Welcome to the first volume of NurStack! I’ve been dying to put out a weekly/biweekly series where I chat about a range of different topics. They’ll include an array of what I’m currently learning, new dishes I’ve made, what I’ve been reading and listening to, and new free tools I’ve discovered that make my life easier! They’ll also include philosophical quandaries I’m working through, a mini Woofstack (this is in place until how I decide what’s next for Woofstack), and more!

This was supposed to be an introductory post, but whatever, let’s get right into it!

Animal chaos and cooking new dishes.

It’s been a hell of a week in the chronicles of the BOYS (the pets). On the top left, you’ll see Bear being a great sport while my mom tries out different headbands on him during Mother’s Day. I prefer the pink and white one posted here the most, but he looked pretty chic in the yellow and white, too. It was a tough call!

On the top right, you’ll see my attempt at making ‘Jamaican Shrimp’. It was actually one of the most delicious dishes I’ve made recently. Only when everything was eaten together, though. I totally overcooked the shit out of the shrimp but hey, Chef Nur is a work in progress.

The backyard has recently become home to a new family of bunnies, and given that it’s Spring, this means, you guessed it, baby bunnies! Now, as much as I love watching them eating grass back there, it’s also Bear’s domain. The domain in which he is notorious for murdering countless rats. Yesterday, I let Bear out and joined him. Bear sprinted into the yard, and I instantly noticed a tiny baby bunny paralyzed with fear. He was standing right next to the door, and I was praying that Bear wouldn’t see him. Unsurprisingly, Bear spots him and runs towards him. I grabbed him just in time for the baby bunny to jump in this semi-circle hole we have attached to a basement window.

I brought Bear inside, much to his dismay, and went to look for the little guy. I removed all the yard tools I had stored there and had no luck in finding him. Right as I had decided to leave good enough alone, I spotted the little guy. He was hiding inside a large black dustpan I had out there, and he was once again, paralyzed with fear. Now, I’m okay with Bear killing whatever he finds out there, rules of nature all that; however, there’s no way I could let that baby bunny get bit. He was way too cute and there was just no way. Anway, I knew the bunny family lived under the shed, so I carried the dustpan baby over there and he refused to move. I had to reach in there, grab him and drop him right next to the shed. If he was paralyzed with fear earlier, can you imagine how he felt when I grabbed him? Whoops!

The cat, Boor (3mbaarr, we use numbers to account for missing letters when writing in Arabic-English, is his real name but I’m sparing you), has been desperately begging to go outside in his old age. He’s newly 13, but living in the woods means coyote central. The number of times I’ve seen or walked by a coyote or two must be abnormally high. They keep us awake at night with their howling, too. I’m not complaining, but it’s certainly not an environment to have an outdoor cat. Unfortunately, smaller dogs in our neighborhood have been killed by coyotes, so I can’t even imagine what they’ve been doing to the cats. I don’t let him out, but that certainly does not stop him from trying, as you can see in the picture on the bottom left.

The bottom right shows one of Bear’s new toys. A sushi chef octopus next to a dog cookie based on a Japanese dish, but its name is eluding me right now!

Philosophical quandary of the moment

Quick disclaimer: I cannot say Hercules without hearing Eddie Murphy clapping and saying ‘HERCULES, HERCULES!’ every single time.

Good ol’ Hercules at the Crossroads. The story has been invading my mind for hours upon hours, day after day. For those who aren’t familiar, the story is as follows. Picture Hercules walking down an old dirt road when suddenly, a fork appears. On both paths of these symbolic crossroads, there is a woman waiting for him. On the right was Kakia, the goddess of vice, and on the left was Arete, the goddess of virtue.

Kakia was dressed beautifully and was very seductive in manner. She offered Hercules an easy life of pleasure and indulgence. She promised that he would gain everything he wanted without effort. Fame, luxury, you name it. Arete, on the other hand, was dressed modestly and had a more intense demeanor. She offered Hercules a challenging life of struggle, discipline, and hard work. According to Arete, greatness was the result of hard work and moral strength. Only through these means could he achieve true fulfillment.

Hercules chose the path of Arete (also the Greek word for virtue). As we all know by now, this resulted in Hercules enduring the infamous Twelve Labors and becoming known as a hero of legend.

This past weekend, I attended a gaming convention: Penny Arcade Expo East. I’ve been attending on and off for about ten years now and I absolutely love going. Unfortunately, something felt different this year. I wasn’t walking around with the childlike wonder I’d had there in the past. Everyone was having a blast, and I was to a certain extent, too, but I couldn’t shake this intense feeling that was practically gnawing at the back of my brain. I even asked the cute Irish bartender working there if the convention scene was dying. She laughed and reassured me that the whole weekend was sold out. It didn’t take much longer to realize that it was not only that I had changed, but the convention was a massive, tangible representation of my own Hercules at the Crossroads moment. I was struggling with the concept of playing video games.

I’ve always loved gaming. I was raised with it, I’ve made incredible friends through online gaming, and I genuinely enjoy my time playing. My attitude towards it is basically: as long as it isn’t interfering with other things I need to get done or be doing, then it’s fine. Lately, however, it’s been challenging to play even under those parameters. It feels too much like I’m playing the actualized dream of other creatives instead of working on my own. Do I think that quitting video games will all of a sudden make me a productivity fiend? Not really, no. I don’t think there’d be much to gain at all, but the struggle persists. I won’t be solving this now or providing solutions, as I’m not there yet, but I wanted to put it out there.

WoofStack

WOOOOOOOF! I’m interested in bringing back WoofStack. In the meantime, I’ll be including a pup in every volume of NurStack.

For Volume #1, we have the legendary Charlie (aka Prince Charles, Charles Darwin, Charlie Sheen, Charles Manson, Charles de Gaulle, etc.) was gracious enough to submit Charlie as well as one hell of a description! In her own words:

“Charlie, much like Natalia, is a lover and selective fighter with a penchant for dreams––though his occur primarily in his sleep. He is an idealist who loves chasing rabbits and his vision of a utopia filled with lean cuts of meat and ice cubes to beat the onset of L.A. heat. He reads dogs and people like Natalia reads books...with a rapid delight! He has one arch-nemesis, Ale. It takes a lot to vex Charlie, but if you cross the line: watch out.”

Would you like to see WoofStack return? Let me know! If you’d like to submit your dog, make sure to send at least 3 pictures and a description of your pup to nur.nadar@gmail.com.

Introducing Humble Homie #5

Next week, Mindy Kurtmer, will be joining me for an awesome discussion on the Humble Homies podcast! Mindy is a Harvard Law graduate who left Big Law in NYC to pursue her soul’s passions. She currently writes and illustrates the well-known Ego Cat webcomic. Her webcomic does an incredible job teaching psychological, philosophical, and spiritual concepts through the medium of comics. She’s also currently working on her journey to take on the pop world as a musical artist. Make sure to check it out!!

You can find Mindy and her work on Instragram at: https://www.instagram.com/miiindy___/

Thanks for reading Volume #1!! If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of NurStack, please do not hesitate to let me know!

I’m extremely excited to present episode 3 of the Humble Homies podcast with my good friend Chelsea McLeod. In her own words, Chelsea is:

‘I am an integrative health practitioner and Founder of the Healthy Hustle Method, which helps busy, driven women look & feel incredible by balancing hormones & fixing gut issues. No fad diets/endless cardio. Corporate dropout, I quit my job this year as a digital commerce director at Crocs, formerly adidas, as my business grew too fast. Backed by science & client results of 100+ female leaders age 28-65 at Amazon, McKinsey, Google, TedX speakers and 7 figure entrepreneurs.’

In this episode, we discuss topics such as:

• How to fix hormone imbalances

• The negative impact hustle culture has on our bodies and nervous systems

• Women experiencing Menopausal symptoms prematurely and what they can do to turn this around

• The cost of staying where you are vs the cost of paving your own way

• Having a strong enough why

• and more!

You can find out more about Chelsea on her Instagram @healthywithchels

Stay tuned for her upcoming podcast ‘It’s not you, it’s your hormones.’

Don’t forget to check out her free ebook: Busy Girl's Guide to Weight Loss!

Thanks for listening!!

Together, we discuss a length of topics ranging from:

• Social Clocks

• Eastern wisdom for the Western mind

• Can you ever be fully prepared for children?

• Identity

• and more!

Thanks so much for listening and make sure to check out Ian and Scott at their publications:

Living Your Wisdom | Ian Haycroft

Curiosity Mindset | Scott Ko

Substack’s penchant for building relationships and communities remains amongst the most incredible things about the platform. I’ve personally made so many friends and connections in only a year’s time, something people claim is impossible in your 30s, and I’ve succeeded in creating what I’ll call a ‘support group’. I left support group in quotations there because at this point, almost one year after its creation, it’s really just a weekly two hour hang out amongst eight friends who discuss different ideas. It really is an incredible thing that I remain in awe of. Amongst the people I speak to on a daily and weekly basis, those of whom I met on Substack now occupy a decently large percentage.

In the midst of that oft repeated soundbite known as ‘loneliness epidemic’, I want to show you how simple it is to build relationships online and, more specifically, through Substack, by sharing the story of how I created my Men’s Group. To sum it up quickly, it’s a group for male vulnerability where we meet weekly to discuss a specific topic, a new one each week. Our ultimate goal is to help each other become better men through genuine, vulnerable conversation. I’m consistently in awe of how everyone continues to show up with so much respect, bravery, and rawness, week after week. Our only rules are:

• be respectful

• complete anonymity outside the meetings

• no woman bashing

• leave the incel garbage at the door

Luckily, with the kind of guys this group is comprised of, I doubt it was necessary to set those rules in the first place. Before I run the risk of glazing the bros a bit too much, let’s go ahead and discuss how I was able to get this done and what the whole process consisted of.

1. Lead by example

Starting on Substack was a very organic journey for me. I started by releasing an essay a week, posting daily on Notes, and trying my best to meet other people on here. I didn’t have many writer friends, and there was a part of me that was used to being the writer in my inner circles, and I really wanted to break away from the possessiveness I held over that title. Being on here and engaging with others’ works really helped break away from that, and I felt very welcome by most who I met on here.

The acceptance for the essays and Notes I was writing felt pretty great and it absolutely encouraged me to share the more raw, visceral shit I’d been writing for myself and not putting out there. This involved writing about my mental health challenges, struggles with religion and masculinity, feelings of failure regarding my current position in life, addiction battles, and so on. Was I not nervous about putting this out there? Of course I was! It’s a scary thought that anyone can find the least hidden website in the world (my first name and my last name dot com) and discover my most sincere thoughts and dig up sentences containing my most damning shames. As we all know by now, I did it anyways. Perhaps a cliche at this point, but I was blown away by not only how this made me feel considerably more accepted, but also by how I found my inbox filled with people who felt extremely similarly and had become inspired after reading my work.

I was definitely surprised by how many people my work had touched, but perhaps less surprised that the majority of them were men. A lot of men feel incredibly lost and unable to express their anguish due to rules they were taught regarding what a man is. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those rules revolved around never feeling ‘unmanly’ emotions and certainly never expressing them. I’m not going to dive too deep on the issues of modern masculinity in this piece, but I’ll sum it up by saying: men are constantly looking for community, brotherhood, and comradery; a place they can fully be themselves without judgement.

2. Send out a feeler and do your research

I knew of the power of support groups / community to help us grow so I decided to throw out a feeler. It was a simple Note that stated: Would anyone be interested in joining a men’s group? The next day, that note was STACKED with replies and my inbox was bursting at the seams. I had almost 100 people interested in joining such a community.

Part of me was like ‘ah, shit. what have I gotten myself into here?’ Another part of me was really excited about taking on this challenge. I already had some brief experience in what such a group should entail, but I scoured the internet and read countless articles on group formats, potential discussion topics, how to properly facilitate meetings, and so on.

From there, I … dropped the idea and procrastinated. I was intimidated by the whole concept. People tend to think all of this came super easily to me and yada yada yada, but no, leading something like this was brand new to me and with that came a lot of nerves. Luckily, a now group member messaged me asking about it. If he hadn’t, I’m honestly not sure if I’d have seen this thing through. Shout out to you, random anonymous man.

3. Lock in your platform, your format, and schedule

For the men’s group, I knew it was crucial that we used at least a voice chat. Eventually, it evolved into everyone being on video, but it started as a voice mandatory, video optional meeting. Point being, we had to move off of Substack.

I knew this process was going to be annoying and that we’d lose a few people with the move, but it ultimately worked out way better than I expected it to. For platform options, the ones that typically come to mind are Zoom and Discord, so I’d suggest choosing a popular and accessible platform like those two. I chose Discord because you can do voice, video, and chat channels for the days we weren’t meeting; it was absolutely perfect for what we wanted.

Once you’ve moved your flock over to a platform of choice, it’s time for everyone to agree on a time. Expectedly, we once again lost a significant amount of people here. It was too bad, but ultimately for the best, as you’re about to find out.

When it came to scheduling, it was always going to be a once-a-week type of deal, but I was never sure what the appropriate amount of time allotted would be. It started out being an hour long, but it became incredibly clear that we’d need more time. Two hours ended up being perfects for us.

As far as format is concerned, it’s going to be a fluid, adapt as you go, type of deal. I started with a specific format that I’d researched and then sought out feedback from the group members as time went on. I incorporated that feedback to the best of my abilities and it took about four months or so to really get to one that all of us were very happy with. Don’t be afraid to experiment and ask for feedback!

As mentioned above, it’s now been almost a year of consistent weekly meetings with such an incredible group of guys, and it’s been an absolute pleasure growing alongside them. I just see them as my friends at this point and I’m really lucky to be able to hang out with them weekly.

If anyone reading decides to pursue something like this of their own, please don’t hesitate to reach out! I’d love to help in any way that I can.

Thanks for reading, loves! Until next time :)

“I am an American YouTuber, language learner (polyglot), writer and traveler attempting to share stories of inspiring individuals from every country in the world. Aside from my writing that is worked into my narrations on my YouTube videos, I am working on writing my first book”.

I’m absolutely blown away by how great this episode turned out and am extremely grateful to Ricky’s thoughtful answers and for sharing his incredible stories.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Travel

• Language

• Humanity

• Anthony Bourdain and his legacy

• Both General Vulnerability and also specifically Male Vulnerability.

• The importance of pursuing your passion no matter the limitations you’re faced with.

• and much more!

You can find Ricky on YouTube and Instagram at:

• https://www.youtube.com/@RickySeaman

• https://www.instagram.com/ricky.seaman/

Enjoy!

Therapy speak and mental health terms are abused in abundance as of late. I’m guilty of this at times, and I’ve come to suspect it’s in part due to possessing a limited vocabulary to express how we feel. There are hundreds of words for this in the English language but realistically, how many of those do we use daily? How many do we even know?

For example: as somebody who’s danced with lady darkness often enough, it’s easy to find myself in the trap of saying ‘I’m depressed’. While there are times where my essence feels like a crippled ghost haunting the mental prison of my brain, there are also times where I just feel bummed out or more generally speaking, ‘blah’. I’m guilty of labeling each form as depression when it’s clear that it only suits one of the two cases.

There’s gargantuan weight tied to the word ‘depression’ and using it all loosey goosey to describe my emotional states does more harm than good. If I am in a depressive cycle, I’ll say whatever the fuck I want with complete abandon, but that’s a different story for a different day as that isn’t currently the case. The emotional state I’ve been taken by recently and have learned to deeply love is the one known as languishing.

Simply put, languishing equals:

• — feeling listless

• — being ‘stuck in a rut/slump’

• — BLAH

Or, as psychologists would call it, the absence of mental health, a state that exists between depression and flourishing. When languishing, we’re not quite weighed down by agony, nor are we fulfilled and killing it in every aspect of our lives. How could I feel deeply in love with this state? Wouldn’t I rather be flourishing? Well, sure, but when I’m languishing, I’m clearly not flourishing. I’m not suggesting we keep ourselves stuck in states that don’t work for us, but it’s worth befriending the state you’re in while you’re in it.

I used to DESPISE languishing. I’d be overcome by a sense of otherworldly boredom and just lament that I had ‘no direction’. I would still exercise, meditate, play with my dog, journal, whatever, but I’d just feel like these were preprogrammed, autopilot activities that I was doing mindlessly.

One day, while lying in my bed staring at the ceiling, as one does, a thought consumed me: I’m not having fun anymore. It was clear to me that I was living my life in a way that no longer served me. Right then and there, I whipped out my musty old lap desk, picked from one of the dozens of journals laying around my room (all emblazoned with a vaguely East Asian design), and went to work. I needed to find what was no longer working for me, and that goes for: thought patterns, relationships, goals, daily habits, you name it.

I was beginning to understand that the state of languishing could be an incredibly wise teacher for me. I’m neither battling intense pain and lethargy in depression, nor am I too busy flourishing to worry about what could weighing me down. Languishing is a great space to really sit down and evaluate how you’ve been living your life. The more I kept an open mind, the more questions, and dare I say directions, seemed to arise in my brain.

Now, as much as I’d love to just lecture about languishing as an objective emotion that’s happening over there, I’d rather take the leap and bring it up close by sharing some of languished musings.

Let’s start with a challenging one: reconsidering the sins of my father. I don’t like being back in Boston, period. I don’t love this city as much as I once did and it’s not where I see myself for any extended period of time. I’m thrilled, however, that I get to see my parents much more often. There’s a bizarre feeling deep in my gut that this is the last time I’ll be able to be around them this much and I should absolutely cherish it.

I do cherish it, I really do, but if you’ve read my previous works (I won’t be rehashing it all), you’ll know I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my father.

A relationship with what I’ll call a ‘reformed abuser’ is beyond complicated. He’s been nothing but caring, supportive, and kind to me, but that doesn’t automatically remove how easily I can become dysregulated by the slightest thing he does. I’ve forgiven him, but there’s reactions I still can’t fully control, so now I’m the asshole. Funny how that works.

My mother loves my father deeply, so she’ll always tell me about his childhood and how he was raised. The process of hearing these stories, after years, has followed this sort of progression:

• I couldn’t give less of damn.

• Then he should have known better

• Hm… well, shit.

I reached the third stage of that progression on a day I was sitting at the dinner table with my mom. There’s nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I’m concerned, but she chose that moment to blurt out ‘your dad has such bad ADHD. When he was a kid in Damascus, his parents would tie him up with rope to the railing of their balcony and leave him there for hours because they couldn’t deal with him.’ Now, I don’t believe that anyone’s obligated to forgive anyone, especially someone who’s made your life immensely challenging, but hearing that story and the imagery of a little kid tied up outside, not knowing when (or in his mind, if) he’ll be let back inside, broke me. It wasn’t a particularly mental health forward place in 1950s Syria, so I try to remind myself that he couldn’t have gotten help even if he was desperate to heal. Sitting with this story and the intense emotions it created in me was enough to allow me to fully let it all go. I don’t have the energy to hold onto resentments anymore, and I’m glad I was able to experience this release while he’s still alive. I refuse to be the thirty-five-year-old who still blames his parents. My mental health may not be my fault, but it’s absolutely my responsibility, and I choose to move forward on a path of healing.

