a while of that, we start to believe that’s how our life is, or that’s how we are.
Yeah, we all have shitty things going on in life, but that may only be 10, 20, or 40% of what is actually going on in life. There is always the other side. There is always something to be grateful for, and your life may be full of beautiful moments. You just aren't focusing on them as much as the shitty things. Or, you're not assigning as much meaning to it or taking action on those things.
Sometimes what we focus on, give meaning to, and take action on are painful things. This only gives more life and validity to painful things and energizes the feedback loop. But we easily forget all the beauty around us. We don't see it, or we don't put as much notice or emphasis on it.
Do you feel that you’re too deep into one side of the contrast and want to flip the table? Remember these three areas: focus, meaning, and action. Change what you’re focusing on, change the meaning, and take different actions. You can feel whatever you want to feel at any time, regardless of the situation you are in. That means you can feel joy even when life is crumbling into a thousand pieces.
We are emotional beings, yes, that’s true. But most people say that to enforce the idea that we are subject to an uncontrollable automatic response from our emotions that creates our experiences for us. It’s really a statement that says, “We are slaves to our emotions,” and so we’re bound to feel shitty because the conditions of our life say so. It can feel like that, and to some degree, it can appear that they are right. We have a lot of patterns and programming built into us from our childhood onward, and those thoughts, patterns, and beliefs can easily go into autopilot without us even becoming consciously aware of them. But bringing awareness to these beliefs and patterns does something pretty remarkable: it enables the possibility of choice. Meaning, when we become aware of our inherited belief systems, behavior patterns, and personality programming, we have the potential to make new choices and create new results.
This is where inward practices such as meditation or journaling come in handy. Sometimes it’s beneficial to get professional help and guidance on creating new behavioral patterns to help create those results. But, it’s possible.
I'm an advocate of contrast and darkness. And by that, I mean that I'm an advocate of people looking at all the dark realms within that we spend our whole life trying to push aside, ignore, abandon, and destroy. Anytime anyone asks me for advice on how to deal with difficult situations, my answer is always the same: go within. Jump into that mess. Look around and lift every rug and open every door in that dark realm. Feel it all. Be with it. It’s probably not as scary and huge as you make it out to be in your mind. But have compassion for yourself and use love as your guide. Maybe you can learn something from it all. Maybe it’s showing you exactly the areas of yourself that need more awareness and healing. Maybe it’s showing you how you can grow. Usually, the answer is right in front of you. And that answer is always to go within and give yourself more love.
I'm purposefully going into the dark realms with this blog and these letters. It’s not to show off my own absurdity, play the victim, or create a sob story. I’m not doing this to sabotage or humiliate myself, although I’m sure that’s happening. Every time I send one of these out, I have no doubt that the few people who know my real identity lose a little bit more respect for me. Or maybe I’m subconsciously trying to kill off versions of myself that I no longer find value in defending, and through exposure and getting them in front of me (and strangers), I can let it all go. You know, emptying the cup of gross, old, moldy coffee that’s been sitting out for days so I can clean the cup and pour in something fresh. I have no clue. Pick your analogy or metaphor.
I try to use writing as a tool and process to create more beauty for myself and maybe help you out too if you align with anything I have to say. If not, that’s okay too.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness's of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
~Carl Jung
I was sitting there watching someone cry in front of me, and I was completely blown away. She was talking about her experience with burnout, a common term spewed around the creative and business realms meant to describe an emotional, physical, and spiritual experience of feeling completely depleted. She was describing how she felt during the moments when she felt burnout and how badly it impacted her life. And as she wiped away the tears that were rapidly flowing down her cheeks and struggled to find words to describe what she felt, I couldn't help but mentally check off each of the emotions, feelings, and experiences she was describing. I had them all and more.
I sat there in awe, watching her, feeling everything, just being with it all. “Fuggin’ hell,” I said to myself. I feel all of those things. But not only that, I've felt them for a very long time—years even. I don’t know why, but I found myself saying that I wish I could cry. I wish I could find a way to just fucking cry and let it all out, whatever 'it' was. I imagined it to be such a release. Somehow, finding a way to let go of whatever was behind it all just felt so rewarding, relieving, purifying, and forcefully depressurizing the soul toward freedom and clarity. But I couldn’t. I’m not sure why. Nothing was there.
Listening to someone else talk about how they felt was… relieving? Comforting? I don't know what word is appropriate. Knowing that someone else is suffering from it too shouldn't make me feel any better. It doesn't add anything to my experience. But I guess it just makes me feel less weird or alone.
