[Part Six of a Twelve-Part Series: A Roadmap to Freedom]
By the fall of 2015, a distinct gap had begun to open for me between my Gatsby world of fast lane livin’ and GQ fabulousness (let’s call this the goal line) and the decidedly unglamorous world of messy emotions that John Lee had tipped me off to in The Flying Boy, and that I was now unearthing in group therapy (we’ll call this the soul line).
The contrast was exceedingly hard to ignore: One moment, I’d be on stage at the Psychodrama Institute of New York with Jacob and the crew, raging at my parents, or journaling long into the night about my childhood, unearthing some old grief. And in another, I’d be wasted at a bar with my fashion friends, or doing key bumps in the bathroom of a downtown club with a woman I’d met on a dating app just days before.
It was on one of those long nights out that my buddy Justin introduced me to Laura. Warm and infectious with red hair and gray-blue eyes, Laura was the perfect balm to the scars Amy’s departure had left behind. Unlike with Amy, I felt no pressure to impress Laura. She showed her adoration of me effortlessly, and it felt like we had a connection eons old. Like me, Laura was in therapy, coming off a breakup with a longtime boyfriend, and we became lights in each other’s darkness—our text banter of self help jargon and classic rock lyrics continued excitedly throughout the work day until we were together again at night.
Other likeminded people like Laura began to appear or reappear in my life around that time, too. A former magazine colleague, Elliot, reached out and offered to take me to my first Buddhist meditation class at Dharma Punx, and I moved in down the street in Clinton Hill from Brian — a talented photographer who I’d worked with over the years — where our bond deepened over long meals where no topic was off the table. These relationships felt more intimate than any I’d experienced in the past, probably due to the vulnerable state I was in from dredging up my childhood feelings every week. To my surprise, my new friends seemed to accept me in this battered state. I didn’t feel I had to be perfect for them at all.
Perhaps the most pivotal healing friend who would appear in my life around that time was a seventy year-old grandmother in Florida named Linda Ward. A friend of my mother and stepfather’s, Linda was an astrologer and numerologist, who agreed to sit with me during a Thanksgiving visit and read my chart. I was blown away with the information she relayed: “Your father’s death was the beginning of a death inside you, as well,” Linda said. “Your old self, the version of you who needed certain things like status, money, sex, to feel validated, that part is leaving. You are moving into a new place, into your heart, into what you believe really matters.”
Any Gatsby at this point on his journey will begin to see a split opening between the worlds he inhabits. Suddenly, the ordinary, material existence he was living in Part One may look strikingly different to him. He cannot unsee what he has seen in his descent. (How can he go back to pushing paper in a cubicle after spending his nights cracking skulls in a basement at Fight Club?) He is different now, and in this early stage of unplugging from the Matrix, he may wonder: Does anyone else see the world like I see it? This hunger will push him to find others who are on a similar adventure - who have also had the beginnings of a “dark night of the soul/ego” - and who are now curious about traveling a spiritual or inward path.
Luckily, our curious vibration begins to attract a new type of person into our lives. It’s not uncommon at this time for Gatsbys to meet folks who just seem to get them, or encounter certain influential characters serendipitously. Friendships develop, but in a way that may feel different than those of our past. We may talk about things with our friends at this stage that go deeper than sports, music, or dating. It’s also not uncommon to go down roads we thought, just months before, were illogical or crazy: I had a client who went on vacation with his family to Italy. At the hotel where they were staying, he struck up a conversation with one of the owners, a woman he’d met many times before, who offered to perform a sort of energetic bodywork on him, which he found extremely helpful. “We’ve known each other so long, why are you just offering this now?” He asked her. Her reply: “You never struck me as the type.” They had a good laugh about it.
There’s a lot of truth in that statement, though. Up until now, we Gatsbys haven’t been “the type”, which means simply that we’ve been a little stiff, not to mention so focused on our material world conquests that we haven’t been ready for certain information to penetrate our psyches. Anything that appears too risky or frivolous to our fragile egos, we know to keep away from. Do not feed or touch the animals.
But now, as we begin to open to our inherent wildness, we don’t just open to more feeling, we also open to more wonder: creating space for new and helpful information to come in: Enter the pilgrimage to India (Remember our friend Richard Alpert from Part Four?) Or the guided MDMA journey. Or the section of the bookstore we would’ve never been caught dead in in our previous life (Is Oprah Winfrey under ‘O’ or ‘W’?)
Remember, last time we were invited deeper into our feminine, and in doing so, we are also invited deeper into surrender: to opening wide and letting the wisdom of the ages begin to penetrate us. In doing so, we become wiser, gaining tools to become more capable as we move towards the deeper layers ahead.
At the same time this new adventure is taking place, our hero will still spend a lot of time in his ordinary world, too. And it will — more often than not — begin to grate on him. People and situations that used to make him feel alive may feel dull and lifeless, friendships may fall by the wayside as he gets more in touch with what makes him feel truly fulfilled, he may no longer be able to ignore certain sticking points with his family.