Next, I want to share other, perhaps less beefy, questions and musings I found myself faced with.

‘What is your plan for Substack? Is your future with the platform just as the guy who posts photos of his dog? Why are you even on here’ By posting weekly essays and being active daily on notes, I had a bit of a meteoric rise when I first started on here. The moment I stopped being as active, as consistent, I saw it all go stagnant. No new subscribers, multiple people shooting past my subscriber count, and friendships I really enjoyed slowly slipping away. It was challenging at first, but it really is a ‘you get what you put into it’ system, and I got used to the stagnation fairly quickly.

It’s easy to announce that I’m making some grand return without actually standing on business. This time around, I already have quite a few pieces prepared, and the Humble Homies video podcast’s calendar is completely booked with really exciting guests. I can’t wait to share it all with you.

Another musing that hit me particularly hard but may not resonate as much with others was: You can’t get away with this shit anymore. There’s no flashy smile to get you out of this one. It’s time to grow up.

You attach too much weight to a broken tooth. Every time you look in the mirror and see it, your mind flashes every mistake you’ve made, as if the tooth was the culmination of all your sins. It’s just a tooth, stop torturing yourself about it.

Stop waiting to befriend King Kong while he’s climbing the Empire State Building and attacking anything that comes near. Catch him when he’s docile and bring him a stack of bananas. You’ll be surprised how much your quality of life will skyrocket once you stop waiting until the chill ass monkey becomes a raging behemoth.

It’s funny to me how much I’d prefer to just write all this in a journal and lock it away. Instead, here we are, publishing it to a couple thousand people. It’s fueled by my deep desire to destroy any imagery of a person who’s flourishing 24/7. We seem to want to convince everyone of that, but it just makes everyone feel inadequate. I find male vulnerability to be particularly important and hope I can continue to lead the way whether I’m curled up in a ball of depression, languishing with the best of them, or flourishing to my heart’s content.

What’re some common thoughts that pop up for you while languishing? How do you deal with this state? Would love to hear your takes in the comments below!

Buy a coffee to support me =)

I’m going to phase this essay into two parts. The first part will focus on the title of this piece: the wisdom of hiking! The second part may as well be considered a blooper reel because I’m going to take you on a ride of all the absolutely soul crushing disasters that have occurred in these places. I’d be doing y’all a disservice by pretending it’s all sunshine and rainbows when it’s better served as a smorgasbord of bizarre experiences.

Part 1

Shinrin-yoku, the Japanese art known as ‘Forest Bathing’, is both a great friend of mine and a theory I have put to the test more times than I’d like to admit.

My hometown was famously built on top of a swamp. It takes a lavish five-minute walk from my house for me to end up deep in the woods.

Naturally, it was the ideal spot for underage drinking. It later evolved into the spot where we’d smoke way too much weed in the parking lot and then go for long hikes because it’d ‘bring us closer to nature’. Whether or not that’s true, I’m not sure, but I once hugged a tree on the most popular path in the place and passed out for two hours. I’ve always imagined a guide taking people through the woods, spotting me and saying something akin to ‘on your left is the resident tree hugging stoner. Legend has it that he’s slept for millennia and has yet to show any signs of waking.’

As I matured a bit, my new favorite activity was to hike about an hour into the woods towards my favorite boulder overlooking the reservoir. Once there, I’d take a seat and whip out my notebook to write poetry and observations of how I felt in the solitude and shelter the woods provided me. I was falling in love. An anxious, depressed, and lost boy found what he was looking for in those woods.

In the twinkling of an eye, I’d learned every trail and had become a more animalistic version of myself. When I’m in the woods or the mountains, it’s the main time I feel completely ‘human as animal’. There’s an instant sense of connection the moment I enter, a sense of belonging, a sense of peace. The bombardment of noise pollution from every car driving by disappears and is replaced by a babbling brook that transcends me to another plane of spirituality. Howling at the top of my lungs in there never once felt strange to me. In fact, it’s one of my favorite releases to this day. I’ve made love in there, I’ve sobbed out my absolute being in there, and I’ve had some of the most profound insights in my life in there. Maybe there’s a reason I look like a woodsman 🤔

Eventually, like a man driven by primordial instinct, I found progressively more challenging hiking trails. Ultimately, this led to me a famous New Hampshire mountain climb: Mt. Washington, the highest peak in the Northeastern US at 6,228 ft. The hike was around four hours up and four hours back down.

I was MOSTLY fit at this period, so the strenuous physicality wasn’t necessary the issue. The mental side is, however, a radically different tale.

The moment I arrived, I remember looking up, straining my neck to get the full view, and realizing the daunting task I’ve just undertaken. It began as any basic forest hike does. The incline was considerably steeper, but there was still a familiarity to it.

I’ll never forget the feeling of when I finally climbed out of the woods and looked out. Standing above the forest I had just spent hours clambering out of, I knew in my gut that I was close to the top. As I turned around, filled with absolute glee and cocksureness that I was on the cusp of conquering my goal, I fell to my knees in an absurd fit of laughter. It felt akin to trekking up an endless staircase, thinking I was nearing the top, and then falling to my knees with the crushing realization that I was still very much at the base.

As I continued to slog up the mountain, being passed at lightning speed by these spritely French-Canadian children, it hit me that climbing this beast of a mountain was a perfect model for achieving anything in life. There are endless metaphors for self-development wrapped around the idea of climbing mountains, and it became abundantly clear why, but more about this later.

One of the things I’ll never forget is how I kept thinking to myself, ‘what is this feeling?’ It wasn’t entirely new to me, but it was exceedingly rare. The combination of endorphins from climbing, a sense of being such a small being in the face of this mountain, and the consistent aesthetical bombardment of natural beauty, all led to an incredible sense of awe.

My senses were overwhelmed in the best way possible. On my right, a gorgeous waterfall. On my left, an enchanting ravine. My ears were blessed by an incredible euphony:

• The surging waterfall: a thunderous curtain of nature’s tears.

• The sound of the wind whispering secrets through the trees’ dancing leaves.

As I neared the top, my legs were absolute mush, expired jelly on a hot summer day. Returning to the model of self-development goals, one thing became clear to me in that moment: if you just keep going and don’t stop, you’ll get there eventually. There was the nice boost of getting through the forest and feeling great about that accomplishment, which reminded me of the rapid progress I can make when I start pursuing a new goal. The realization that I wasn’t even close to the peak was representative of the feeling when the rapid progress slows down and it became painfully clear how much more work is necessary to reach the top. I refer to this phase as the ‘muck’. The muck is unrewarding. The muck is boring. The muck is necessary. By putting in consistent effort (continuing up the mountain), resting when necessary, changing paths when discovering one that felt more suitable for me, I eventually reached the top. Having the ability to visualize and feel the reward at the end helped immensely. I couldn’t stop thinking about how incredible I’d feel when I reached the top. No matter what happens in my life, I could say I climbed Mt. Washington. Visualizing how amazing the steak and beer I was going to crush once I got back down certainly didn’t hurt, either.

Nature has so much to teach us when we’re ready to receive the lessons. It’s significantly easier to attain insights when facing something quite literally greater than you. Being reminded how small we really are, a single grain on an endless beach, helps put things into perspective in a very sublime way.

Stay tuned for Part 2, aka the blooper reel of my endless struggles and failures on several different trails.

Paid Subscribers: I’m starting a series that will be around 2-3 newsletters a month for paid subscribers only. Don’t miss out! Bear and I appreciate the hell out of your support! Also, stay tuned for the first episode of Casually Copacetic coming in the next couple of weeks!

Subscribe now

Are you much of a nature person? Let me know about your experiences in the comments below!

• What inspired you to move in this direction?

• How have you conquered the fears and doubts associated with a project like this?

• What advice would you have for anyone who is interested in venturing down a similar path?

We’ll definitely get into the nitty gritty and I’m almost certain that our conversations will turn to the profound and philosophical quite often.

Anyhow, without further ado, allow me to introduce the first three guests:

Ricky Seaman

“My name is Ricky Seaman. I am an American YouTuber, language learner (polyglot), writer and traveler attempting to share stories of inspiring individuals from every country in the world. Aside from my writing that is worked into my narrations on my YouTube videos, I am working on writing my first book”.

Chelsea McLeod

I am an integrative health practitioner and Founder of the Healthy Hustle Method, which helps busy, driven women look & feel incredible by balancing hormones & fixing gut issues. No fad diets/endless cardio. Corporate dropout, I quit my job this year as a digital commerce director at Crocs, formerly adidas, as my business grew too fast. Backed by science & client results of 100+ female leaders age 28-65 at Amazon, McKinsey, Google, TedX speakers and 7 figure entrepreneurs.’

KodePink/Kenan Nadar

“Hi my name is Kenan Nadar and I’m a pediatrician and full time music producer (1/2 of the dance pop duo Kode PinK). I started producing music 7 years ago at the end of my medical residency and since then, I’ve played shows across the US, in Japan, and Korea, and my project has amassed over 1 million streams on Spotify. My goal in music is to express my creativity and inspire others to fulfill their passions in life.”

Hoping to have the first episode out later this month or early next month. Get excited people!!

Nur

We strive to do it all. I certainly do, anyways. Unsurprisingly, that shit rarely works out. Recently, I took on a short-term consulting gig that ended up lasting around four months. It was incredible to see how easy it was to suddenly ‘not have time’ for anything. What a convenient excuse it was. Consistent weekly newsletter? Can’t do it — no time! Weekly WoofStack? Fuggetaboutit. I made sure work and the gym were solid and used that as a justification to let the rest fall to the wayside. I knew I was full of shit, though. I had plenty of time for what I had to get done; I simply chose not to. Would I admit that at the time? I doubt it, but the bullshit is beyond obvious in retrospect. Was this making me happy? Of course not. There was always a gnawing in the back of my mind telling me that I’m not doing what I need to be doing. I’m not working towards my destiny.

As much as I have taken responsibility for my actions and prepared to rocket off into grander heights, it was easy to forget that personal accountability isn’t synonymous with personal blame. It’s easy to say ‘I should have done this, I should have done that’ ‘I’m such an idiot’ ‘insert self-lashing here’. It’s much more challenging to embrace saying ‘I did my best with what I could. Blame is unnecessary but it’s my responsibility to move forward to greater things’. If I was to lockdown what the pattern was that kept me from thriving in the way that I wanted to, I’d simply say: I was being incongruent.

The hell is that about? Well, a state of congruence for me is when my thoughts, feelings, and actions are aligned. For instance, I was watching Squid Game the other day. I like to bang out my stretching routine with a show on in the background, but sometimes I get a little too absorbed. Every single time that happens, my feelings are flooded with tension and my thoughts are bombarded by: ‘dude, stretch, you can still watch it, get down on the floor’. My action in the moment was to just watch TV. Completely entranced by Thanos and his shock of purple hair, koreanglish, and his drug-induced flip flopping between evil and a state of child-like wonder, yet my thoughts were like a woodpecker just smacking away at the back of my brain. The simple act of getting down and starting instantly caused a wave of relief and pleasure to wash over me.

I’d also point to how easy it is for me to shift into a mode of abnegating. To abnegate is to reject something of value, and what I was abnegating was the discipline and sense of personal responsibility required to both get what I want out of this life and be the person I want to be. I write this as both an admission as well as a method of examining why I fall into patterns of working against my own interests.

Aside from falling victim to my own abnegations, I’d also begun to feel as though I’d unwittingly pigeonholed myself. My essays took on the following pattern: Here’s a story from my past, here’s how it affected me, and here’s what I did about it. I’m absolutely still going to write personal essays of that sort, but I don’t want to feel like that’s something I HAVE to do. It’s a bit of a bizarre mental prison I locked myself in. There was zero external force suggesting that I had to stay in this niche, but it significantly drained the passion I had towards writing. Moving forward, I’m going to write whatever I feel like writing about. In fact, I already have not only five newsletters in the pipeline, but also an exciting new project I’ve been working on: the Casually Copacetic video podcast. I’ll be interviewing folks, primarily up and coming creatives, who are paving their own way and putting in the work to live the kind of life they’ve always dreamed of. I have three amazing guests planned for us and I’ll be sending out a newsletter introducing the three of them very soon. I may even be integrating WoofStack into this newsletter, but that’s yet to be seen (you have the option to opt out of specific sections of a newsletter, so no worries there if it isn’t something you’re interested in).

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver

My love for this shit is back in full force and I can’t wait to share all I’ve been cooking up with y’all. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the upcoming newsletters:

• A recap of my experience on Substack so far, including tips and tricks to help your newsletter blossom.

• What it’s been like to start and lead a weekly men’s group and how that came to fruition.

• Hiking and how it’s played a significant part in shaping the person I am today.

I will leave y’all with a picture of me cheesing to the future. With much love and excitement,

Nur

“Praise him!”. A common sentiment throughout my childhood. I sometimes wonder what good it’d have done if I submitted rather than fought. Was the goal to save my soul, or theirs? Rebellion and my particular brand of chaos had me eventually labeled as an Ifrit. An Ifrit is essentially a winged demon made of smoke in Arab folklore. What sort of lasting impact occurs when one’s called a demon by those whose words mattered most, I wonder. Who knows.

“Praise him!”. How could I? Demons and God weren’t exactly on worshipped/worshipper terms. You wouldn’t make me forsake my demon brethren, would you? Besides, I had already sworn fealty to a different god. His name was Anger, and he answered when I called. His name was Anger, and he protected me. He gave me strength. I didn’t need to question his existence because unlike many, he actually showed up.

Anger is being told that that which soothes me will lead to being tortured for all eternity.

Anger is being told that listening to music results in molten lava spewing from my ears in the afterlife. Told by someone who would play music loudly whenever he got the chance, no less.

Anger is repeated public ridicule over that which I had no control over.

Anger is knowing that neither home nor the outdoor world were places of safety for me.

Anger is … inappropriate?

Anger is repressed

Anger is intense tension, anxiety, an electric shockwave which eviscerates your insides, a screaming radar, repeatedly bashing into your head the message that ‘SOMETHING IS NOT OKAY’.

Anger is crippling resentment

Anger is dying alone, a bitter mess over what could have been.

It was a shitty moment when I realized anger was so frowned upon. Why? Well, that anger I'd amassed inside myself now had nowhere to go. It’s not going to evaporate because of this new social feedback. It instead gets completely internalized and turned against me in the form of anxiety. Thankfully, as an adult, I have a considerably healthier understanding of anger and its intricacies. Nowadays:

Anger is dwelling on my choice to not respond to a text and wondering if it could have saved them.

Anger is seeing my parents get older and knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop it. How much time had I wasted harboring resentments towards them instead of appreciating any of our time together.

Anger is seeing my Dad be so incredibly sweet to my pets and lamenting that my childhood self never got to experience that version of him.

Anger is verbally and/or physically removing an annoying man from a partner’s vicinity.

Anger is valid. Anger is more than appropriate. Necessary, even.

How does one really quantify the ‘appropriateness’ of such a primordial emotion?

Looks like it’s time to dust off the philosophy degree and consult some ancient wisdom. The question I’m going to pose is whether or not moral philosophy can help us determine the following:

• When is it appropriate to act on anger?

• What amount of anger is appropriate for a ‘man of virtue’ to possess?

• What happens if we act on our anger and cause a mess?

Now, although we’ll be consulting several different schools of moral philosophy, I’ll also be adding my take at the end. The point of being a philosopher, for me, will never be to just recite what some ancient dudes said about x, y, and z. It’s important to learn what they had to say, but that’s mainly because we’re exposing ourselves to several different methods of thinking as well as a breadth of ideas, we can ponder yourself. Soaking in all this knowledge from other people’s books, ideas, and so on, should be done with the ultimate goal of building our own interpretation of the ideas and our own answers to the questions being posed.

Stoicism has been incredibly popular lately. The number of times I’ve been told something like ‘Well, Marcus Aurelius says…’ from a ‘Stoic Bro’ has reached the absurd. I’ve read Meditations at least 16 times in the 13 years I’ve known of it. I’m not interested in hearing what Marcus has to say. I want to know what you think about the topic at hand. Anyway, let’s dive in and stay tuned until the end for my interpretation.

Why won’t a deontologist tell a lie? They Kant. I’ll give everyone a minute here to gather themselves after that colossal laugh attack you must have experienced. You good? Okay, let’s get into it.

We’ll begin by examining three schools of thought in (Western) Moral Philosophy, starting with Deontology. Perhaps a particularly jarring school of thought, Deontology is known as the ‘never break the rules’ school. If you’re thinking “wow! Deontologists sound like some annoying fuckers!”, then you’re probably right. Moral philosophy mainly focused on either Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, Deontology, or the school known as Consequentialism. According to Deontology, some rules, no matter the consequences, are too sacred to be broken. Changing your position in lieu of circumstances would be considered unethical.

Immanuel Kant, a philosopher who lived from who knows to who gives a fuck, believed in a system of ethics that stems from what he called ‘The Categorical Imperative’, also known as the fundamental ethical rule which rules all rules (or, a Moral Compass). The imperative is categorical as in we have to do the thing regardless of how little we want to. He referred to this as a person’s Duty. Kant asserted that human beings are rational beings who are deserving of respect. They are also moral agents who act according to their ethical duty.

Sounds like a blast so far, right? We’ll get into an example soon, but first, let’s break down what exactly all this means and introduce three formulations that are necessary when following the moral compass that is The Categorical Imperative.

Formulation One: The Maxim (moral rule) must be a universal law with no exceptions. (If you are about to do something, consider whether you would be okay with everyone else also doing this thing all the time).

Formulation Two: Human Beings are an end themselves, never a means to an end. (Treat people with respect and not as tools).

Formulation Three: Act out of Duty not personal desires. (Act as if your behavior is setting the tone for a perfect world where everyone is fair to one another).

Let’s kill off Deontology quickly so we can move on to a system that might actually help determine the ‘appropriateness’ of anger. Here’s an easy example:

Lying would never be permissible. Tell a white lie to spare someone’s feelings? No can do. How about an untruth? Does ignorance of a rule rectify the sin? Wouldn’t happen in a perfect world where everyone told the truth all the time.

Consider the following: An absolutely battered, beat down man with a horrified look in his eye comes to your door. ‘Please help me! This lunatic is after me and I’ll die if you don’t hide me!”. You let him in. In a perfect world, people would save other people from murderers. An hour or two goes by and there’s another knock at the door. You can’t believe your eyes! It’s the friendly neighborhood murderer. “Have you seen a strange man around here?”. You, being bound by the truth, follow up with “It’s so funny that you say that he’s actually right upstairs!”. At this point, you’ve violated the first maxim (moral rule) that people should save other people from murderers. You did, however, adhere to the other maxim that thou shall not lie. Your friend upstairs has a knife in his face, but at least you didn’t lie.

