I'm learnin' how to be alone
Fall asleep with the TV on
And I fight the urge to live inside my telephone
I keep my spirits high
Find happiness by and by
-Jason Isbell, If It Takes a Lifetime
[Part Ten of a Twelve-Part Series, “A Roadmap to Freedom”]
After living with near-constant inner friction for all of 2017, and finally letting go of a multiyear wrestling match with my New York life and Amy, I was positively exhausted as 2018 limped in. The year began on a restorative note—with days hiking and nights curled by the fireplace in Big Sur, California with friends— after which I returned to my empty Echo Park apartment to begin what felt like a new life in LA.
Gone were many of the elements of my Gatsby persona: my job as a fashion writer, my friends, my relationship, my furniture, even my clothes (after an epic closet purge in 2016). And I continued the housecleaning by permanently deleting my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram handles. In the privacy of my apartment, this thorough cleanse felt totally freeing and even empowering. But when I went out into the world, I felt vulnerable and scared without my old, protective shell.
The first place I noticed the insecurity was at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting I’d go to in the mornings at Café Tropical in Silverlake. It was in those AA gatherings—sitting on folding metal chairs amongst a group of strangers cradling lukewarm coffees—that I first discovered a name for the condition that seemed to seep from my pores: Shame. I felt SO uncomfortable in my own skin. In fact, I wanted to crawl out of it when the time came to raise my hand and share, when a fellow drunk smiled and introduced themselves, or god forbid, if an attractive woman sat down next to me.
Shame showed me that without my New York ego-persona, without Amy, without my status as a GQ writer, or my credentials as a downtown cool guy, I didn’t have a lick to fall back on. The true fragility of my ego was revealed - in all it’s anxious, awkward glory - and all I could do was call it out. One morning, I put up my hand and told that crowded room full of strangers at Café Tropical the truth:
“I don’t know who the fuck I am anymore.”
As uncomfortable as that revelation was, I knew it was a first step.
Every Gatsby’s journey towards feeling truly comfortable in his own skin will look a bit different, but by now, we should be seeing some major congruences. And Part Nine feels like the ideal time to recap all the places we’ve been on our journey to-date:
In Part One, we were unconscious, living on autopilot in our ordinary ego worlds, silently suffering perhaps, but unaware there was another way to live. Until Part Two, that is, when the earth shook and the first cracks appeared in our well-crafted facades. Terrified, we were invited to descend into our psychic basements for a look around.
Faced with the prospects of facing our own darkness in Part Three, however, our egos took the wheel, and we bailed for more comfortable pastures. But by Part Four, we met someone (or read or heard some piece of wisdom) that made our present condition un-ignorable. Reluctantly, we used this book, theory, friend, mentor, advisor, therapist, or as a catalyst to go deeper into life’s mysteries.
By the time Part Five rolled around, we had the courage to begin the journey inward in earnest. We started to take our first wild and wooly steps away from the existence we knew and into our true feelings. And by Part Six we were living between two worlds: asleep and awake, blue pill and red pill, the trap of societal and familial conditioning or the limitlessness of true freedom.
We were rolling then! But in Part Seven, temptation came calling. Would we return to our old ways? By Part Eight, we probably did. And it was then we faced a challenge so great it brought us to our knees: Would we go on living as we had, or take the leap into the great unknown?
Miraculously, we survive the battle with the big boss in Part Eight, and are then presented the prize of Part Nine: a new, albeit precarious, beginning. Like a puppy taking its first awkward steps, we are wobbly on our tiny legs. Things feel fresh and strange and raw. We’re as unsure as we may be curious.
This wobbly season is Part Nine, and it’s a humbling moment for any Gatsby: Without the protection of our ego shells, we quickly see — like I did — that our entire identities were based on the external trappings of our former lives and conditioning: our job titles, our circle of friends, our partner, our internet persona, our family’s legacy, etc. and that without these elements of our personalities, we have no idea who we are at all—an enormous and life-changing thing to admit. (Most men never arrive here.)