Many Gatsby men at this stage may look around and see that they’ve been living in mostly a surface world, and want to change that. They may even be hard on themselves for not seeing this sooner. (As if they could have magically done so.) Others may demand a new and deeper level of connection from everyone: friends, colleagues, partners, becoming the guy who wants to discuss the meaning of life when his friends want only to get drunk. There may be awkwardness and confusion and many a Kanye shrug. (I remember thinking 3am at an Austin taco truck was a good place to have a conversation about God with an atheist friend I was visiting with during SXSW, but I had also done enough cocaine to charge up a Tesla, so take that with a grain of salt.)
Speaking of drugs, any addictions we’ve had may begin to loosen their grips in this stage, too. As we awaken our cells through feeling, our bodies wake up, too, and it is only natural we will begin to see the ways we’ve been ignoring or sabotaging them. We may be looking into newer, healthier ways of being. It was during this stage that I quit smoking, experimented with a healthier, less inflammatory diet and began the painstaking process of exercising again after nearly a decade of never lifting a Hoka. I also ceased criss-crossing the globe twice or three times a month for magazine stories, and stayed closer to home, where my life began to slow down. As I did, certain questions began to emerge:
What have I been adamantly opposed to without really knowing why or investigating?
What do I have strong reactions to?
Who in my life can I share something really vulnerable with?
Do I find myself acting a certain way in one place (say, work) vs. how I act at home, or with friends?
Do I edit myself with certain people?
Do I pretend to be something I’m not to avoid rejection/misunderstanding?
How do I feel when I leave hanging out with certain people vs. others? Am I upbeat, or do I feel drained?
If no one else cared what I was doing, what would I do with my days?
Am I treating myself and my body well? (Think like a plant: food, rest, sunlight, water)
Am I making sure to get time to myself/alone to process?
Is my commitment to physical health matching up to my mental and emotional health, or vice versa?
Are there things that make me feel bad, but that I’ve always done automatically?
What can I let go of that is no longer serving me?
As I stopped living fast and started taking better care of myself, I noticed I had, to my surprise, grown out of tune with the once infectious go-go-go ethos of New York City. So I bought a small cottage in the Hudson Valley, a place where I could sit in the silence, away from the city, a place to do my feeling work from Part Five, a place to feed logs to the wood stove while watching the deer traipse through the trees and the ice shift on the lake.
It was in this house that I would begin to get in touch with myself and my natural rhythms in a deeper way. Plus, the house became a gathering place where Laura, Brian, Justin and other friends came to join me for weekends where backyard bonfires, living room dance parties, and long, wine-filled dinners at intimate, little restaurants in town became the norm. There was a sense of richness and joy in those years, and of coming into myself surrounded by people who I felt connected to in a more sacred way.
I also began reading Jung around this time and, as a part of the shadow work I was doing, decided to write down my entire life story beginning with my childhood (an exercise I would highly recommend to anyone). This new, personal writing became the highlight of my life, even as my days were still filled with celebrity interviews, filing stories for magazines, and sitting in stale conference rooms with copywriting clients who were concerned only with the latest season’s merchandise and how to sell it.
This deep dive into myself crescendoed during the winter of 2016, when I took a sabbatical in Los Angeles, crashing with my old college buddy Matt, his wife Gavie, and their Golden Retriever Berkeley in their Manhattan Beach bungalow. Cooled by constant ocean breezes, I felt completely removed from any of the old temptations of my New York life. And I took the opportunity of a clear head and the perspective of distance to feast on my life story, writing every morning from my sun-drenched bedroom, and spending the rest of my time falling in love with Southern California—especially on a very special trip to Joshua Tree National Park where a search for one of my father’s old musical heroes brought me closer to Dad, as well.
As I drove through the hot, California nights blasting my Dad’s music and grieving the loss of my father and my past, I slowly began to heal pieces of my original loss. And as I began to heal that loss, I felt my attachment to the Gatsby shell that had protected me from it beginning to recede—the parts of me that felt that I needed an impressive job, a cool wardrobe and a sparkly girl like Amy on my arm to be okay. It was the beginning of really validating what Linda had told me: that there was actually a death occurring inside me. A death that I knew needed to happen if I wanted to keep going on this path to knowing myself.
Those sunny SoCal days were just the beginning, but a crucial shift had occurred: A seed of hope was planted—the life I was driving towards had now become more promising to me than the life I had left. And thanks to the new friends, and the serendipitous evidence that continued to appear almost daily, I was developing a deep sense of trust in the unfolding of this crazy process, even as it was taking me further into the unknown.
(Part Seven will be published on October 17th.)
Hi Sean from part 6 I can see your beginning to like yourself more which opens your world.
I trust my interpretation is correct.
Looking forward to part 7
David