It’s not the best system. Kant writes in a later work that one can use their judgement before acting. if absolutely necessary. Thanks for that buddy.

I led with Deontology because it’s easy to explain Consequentialism as, well, not Kantian. It’s easy to explain it period, really. Act in accordance with what the consequences would be. What behavior/decision brings about the most good in a given situation? Your judgement is employed from the beginning, and you can use people as a means to an end, in stark contrast to Deontology.

You may have heard of Utilitarianism. It’s Consequentialism but with the caveat of ‘What behavior/decision leads to the most good for the greatest number of people’. Let’s use a variation of everyone’s favorite thought experiment: The Trolley Problem.

You’re standing on a bridge above some train tracks. You look down and notice that there are five people tied to the tracks and an out-of-control trolley is speeding by, with no means of stopping. Coincidentally, there is also a giant man in the process of losing his balance with the potential to fall off the bridge. If he falls, his body will stop the trolley before it hits the five people. He’ll die, but the other five people won’t. According to the principles of Utilitarianism, it would be in everyone’s best interest if you just went ahead and pushed the man off the bridge (what a strange day you’re having. Honestly, at this point, just call it a wash and go back to bed).

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism make a lot of sense at first. It’s an easy system to agree with. It, however, becomes wildly inefficient when you begin to quantify what the ‘greater good’ means in every situation, especially the greater good for everyone involved. Have you seen ‘The Good Place’? It’s an awesome show with moral philosophy sprinkled throughout. Anyways, they have a points system that either goes up or down based on the actions you take. Having a machine like that that could predict the goodness of your actions would make Utilitarianism a lot easier to employ! Even then, though, they end up finding out the points system was totally busted.

Lastly, let’s take a look at Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics. Socrates, Plato, The Stoics, etc., preach that one should act in accordance with their virtues. Aristotle is the one that really laid out a system to determine what makes a virtue. Lucky for us, the appropriateness of anger is perfectly laid out here.

According to Aristotle, one must discover virtue through the use of The Golden Mean. Let’s put two extremes of a behavior on a line. On the left side, there is mildness. On the right side, we have MOLTEN RAGE. What exists in between is The Golden Mean and the virtue we should employ. For example:

Imagine I’m walking down the street with my imaginary girlfriend, Zoey. There we are, holding hands, sauntering down the street in our love drunk haze. Suddenly, Johnny Womanhater walks by and very obviously pushes Zoey intentionally. He turns around with a smirk on his face and says ‘sorry!’. Let’s say I choose to respond with “No problem! Happens all the time =D”. Aristotle would drop out of the sky and slap me back to Ancient Greece. I acted too mildly. Okay, let’s try another approach. This time, I choose instead to grab Johnny by the throat, push him into a wall and bash his head in until he ceases to exist. Look who’s falling out of the sky again! No slap back to Ancient Greece this time. Just a really disappointed, Dad level disappointed, look of disapproval on his face. Ouch. I acted way too brazenly.

In reality, the best course of action would likely be to check on Zoey and make sure she’s okay, and then yell at Johnny to go fuck himself. Depending on the strength behind the push, an ass beating may also be necessary. Oh, Johnny Womanhater, how you turned up like this I will never know but I suspect your last name didn’t do you any favors there. Point being, according to Aristotle, there’s a middle ground in between two extreme vices that defines Virtue.

Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for, it’s time to turn to my favorite school of thought. It’s the N to the U to the R, Nurology! Nah, I’m not quite narcissistic enough to name a school of morality after myself. I don’t think I have all the answers, but I’ll share with you what I do know.

My mentor really imprinted this idea on me. If I was to turn in this essay to him that looked like the above section I wrote on Kant, he would say ‘it’s a goddamn biography’ and probably throw it in the trash for dramatic effect. The idea is that everything we learn enters and compounds within the compendium from which we draw our Interpretation. Our capital I Interpretation is how we view things based on every life experience we’ve had, every book we’ve read, every friend we’ve known, every job we’ve had, and so on and so forth. This totality is what forms our Interpretation. It’s what makes every one of us unique. It’s why I don’t think creatives should fear generative AI. Our Interpretation forms our ‘Voice’ and AI can never consist of every individual’s unique experiences. Maybe in the future when we all live in goo and our brains are connected to some AI overlord, but not now.

My interpretation of the ‘appropriateness’ of anger in any given situation is as follows. We’re all adults. Our feelings are valid, and we can handle the consequences of our actions. If we feel overwhelming anger, we don’t have to act on it. If we do and ultimately end up making a mess of things, there’s steps we can take to rectify the situation by apologizing and making amends where necessary.

We have to find a way to release our anger, as well. My personal favorite methods are boxing and howling in the woods when necessary. Screaming into pillows seems like a popular move, too. It’s all energy and if we don’t let it out in a healthy productive way, it’s going to turn into resentment. It just is.

I focused on Western moral philosophy in this piece and while I don’t know as much as I would like to about Eastern philosophy, I do know that there’s a belief that holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting it to kill the person you’re mad at. Resentment is a monster that’s capable of eating at us until we wither away. It’s not worth letting our anger get to that stage. If it does get there, we can once again take action and work through it with either a professional, a free support group, journaling, meditating, or yoga.

It’s challenging to sum up my take on anger. It’s taken a lifetime to formulate it and I’m just a winged smoke demon trying to find his way in the world. If I had to, though, I would put it like this:

• Take responsibility for your actions.

• Don’t take anything personally. It truly never is.

• You can handle the consequences of your actions. You’ll be fine regardless of whether you fret over it or not.

• Your angry energy has to go somewhere, or it will be stored internally as resentment.

• If you end up regretting how you acted in a state of anger, there’s plenty you can do to work through that regret. The same goes for guilt.

Anger is a great energy that we can use in healthy ways. A lot of us lost our ability to utilize that emotion when we were taught to be ‘polite’ little boys and girls. We’re adults now and it’s time to reintroduce ourselves to the flame.

Well, folks, I asked, and you certainly answered! The following is a list of book recommendations from myself, our readers, and many fellow writers. Highly recommend taking a look. Any pick is sure to be a winner. I’ll be playing around with this list and sending out new recommendations on a sporadic basis. If I didn’t include your submission in this list, I’ll do my best to get it in a future version.

Enjoy and happy browsing!

Non-Fiction

Enlightenment Now: The case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress – Stephen Pinker

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created – Charles C. Mann

Yes, please — Amy Poehler

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death — Irvin D Yalom

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and The Teachings of Plants

The Denial of Death — Ernest Becker

Outliers — Malcolm Gladwell

The Mind’s I — Dennet and Hoftstadter

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick — Philip K. Dick

A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — Oliver Sacks

48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene

Mastery — Robert Greene

Less is More — Jason Hickel

The Art of the Common Place — Wendell Berry

Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans — A.J. Baime

Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage — Alfred Lansing

Running with Sherman: The Donkey Heart of a Hero — Christopher McDougall

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster — Jon Krakauer

All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated — Neil Bernstein

A Sea of Words — Dean King

Harbors and High Seas — Dean King

Histories — Herodotus

The Undiscovered Self — Carl Jung

Psychology of the Unconscious — Carl Jung

Social Interest — Alfred Adler

Understanding Human Nature — Alfred Adler

Philosophy

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

Discourses — Epictetus

Enchiridion — Epictetus

Letters From a Stoic — Seneca

The World as Will and Representation — Arthur Schopenhauer

The Republic — Plato

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason — Michel Foucault

On the Suffering of the World — Arthur Schopenhauer

Introduction to Metaphysics — Martin Heidegger

Being and Time — Martin Heidegger

Basic Writings — Martin Heidegger

Fear and Trembling — Soren Kierkegaard

The Sickness unto Death — Soren Kierkegaard

The Concept of Anxiety — Soren Kierkegaard

Works of Love — Soren Kierkegaard

Phenomenology of Spirit — Hegel

Fragments — Heraclitus

The Book — Alan Watts

Out of Your Mind — Alan Watts

Become What You Are — Alan Watts

The Way of Tao — Alan Watts

The Way of Zen — Alan Watts

Incerto Series — Nicolas Nassim Taleb

A History of Western Philosophy — Bertrand Russell

Ethics — Baruch Spinoza

Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzche

Thus Spok Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzche

The Will to Power — Friedrich Nietzche

Being and Nothingness — Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism is a Humanism — Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre

The Human Condition — Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt

The Sublime Object of Ideology — Slavoj Zizek

The Fragile Absolute — Slavoj Zizek

Memoirs and Biographies

Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Anne Dillard

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life – William Finnegan

Way of the Peaceful Warrior – Dan Millman

Can't Hurt Me – David Goggins

Never Finished – David Goggins

When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi

Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humilliation

Rat Girl — Kristin Hersh

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? — Roz Chast

Why Fish Don’t Exist — Lulu Miller

The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King — Martin Luther King

Team of Rivals — Doris Kearns Goodwin

William Tecumseh Sherman — James Lee McDonough

Franklin Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David W. Blight

Self-Development

The War of Art – Steven Pressfield

The Creative Act; A Way of Being – Rick Rubin.

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind — Joseph Murphy

Anything you want – Derek Sivers

New Happy – Stephanie Harrison

Steal like an Artist – Austin Kleon

Feel Good Productivity – Ali Abdaal

Conversations on Love — Philippa Perry, et al.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

The Comfort Crisis — Michael Easter

Scarcity Brain — Michael Easter

Living an Examined Life — James Hollis

The Dark Side of Light Chasers — Debbie Ford

True Fit — Jim Beqai

Break the Wheel — Jay Acnuzo

The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron

The Third Door: The Mindset of Success — Alex Banayan

Stolen Focus — Johann Hari

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense — Rory Sutherland

Michael Pollan — How to Change Your Mind

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

The Authentic Swing — Steven Pressfield

Fiction

East of Eden — John Steinbeck

The Father’s Tale — Michael D. O’Brien

100 Days of Sunlight — Abbie Emmons

Daniel Deronda — George Elliot

Middle March — George Elliot

The Slave — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Horacio Hornblower — C.S. Forester

The Witch Elm — Tana French

The Sound of Building Coffins — Louis Maistros

No One is Here Except All of Us

Resurrection — Leo Tolstoy

Naive. Super — Erlend Loe

I Am Pilgrim — Terry Hayes

The Covenant — James A. Michener

Aubrey-Maturin — Patrick O’Brian

Rebecca — Daphne Du Maurier

Anna Karennina — Leo Tolstoy

Hunger — Knut Hansen

War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy

Martin Eden – Jack London

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

The Ocean and the Stars – Mark Helprin

Odd Thomas — Dean Koontz

We Have Always Lived in the Castle — Shirley Jackson

Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

The Last Green Valley – Mark T. Sullivan

A Prayer for Owen Meany — John Irving

A Tiny Ending — Joanna Cannon

The Last One — Alexandra Oliva

The Caine Mutiny — Herman Wouk

The Monkey Wrench Gang — Edward Abbey

The Entire Sky – Joe Wilkins

The Walking Drum – Louis L’amour

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Forbidden Child – Gwen Newell

The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

A Country Doctor’s Notebook — Mikhail Bu6lgakov

Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Witch of Portobello — Paulo Coehlo

The Revolutionist — Robert Littell

If We Were Villains — M.L. Rio

Winne The Pooh — A.A Milne

Crossing to Safety — Wallace Earle Stegner

Crooked Little Vein — Warren Ellis

A Wild Sheep Chase — Haruki Murakami

The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath

Ask the Dust — John Fante

Greta & Valdin — Rebecca K Reilly

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The Mountain King — Anders de la Motte

White Noise — Don DeLillo

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western — Richard Brautigan

Fight Club — Chuck Palahniuk

The Magic Toyshop — Angela Carter

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle

Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys

The Bookseller of Inverness — S.G MacLean

A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles

Notes From Underground — Fydor Dostoevsky

Stoner — John Williams

Butcher’s Crossing — John Williams

The Chronoliths — Robert Charles Wilson

Bridge of Years — Robert Charles Wilson

The Little Prince — Antoine de Santi Exupery

Night Over Water — Ken Follett

Fantasy

The Crystal Cave – Mary Stewart

The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss

Spin the Dawn — Elizabeth Lim

Unravel the Dusk — Elizabeth Lim

Twin Crowns — Catherine Doyle and Katherine Webber

Cursed Crowns — Catherine Doyle and Katherine Webber

Burning Crowns — Catherine Doyle and Katherine Webber

The Night CIrcus — Erin Morgensten

Malazan Book of the Fallen Series – Steven Erikson

Rivers of London — Ben Aaronovitch

The Last Continent — Terry Pratchett

Wheel of Time Series — Robert Jordan

Red Queen Series — Victoria Aveyard

Sword of Truth Series — Terry Goodkind

A Song of Ice and Fire — George R.R. Martin

The City of Lost Fortunes — Bryan Camp

Gather The Fortunes — Bryan Camp

The Mists of Avalon — Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Compleat Enchanter — L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt

The Compleat Werewolf — Anthony Boucher

The Dragonbone Chair — Tad Williams

The Stormlight Archives — Brandon Sanderson

The Will of the Many — James Islington

Swordheart — T Kingfisher

The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien

Neverwhere — Neil Gaiman

The Ten Thousand Doors of January — Alix E. Harrow

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — V.E. Schwab

Science Fiction

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ada’s Children – Larry Hogue

Paradox – Michael Woudenberg

Integration – Michael Woudenberg

The Power — Naomi Alderman

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet — Becky Chambers

Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham

Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis

Perelanda – C.S. Lewis

The Midnight Library — Matt Haig

That Hideous Strength – C.S. Lewis

The Flicker Men — Tom Kosmatka

Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood

Red Rising — Pierce Brown

Exhalation: Stories — Ted Chiang

Artemis — Andy Weir

Seveneves — Neal Stephenson

Permutation City — Greg Egan

Special thanks to: John Mitchell

‘IT’S TIME FOR THE FUCKING REDEMPTION TOUR!’ That’s what I tell myself. ‘MAXIMUM EFFORT!!’ Thanks, Deadpool.

Perhaps a natural consequence of fading pain and rising hope. ‘It’s not working. Something just isn’t working’. The all-encompassing desire to reclaim that which was mine. The succubus entrenching every quark, every string inside me with the desire to blast off at Mach 10. All of it must be returned, now.

"Oh my god. I've lost my Mojo!" - Austin Powers

‘What the fuck are you talking about’, the reader asks. As the ebb fades and the flow returns, the dreamer dreams as though possessing infinite sands from the Sandman himself. It’s very easy to get seduced into an almost grandstanding plan of how we’re going to approach this next flow. Our thoughts can look anything like:

• I can’t believe I wasted so much time being depressed when I could have been productive

• I have so much time to make up for

• I’ve fallen so far behind

• Imagine where I could be if I didn’t have to deal with ebbs

All mainly representing similar feelings of ‘time anxiety’. Time’s our most precious commodity. It’s a really challenging position to be in. I constantly romanticize the hypothetical Nur Nadar who did not have mental health struggles. Instead of wasting time with anxieties, depressions, whatever, I could have been achieving and succeeding. Now, this naturally springs from an overachieving perfectionist mindset. It’s challenging to reconcile it. ‘No, but seriously, where the hell are you going with this?’. Well, reader, I’m talking about the steps to get our mojo back, baby.

What is mojo and why do we want it back?

"If you pick Mojo to be your guide, I will shower you with precious gifts and things." - Mojo Jojo

Mojo is that ineffable sense of energy, passion, enthusiasm, drive, and confidence to get things done, improve, and succeed. Unfortunately, we almost always lose it when we’re ‘in a rut’. Ideally, it’d eventually return with a vengeance. Most of the time, however, it won’t get there without a push. When we’re in a rut, effort and action is the last thing on our minds. It’s much easier to sit around and wait to ‘feel motivated’.

‘Guess I got my swagger back, true.’ - Jay-Z

Action begets action, period. There’s a poetic irony in the truth that sometimes, the things we want to do the least are the things that will benefit us the most.

When coming out of a rut, action feels like a herculean task. The challenge of escaping the comfort of what we allow during ruts (trash diet, no exercise, binge watching, bed and couch all day) is massive. Not only because we have to get our engines revving again, but also because it’s likely that there’s a sense of resistance in which we do not believe we deserve to improve.

It absolutely is a massively uphill battle in a time when that’s the last thing we feel capable of taking on. We may feel powerless, but we’re not. Well, how and where do we even begin? Luckily, I’m currently in this exact situation, so let’s take a look at my methods thus far.

Take Inventory

As I said above, my instincts scream at my soul to instantly return to full daily productivity mode. Light speed recovery, not coming right up. What I’ve learned to do to dampen that drive is to take inventory. When I’m in a rut, my mind is reminding me of all the ‘fuck ups’ and missed opportunities I’ve had in my life so far.

Although torturous in the moment, what it sets us up for is the ability to identify what it is we want the most. Perhaps the rumination focused on appearance or weight. Perhaps it focused on relationships, accomplishments or lack thereof, friendships, and so on. My list ultimately ended up looking something like this:

• I want a new job

• I don’t feel like I’m doing enough for exercise and I’m fucking tired of doing boxing every single day. I’m falling out of love and it’s becoming a drag

• I don’t feel as strong or confident as I used to

• I want new friends and to start dating again

• I want to start reading way more

• I want to return to journaling - general journaling, gratitude journaling, emotional exercise journaling

• I want to insert more peace into my life

• I want to start stretching more

As a testament to genuinely pacing ourselves, focus on only a few at a time or find ways to incorporate what you want into your life in different ways. Keep track of the efforts you’re making as it’s important to remind yourself that you’re actually doing the work and not just gazing at a distant dream.

Let’s look at my list. I’m already applying and interviewing, so bullet one is being worked on.

“While Mojo suggests any art that invokes supernatural powers, for us creators Mojovation means finding magic in what we do.” - Robert Genn

Let’s combine bullets two and three. I want to take a break from boxing yet want to feel strong and confident again. Physicality is a big part of that for me. Now, if I don’t have it in me to jump into something new, how can I adjust my current day to day to get those needs met? Well, I used to love rucking (weighted hiking). Also, I have to walk Bear three times a day whether I’m feeling it or not. So, I went ahead got some bags, some all-purpose sand, and made sand weights. I made three plates, 10lbs each, put them in my backpack and voila, my walks with Bear now provide an additional layer of enrichment.

As far as reading way more and stretching more, it’s considerably wiser to start with simpler, smaller time frames. Instead of stretching for at least 30 minutes, which was my past norm, I’ll ease back into it with five minutes a day in the morning until I’m ready to up the ante. I consider both reading and stretching as tremendously relaxing hobbies, making them consequently easy to pair up. After my five minutes of stretching, I’ll read at least five pages. I could even listen to an audio book while stretching.