Confusion sets in, perhaps. But also deep f**king relief. We no longer feel as compelled to play a game or pretend to be someone just to keep up appearances. We feel unshackled from the role we’ve been acting out our whole lives. Surely most men here will remember the transformation of Ron Livingston’s character Peter Gibbons in Office Space—who broke free of the cubicle prison he inhabited and finally became his straight-shooting, authentic self. And it was precisely the moment Peter stopped caring that he started to achieve the inner contentment he would have craved in his former, outward-focused life.
Other examples exist in Hollywood and pop culture: Jim Carrey, a Gatsby who, after going through a dark night of the soul (or many), gave up his acting persona, took up Transcendental Meditation, and now tours the world giving talks on mental health and the power of realizing that we are not our bank accounts, not our fame, not anything but our selves - whoever that happens to be.
Carrey’s journey out of the slick and surface world of Hollywood segues perfectly, here. After all, Part Nine is a spiritual time. We have survived an epic moral battle in Part Eight, walked away from the material world that defined us, and are now thrust into a liminal space filled with the excitement of all that lies behind the ego’s safeties, and the identities we thought we needed to survive.
In Jung’s Theory of Individuation (a major inspiration for this here roadmap) we’ve arrived at Step Three - the encounter with the Wise Old Man: To Jung, the wise man symbolized less an actual flesh and blood teacher like in Part Four (although meeting another mentor here at this stage of spiritual growth is likely and potentially beneficial), but more the collective wisdom of the ages—the spiritual teachings whispered by the sages and gurus and musicians and poets, the ones who channel the heavens, and the space in between the space. This is also a time when we begin to feel an even greater access to trust and faith — the death we faced in Part Eight has a funny way of doing that — and our own inherent resilience. We become less vigilant and rigid and more open to new experiences.
Gatsbys at this stage will likely begin living a more intentional life: planning out their days to include ample time for self reflection, journaling, meditation and other practices of connecting to their intuition, Source, a higher power, or the Divine. As such, this is often hermit time for many men. They may go to India a la our buddy Ram Dass, or disappear into the woods to ponder their existence (Thoreau’s Walden is a Step Nine exercise). It’s also not uncommon at this stage of a man’s journey to find him flipping through the Tao, tripping further into the duality-challenging realms of psychedelics or plant medicine, or spending long nights in front of a campfire looking for answers in the flames. After all, knowing oneself begins with knowing one’s own spirit, our own soul, and to do this we need both time and space away from the world to remember who we are without our ego leading the way—not to mention a wellspring of spiritual teachings to reflect on.
But before we get all excited about flying off to the moon on a mushroom cloud, it must be said that balance is key in Part Nine. All Yin must have its Yang. Light its Dark. Air its Earth. And we men, too, must do something of the earth to ground our “higher” learnings during this time. Resistance to grounding can lead to a God complex, spiritual bypass, and an untethering from our bodies and emotions, which we worked so hard to connect to in earlier stages. So, there is still shadow and shame work to do in our men’s groups and therapy forums. But it is, for a stage, perhaps lighter and more inspired. We have moved out of Hell for a season, and can reap the benefits of the birds and the planes: a 30,000 foot view of our situation.
Questions that may arise at this time include:
If you strip away everything I own, or am associated with (my job, my family, my status in the community), who am I at my core?
What am I doing here?
What is my reason for being alive?
What makes me truly, truly happy and fulfilled?
Do I need as much as I have?
How do I want to spend my days?
What kind of man do I want to be?
What have the great men throughout history believed about life, work, love, and money?
How can I incorporate these teachings more into my own life?
Is there some ancient, passed down wisdom or spiritual mentors that could help me on my journey at this time?
What have I believed life is about to this point? Do I still believe that?
What is of true value to me?
