To all the sufferers and seekers out there... [Poem]

My dear ones…

We don’t know what we’re doing. Isn't it time to just admit it?

You, me, all of us... just... like... duuuuhhhh.

We give each other doctorate degrees for learning a lot about what other people who equally don't know what they are doing think.

We judge each other, calling people we don't like "stupid", when we don't even really know why we're alive, or what life is, or what the point of all of this is... if there is any.

We can get to the moon and we can push our children to score high in tests we invented based on arbitrary metrics, but we can't overcome the urge to eat the brownie, we can't keep our hearts from slamming and our palms from sweating when we step up to a podium in front of a room of peers, and we can't resist judging people based on appearance even when we think we can.

We don't understand our own minds, and we can't choose our own choices even when we think we do. 

What happens when we embrace the truth?

Don’t feign indifference, ease, confidence, perfection.
Nobody has it.
Instagram is a liar.
There’s no power in the Emperor’s Clothes.


Embrace your weakness, your fear, 
the overwhelming rage and pain and failure of your daily struggle and identity. 


Lean into your broken heart and listen to its cry for help. 


Open your eyes on the human mess left crushed under the weight of invisible urges, habits and thoughts and cultural expectations. 


Grit your teeth against the taste of how you unknowingly invited this into you, and crushed yourself in order to earn a place in the armpit of an undeserving culture of imitation and lack of fulfillment. 


Seek the scrape of your fists on the walls and the bruising of your knees on the rock bottom of your isolation, guilt, shame, and regret. 


Never brace yourself for the inevitable fall.


Never stall before your arrival at that point of no return, but bring it forever closer to the light, closer to your beating heart, and closer to the surface. 


Bring your sensitivity into sharp relief, dive into your irritation and desire to change something, anything, and light a flame under your utter resolve to break free. 


There is nothing that fuels the evolution of the human race more than a complete conscious refusal to accept less than joy, less than connection, less than communion, less than truth, less than love. 

And you deserve all of it.


Bring that point of breaking forward until it is hot and raw and bleeding on your kitchen table. 


Don't avoid it, burying it under layers of memory, repression, ignorance. 


This hot red poker in your side is your ticket to motion, piercing through the veils of complacency, an ignition switch launching you toward the being that you came to BE. 


The pain is a gift, wanting to throw you into action, to force you to release all the ties that bind and the baggage that suffocates you, and to cast off all chains as you rise into the unknown, kicking and screaming in every direction, as you fight for the gulp of fresh air you, my dear one, deserved since the first breath you took. 


You didn't come here to slowly drown in the whirlpool of complacency. 


You came here to learn to live fully and authentically. 


You came here to breathe, sharp and clean and possessively, drawing in that aliveness you long for in a sweet and tonic soprano of light, and exhaling the great great confusion of disappointing years of dissonance.


You are the cauldron, the epicenter of the machine of transformation, and the zero point between what is and what can be. 


You are the event horizon.


Choose, choose, and choose again, even when there seems no choice, to raise that rocky bottom of everything you fear until it is up so close that you no longer have to fall through the depths to reach it. 


Raise it up until you stand on it every day, and say:


Today I will only go forward into the unknown, and rise higher.


I will accept nothing less. 


This very moment is the point of no return, and every moment thereafter. 


I will not wait to make the change I know I must make. 


I will not waste my life drowning and waving for help. 


I will save me.


I will rise.