The idea for all of this is to just ease back into the habits. Action begets action begets action begets action. If I was to map the process out, I’d see it as [ Action > Motivation > Action > Motivation > Action > Action > Motivation > Action > Action > Action> Motivation > Action > Motivation]. Sometimes I’ll feel motivated and sometimes it’ll be a complete reliance on discipline for longer stretches of time. That’s okay. The motivation does come back.

To round out the bullet points, let’s look at journaling. I have three types of journaling that I’m itching to reintegrate into my routine but instead of doing them all at once, like my impatient ass is dying to do, I’ll just start with writing down a few gratitudes before bed every night.

I find it to be incredibly important to start feeling strong and energetic in order to cook up the recipe for mojo madness, and these tiny steps are beautiful ways to get there.

What’s standing in your way? What are identifiable roadblocks that seem to be keeping you from attaining your goals?

The number of ways in which we self-sabotage without being aware of our actions is endless. Perhaps it’s an addiction to overstimulation that we refuse to acknowledge. Perhaps it’s an addiction to anger and outrage. Are you addicted to panic, anxiety, or sadness, but can’t face the truth of it?

All of those addictions I listed are ones that we get a lot out of. It’s incredibly challenging to open anyone else’s eyes to the fact that they might be addicted to these things. The addict always feels so unquestionably confident that they are right in feeling the way that they do. When someone is intoxicated by their sense of righteousness, it becomes an impossible task to try to reason with them that they may be getting something ‘positive’ out of that which seduces them to the dark side. Unfortunately, healing is awfully difficult when we refuse to see how something so awful like depression may be ‘helping’ us in one way or another. Let’s look at a bit of an extreme example:

I grew up with a kid we’ll call Jameson. From childhood up into his thirties, he was always nervous and pulsating with anxiety. It never once occurred to me that there was anything deeper going on. It just seemed like he struggled severely with social and general anxiety. I remember a very specific moment where he told me about some of the things he daydreams about, and I had a very strong epiphany.

Jameson was the way he was because he’s a covert narcissist. He had a very strong sense of entitlement and a deeply ingrained belief that he was better than everyone else. He was obsessed with riches, while having none, and believed he deserved to have a European princess show up out of nowhere and marry him, with zero justification as to why this would ever happen.

How does this relate to nervousness and anxiety? Well, it stands to reason that if you believe you are the equivalent of a god in mortal flesh, everyone you meet, converse with, whatever, has the ability to provide the feedback that that’s not the case. Anything, whether through conversation or activity, that proves that Jameson is indeed not a demi-god, will shatter his internal reality. It’s too much of a threat. Therefore, it’s far safer to keep to himself and avoid any situation that could humble him. Heaven forbid a demi-god be rejected.

Trust me, it isn’t that the person is consciously manipulating everyone (although that sometimes is the case) or even aware of the deeper reasons for their behavior, it’s just that the person’s nervous system has learned how to protect his grandiose ego over the years.

Notice all the ‘I want’ and ‘I don’t feel’ in my bullet point inventory above? It’s funny to me how self-centered I become when depressed. The bigger the ego, the bigger the downfall. That may as well be a universal truth at this point. Depression and anxiety are so deeply rooted in ‘me me me I I I’. Sometimes we really need to ask how our so called ‘negative emotions’ are actually serving us.

Do we perhaps get extra attention and doted upon while depressed? Does our anxiety alert us about potential situations in which we’ll feel more anxiety, thus creating a feedback loop in which we become anxious over feeling anxious, thereby enticing us to hold to comfort as if for dear life? Longest sentence ever, yeesh, but bear with me now.

How do we figure all this out? Well, it certainly takes a deep dive through meditation, journaling, therapy and so on. A not so singular approach would be to ask other people. Ask someone really close to you exactly what they think about you. What they think your strengths and weaknesses are, what they think your self-inflicted obstacles are, what they think you could be doing differently, and so on. It’s important to pick someone you trust completely and who you don’t feel will use this moment against you in any form. Furthermore, you can try to deduce what you project onto people. We usually project what we resist within ourselves, whether it’s a strength or weakness.

Take full ownership of your shit. I say this often and I’ll say it again: your mental health isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility. The fun part about that is: no one really gives a shit. No one is going to assume your trauma and carry you to where you want to be. No one is going to stick their fingers in your brain and rewire it for you. It sucks and it’s hard, but you have to take full ownership of your shit. Visualize what it’d be like to shift from ‘oh no, no one cares :(‘to ‘fuck yeah, no one cares so I can do whatever the hell I want’.

Get yourself out there

This is the greatest picture of all time

"You've had your Mojo all along. You've defeated Dr. Evil, you've saved the world. And believe me, you're gonna get the girl." - Felicity Shagwell

Once we feel like we’re getting in the groove of things again and feel confident in our progress, it’s about time to get ourselves out there. People cite countless reasons for not wanting to go meet new friends or get out there and start dating. Reasons such as: I’m not ready, I need to heal all my shit before I date, my mental health has to be perfect to meet new friends, etc. etc. etc. It’s noble, maybe, but it’s bullshit. They’re just more lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves stuck.

Relationships, platonic and non, are some of the best teachers. They teach us so much about ourselves that I struggle to come up with a comparable teacher. Perhaps a hallucinogenic can teach as quickly as relationships do, but that’s a different story for a different newsletter.

You don’t even have to rely on dating apps or friendship apps or whatever the hell is out there now. I haven’t used them in a long while, but that hasn’t really slowed me down. Bars are easy, sure, but look up public meetups for hobbies you’re interested in. My friends and I have met more people through meetups, and, admittedly, bars, than we ever have through any other methods. It’s refreshing and it’s extremely easy to break the ice when you’re all there for the same reason. At a rock-climbing event? Just go up to the person you want to talk to and yell enthusiastically ‘SO TELL ME, YA LIKE ROCKS?’. Who cares, just do it.

Getting your mojo back is a combination of identifying your goals, taking action little by little, addressing the deeper shit on a psychological level, and then putting yourself out there. You’ll be the belle of the ball in no time.

While we’re on the topic of relationships, make a note of people you may have met and allowed into your life while depressed/in a rut/whatever. Take time to really think through how that person has been affecting your life so far. If it’s been a positive influence and you can say that with ease, then no problem! If you have your doubts, however, it’s worth taking them seriously. When in low states of being, we’re more likely to let insidious people into our lives. It’s worth attempting to identify who that might be and removing them from our lives as quickly as possible and ideally before they can cause any harm.

What do you do when you feel a lack of mojo in your life? How do you go about reclaiming your passion, drive, and lust for life? Let me know in the comments below!

“Good morning, if it is a good morning… which I doubt” - Eeyore

I’m not sure anyone struggling with depression is particularly craving a melodramatic performance to display what is unfortunately invisible. It’s a bit akin to the stereotypical imagery of a woman with an invisible disability parking in a handicap space, getting out of her car and walking, seemingly normally, when all of a sudden, a random douchebag yells ‘HEY LADY THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU! YOU CAN’T PARK THERE’. Thanks for your contribution, inspector Dicknose. Your buddies over at Mealteam Six are missing you.

It can take a particularly keen eye to pick up depression in someone else. Sure, there’s days during my depressive cycles where I’ll lie down on the bare floor and think ‘here’s good’ and just stare into oblivion. Bit of a giveaway, that. The vast majority of the time, it isn’t nearly as obvious.

My depression ebbs and flows pretty regularly. I’ve picked up the habit of trying not to succumb to it. I remember for the longest time, hell, probably the majority of my twenties, I would desperately try anything I could to prevent the ebb. In my mind, if I lived a very orderly, strict, disciplined life, the ebb would never come! If every single day I: write, exercise, meditate, stretch, read and just stay on top of my shit, there was no need for the ebb cycle.

An ebb used to be considerably worse. The more actively I tried to resist it, the harder it came. Since I believed it was my duty to prevent it, how could I not see it as my personal failure every time it inevitably took control of me? The cycle would look something like: four months on, two weeks off. The amount of destruction that Nur Nadar could cause in those two weeks, should he so please, was tantamount to pandemonium. Sure, it was only two weeks, but I’d make damn sure that the damage caused would be a lasting affair.

Recently quit smoking and drinking for the past four months? Too bad. ‘Do not pass go. Do not collect $200’. Spend a considerable amount of time repairing a relationship that perhaps was soured during a different ‘down period’? For my next trick, allow me to demonstrate how to make any friendship disappear! Fitness lifestyle been on point? Exactly why I’m going to order Chinese takeout every single night for a week. It is genius incarnate. The Philosopher King made manifest.

Nowadays, an ebb is far less action packed. It is much more contained. I am just now dusting the cobwebs off and shooing the shadows away and this time around I:

• distanced myself from friends and Substack.

• smoked a couple cigars.

• vented to a friend.

• had some bourbon.

• lashed out at one or two people.

• watched some movies with Bear.

I’ve dubbed these smaller ebbs as ‘controlled burns’. I know what’s coming and I know any attempts in the past to delay or completely forego it have proven impossible so, I’ve learned to ride the wave.

Not only have I learned to accept these periods of my life, but I’ve also come to view them as opportunities to check in with myself. Even with daily check-in practices like journaling and meditation, I can still be so caught up in the day to day of what I’m doing that I don’t pick up on some bigger picture issues.

There’s tons that I picked up that I wanted to share with y’all but before we get there, just remember that it’s okay to take a break. I don’t mean a very specifically regimented ‘productive relaxation’ session, either.

Imagine you have a MASSIVE stack of boring old papers in front of you. Envision these papers as representing your ‘to dos’ of the day and everything you’re currently stressing about. Now, imagine grabbing that fat stack and filling yourself with childlike glee as you leap into the air, toss the papers, and let them rain down on you. Now, get the hell out of there and do whatever it is you feel like doing.

Now that we got that out of our system, let’s return to all I discovered in my lament filled sojourn in the land of Ebb.

Self-Destruction as Self-Expression

What am I supposed to do? Pin a tail with a pink ribbon on my ass and call myself Eeyore? Great plan! From now on, I’ll start dropping witticisms like:

“Good morning, if it is a good morning, which I doubt” - Eeyore

I’m particularly proud of pulling that one out of thin air when it came time to be petty in an argument. I was raised believe that anger and pride were acceptable emotions for a man to demonstrate. Everything else was outrageous to even consider. Forget about how I was raised, it’s a mainstream joke that all men should ‘shove everything down until the day they die’.

If I'm deep in an ebb and I have a glass of bourbon and a mini cigar, it’s easy to slap a label on that that says ‘self-medicating’, scream ‘next!’, and rush to move onto the next thing like an eager psych student trying to prove their chops. I definitely have fallen victim to the vicious cycles of self-medicating in the past, but I know that’s not ENTIRELY what it is now. So, perhaps it’s self-indulgence or self-destruction? Also, maybe! By definition it certainly is. If none of the above, then what, exactly, are we aiming for here?

It’s a form of self-expression. When I say I get depressed in my ebb cycle, it means the sort where simply getting out of bed becomes a Herculean feat. It isn’t fun, but I do it anyways. I still get dressed, rip my shoulders back, stand up straight and smile, but it’s done in a constant mode of pain. To be crystal clear about depression, when the metaphorical clouds enshroud me, I’m not just a little extra sleepy or generally out of energy, I’m deeply in pain.

If on the outside I look swell as can be but on internally there’s a war waging in the depths of hell, of course I’d have a deep yearning for that to be seen. Eeyore tail, emo bang, massive face tattoo that says ‘damaged’? It all seems pretty stupid. Drinking a bit more and smoking while acting erratically are absolutely not the healthiest ways to go about it, but it does ring warning bells in the minds of others. It certainly doesn’t numb the pain or make anything easier, so I don’t really consider it to be self-medicating, anymore. If anything, it gets me to access deeper layers of sadness (alcohol is called a depressant for a reason). It’s more so an attempt of waving a massive neon sign that says ‘HI I’M IN PAIN BUT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPRESS IT WITHOUT FEELING LIKE A BURDEN OR OVERLY INADEQUATE! THANKS FOR READING!!’.

So, what’s to be done about this, exactly? Find healthier ways to express your inner pain to others. I place high value on joining support groups for this very reason. In support groups, we meet people who are there for the same reason as us. It is considerably easier to pick up a phone and call a new friend we met in the ‘DEPRESSED FUCKS OF AMERICA’ group and vent to about how we’re feeling than it would be to call somebody else in our life. Presumably, as we become a part of the group, people will call us for the same reason, too. It’s much easier to not feel like an inadequate burden if the people we’re calling are also calling us for the same reason.

Support groups are for everyone. There’s ‘men’s groups’, ‘women’s groups’, substance abuse groups, various identity groups, mental health groups, and so on and so forth. They’re all out there. It just takes a little looking for. If they were more acknowledged and more effort was put into coordinating such groups, they could prove as a balm for the loneliness epidemic our world is currently facing. It’s gotten so desperate that I’m starting to wonder if online trolls only lash out and hate on others just so they can have someone who actually responds to them. Anyhow, moving forward!

Our brains love lying to us

While it certainly isn’t a malicious effort, our brains love to lie to us. As an ebb becomes increasingly more robust, it begins a flailing war of attrition. Fortunately, it doesn’t escape me that the ammunition being fired is all in the form of Automatic Negative Thoughts, or ANTs. Although I was almost certainly chasing an unattainable state of being, the actual work I put in, day in and day out, tremendously strengthened my ability to be able to view my thoughts through an objective lens.

With a considerably stronger base of mindfulness, it became obvious that these thoughts were just consistently repeating themselves in my head. No input from me, whatsoever. Just a merry go around of ‘haha you suck!’. For the sake of transparency, here’s the ones I noticed the most:

• You’re an inadequate piece of shit.

• You’re a failure and you’re not going to get another chance.

• It’s over for you.

• I can’t think of anything to write about.

• Substack is a waste of time. You’re only fooling yourself.

• No one wants you. Everyone abandons you.

• Bear would be better off with someone else.

It’s all ridiculous but I share it with the hope that perhaps if any of you get caught in such patterns, you’ll be able to recognize them as just an automatic negative thought barrage. They’re always temporary. Am I inadequate? Nah. I’m pretty happy with who I am. I know my strengths and weaknesses. Am I a piece of shit? No - I came out of the other hole.

Am I a failure who will never get another chance? Is it over for me? Nah. I’m sensing a wound birthed from consistent rejection in the face of dogged effort. As time goes on, uncertainty skyrockets and breeds all sorts of internal doubt, but that’s all that it is: internal doubt.

Am I out of writing ideas and am I only fooling myself on Substack? No, and I find it incredibly interesting that ‘I can’t think of anything to write about’ is an ANT. I always assumed it was something I felt viscerally, as it’d breed a sense of a panic in the form of ‘WHAT DO I WRITE FOR NEXT WEEK!!!’. Identifying it as an ANT helped me realize, though, that I have a laundry list of ideas. Stephen Pressfield’s ‘Resistance’ is manifesting itself as automatic negative thoughts as it burrows deeper and deeper into my psyche. I still show up to boogie, though, so I’m doing alright.

Does no one want me? Does no one like me? Would Bear be better off without me? For the first two, it doesn’t matter. It matters that I know I’ll be okay whether they do or not. Regarding Bear, I’m a fucking fantastic dog owner and that little dude is my shadow. I remember once being just gut wrenchingly depressed and thinking he’d be so much happier if he didn’t have an owner who went through these vicious ebbs. I looked into Bear’s six-month-old puppy eyes, mind you - I was on mushrooms at the time, and I just felt a profound sense of unconditional love. It was as if this young, animated teddy bear was telling me: I love you for your ebbs and your flows. It was profoundly beautiful.

I’m going to once again endorse dedicating time and effort to strengthening your ability to observe your thoughts from a detached perspective. The purpose in me laying it all out like that in the above paragraphs is to emphasize that when you catch yourself in an ANT pattern, continuously ask: What evidence do I have for this? You’ll almost certainly find that the negative rhetoric is simply biggity bullshit that’s been badly beaten into your brain overtime. That doesn’t make it true. Observe, question and address if necessary. The final step is to let it go. It will come back but as you repeatedly practice this process, the ANTs hold on you will shrink more and more each time.

Take responsibility for yourself

Our mental health is not our fault. It is, however, our responsibility to manage it. The last thing we need in that monumentally challenging state of being is to give others power over ourselves by blaming them for our circumstances.

Instead, it’s a fantastic time to reassess our targets in life. Listlessness is generally caused by a lack of purpose, and we owe it to ourselves to make sure we’re aiming at the right target. Are we wasting too much time on a goal we only think we should be accomplishing? Are we working towards a goal just because we want to prove something to someone, maybe even ourselves? Get your money, pay your bills, do your thing. We all have to do what we have to do to survive. Just make sure there’s a target you’re aiming at that fulfills you. Period.

We have a deep yearning for growth and it’s going to come out in one way or another. Let’s just make sure it comes out in a way that serves us. In a way that fulfills us, deeply.

Take nothing personally from others

That’s a response I got because I took a break from releasing a newsletter last week. It’s always when we’re feeling the worst that we seem to get these unsanctioned barrages.

It didn’t bother me. There are so many factors that determine specific interactions that it’s not even worth wondering if outside events determine our internal worth in any way.

Let’s look at this person who is charmingly having logorrhea all over my face. They have whatever is going on in their day or life that’s stressing them out. They see me in a dejected state and are disappointed by my decision to bypass a week of my newsletter in order for me to do what it is I had to do. Their disappointment now triggers everything that’s been building up inside of them, and a vicious tongue lashing begins.

They are tongue lashing the dejected state you are currently portraying. Remember, seeming is different than being. Now, however we respond is going to be targeted at their current tongue-lashing state, that resulted from their buildup of stress that was detonated by them being disappointed in an action I took for the sake of my own interest.

It’s a bizarre battle between human-seemings, not human-beings. How many degrees of separation are there before we actually reach the depth of someone attacking the spirit of who are. There’s no room for taking these things personally and on top of that, they very, VERY, rarely, are.

The flow is great, yet the ebb arrives anyway. Learning to surf the shadows of the Ebbs has tremendously helped me in weakening their grip on me. Peer support has helped me feel less ashamed, more free and healthier in how I express my depression. Mindfully evaluating my thoughts has helped me identify and castrate the automatic negative thoughts that were wreaking havoc in my brain. Reaffirming or redirecting my aims, whichever proved necessary, helped me defeat listlessness and made sure I had a target to aim for that filled me with purpose. Taking responsibility for my mental health and brushing off the opinion of others has helped me mitigate an incredible amount of potential external damage to my mental health.

It’s frustrating and can feel like being dealt a shitty hand in life. I mean who wants to feel like they have to work incredibly hard at managing something that others may not have to? If we can put away our pride and enjoy the process of getting better, we’re in for one hell of a rewarding ride.

What do you do to get yourself out of darker spaces? What strategies do you employ to help you see the sunlight again? Feel free to share in the comments!