And to be honest, I feel alone all the time and have for as long as I can remember. I've learned to just be strong enough to get by and keep going. That's all I've known, really. But yet, I think finding strength in that type of experience is a strength that is actually a great weakness. A faulty part of myself that I don't realize has taken over so much of my life experience without me even realizing it. I go and go and go and do all I can for others—to motivate them, keep them afloat, help them through their life situations and experiences, and guide them through the depths of sorrow, guilt, and darkness—because that's all I can really offer when I sit and think about it. I'm not worth much else. Keeping my mouth shut and making others happy is something I can do well because it's what I know. It's what I've become so familiar with to the point of not even knowing it's a familiarity anymore. It's an experience that is no longer separate from the observer; it becomes intertwined with an identity. Even my silly human design profile says that my value is to be of value to others, to advise them, to guide them, and to support and inspire them. I'll never be the one to make things. I'll never be the #1. But I make the best #2, I guess. Someone who builds another up towards their glory, fame, and success while never really reaching my own.
All of that is something I've spent a lot of years trying to understand and work on accepting. I don't know if I've made too much progress, to be honest. I still have to battle it. I don't know why I resist it so much. Ego, I know. Fucking ego. But man, sometimes I want to be the #1, you know? To do something incredible that makes a difference and that others look up to. It’s not that I want the glory for something; I just want to make something that matters for once. Or at least make something that doesn’t suck or fail; to not just be the guy in the background who accepts mockery and jokes because I know it makes others feel better for me to absorb that.
I guess this is something I've always had to battle. Middle child syndrome, I guess. My older brothers were always the stars, always popular, always successful, and always talented. Anytime I go to do something that I feel proud of, I find out that they've already done it, usually faster, better, and in a way that makes it seem like no big deal. Pick anything... I could proudly announce that I just summited three of the tallest mountain peaks where we live. “Oh, really?” they say. “That's cool. We did those same three while doing another seven, and we did them all in two days, without shoes or food, while giving a grizzly bear a piggyback ride.”
Well, fine then, I’ll just go fuck myself.
I've done a lot of good though, I tell myself. I have to tell myself that honestly because otherwise, I don't know what I would say. A little part of me looks at all the others that I've helped become mega-rich and successful, or immaculately joyful with life, while I return to my dark inner world that's so hollowly comfortable now. And I sit there alone and think, What good have I really done? What do I have to show for myself? Do I even know what my “self” is? Or have I wasted 40 years becoming what others needed me to be so they could obtain what they wished to obtain—feelings, status, belonging, power, or even $100 million? What do I have to show for my efforts, work, and value? Do I even have value? I look around that space, and I don’t really know sometimes.
The few times that I've dared to let anyone into that space and shown them the ruins of what was once my soul, they took hold of it without me realizing there was a match in hand, and it all caught fire. There was a point where I sat and watched everything sacred, everything beautiful, and everything pure catch fire and burn away, right in front of me. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. A light went out within me, and I've never figured out how to turn it back on.
I suspect some of you know what that feels like in some way. Maybe you’ve been through your own version before. Perhaps you’re watching the flames right now, burning down everything beautiful in front of you, and you’re wondering if there’s anything left or how you can really go on.
But even though the light within me went out, I know how to create it in others. I can show them how to get a spark going, and I can help them nurture its growth and get it building and expanding, getting brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter. Then I show them all of it—the light that they have within and the light that they are. And once they see it and hold onto it, I return to the darkness because I don't really have anywhere else to go.
I exist within the darkness, so I can show others the light.
There it is.
That’s something, isn’t it?
Maybe that’s my value.
Maybe that’s what a lot of us are doing.
I sometimes feel that’s the only real value in whatever it is we are doing as humans.
Maybe it’s everything else that is lost.
“You are really in search of yourself, without knowing it. You are love-longing for the love-worthy, the perfect lovable. Due to ignorance, you are looking for it in the world of opposites and contradictions. When you find it within, your search will be over.”
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Cutting out the darkness is like cutting out the ability and potential for more beauty. It's like trying to scrape off all the color from a painting to get back to a clean white canvas. First of all, good luck; you'll just make a mess. And secondly, wtf!? Why would you rather have a plain white canvas instead of a gorgeous painting of a scenic landscape? You love the color, and the color is what makes the image and brings it life and beauty. Besides, have you ever met someone who tries to be all light and love all the time? They’re lying assholes, and the bullshit shines through clearly. Usually, their attempts to use light and love to cover up their mess just make the mess appear more clearly.