My own spiritual exploration took on many forms at this stage: from shamanic workshops with Michael Harner and co. to Monday evening sanghas with Noah Levine’s Against the Stream, to monthly trips to Joshua Tree with an old New York friend, Julie, to dabble for the first time with psychedelics. It was under the hot desert sun with Julie, my body full of psilocybin mushrooms, that I again felt my heart open impossibly wide like I had on Amanda Foulger’s couch on Christmas Eve. “This is the best day of my life,” I told her. “Why can’t every day be the best day of my life?”
I knew the self love I saw and felt on psychedelics was real. But I also knew it would take a lot of work and time to integrate the blissful teachings I was receiving on those desert weekends. For now, any freedom I felt temporarily would be jarred back into reality when I walked into my AA meeting or the grocery store the following Monday, still raw and full of shame, still working on showing slivers of my true self to a world I wasn’t sure would accept me without my Gatsby identity. I had a long way to go to loving (or even liking) myself. But 2018’s expansion would move the needle.
A massive shift for me during this time was learning how to be alone with myself in a new city. In the wake of Amy’s and my breakup and my newfound sobriety, I found myself struggling with a deeper layer of unprocessed grief from my childhood that made it difficult to sit still, much less get through an entire day. I was horribly lonely. And — as so many of us do —I took to music to comfort me, specifically the soulful, alt-country tunes I was vibing to then: Sturgill Simpson’s trippy 2014 album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was a staple at this time. As was Jason Isbell’s 2015 Grammy-winning Something More Than Free, which seemed to dredge up more tears than any other listen. In Isbell’s hard-won lyrics about addiction, lost love, and starting over, I saw my heartbroken, newly sober self, just trying to put one foot in front of the other.
Perhaps the most profound growth arrived from my friendships with an ever-growing tribe of AA buddies, which continued the “men’s work” I’d begun doing in Stephen Johnson’s group the previous fall. For the first time in my life, I felt I could actually drop my guard with other guys, and the deep and authentic friendships I formed began the long road of dissolving the pain and distrust I had with men in the wake of my father’s suicide.
As I healed my relationships with men, and my self esteem grew, I began to notice with new clarity how much I’d relied on the validation of women to carry me in the past. I was still filled with regret from a decade of using romantic relationships and sex to avoid being alone, and from juggling Laura’s and Amy’s affections the previous year. Now, as Julie I began to get closer, I knew I was arriving at the threshold of another important decision: would I re-enter a romance I wasn’t fully sure of just for the temporary relief? Or, would I continue this new and sacred exploration into myself—a road that was yielding new and important results by the day?
I remember the weekend the verdict arrived clearly. Julie and I were shacked up together in Joshua Tree, and the sexual tension was thick. Most of me wanted to give into the urges, to throw myself into her arms after months of loneliness. But a new version of me had been born in the previous 4-5 months, a version of me that wasn’t willing to sacrifice the sacred space I was building in the name of temptation.
I held on. And the weekend ended without fireworks. Julie was rightfully angry with me for leading her on, and for not being clear about my intentions. But all the nuances in the moment seemed unimportant. I had managed to — albeit unskillfully — do something new: I had put myself, my growth, and my sanity above all else.
This is the seismic shift our hero experiences in Part Nine, and the reason we’ve gone through hell to get here: As Gatsbys, we’ve spent our entire lives being convinced that an inability to measure up to our families’, our friends’, our partners’, or the worlds’ approval is sure death (or at the least rejection, abandonment, and failure). How others perceive us is our religion. So the moment when we — to use an oft-used Twelve-Step saying — “put our oxygen mask on first,” it is a moment worth celebrating, no matter how messy it unfolds. We have chosen US, perhaps for the first time.
A massive victory, no doubt. One that will begin to change everything. But, as we’ll see in Part Ten, this new discovery also presents a hearty challenge on the road back to the ordinary world we once knew.
More next time.
(Part Ten will be published on December 5th.)
HI Sean glad you chose yourself first, we can't fully heal in a few months. looking forward to part 19