“It felt incredible to be back together with everyone, finally; it had felt like ages. The boundless love, laughter, and kinship that I'd so deeply craved were finally there again, lasting only a few moments before I woke up and remembered everything.”

Chaos is comforting. Sometimes it veneers as an orchestrated frenzy. When trying to conduct an orchestrated frenzy next to the demands of the modern world, everything is bound to detonate in the end.

Controlled chaos is by definition a volatile illusion. The antidote to chaos is, unfortunately, incredibly boring. Everything becomes orderly and scheduled. This isn’t inherently a bad thing. By no means. In fact, the personal rebellion against it is indicative of a bizarre problem. What is this paradoxical state of being where chaos is comfort and order is agony?

I remember pumping gas one night. At the time, I had a great, steady job. I was sober. Active social and dating life. On paper, I was doing incredible. Killing it. In reality, I was the kid pumping gas while heavily daydreaming about throwing it all away.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny to just give it all up?’. A metaphorical l’appel du vide, if you will. L’appel du vide, the call of the void, implies an attraction to nothingness. That isn’t quite what I would experience. It was more like a metaphysical force pulling on every aspect of my being, encouraging me to return to chaos, to return home.

There are times I felt prisoner to the destiny of recreating the childhood conditions I so famously despised. It’s very obvious in my writings that my childhood was very chaotic and what has followed from that is a lifetime search for tranquility and ‘happiness’, whatever that means. I always saw this as me moving towards something better. I’ve justified certain uneasy feelings on the journey as a consequence of a natural ‘two steps forward, one step back’ sort of progress. That is what it is, too, to an extent.

What I’ve been more and more aware of recently, however, is that it isn’t just this ebb and flow growth pattern. It’s that I’ve misunderstood what a comfort zone really is. The phrase evokes an image of a child in a room with their favorite blankey. That’s the comfort zone. The child never wants to leave their room but a letter from Santa is waiting for them in the mailbox. The child sprints outside, grabs the letter, sprints back in. Success. They left their comfort zone to retrieve the letter.

That isn’t the reality of a comfort zone for me. My comfort is chaos. People yelling. Drama being tossed around. Heart rate at 120 just by sitting there. Peace, on the other hand, is so boring. Our brains naturally want to take the path of least resistance. Whatever path it’s most used to taking. Embracing peace, for me, means facing Resistance. For me to experience peace, I have to come clean. I have to admit this to myself: I am addicted to chaos.

The manifestation of this addiction comes in many forms. It could be:

• Procrastination. Sometimes even purposely to ‘light a fire under my ass’

• Drinking heavily the night before a big presentation at work

• Condescending self-talk

• Shying away from any challenges or opportunities that would better my situation

Anything that would get me away from chaos is ultimately destroyed. Self-sabotaging at its finest.

“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the ‘someday I’ll’ philosophy” - Dennis Waitley

Yesterday, I was watching some of the neighborhood kids playing with my dog, Bear, while I was chatting with their mom. They were all beyond thrilled and it was just a group of babies laughing and goofing around. I suddenly felt such a profound sorrow as my brain told me ‘You’ll never have this’.

Recently, anytime I start dating someone, I seem to rush to the part where I just abruptly end it with them. Is it because I really know what I want in a partner, so I can spot what I don’t want immediately? Maybe. It’s more likely a fear of getting what I want. I want a family of my own. I want to raise children in a healthy, loving environment. An environment opposite to what I had. So why do I throw away relationships that could potentially get me there? Well, I’ve decided that I’m afraid of success.

There clearly exists a part of me that fundamentally rejects the idea of succeeding in my deepest desires. I’ve been able to push this aspect away in the past in order to reach an admirable amount of real world ‘successes’, but it always seems to come back with a vengeance.

I’ve reached a point where I simply cannot allow a fear of success, which leads to self-sabotaging, to have power over me any longer. I’ve read voraciously to see how I could tackle this head on, and this is what I found.

1. Identify the Root of the Fear

“If you self-sabotage a healthy relationship when you finally receive one, it may be because peace was never granted to you without a catch. Peace looks threatening when all you ‘ve ever known was chaos” - MindfullMusings

Remote and Hybrid work schedules have been a blessing. It was always very challenging to contort myself into the 9-5 commute schedule for five days a week. Wake up, get ready, go to work, get back home, cook dinner, do your chores. Okay, awesome, glad I have so much free time left to do what I wanted (hah). I noticed that this schedule quickly had me developing sleep ‘issues’. It would come time to go to bed so I could get my 7-9 hours of sleep and I just would not go to sleep. This became a repeating pattern and I looked into everything related to insomnia, but nothing was working for me.

I had to take a really deep, comprehensive view at what the ‘issue’ was and when I finally figured it out, it all seemed so obvious. I wasn’t struggling with insomnia; I was straight up rebelling. I didn’t have time to do everything my heart genuinely desired in the bullshit weekly corporate schedule so, I sacrificed sleep hours to be able to do more. The freedom of the night was intoxicating. Everyone was asleep so I could just do whatever it was I wanted to do without interruption. It was nice! Unsustainable self-sabotage, but nice!

I later came to find that this is something psychologists call ‘revenge sleep time procrastination’. What an incredible label. It captures the essence of it so perfectly. In the end, I shifted my schedule so I was waking up early instead of sacrificing sleep. That way, I could at least still enjoy the feeling free while everyone else slept. Perhaps it’s all about finding the best possible compromise.

Being able to identify the specific reason why I was doing something helped tremendously when I ultimately began to work towards adopting a better option.

2. Befriend Resilience and Self-Compassion

Once we identify a fear, it’s necessary to be patient with ourselves as we build the necessary toolset needed to tackle the problem.

Let’s break down another fear and see how we can move past it: Fear of success with finding a partner and having a child with her. As I mentioned, I want children for a few reasons, but a big one being that I’d like to give them the calm, peaceful home that I never had.

What if through all the healing, all the training, all the self-edification, etc., I ultimately end up not being able to give that to them? What if the stresses of certain moments activate not only the chaos loving side, but a side I don’t know about that will replicate exactly how my parents treated me? I’d have just brought a child into the world only for me to repeat the sins of my parents. The child would have every right to resent me. I helped grant them their existence; therefore, I also granted them their ability to suffer.

Those thoughts are what they are, but the benefit of having them is that I have an idea of what areas I need to train myself in. If I’m particularly concerned with high stress situations triggering some deep, abusive side of me, then it stands to reason that my best defense against that would be training myself to befriend my stress response. Whether it’s through breathing practices, meditation, yoga, whatever. The fear usually contains the antidote.

For my situation above, where I had mentioned how boring order and calm can feel, I would have to learn how to feel content in those states of being. I would have to learn to identify triggers that lead me to feel like I want to throw it all away and learn how to mitigate them.

The consequences of succeeding seem far less daunting when we lean into what our fears are trying to tell us. It requires an immense amount of self-compassion to be patient with ourselves, understand that we’re not bad people for having these thoughts and fears, and that we deserve to succeed in these areas. There’s no need to throw a wrench into it all out of fear that we’ll actually get what we want.

3. Be Honest with Yourself

How much of it is actually a fear of success vs. fear of a success that you do not even want to achieve, but only feel like you have to?

At the beginning of this letter, I included a 'two sentence story’ I had written. I don’t really write fiction that often, so it was a bit out of character for me. The reality of it, in a section whose title demands absolute candor, is that that’s how I wake up at least three times a week. It’s either ex-girlfriends, big friendship groups that I’m no longer a part of, or both. It’s bizarre. I don’t want any of the people in these dreams. Not a single one appeals to me anymore. I don’t even need these big friend groups anymore. Perhaps these dreams are signaling to me that I’m lonely, but before I really looked myself in the eye, I thought I DID want those people back.

It would have been such a wasted effort if I pursued it. I also think our minds and bodies have a way of self-sabotaging us when we’re moving towards something that isn’t truly meant for us, or even good for us.

Write out a list of the things you want to achieve. For each bullet, close your eyes and just visualize what it would feel like to achieve that goal. Everything from how you’d be dressed, how big your smile would be, how fresh to death your cologne smells, whatever. Now, stay with this image and really notice how it makes you feel. Are the images invoking anxiety? Is there a sense of doubt in your gut or tightness in your chest? Lean into these feelings and see what they have to say. It could be that this isn’t something you genuinely want after all.

4. Discover how you Self-Sabotage

I am very good at convincing myself that something is a good idea or even the right idea, when I know damn well it is not. Luckily, I’ve learned exactly what I say, feel, and exactly how I react to this covert devious devilry to trick myself. Once I learned that pattern, it became way easier to recognize it, roll my eyes, and move on.

“I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good for nothing thoughts” - Michael Bublé

I’m reminded of people I’ve met in the fitness community. They claim they want to lose weight and have this ideal body, but they also say and do some of the most ridiculously funny things. ‘Oh, I just burned 200 calories on the treadmill! I deserve this chocolate cupcake as a reward’. Okay. Sure. Enjoy yourself. This particular person self-sabotages by choosing to reward their hard work with a treat that is completely counterproductive to the work they just put in.

Another example would be my aforementioned dating one. I would be seeing somebody and then just choose to end it way too quickly. I never really gave it the chance to blossom and see what it could have become. I’m self-sabotaging by jumping the gun and the antidote would be to just chill out and let things unfurl and see what’s what.

Ignorance begets strife. Understanding begets fellowship - Gulool Ja Ja

What are some of the areas where you notice yourself self-sabotaging the most? What are your self-sabotage methods of choice? Let’s get them out in the open, people!

“Why are you such a piece of shit?”

I’d heard the first question after someone is in a car accident should be ‘are you okay?’. I was around 22 at the time this happened. I was obviously both furious and hurt by the comments and just frustrated with the overall situation. My best friend at the time, Ross, was with me and I remember him explicitly saying ‘hey, I’m going to leave. I don’t like being around him when he’s like that’. Who could blame him?

There were two responses I had at the time:

• I’m an adult now. Why does shit like that still hurt so much?

• What am I even doing? Expecting him to change or be anyone that he isn’t is just making me miserable.

I pushed the adult/feelings part of the equation to the side, as I so masterfully did at this point in my life, and really focused in on how my expectations were setting me up to live a life I’d never enjoy. I had very high standards for myself which, sure, limited me in their own ways but I couldn’t go on projecting those standards onto anybody else. I was resenting people because they weren’t who I needed them to be at any particular moment. They weren’t who I wanted them to be.

This led to a lot of ‘if only they were, then I would…’ thinking. Just diabolically self-centered fantasizing that was doing nothing but pushing me further and further away from accepting my reality as it actually was.

Just last week, I found out that I didn’t get the job I had been interviewing for for over two months. I’m both a dreamer and a doer (anyone who says the two are mutually exclusive is a braindead moron). This means that when I go for what I want, my brain has the tendency of attaching all these fantasies and opportunities that would occur as a result of me getting the specific thing I wanted.

With that job in particular, I attached the hopes of:

• Moving to either a new city or returning to New York. Either way, the company would pay for all relocation expenses.

• I’d be independent and could start dating again. Having a family of my own is a big goal of mine, and this would only bring me closer to that.

• I’d feel like less of a disappointment to myself. No one was expressing disappointment in me, but I had started to feel hopeless.

I certainly don’t think it’s abnormal to project all of this onto certain opportunities, but I do think tempering our expectations is perhaps the best strategy in the interest of self-preservation. Thanks to teaching myself how to handle disappointment, these feelings came and went all within around a five-day period. That’s one of the main things I’m grateful for, honestly, is that my past-self hooked me up with a toolbelt I could use to get myself through what I needed to face. My parents certainly didn’t.

At my age of 34, my philosophy around my mental health struggles that came from my childhood is essentially the following: it’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility. I never, ever, write about my past in order to blame anyone or ask for pity. We’re way beyond that phase. It’s now my responsibility to take care of myself and my mental health. I did wish for a long time, though, that they had taught me how to handle disappointment.

As a kid, I would just fantasize about being a superhero a lot. Not just because I thought it was awesome, because I did, but also because with superpowers, I wouldn’t disappoint anyone or feel disappointed because I could do what I wanted. After growing out of that phase, I got to a point where instead, I would convince myself that anything I was hoping for would not actually happen. If I set myself up to be falsely nonchalant about the outcome, I wouldn’t care when the disappointment actually struck, right? NOPE, still hurt the same amount.

At the end of my college tenure and the beginning of my foray into the corporate world, I stopped having to worry about disappointment. I felt like I was genuinely blessed by the gods I didn’t believe in because everything was just handed to me. Got everything I interviewed for on the first shot. Awesome friends just seemed to appear effortlessly. It felt like I could have any beautiful women I wanted. It was a bizarre time where everything just turned up Nur.

When living in a reality like that for years, you feel invincible. When living in a reality like that for years, it’s also a guarantee that eventually, you will crash and burn. It’s a wake-up call that makes you never want to fall asleep again.

At this point, the only real skill I had to deal with the overwhelming tides of disappointment was to just assume I wouldn’t actually succeed at anything. Then, I did start succeeding at everything, so that belief went away. Now, without that belief, the only defense I had for disappointment was my good friend Jack. No, no, not my actual good friend Jack. The other one. My good friend Jack - jack fucking shit.

It just became this sense of total abandonment. I stopped seeing myself as someone that matters. I stopped seeing anyone else as people who were also suffering. It’s an incredibly lonely, self-centered, tunnel visioned state of existence. I’m this wounded being, no one else understands how wounded I am, and I drink, chase women, smoke, whatever, to numb my existential pain. It’s just what happens when hope dissipates. Why should I care if smoking and drinking excessively is damaging my body?

Why should I care that my mental health and appearance have gone to absolute trash? It was over, and there was no redemption on the horizon. Very dramatic to think when you’re only 26 years old, but that’s what happens. I’d even romanticize that particular state of being. It was the idea of fulfilling the ‘suffering artist’ archetype I’d internalized from the lives of the likes of Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Alan Watts.

The reality of this state of being, in vast contrast to how I imagined my favorite artists and thinkers (at the time) living their lives, is that people become tired of you very quickly. In that state of being, it’s extremely easy to see this as selfish and ‘fair-weathered’ behavior. It’s much more challenging to see that the way you’ve been living your life has been hurting the people who care about you. It’s much more challenging to see that it’s YOU who is the selfish asshole and NOT the people who still haven’t left you behind, even when they had every right and reason to do so.

I was extremely lucky to have had a point where I snapped out of it and thought ‘what the hell am I doing?’. I remember my cousin was going through a brutal breakup at the same time that I was going through my whirlwind of self-pity. He sat me down once, to vent about his own stuff, and I’ll never forget him saying ‘Nur, our lives would have been much easier if we had been taught how to handle disappointment’. There was something about seeing it through that specific lens that helped me considerably. It’s the beauty of being able to name feelings and emotions. Once it’s named, it becomes more real, and gives us something concrete to look into.

The thing that fascinated me the most about disappointment was how multifaceted and far reaching it was. To mitigate the risk of repeating myself from previous newsletters, let’s jump right into what I discovered.

The ‘Why’:

1. Expectations

For me, my expectations seemed to bite me in the ass the most when they were based around:

• People

• Events

• Goals

With people, it was always the same story. I’d project way too many expectations onto them. I’d always want them to be who I wanted them to be, who I needed them to be. Funnily enough, I always thought that I was accepting them for who they were. Or at least that’s what I’d tell people. And, with humans being humans, I was setting myself up for disappointment each and every time.

With events, it’s what I described earlier. I would fantasize excessively on the possible outcomes and be crushed if I didn’t get exactly what my imagination was so desperately hoping for.

With goals, and this one is my favorite because of how subtle it might be, I noticed that I would work towards a goal, stop, lose progress, then wonder what happened. Then, I’d work towards it, stop, lose progress, wonder what happened, ad infinitum.

I began to realize that while people were so quick to jump to explaining this away with either a lack of discipline, willpower, and not ‘wanting it bad enough’, the reality was quite different. Although those were certainly aspects of it, I began to realize that what I was doing was self-sabotaging. Why? Well, what happens if I reach my goal and the result isn’t what I wanted it to be? Let’s take myself as an example. I had been very fit my whole adult life. As I’ve mentioned before, over exercising was my coping jam. After alcohol and food binge city, that wasn’t the case anymore. I’d always get very close to my goal physique again and then; I’d just give up.

I’d built my goal physique up as a cure all for so many things. ‘When I reach my goal physique, I’ll look amazing again, I’ll get the halo effect back, I’ll get so many women again, I’ll this, I’ll that, etc., etc.’. I was setting myself up for disappointment. Like people, I was expecting way too much from it. Like the outcome of events, I was expecting life changing magic.

2. Toxic Positivity

‘Be positive… or else!’. The zeitgeist of the time, within my group of friends, was an outrageous emphasis on being positive and optimistic all the time. Messages that positive people were more desired, happier, and more successful, seemed to bombard me at every corner. Whenever I felt negativity, disappointment in particular, I felt like I had to go full ostrich mode and hide my head in the sand.

We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions. - Brene Brown

I remember being on vacation in Nantucket one summer and very publicly dropping my sunglasses and having them shatter all over the floor. I loved those sunglasses. They might have been cheap knockoffs, but they were rose-colored aviators and I loved them. Obviously, I was momentarily heart broken and disappointed. Since I had all eyes on me at the moment, instead of expressing any sort of real emotion, I said: ‘whelp, there’s an opportunity to learn how to let go!’ and I just laughed it off. I feel sad for the boy in that memory. While I consider what I said to be a good sentiment and something to aspire to, it wasn’t what I felt in the moment. What a shame to feel the need to lie about my emotions. What a state of being it is to feel trapped in a prison of false positivity.

It reminds me of when I first raised Meelo and Bear as puppies. It was HARD. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: raising Samoyed puppies by myself is perhaps the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in this life. On top of how difficult it is, I never felt like I could express that. I didn’t want the disappointment of feeling like I was a ‘bad’ dog owner or that I just couldn’t do it. Funny thing is, the majority of the dog community I was instilled in seemed to feel the exact same way. How did I know that? Well, NO ONE talked about how fucking hard it was. No one wanted the disappointment of being, feeling like, or being seen as a bad fur parent. So, everyone did the clearly healthier thing: we all suffered in silence.

How does anyone deal with all this when it seems like it’s the normal thing to do? Well, luckily, I discovered quite a few ideas.

The How:

1. Embrace Temperance and Love the Process

Disappointment bites us in the ass when we are laser-focused on outcomes. Notice that the majority of fantasizing that I projected onto goals and events were all outcome based. The outcome is rarely what truly makes us happy, anyways. The process does. Becoming the person we need to be to achieve a goal, for instance, and seeing that steady progress, is way more fulfilling than the one singular moment when we realize we finally hit our goal. Emphasizing the one singular moment that we put so much weight on, instead of the plethora of moments required to get there, seems silly in retrospect.