Have you ever watched Bob Ross paint? Do you know one of the first things he does when he’s starting a new painting? He lays down a base layer of darkness as a foundation. It's just a messy, ugly, splotchy disaster of dark color that he splatters all over the place. We watch him do this, and we are confused. It doesn't make sense. It looks hideous. How does THAT turn into what we expect to be a beautiful, scenic masterpiece?
But from there, he carefully and patiently adds various colors and highlights in just the right areas. He doesn’t completely put the light back in and certainly doesn’t rush to do it. He still leaves room for lots of darkness to be seen. You need a mix of both for the process to work and for the magic to happen. But in no time at all, BAM! Out of that darkness, a beautiful forest, a pretty little cabin, and happy fucking squirrels all over. When he's done, you look and say, “That's incredible and beautiful!” But that beauty only comes from the darkness. It's the foundation of everything. It mixes in with everything to create the beauty and depth that we see and experience. If he were to put white ink on a white canvas and be "pure love and light" all the time, on every painting, he'd have a collection of hundreds of white, empty canvases, and no one would care at all about who Bob Ross is.
I dare you to take the darkness away from those paintings. You'd destroy it all and have nothing left.
And I dare you to try and remove the darkness from your life. You'll destroy the foundation for everything beautiful and sacred. You'd have nothing left. You couldn’t do it, first of all; let’s be real. And your attempts to do so are really what’s causing your suffering.
Let me say that again in a little summary form to make it clear. The darkness and contrast of your life aren’t what’s causing your suffering. It’s your resistance to the darkness and contrast that’s the real cause.
The funny thing is, I believe the darkness and contrast to be illusory. So really, you’re reacting toward illusions (and I’m writing about them). But that’s way too deep of a concept right now, so we’ll slowly build up to that someday in the progression of this blog/newsletter/embarrassment.
Life is constant change. We’ve all heard that, right? It’s the cliche saying from every self-help personality you’ve ever heard, whose whole career is based on poorly regurgitating stuff that came out as original thought thousands of years ago. We get it. But at the same time, we never get it. Things will change. Things won’t go according to plan. People will do things that bother you. You’ll fall short in ways, and your expectations will never be met. You’ll get sick, get fat, get wrinkled, lose your hair, and you’ll find disappointment around every turn. Everything will change. Everything WILL change. You can’t do anything about that.
But your resistance to the change will make you suffer. Your attempts to hold on to how things were instead of welcoming how they are becoming can create suffering within you. This is the gap of suffering I wrote poorly about in a previous post. How you want things to be versus how they are. The greater the gap between those two, the greater the suffering.
You don't need to destroy the darkness or remove it from your life. You couldn’t do it even if you tried. Instead of resisting it and trying to run from it, stop. Look at it. Have compassion for yourself. Give love to yourself. Listen to it. Learn from it. It will make you a better person and take you to new realms of love and light.
If you feel that your life is a grand splotchy mess of darkness, contrast, and change right now, just know that it's the universe, posing as good ol' Bob Ross and his coke nail, spreading around the dark paint that's becoming the foundation for one of the most beautiful scenic paintings you'll ever see: your life. You have grand beauty coming your way. Just be patient. Allow the process to unfold. Allow the light to mix in here and there. Learn to see the beauty that comes from the collaboration and oneness of the contrast working together. Maybe even try to enjoy the process of the painting coming to life. Sometimes life paints the dark for us, even when we didn’t want it to. But then life hands us the paintbrush, giving us the opportunity to add the light back in. Do you add the light back in or just complain about the dark? Do you paint a grand forest with a lovely cabin and a beautiful stream? You get to decide.
And maybe, if you really look and pay attention, you’ll realize the beauty was there all along. You never had to wait. It never had to be created. All of it was beautiful and perfect.
Sit with it and try to find the beauty that’s being offered. Try to find the light that’s still there or the light that’s coming through in small little cracks. I promise you there is always something you can be grateful for. It could be as simple as you being grateful that you have food to eat and clothes to wear, or being grateful for a song you like that you feel speaks to your soul.
I lived on the streets for a short time, and a homeless friend of mine taught me to be grateful for the cold, hard cement that we slept on. I complained about it constantly. But he never did. Not once. It was the last thing, he said, that truly kept him from falling into the abyss of nothingness, and he was grateful for it.
If my homeless friend can be grateful for the floor he sleeps on, you can find something to focus on and be grateful for.
I can do better, too.
I started this little letter by saying that I see suffering everywhere, in everyone. Yeah, that’s true. But I also see beauty everywhere, in everyone. I see love everywhere; I see goodness, kindness, and compassion.
I see it in others.
I see it in myself.
Sometimes I just don’t focus on that as much.
Maybe I need to do more of that.
Maybe we all need to.