As far as expectations go, temperance is our best friend. Tempering our expectations and seeing things through a more realistic lens is a lifesaving activity. There’s nothing wrong with being excited for a potential outcome, that isn’t what I’m getting at. It’s when excitement turns to extreme fantasizing and extreme anticipation that it becomes a problem. We’re setting ourselves up for the potential disappointment to hit us significantly harder. It’s self-sabotage. Remember self-sabotage often feels very good in the moment. Rarely does it serve us in the long term, though.

Temperance in the form of patience is the one that took me a while to fully understand in the realm of disappointment. I came to realize that many times when I was disappointed with an outcome, it was because I wanted it now. Not only did I not get the outcome I desired, but now I also had to do all the work all over in order to even try again. It’s why not putting our eggs in one basket is such a brilliant adage. Working towards multiple options has the profound effect of not only tempering outcome disappointment, but also not burdening us with the feeling that we have to start from scratch.

Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind. - David G. Allen

It is incredibly easier to deal with disappointment when we think ‘oh well, I may have lost X but I still have Y!’. Boys, I can’t emphasize this enough: this is not me giving you permission to have side chicks when in a relationship.

2. Vulnerability, Gratitude and Appreciation

It never fully makes sense to me when certain newsletters seem to wildly out preform the ones I think are my best. I always assume they’ll be by far my best pieces yet, but that never seems to be the case. Honestly, I learned to be grateful to even have a single reader and have learned to appreciate how they receive and digest my writings vs how I do.

Gratitude and appreciation really go a long way in helping us deal with disappointment. Being grateful to even have certain opportunities has been like a healing balm in opposition to me feeling almost entitled to getting something; therefore, feeling outrageously disappointed and a bit wrathful when I didn’t get what I wanted. It was just a bitter existence when I saw things that way and I’m glad to have exchanged it for gratitude.

They both apply to disappointment with people, too. Instead of projecting who I wanted someone to be onto the person, I learned to be grateful to have them in my life and appreciative of who they were. All their quirks and imperfections started to shine and become incredibly endearing rather than fodder for disappointment.

Let’s revisit the example of the dog community and no one wanting to paint themselves as a bad dog parent. Do you know how much of a breath of fresh air it would have been for just one single person to tell me ‘Yeah dude, the puppy phase is hard as hell’. Sometimes we just really need someone to listen and say ‘damn, that sucks’. Sometimes we just need someone to acknowledge that what we’re going through isn’t all kittens, koalas and capybaras. It’s okay to express disappointment, and it’s okay to respond to disappointment empathetically. The guise of toxic positivity being turned on 24/7 is absolutely exhausting, completely unnecessary, and wildly reckless.

Toxic positivity is forced, false positivity. It may sound innocuous on the surface, but when you share something difficult with someone and they insist that you turn it into a positive, what they're really saying is 'My comfort is more important than your reality. - Dr. Susan David

3. Exploring Fear with Mindfulness

What does fear have to do with anything? I’m going to keep this part short and sweet, and totally not only because I’m about to hit the ‘email length limit’ 👀. When you feel disappointment, focus on where in your body it is coming from. Allow yourself to feel the feeling and gently explore what it is that’s arising in you. The reality is that disappointment is almost always activated by fear, and it is immensely beneficial to figure out what that root fear is. I’ll show you this exercise using the example of me not getting the job I wanted (it’s the same one we’ve done before for resentments):

I am disappointed because I have fear: fear that I’ll never get a job, fear that I’ll never be able to be fully independent again, fear that I’ll never have a family of my own, fear I’ll end up alone.

What do you do when you feel immensely disappointed? How do you temper your expectations and show appreciation for the ones in your life that you’re immensely grateful for? Go ahead and share below! Can’t wait to hear from you and until next time, my loves.

‘I miss grandpa’

‘What the FUCK do you want me to do about it?’

That’s the earliest memory I have where I felt like: oh, okay, so my feelings don’t mean shit.

I recently learned about this ‘third culture kid’ term. My parents’ culture was Syrian/Arab/Muslim. My environment’s culture was good old fashion upper middle-class Americana. We lived in the poor part of a wildly rich town. MY culture was whatever the combination of those two are. That’s where things get interesting. Why? Well, those two cultures do not mesh very well and as a sensitive, intuitive kid, the signals I received were always contradictory.

My journey of masculinity is one of my favorite ways to explain it. From what I saw from my Dad and his brothers, masculinity was about being loud, being the breadwinner, never showing unmanly emotions (whatever that means), and being quick to anger.

Perfect, I was already angry all the time. What I found in school and living in my quaint Massachusetts town, however, was that a big part of masculinity seemed to be the ability to remain calm. Two very, very conflicting signals. Me being quick to anger was something I expected to be seen as a virtue but instead I was alienating people. I had all this anger that I thought to be a good thing but all the direct feedback I’d received from my environment was that it was wrong.

So, now, I have all this anger with nowhere to go so, I shoved it deep down. The problem with shoving anger deep down is that our emotions need somewhere to go. It isn’t just going to disappear. In the case of anger, I’ve always felt that shoving it down just converted it into anxiety and muscle tension.

Uh oh, anxiety? Men aren’t supposed to be nervous or anxious.

The number of things I was told to be ‘haram’ (sinful) was absurd. There was a time where my cousins from Saudi were visiting, and we took them to Atlantic City. Gambling in Islam is famously sinful. What was the first thing the person who told me that gambling is sinful did? Grabbed my cousin and ran straight to the slot machines. Before they went into the casino, I vividly remember saying ‘but it’s haram' and being waved off and silenced, as per usual.

The difference this time, however, was that I remember having such a stark moment of ‘oh, so nothing actually matters. All this guilt I’ve felt over having certain desires, desires that I stuffed down, was just all for nothing. It was all just bullshit’. I felt incredibly betrayed. There was clearly no point in communicating that, though, so once again, I shoved it all down.

I was a kid who at twelve or thirteen years old was being indirectly taught that

• Rules are bullshit, clearly.

• My feelings and emotional responses were always ‘wrong’.

• Voicing my opinions was a total waste of time

All I felt at this point was anger and anxiety and even then, I thought I had to repress them to put on an image of strength and positivity. To an extent, at least. It wasn’t just negative emotions that I had learned to repress, either.

If I felt happy, I had to hide it to make sure people knew I wasn’t too happy. If I thought something was hilarious, I’d repress my laughter to not laugh too hard. I was sacrificing everything I could at every turn. Anything to not feel vulnerable. Anything to put on this false image of masculine stoicism.

The only times I ever felt comfort were through over-exercising or playing World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW had just come out as I was entering my freshman year of high school. At this point, I had completely given up having a social life with anyone at my high school. I just walked the halls like a knight in rusted armor, waiting to get home and hop online.

In WoW, I got to be a different version of myself. Millions of other players were playing in the same world as me and I made SO many friends. I was finally well liked. I was finally having all these experiences I’d dreamt of, albeit online. I finally felt like I was worth something.

I met my first girlfriend on there. I made friends who I’m still friends with to this day, 20 years later, I met people I looked up to on there. I was finding something close to happiness in this alternate reality we were all indulging in.

It turns out that some people don’t particularly like it when you’re happy. At this point, I am a sixteen-year-old who has been repressing anxiety and anger for years. I found a place that finally made me feel happy. A place where I fit in. So, what is my father’s solution to this situation? It’s to take away the last remaining thing this kid was holding onto.

I’d always heard of these tribal ‘coming of age’ rituals. One would go in as a boy and come out as a man. That’s how they went. I never asked to be given a very tribal coming of age moment.

God, do I mourn for that kid and what he had to go through. I write different childhood struggles in different letters because they’d be too long to list in a single one, and it keeps things from being redundant, but I mourn the loss of what could have been.

You know how people say, ‘I’d rather my parents be mad at me than have them be disappointed’? That’s total bullshit to me. I’d rather face disappointment over the rage face that I still get flashbacks over, any day.

Returning to the story, my father decided to take away my router. I was playing too much and blah blah blah. I dissented and it looked like I was about to pay the price for that. Rage face approaching me, hands up, from my room’s door to my desk on the opposing side. This is what I call the ‘you’re about to get your ass beat, again, signal’. That’s where everything just came to a head for me. I was tired of all the contradictions. I was tired of the abuse. I was fucking tired of not feeling safe in my own home.

It felt like every ounce of anger I’d ever shoved down just erupted to the surface. I stood up and hit this man harder than I’ve probably ever hit anything, to this day. He quite cartoonishly went flying backwards and slammed into the wall, looked at me in total shock, and left my room without a word. I was done with him, but I wasn’t done with the emotions. They were still there. They had come out to play. I had no clue what to do with them because my emotions had never been taken seriously, so emotional regulation was a foreign skill to me.

I remember going down to my kitchen, grabbing the largest knife I could find, and running back upstairs to my room. I then proceeded to just destroy. I was slashing up my furniture, punching the shit out of the floors and the walls, and ultimately just falling to my knees and crying profusely for what felt like hours.

I didn’t need this archetypal, father vs son, bullshit. I just wanted to play my game.

After that intense saga, I just did not want to feel anything. My twenties were characterized by numbing anything that I could have used for significant personal growth. Breakups? Drink excessively. Anxiety? Drink excessively. Stress? Smoke a cigarette. Feel bad about myself? Go pick up women.

I felt like a baby. The alcohol was my bottle and the cigarette my pacifier and I relied on women to soothe me instead of self-soothing.

Food became a problem, too. Binge to feel something and then fast in regret for days. Anything to not feel. It was way too painful and overwhelming.

Eventually, these things all stopped working, so I started adding benzodiazepines to my drinking to REALLY not feel a goddamn thing.

I remember the pandemic had just started and I was laid off, as so many people were at the time. I was in my childhood room at my parent’s house, drinking, taking benzos, and watching T.V. I remember getting up to go to the bathroom and then next thing I knew, I was in a room and some guy was sitting in a chair just watching me. I, being the pleasant drunk I was, shouted ‘why the FUCK are you just staring at me’. He laughed at me and said, ‘because I have to’. That’s when I really took a good look around. ‘Oh…I get it now. I’m sorry, man’. Not really in a position to shout at anyone when I walked to the bathroom in my house and teleported to being handcuffed to a hospital bed.

My parents found an empty benzo bottle next to an empty whiskey pint and assumed this was a suicide attempt. It was not, but none the less, there I was. It was covid so there were no visitors allowed in the hospital. It was covid so no one was allowed to bring you anything. No phone, no books, and apparently no drugs from the nurses to help my withdrawals, either, because of some new protocol.

For four days straight, I sat in a room alone doing absolutely nothing besides watching King of Queens reruns while going through the absolute depths of internal hell. I never want to see Kevin James’ face again, and I’m in the movie ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’! (Clarification after getting asked: yes, I’m actually in that movie. I wasn’t referring to a delusional moment)

“Daring greatly means the courage to be vulnerable. It means to show up and be seen. To ask for what you need. To Talk about how you're feeling. To have the hard conversations.” - Brene Brown

I didn’t have a choice besides to sit there and let the torrent of emotions wash over me. I felt every anxiety attack, every shame attack, every flashback, everything, and I couldn’t run away. By day four, was I a sack of flesh whose bones had been consumed by his repressed emotions? Nope, still the same goon. I was still alive and that gave me hope! It was time to recruit every research loving ounce of myself and utilize it to understand why I should care more about my feelings. Particularly, methods on how to do so, and why I should care enough in the first place.

1. Mindfulness, Self-Understanding, and Emotional Release

It’s one hell of a complicated beastie when we feel something, and our first reaction is ‘this isn’t the right thing to feel’. Honestly, what an absolute shame. How much time have we wasted because we had ourselves convinced that certain emotions and certain reactions were for some reason inappropriate. Inappropriate or not, what we’re feeling is what we’re feeling. If we repress it, it’s not only not going to go anywhere but it’s just going to grow stronger.

My favorite example of this is how my good friend Nur Nadar used to take longer to get over break ups than most people he knew (longer than what most people claimed to take, I should say). Why? Well, he’s a man. He wasn’t going to let people see how crushed he was. Rejection? So what? Hit the gym and get in some one-night stands.

Seriously, though. I didn’t feel like it was okay to cry. I didn’t feel like I could sit in my room and mourn the loss of the person and the future we’d planned. Instead, it was an active competition with myself to see how quickly I could get over it. Which, paradoxically, just made it take way longer.

Repeat after me: We cannot repress emotions and expect them to go away for good. We cannot understand who we are as people if we consider our emotions to be incorrect or inappropriate for a falsely idealized version of ourselves to feel.

The only way out is through. Take my word for it when I say that denying who we are has done nothing but take years of joy and freedom away from us. Stopping ourselves from laughing or enjoying things because it’s not ‘manly’, or whatever the justification might be, is such a horrendous shame. Stopping ourselves from grieving because ‘a strong person wouldn’t do that’ is an absolute tragedy.

That’s the beauty of mindfulness and particularly mindfulness meditation. You’re making an active effort to pause and reflect on what a feeling is telling you. It can either be a practice of sitting down with your eyes shut or something you do as you’re going about your day. Either way, what you want to focus on is:

• Identifying where in your body this feeling is. Is it in your gut? Is it a tension in your neck muscles? Tensing of your jaw? Try to gently notice how your body is reacting to these feelings.

• What is this feeling trying to tell you? How many times have we pushed away a feeling in a situation where we would have benefited tremendously had we only listened to it instead?

• Make sure we’re not adding value judgements to any of our feelings during this process. There’s no reason to identify our feelings as good or bad. Just notice them.

• Focus on a particular sensation in the body and breathe in gratitude for that feeling. Even if it is something we can identify as being an anxiety response that may not necessarily serve us, we must still focus on the feeling, take a deep breath in, thank that feeling for how it is trying to help and protect us, and then take a longer exhale to let go.

2. Journaling and Creative Expression

Once we learn how to identify our feelings and lean into them in a curious, non-value judgmental (good or bad) fashion, we can move one step further and try our best to begin to understand them.

Journaling is by far one of the most effective tools to understand our feelings. It’s also incredibly beneficial to just get these feelings outside of us. Getting them out can feel like decongesting a stuffy head. Having our thoughts and feelings written in front of us also gives shape to our internal world. It’s far easier to make sense of what we’re thinking and what we’re feeling if it is right there in front of our eyes.

There’s also a plethora of written exercises we can do to help ourselves get to the root of our feelings. What I call feeling chain exercises are by far my favorite. I’ve written out instructions on how to do them at the bottom of my previous ‘Am I really the one I’ve been looking for’ newsletter. It’s an absolutely fantastic exercise and really helps us peel back further layers of the proverbial onion.

Creative expression is by far one of the most helpful ways I’ve found to feel our emotions. I’m going to use myself as an example. I write personal essays where my intent is to share things I do not want people to know. These experiences are usually ones that have brought me shame and that I still struggle to let go of. However, something truly beautiful happens when I write these and put them out into the world.

The writing process alone is absolutely draining. I’ve had to push through so much stress and anxiety to put my past on paper. I’ve been brought to tears while writing the past three or four of these newsletters. The thing is, though, as painful as it may be in the moment, once I put it out there, I feel the weight of a million suns lifted off of me. It’s out there. I don’t have to hide anymore. It’s out there and I’m still okay. It’s out there and the less I have to hide, the more I get to enjoy just being myself.

3. Therapy and Self-Compassion

Sometimes feeling our feelings can be too overwhelming for us to do alone. That’s when a therapist or a counselor can be of immense help to us. As we express what we’re going through, it can be one of the first times not only that we get it out there, but also the first time that someone, the therapist, provides different feedback than what we’ve been telling ourselves the whole time.

Admitting that we’re sad to a therapist isn’t going to get us the reaction we’ve been giving ourselves, particularly if the reaction was that sadness is bad and a weak emotion. We’re likely to be met with empathy and compassion over those emotions for the first time.

As our emotional responses are more often met with compassion, we begin to internalize this and develop a stronger sense of self-compassion. If we have an emotional reaction, instead of running away or reaching for our phone to distract us, we can take a breath, locate the emotion, honor its intention, and let it go. That’s an immense act of self-compassion in and of itself. The decision to feel our feelings instead of scrolling through every single app we have repeatedly, in hopes that a notification marker will make us feel better, is a massive act of self-compassion. We’re showing ourselves that we’re worth taking the time, facing the resistance, and honoring our pain so we can integrate it and move forward with our lives.

There’s a few choices we have ahead of us. We can embrace feeling our feelings and develop:

• Better emotional regulation skills

• Better relationships

• A more free, authentic, fulfilling version of our lives

We can also choose to keep repressing and judging them. Besides, in our last days, we’re not going to regret living a stressed, inauthentic, and regret littered life, right? ……Right?

I’d love to hear how you process your feelings and the strategies that you’ve found to help. Please list any and all in the comments and I can’t wait to read them!

“It’s harder to write this because this time, I’m the one who fucked up. It’s harder to be vulnerable when I’m the villain of the story I’m telling.”

Shame, shame, that’s the name of the game. It’s not just a catchy rhyme. It’s been my reality since the beginning.

To a certain extent, that’s totally fine! It’s completely normal to be sitting there and have a memory come up that makes us cringe. It’s an uncomfortable feeling but if we live our lives with intention, we can pause, realize that we’re experiencing a growing pain, and honor the moment. We can’t look back on a behavior and have a shameful reaction if we haven’t grown beyond the person we were in the memory.

Toxic shame, on the other hand, brings with it no guiding light. There are times where I’ve been at the gym and, in the middle of a workout, what’s known as a ‘shame attack’ would come on. Shame attacks make us want to crouch and shrink into the tiniest ball possible. That isn’t even a dramatized view of it. When a shame attack comes on, our bodies instinctively want to pull us down into a ball. Our body instinctively puts us in a position where we are less likely to be seen, theoretically, and most protected. This photo from ‘Mind Journal’ is the best depiction I can find.

Toxic shame wants to remind us that we’re garbage. We ‘fucked up’ in that moment, therefore we deserve to suffer for it for the rest of our lives. Toxic shame wants to destroy our sense of worth and our self-esteem. It wants to corrode our mental health until the health part flees the equation.

“Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change - Brene Brown”

The TS monster (toxic shame, TS monster occasionally moving forward) wants us to be in survival mode and on the defensive 24/7. It turns us into people who:

• Blame everyone else for our issues

• Lash out at criticism

• Deflect

• Self-Sabotage

• Become overwhelmingly perfectionistic

We don’t blame and lash out because we actually think someone else is responsible. We don’t blame, lash out, and deflect because we believe we’re perfect little angels. On the contrary. We know better than anyone else what we did wrong. There’s a constant tape playing in our head that reminds us of what we did every single day, don’t you worry now.

We’re already beating ourselves up daily for the sins of our past. Having someone say it out loud triggers an anger response. Anger and anxiety are cousins, after all. So, when we’ve already been experiencing so much self-inflicted shame, when we’ve already been walking around in a state of anxiety all day, hearing it just overwhelms us and the anxiety bursts into anger (it’s called fight or flight for a reason).

When I blame, what I’m really saying is: I FUCKING KNOW. When I lash out, what I’m really saying is: I cannot handle the extra pressure of hearing it from someone else right now. When I deflect, what I’m really saying is: Don’t worry, the TS monster doesn’t let me forget for a moment. If I can convince that person that it isn’t all on me, then I can at least get them off my back. That’s the thinking, anyways. It’s purely a defensive response.

I used to live with a roommate, we’ll call him Bob, who would practically follow me around to fault find and poke at every little thing I did. He was clever, that Bob, because he did it all in the guise of ‘trying to help me’. ‘Do this, don’t do that, girls wouldn’t like that' and yadda yadda yadda. Unsolicited advice, toxic shame or no, is just criticism in a cute little costume. If I want advice, I will gladly ask. If I want your feedback, I will ask you.

I was a 31 one year old man with a room in the heart of the city and I chose to spend more time at my parents’ house so I wouldn’t have to deal with that.

To really get into the heart of what the TS monster is all about, let’s travel back to one of those moments I call 'an original sin’. Putting this on paper is perhaps the most challenging writing experience I’ve ever had but here goes:

When I was 25 and living in San Antonio, Texas, I really did have it all. Worked at one of the best tech companies in the world, had a beautiful girlfriend I was crazy about, and more friends than I could manage. I cannot for the life of me explain why this happened or what the exact cause was, but I got to a point where drinking was an absolute necessity. I had started feeling uneasy about everything and the only friend I felt comfortable sharing any of this with was a handsome fellow from Kentucky named Jim Beam.

When I was drunk, my behavior was erratic and self-destructive. When I was sober, I was beginning to feel anxiety like I’d never felt before. It later turned out that I just didn’t recognize the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, so I assumed it was just general anxiety. I became both a terrible boyfriend and a burdensome friend. I remember one of my best friends at the time, Marcus, sitting me down and asking ‘Dude, what is wrong with you? Something is going on. You’re like a zombie ALL THE TIME’. I ignored him. I knew what I was doing. He just didn’t understand, hah.

My girlfriend ended up leaving me and that’s when something in my brain just snapped. I had been using her excessively for comfort and it became too much for her, understandably so. This is when things became exceedingly bad.

I could not leave her alone for months after that. I was drinking every day from sunrise to sunset and just texting and sending ridiculous emails. In my drunken 25-year-old head, if I just said the right things, I would get her back. This behavior made more and more people distance themselves from me. Her and I worked together and co-workers I didn’t even know were staring me down like I was sewer trash. I was destroying the reputation I had built, the friendships I had built, and the job I was so proud to have.

Drink, fuck up, drink even more to numb the shame of the fuck up, repeat.

As a complete shock to absolutely no one, I was inevitably fired. I didn’t have any reason or prospects to stay in San Antonio, so I made my way back home to Boston. It’s harder to write this because this time, I’m the one who fucked up. It’s harder to be vulnerable when I’m the villain of the story I’m telling.

I felt like I was exiled. I had always read about how people who were bad for the tribe would be exiled to die alone in the woods. Dramatic as it may be, that’s exactly how I felt. I knew I did it to myself. I knew that it wasn’t about getting the girl back. Not at all. It was me trying to be a hero to myself. It was me trying to cure the original sin, and she was the first step. If I got her back, everything would go back to normal. If I got her back, the respect, friends, and esteem would all return with her. It was a fool’s errand and I shot myself in the foot, every individual toe, my eyeballs, and then some.

Any guesses on how long it took me to move forward and stop having shame attacks over the memories of what I did and how I acted? One year? Two? Three? Nah, try six. My brain truly needed to understand that the original sin did not have to be redeemed. My brain needed to realize that everything is still okay.

I’ve become a far better person and made amends in my own way. I had been living in a perfectionistic nightmare. It wasn’t real and I had to understand that I did not have to fix the past to move forward.

It took hundreds of books, years of therapy, hundreds of hours of meditation, four years of sobriety, support groups, obsession with physical fitness, etc. to finally be able to move on. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to overcome. The TS monster makes us feel so, so inadequate. Constant guilt, shame and anxiety was my existence for years. I did, however, kick the TS monster’s ugly ass and I want to share how you can do the same; but first: let’s talk about where the monster even comes from.

When I was a kid, I was very clearly told when I did something my parents did not like. I wasn’t always told in the way one might expect, though. If I did something that particularly bothered my mom, she would stonewall me until either A, she got over it, or B, I would redeem myself. See any similarities with the story above?

I was also an obese child and an eleven-year-old Arab kid during 9/11. Suffice it to say, people have been telling me that either there is something wrong with me, or that I wasn’t good enough, since as long as I can remember.

Being raised conservatively Muslim in America also led to intense feelings of shame and guilt because the things I naturally wanted to do were considered ‘haram’ (a sin).

Based on my personal experiences, I’d have to say that these three are what instills toxic shame in us as children more than anything else:

• Abuse - Emotional and physical

• Neglect

• Cultural/Societal/Religious expectations

So, what can we do about it? Do we really have to do the six year personal growth insanity that Nur did? No. Would it hurt? No, but my journey was different. I didn’t know what I specifically needed to work on so I hit the catch all approach. Surely there’s a more targeted approach, then? Of course, and don’t call me Shirley.

1. Feel your feelings

I’m sorry in advanced for this one. It’s not easy and I’m not going to sugar coat it. When we experience a toxic shame response, our first instinct is to IMMEDIATELY DO SOMETHING ELSE. Pick up our phone, blurt out random words, turn on the tv, and so on. Our instinct actually becomes avoidance. Anything to not feel the immense pain we’d feel if we leaned into it.

You’re going to hate me for this one, but it is what it is. The only way out is through. Next time you experience a shame attack, fight the instinct to shrink your posture by any means and sit as you would normally. Do not reach for anything. Just sit there, close your eyes, and let the feelings flow through you. It sucks and it hurts but it’ll eventually stop. The more we do this, the less it’ll suck, the less it’ll hurt, and we’ll start noticing that it has a far weaker grip on us than we could have thought possible.

Denying and rejecting our feelings unfortunately just never works and as Carl Jung has very famously put it:

What we resist not only persists, but will grow in size - Carl Jung

If this feels like too overwhelming of a step, then it’s very important to consider #2 on this list instead.

2. Seek professional help

It’s honestly incredible how many options we have for specialized treatment these days. Starting with more traditional options, a clinical psychologist or a therapist can help you through the process of feeling your feelings. It can be scary to do alone and even dangerous if you don’t feel prepared. Having a professional right there with you makes the process more bearable. Another benefit of a therapist here is that just admitting to someone else what happened can be extremely therapeutic when it comes to shame. Getting it out there loosens its internalized grip on us.

Another form of specialized treatment that works wonders for toxic shame is known as ‘EMDR’: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. It’s commonly used for those who suffer with PTSD flashbacks. Toxic shame attacks and PTSD flashbacks might as well be the same thing as far as I’m concerned but people seem to think there’s a difference.

Anyways, EMDR involves a professional guiding you through your Toxic Shame memories while you move your eyes in certain directions. When your brain stores normal memories, it connects them to your other memories. When your brain stores a more traumatic memory, it doesn’t store it properly in a way where it’s connected to the rest of your memories. Your brain is storing it in a way that doesn’t convey that the danger or threat from the memory is over. EMDR helps rewire that.

3. Learn to set healthy boundaries

Listen, the TS monster makes us feel like absolute shit about ourselves. As a consequence of that, we tend to let people overstep way too often. We let the people who abused us too close, we let people say awful things and just laugh it off or pretend like we didn’t hear it, we never say no. Consequently, what usually happens is that we let ourselves internalize all these feelings and set ourselves up for the blame, deflection and lashing out cycle.

We need to learn to stick up for ourselves and reclaim our autonomy. Here are some of my personal favorite lines that just naturally come out of my mouth when the wrong person oversteps the boundaries:

• I won’t be spoken to like that.

• You’re not allowed to speak to me that way.

• You’ll just try that one again with a little more respect this time, yeah?

Victims of the TS monster need to feel strong. Our strength was stripped away from us and it’s time to reclaim it.

If you’ve tried setting boundaries and it’s just not working, then it’s time to seriously consider removing these people from your life. Their need for you isn’t more important than your need for peace.

4. Practice Self-Care

It’s extremely easy to stop taking care of our minds, bodies and spirits when we’re constantly receiving shame filled messages from our brain telling us that we’re not good enough. When in a shame spiral, there’s something very appropriate feeling about looking in the mirror and seeing a very unkempt and out of shape version of ourselves. It feels like that’s what we deserve to look like.

It’s so very vital that we flip the script on that one. Just the simple act of engaging in a self-care activity is a step in the right direction because we’re telling our brains ‘See, I care about myself’. Whether it is exercising, grooming and dressing nicely, or relaxing in a nice warm bath with a good book. Our focus is to remind ourselves that we matter and deserve to look and feel good.

“Feelin good, lookin good, oughta be in Hollywood!” - Mark Divine

5. Mindfulness, Journaling, and Accountability

When it comes to shame, it’s so very important to be able to observe our thoughts and try to not react when the shameful ones show up. If we can pause and gently notice the thoughts that are occurring during a shame attack, we can slowly become more aware of our triggers and work on not reacting as harshly each time the TS monster shows his face.

Journaling is very similarly beneficial in that it can be easier to know what thoughts, patterns, and triggers to look for if we have them written down before us. Also, since shame is something we, almost by definition, bury deep inside us, writing out the event and just getting it outside of our head for once can be tremendously helpful. It’s also easier to view the situation objectively when reading it off of a piece of paper.

Earlier, I explained why we can so quickly jump to blame while experiencing shame. While it’s important to understand why we do that, it’s equally important to move forward from that and take accountability for our own part in the situation. Listen, no matter what anyone says, it takes two to tango. It’s very rarely only one side’s doing in any of these situations. It’s important for our recovery, though, to identify exactly what our role was in all of it and admit that to ourselves. It’s both empowering and healing beyond belief to learn to say, ‘I messed up, here’s what I did and I’m really sorry about that’.

Do you ever find yourself up against the TS monster? How about even just minor shame cringes? How do you find yourself feeling and how do you usually react when those memories pop up? Let me know in the comments below!

Just be yourself…or else!

“I’m worried about you.”

Here I was in all my arrogant glory: Wildly Loud; Embarrassingly Cocky; Unforgettably Insecure.

My second Existentialism class of the semester had just ended. People hung around after to discuss the lesson from that day. I hung around after to pursue the pretty blonde.

“I’m worried about you.” This bizarre and absurdly eccentric professor walked right up to me after class that day. He stood at around 5’4”, didn’t really take care of his appearance, and had a lazy eye. For reference, I’m a 6’3”, 200lb+ male.

As he was looking at me with his one good eye, he corrected his lazy eye to look straight through my soul and say, “I came over to kindly ask you to drop my class.”

Every muscle in my body was tense and it felt like what I can only describe as ‘negative electricity’ rapidly coursing through my body. I was horrified. My ego thinking: ‘who the hell are you to worry about ME’. (Translation: ‘Please don’t say anything that implies there’s something wrong with me. I am so fragile that any negative description of me that doesn’t fit my current view of reality will shatter me’.)

“But”, he continued, “I saw something in you today that made me change my mind”. He walked off without another word. He walked off like he hadn’t just filled me with darkness only to bathe me in sunlight.

The part of myself that existed beneath the facade I presented to the world was completely entranced. ‘What did he see in me?’ ‘Was it something I said? Something I wrote?’ ‘Was it the smooth sugar I was dropping on the pretty blonde?’

‘……………….somebody actually sees something in me?’.

Thus began one of the most positive relationships of my life. The feeling of this revered figure, who I admired tremendously, taking an interest in me, was beyond new to me. He became both my mentor and something akin to a father figure. We spoke almost every day while on campus. He made so much time for me and we continued to speak multiple times a year for the next thirteen years. I’m the person I am today largely thanks to him. He taught me that it was okay to be myself. (Rest in peace, Kerry Dugan, I’ll never forget what you did for me).

I grew up in a pretty chaotic haze. My parents came here from Syria when my mom was around six months pregnant with me. In fact, our WHOLE extended family moved here within a year of each other (such an Arab move). I was a very sensitive kid. Chaos at home was not an environment I could thrive in. There was always shouting. If I did something wrong, I was at risk of:

• Being called a piece of shit

• Being hit until the adult or my brother had their fill

• Being threatened with abandonment

• Being called the whole extended family’s title for me: stupid. Technically, it was ‘hmar’, the Arabic for ‘Donkey’, but that’s what I got. My aunt would always laugh and say ‘Nur, nobody expects anything out of you, we know you’re a hmar’.

I don’t write these words lightly. I’m not interested in demonizing my family. They’ve all (mostly) blossomed into amazing people. I’m not interested in pity. I deeply love and am so, SO, proud of the human being I am today. I’m simply setting the stage.

My upbringing was very much: America outside, conservative Muslim home inside. There were so many things I was interested in pursuing but the voice in my head had no problem reminding me: ‘You’re Muslim. If you do this, you’ll burn in hell.’

At school, I was teased for having a different name, being Arab, being poor, you name it. Home certainly didn’t feel safe and school, throughout my k-12 education, felt like I was walking into a minefield every day.

As kids, we’re evolutionarily inclined, for our own safety, to adapt to these situations in any way we can. For me, it was perfectionism, people pleasing, and being on guard every second of every day. I was constantly searching for the right thing to do or say to make sure I didn’t ruffle a single feather. It was no way to live and I had completely shrouded myself in inauthenticity in order to survive.

I remember just consistently feeling paralyzed. I remember once when a joke was told in class, everybody laughed, but I was way too much a prisoner in my anxiety ridden cage to share their response. That’s when I started to notice: I’m not having the same reactions to situations and conversations that everyone else is having. They had a levity to them that I learned to deeply envy.

Just be yourself!

I was angry and envious ALL the time. The only place I ever felt at complete ease was exercising with music on. I was able to daydream on full blast and it was the escapism I became addicted to.

A lot of the media I was consuming revolved around a main character who started out as an outcast and slowly built himself up. He’d become beloved and with a plethora of friends. In my young mind, I assumed this is how life was supposed to be. Why didn’t I have that? Why couldn’t I form the relationships I so desperately needed? I had a girlfriend. She was 23, I was 15. It wasn’t enough to satisfy what I was looking for.

“Find the courage to be authentic. Not everyone will like you, but no one can if they don’t get a chance to know you.” - Lori Deschene

When I turned 17, I absolutely blossomed. I would be called ‘beautiful’ by strangers at least twice a day. My newly deepened voice dubbed me the nickname Barry White. I grew to 6’3” and was muscular thanks to all the exercise - active day dreaming did me good! I was finally getting approval from my peers. In fact, I became addicted to it.

If I didn’t get those compliments, I would fish for them. If I didn’t get those compliments, I would spiral. I had no internal system of approval. I deeply relied on other people and willingly gave them complete power over me.

Why let other people have any power over you?

There was this person trying to burst out of me but I would use all my power to reject and repress him in favor of conformity.

I just couldn’t do it anymore.

I began a mission to learn how to be myself. It involved hundreds and hundreds of books, multiple therapists, my aforementioned mentor, meditation and yoga classes, you name it. I dove right in with everything I had. I had a problem to solve, and that problem was me.

Just be yourself!

Growth is never linear, and it certainly takes MASSIVE effort to make real, sustainable change, but learning to live a life of authenticity in a way that honors me every day has been one of the best experiences of my life and I want to share that knowledge with you. Here’s what I found to work best for me:

1. Acceptance

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, DBT, is absolutely genius. Its approach uses dialectical philosophy - a very Socratic approach (I’m an ex-academic philosopher and geek the hell out about this stuff).

Dialectical implies the ability to hold two opposing truths in our mind at once and learn how to integrate them. It’s the synthesis of opposites.

On one hand, we need to accept ourselves as we are right now. On the other hand, we have the desire to change and grow to make our lives better for ourselves. Seemingly two opposing truths, right?

The way we would go about it is accepting ourselves as we are right now. The human being we’re accepting is also someone who wants to change and grow.

Have you ever loved and hated someone at the same time? Same idea.

We’re able to find a balance between the two and see where we can employ the method elsewhere. It’s extremely beneficial for any of us to learn how to hold two opposing truths in mind. It’s also extremely beneficial to think more in the gray area. There’s a lot of nuances and complexities involved in situations that we would miss otherwise. Things don’t have to be, and are rarely, so black and white, either/or.

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." - Carl Jung

2. Cheese and rice! Stop being so nice.

How many times have we been in situations where we choose inauthenticity just to make sure we don’t ‘ruffle any feathers’. How many times have we said yes when we really wanted to say no?

It’s funny, there’s times where I would say an opinion I thought someone would want to hear, only for them to disagree with me and state the opinion I ACTUALLY HELD.

How can we form a genuine bond with someone who never expresses their honest feelings and opinions? If that person is us, how can we develop healthy boundaries if we allow others to step all over us?

It lacks authenticity. It is absolute fodder for resentment. It’s a setup for self-neglect. I was once meditating in a sauna, having the time of my life. A guy walks in and starts pouring eucalyptus on the stove and it just absolutely blinded me. It’s such a sharp, unpleasant sensation when it gets into your eyes. There are times where silly things like this wouldn’t bother me and I’d let it go. Not this time. I lit him up because in the moment, I felt disrespected and had to deal with it in my way. I could have just smiled and said no big deal. I could have just let it go. In the moment, though, those options would have been inauthentic to me.

Remember, it’s micro choices that we deal with every day. Choices that require us to honor ourselves. The more we choose authenticity, the more authentic we become.

3. Resentment and Responsibility

The amount of resentment we carry is wild. Even more so, we aren’t even aware of it. You ever think back on a memory and feel flooded with negativity? What about a memory about a specific person?

I would get caught in daily cycles of thinking of someone from my past and not enjoying how I felt. ‘Fuck them, they fucked me over’ yada yada yada. When we have a laundry list of resentments, we aren’t taking responsibility for our side of things. Why don’t we hold ourselves accountable? Well, it’s because it’s extremely challenging.

It requires us to dig deep to confront memories and feelings we’d likely rather repress. Not only that, but we have to confront them while admitting that our side of the street isn’t clean, either.

You aren’t going to be capable of authenticity if you do not have the courage to face these feelings. Why let other people have any power over us?

"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die" - Gautama Buddha

*SEE END OF LETTER FOR AN EXERCISE

4. Vulnerability and Courage

It takes tremendous courage to let ourselves be seen. It’s funny, a lot of us choose to bury the shame and embarrassing moments deeply so no one finds out about them. After all, they’re shameful and embarrassing! Why is that funny? Well, the antidote to toxic shame is sharing our shameful experiences and moments of embarrassment with others that we trust. Our friends will almost always offer empathy over the situation. We’ll have a good laugh about the whole thing and that’s that.

Once we’ve laughed about it, once we’ve received empathy from another person, the toxic shame doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it did a few moments ago.

It’s so challenging to get to a stage where vulnerability is second nature to us. It really does require an immense amount of courage. When opening ourselves up and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, we face:

• A fear of uncertainty and the unknown

• Fear of being judged

• Fear of rejection

• Fear of being perceived as weak

I’ll be straight with you, none of these are easy to face. At first, anyways. It’s a muscle just like anything else in our brain. The more we practice vulnerability, the more courageous we become. The more we practice vulnerability, the more the world gets to see the real us.

“Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable; exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough.” - Brene Brown

5. Mindfulness and Silliness

Do not take yourself so seriously.

The self-imposed toxic stress is absolutely terrible for us. It doesn’t even help us preform. Sure, we might trick ourselves into believing it does, but it does not.

The overly self-serious person is controlled by their anxiety and stress. Can you be authentic if anxiety is steering the ship? Do we make better choices when we’re in a state of anxiety or a state of calm?

There’s zero net benefit to it. ZERO. There’s a plethora of negatives, though.

It’s okay to play and have fun. It’s okay to sit around and watch silly comedies instead of the latest art house movie. Honoring our authenticity means honoring our inner child, as well.

Learn to laugh at yourself! As I said, I grew up in a very chaotic little world. I was constantly laughed at, and I learned to HATE being laughed at. If I was being goofy and doing a dance at a wedding and people were looking at me and laughing (the intended purpose of my dance), I’d suddenly feel myself tighten up, my brow furrowing, and a sudden need to just not be seen.

See how my authentic self-wanted to dance and goof around, whereas my trauma / anxiety response didn’t allow it. When these things happen, I find it extremely beneficial to employ mindfulness to help me get back to being myself. I could close my eyes, watch what my thoughts were telling me, and breathe myself back into reality. I’m personally a fan of 4/7/8 breathing as it seems to have had the strongest impact on my life. I’ll show you how to do this below.

Keep on keepin on. We’re all just trying our best and it’s important to remind ourselves of that every now and again. We got this.

I’d love to hear how y’all deal with shame, uncertainty, guilt, and the fears of rejection and being perceived as weak, below in the comments!

RESENTMENT EXERCISE:

Exercise: Take out a piece of paper and write down the first resentment you think of. On one side, write their name (Paul for our example). On the other side of the sheet, write your name (Nur). On Paul’s side, write down what Paul did that’s making you hold onto this resentment. Next to it, write WHY it bothers you so much. Did it affect your self-esteem? A financial prospect? Your emotional security? Next, head over to the column with your name (Nur) and write what your part of it was. It takes two to tango. What was your part in this situation?

I’m thoroughly convinced that resentment is an expression of fear. After you’ve completed the previous part, it’s time to do what I call a ‘fear chain’. For the sake of the example, I resent Paul because he stole all my Pokémon cards.

I resent Paul because I have fear: fear that I won’t be able to get cards like that again, fear my friends won’t want to hang out since I can’t play Pokémon, fear that I won’t be able to make new friends, fear that I’ll end up alone.

I’ve dissected it to a point that’s way more manageable: I resent Paul because I’m afraid of ending up alone. From there, you can work on letting it go for the sake of your own happiness and tranquility.

BREATHING EXERCISE:

4/7/8 - Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, exhale for eight seconds. Do this 4 times a day to get in the habit of using it. It works to activate our parasympathetic nervous system, the ‘rest and digest’ mode, and leaves us feeling noticeably more at peace.

June book haul! I’ll be trying to finish these this month. Excited to dive in. Bonus cat magnet bookmark haul. Absolutely nuts:

I do not want the things in this letter to be known.

Why am I afraid to show you who I am?

How can I keep up appearances if I put it all out there?

I often preach authenticity and yet I currently find myself deeply reminded that authenticity takes work: a lot of work. We’re bombarded by a plethora of micro choices every single day and a lot of those include choices that pose the question: Am I honoring myself in this situation, interaction, etc? It isn’t always easy.

This past year, I found myself to be taking the easier route more and more. Why am I afraid to show you I am? Well, if I don’t like who I am right now, why should you? Authenticity is challenging but it’s made significantly more so if I’m not even being authentic to myself.

So, this letter is obviously about authenticity, right? Nah; maybe some other time. This letter, however, DOES require I be as authentic as possible if I want to do it justice.

This one’s about authenticity’s greatest assailant; The guy who beats it dead and continues smashing away until any hope of it has been snuffed out. Yup, you guessed it (damn, y’all are wicked smahht), it’s EVERYBODY’S good friend, the Comparison Monster!

Last year, I was a 33-year-old with an awesome apartment in the Upper East Side of New York City. I had a high paying career, a very active dating life, the best puppy on the block - basically, I had the things that, at the time, made me feel like I was crushing it (notice how I didn’t mention ‘friends’). And then, life happened.

My mentor of twelve years, who was like a father figure to me, passed away. It was devastating and grief is an ugly bastard, but life went on. About two months later, my closest friend since childhood, who I had recently cut off due to what I saw as exceedingly toxic behavior, also passed away. Fast forward a couple of weeks and my job was cut due to layoffs. To put it bluntly: I WAS LIVING THE DREAM, if that dream was a crippling nightmare.

With the weight of the grief for my mentor and friend, as well as the weight of the grief for the life I was supposed have, I moved back home to the suburbs of Boston.

A quick jaunt to woodlands I call home and I’d be right back at it, right? My mom was having surgery as well, so I was able to be there to help her through her recovery. I’d be able to reclaim everything I lost and claim the title of world’s best son along the way. Bear and I could be ‘the goodest boys’ together.

Well, that shit didn’t happen. I already felt so low from events beyond my control, and with the added weight of the realization that this wasn’t going to be this short excursion, I transformed into a shell of who I once was. I was just bitter, lifleless, angry, irritable and didn’t feel like I could see the way out.

To add insult to injury, it felt like I couldn’t look in any direction without seeing everyone my age getting married, having kids, buying houses. Everyone seemed very well-put together and were achieving the things I wanted, and it just made me feel worse and worse. We know we’re only seeing other people’s highlight reels. We know we’ll get all of that eventually (although it’s easy to start questioning that). We know everything will get better, but none of that helps in the moment.

It’s just this raw, visceral feeling that grabs hold of us and holds on for dear life.

I could NOT stop comparing myself to anything the moved. I was so hypercritical and negative and felt extremely alone in all of this.

Thankfully, I eventually reached a melting point where I was just ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’.

I knew how to drag myself out of this hole I’d created for myself, so I decided to retake my own sanity. Months of intensive healing soon followed, which funnily enough led me to starting Humbling the Narcissist, and I was feeling like a new version of myself that I was quickly learning to cherish.

Regardless of how much better I was feeling, I still had unanswered questions and lingering feelings. I didn’t really place value judgements on these feelings. They weren’t GOOD or BAD by any means, but they begged a bit of investigation.

Questions such as:

• ‘Is it something specifically about this age that made me lean so hard into comparison?’ I was genuinely wondering if it was something about the 30s that did this to us.

• ‘How do I stop myself from comparing myself to others in the future’. Aside from seeing the obvious futility of comparison, I also felt like the added layer of comparison bastardized the grieving process I was experiencing.

As I looked further into these questions, I also began to document not only the answers, but also the strategies I was finding to help the most with fighting off or maybe even accepting comparison.

1. Realize that we’re FAR from alone in feeling this way.

Just last week, I ‘restacked’ this image that had really resonated with me. It always seemed easy for me to forget at times that regardless of how much I have accomplished, if there were certain things I hadn’t accomplished by a specific age, then I had failed.

I woke up the next morning and this thing had taken on a life of its own. Take a look:

Clearly, this resonated with way more people than I expected. The comments were from people as young as twenty years old giving sentiments among which were that they are afraid to move forward in life due to not feeling up to par. There were also a number of fifty, sixty, seventy-year-olds all saying the same thing: ‘Something you remind yourself of in your 30s? Hah! Try 70s!’.

There’s something light and healing about the idea that this seems more a part of the human experience rather than a cause for ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!’.

2. Visit a support group

I’m piggy backing off of the previous point here, but this one is a bit more specific.

In 2016, I had a reached a point where I just didn’t want to deal with alcohol any longer, so I decided to check out some AA meetings. I went in thinking a lot of my thoughts, experiences and concerns would be unique. I quickly found out, however, that that could not be further from the truth.

Listening to individuals in a group of people all brought together to treat a common ailment was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. Here I was, comparing myself to everybody I could and catastrophizing in my loneliness, when all of a sudden, a different person’s mouth would echo my exact fears, thoughts, and worries.

I was further able to meet so many people from the group and the more I attended meetings and spoke with my peers, the more I realized that the whole ‘lonely in my comparison fueled nightmare’ dramatization was some of the biggest bullshit I’d ever convinced myself of.

It is monumentally more challenging to take comparisons seriously when it becomes so clear that everybody is going through their own individual shit. It also seemed like everyone was comparing themselves and everyone else to EVERYONE ELSE. Me comparing myself to you comparing yourself to him comparing himself to her comparing themselves to them, ad infinitum.

Yes, I did have to listen to a man complain about how his quality of life plummeted because he could no longer drink on his yacht, but to each their own or something.

3. Use Mindfulness

“Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.” - Tara Brach

One of the most important things I found was the ability to catch myself when I found myself comparing myself to others, and then sitting there with those thoughts and feelings.

What was spurring me to get lost in comparison right now? Was there anything I wasn’t doing? Was there anything I was doing too much of? What was is it that I needed in the moment to honor myself.

It’s funny - in the past, I had tried to put my work out there. I’ve published before and I was always really proud of the fact that I did so, but I would ALWAYS fall into the trap of comparing my writing to the plethora of other people publishing their works online. It was really, genuinely, paralyzing.

I worked on this and worked on this, and it was monumentally challenging because of all the negative feelings I would feel each time, but it’s now to the point where I’m part of a massive writing platform (Substack) and I haven’t once found myself comparing my work to anyone else’s.

It became obvious to me that if I was reading someone else’s work and constantly comparing and worrying, I was very obviously NOT ACTUALLY READING THEIR WORK AT ALL. I can’t emphasize that part enough. By not employing mindfulness to really home in on what we’re reading, and consequently not filtering out any negative thoughts that may be present, we miss out on:

• Learning from other writers in our community. If I’m only worried about who’s better, am I really going to be open to learning from you?

• Getting inspiration. If I have to push away your work so I won’t spiral into judgement and comparison, then I’m going to miss out on so much inspiration.

• Ideas. How can I steal from your ideas if I don’t consider them good enough?!

4. Use Gratitude and Self-Compassion.

“Remember that if you really want to motivate yourself, love is more powerful than fear.”

- Kristen Neff

It’s so easy to forget all the great things we have in our lives when we’re visited by the comparison monster. Training ourselves to practice gratitude and self-compassion are natural remedies to comparison but it’s hard to remember to equip them unless we make a habit out of it.

Cultivating gratitude really just requires us to take a few pauses during the day and look around for a few things to be grateful for in the moment. Alternatively, this can be a more structured practice where we write out five things we’re grateful for every night or morning. That can look like:

• I am grateful for my continued health

• I am grateful for my car and how it allows me to get where I need to go

• I am grateful for waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

• I am grateful for the pauses I take every day to admire the sights, sounds and smells all around me.

It really doesn’t have to be anything too complicated.

Another practice we can employ is to write down our wins in a place we can revisit often. When we’re stuck in a comparison rut, it’s hard to remember all the good we’ve done in life and all of our accomplishments. If we pick out a journal that we slowly fill in with all the accomplishments, big and small, that we can remember and add to it as we go, then we’ll have that list to reflect on whenever we feel like we’re just not up to snuff.

As far as self-compassion goes, it’s an act of self-love to only compete against the person I was yesterday. To only compare myself to the person I was yesterday. I love myself, therefore I want my future self to be better. I love myself, therefore I want my future self to be able to look back to yesterday and be grateful for my present efforts.

It will also NEVER hurt to pause and tell ourselves: ‘it’s okay’. It’s never going to hurt anyone for us to pause and put our right hand on our left forearm and remind ourselves that we’re doing our best and we’ll get what we set out for when the time is right for us.

Comparison may very well be a natural part of the human experience but I’m all the way over letting it decay my joy and bastardize my journey.

What do you do when you find yourself visited by the comparison monster? What sort of things do you find them telling you and what strategies do you employ to kick it in its ugly-ass face?

I would LOVE to hear your experiences so please comment below, dear readers!

Quote I’m currently pondering:

Books I’m working my way through right now:

‘Why the hell do I feel like this right now?’.

My muscles were tight, my breathing shallow, my posture cramped and restrictive.

‘Why am I even doing this? It’s not going to go anywhere this is a total waste of my time. I’m just going to abandon it anyways and…’

Pause

Of all the skills I’ve learned in this life, the ability to catch, and more importantly put a stop to, when my thoughts are in a negative spiral, is by far my favorite.

‘Wait. Why DO I feel like this right now? Why ARE my thoughts running rampant in such a negative direction?’

I sat up straight in a much more expansive posture, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let that higher voice take over.

‘Why do you feel this way? Why are your thoughts spiraling? Dude, Nur, you’ve been sitting on Substack for like three weeks straight and neglecting SO MUCH of your daily routine. Of course this is the result’.

When I started out on here, I discovered a plethora of information and my brain just wanted to devour all of it. Who are these people? This isn’t just a platform for hosting my stuff? Why am I seeing these people in particular? Why is this person getting so many ‘likes’ opposed to this person? Why does my page look like dogshit compared to this person’s? Why do my ‘Notes’ make me feel like I’m yelling into the void? How do I attract an audience organically? And on, and on, and on.

I’m aggressively curious to a fault sometimes but I found myself completely entranced by this platform and as a result, my time sitting on my computer, or my time hunched over staring at my phone screen, skyrocketed. I mean, that’s okay, honestly. I found a place I was really vibing with and a place where I could finally be more serious about my writing. Also, I was meeting SO MANY new people. Neglecting my routine, or ‘making sacrifices’ as I like to call it when I want to feel cool, was a natural consequence of this new journey I’d found myself embarking on. It all felt very justified.

No matter how justified this neglect felt and regardless of what words I used to romanticize it, I still found myself feeling annoyed and disappointed in myself. I was operating at the pace of pain.

A sober friend in recovery once introduced me to this phrase. Instead of going to AA meetings every day, keeping in touch with his sponsor and friends in the program, and working the steps, he would wait until he felt himself spiraling and craving a drink to take action.

I drew the parallel to preventative care versus curative care. Was I taking my proverbial medication to keep myself healthy or was I rushing to the Urgent Care every time something felt slightly off?

Right now, I feel like a firefighter sprinting to put out one metaphorical fire after another. I’ve spent my day struggling to write this, making jokes on Notes about writing woes, and scanning my life to see what I had stopped doing. I rely on my routine to prime me for handling the challenges life throws at me and for me to be the best I can be at whatever it is I’m doing.

Of course I was struggling this much. I had stopped doing the routine listed below and was facing specific, obvious consequences as a result. These are the things I did every day because not only did they prime me, but I also feel my happiest when I have this routine in my life.

I stopped:

ACTIVITY: CONSEQUENCE

• Reading : I felt less inspired. Especially when writing!

• Meditating: I was noticeably more scatterbrained and less at peace

• Journaling: I felt emotionally stuffier. I felt like I was holding too much inside

• Stretching: My hip flexors and lower back will never forgive me

• Grooming: I didn’t feel nearly as good about myself

Reactive living is no way to live at all. It doesn’t make me feel good. So, how do I plan on tackling this and returning to a more proactive lifestyle? Well, here are a few ideas I’ve come up with that I hope will help you too.

1. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the skill that allows me to catch my thoughts when they begin to wig out and take me down a road I don’t want to go down. I also think our thoughts become so negative when we’re out of whack as a way to make us realize that we’re not treating ourselves with the love and care we require to thrive. Taking care of ourselves is the most profound expression of self-love that there is, and our brains won’t hesitate to alarm us when we stop expressing it.

Mindfulness is also the skill that allows me to pause for a moment and scan through my week. It’s what allows me to create that space and mentally recap what I’d been doing that week and more importantly, in this case, what I haven’t been doing. It very obviously saved my hide and pulled me back to reality, so I plan on doubling down and strengthening this skill even further. Besides, as some of my favorite quotes would say:

“If you do not have time to meditate for five minutes, then you must meditate for one hour.” - Zen Proverb

"I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one." - Gandhi

Bear really didn’t want to give back the firefighting gear

2. Take a step back

I’ve heard so much about dopamine overload and the concept of dopamine detoxing, but I never took them very seriously. I’m quick to dismiss these things because as a child of the internet, I’ve seen so many fads and trends blow up with nothing to scientifically back them up. What made me give this one a chance? Well, Substack did.

I’m extremely lucky and extremely grateful to have met so many awesome people so quickly on this platform and hit milestones way faster than I could have ever hoped for. It’s been an amazing experience, and I genuinely can’t wait to see what lies ahead. As awesome as it has been, there’s definitely a drawback to SO much all happening at once.

All the likes and comments and introductions, all the massive numbers on the notifications and direct messaging icons, it was as mentally overwhelming as it was wildly seductive. I could feel my brain being overloaded but it was too late for me. I was fully seduced. Also, having stopped doing the daily habits that help me unwind and healthily detach, I was an overstimulated, burnt brained barnacle.

“Sometimes the best solution is to rest, relax and recharge. It’s hard to be your best on empty” - Sam Glenn

Moving forward, I plan on taking a bit of a step back and making the things that help me unwind a priority over the seductiveness of the living, breathing enchantress we know as Substack.

3. Reprioritize and write more

I’ve found that it’s important to take opportunities at least once a month to really sit down and write out our priorities. What is most important to us right now? What kind of progress have I been making on my goals? Am I focusing on the right things or am I being carried away by instant gratification?

At the end of the day, I’m here to write. Yes, writing this in this weaker state has been monumentally challenging, but it’s what I’m here to do. The following quotes express how I felt all day better than I ever could:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”  -Ernest Hemmingway

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”  -Gene Fowler

I know that this is a natural consequence of this art form. Writing and resistance may as well be a package deal. That’s why it’s so important to prime ourselves, give ourselves the rest and relaxation we need when we find ourselves overstimulated, and to consistently check in with ourselves to make sure we’re doing what it is we set out to do.

I’m here to write. I’ve been massively enjoying the social side of Substack and I’ll continue to do so at a different pace but it’s time to step back from that side of things and return to the long process of mastering my craft.

What are some methods you employ to center yourself? How do you prime yourself to go through life at your best? I’d love to hear yall’s strategies in the comments!

Quote I’m currently mulling over: