26

cross-section of a tree fern

I turned twenty-six this week. I’m quite well—December has been pleasantly warm so far, and I’ve been eating properly—with the exception that after taking a nasty fall while climbing in the gym a few days ago I haven’t been able to move my right arm without some pain. This was sort of predictable, considering that I was trying to lift my heel above my elbows and balance on it twelve feet off the ground (but I just wanted to finish the route so much). Oh well. Bodies are made to be used.

This year has been eventful. I began meditating seriously. I had a brief and turbulent friendship with someone who had spent years in a cult devoted to supporting the good aliens as they fought against the bad aliens to save humans from the prison planet Earth. I discovered that my mathematical abilities are even sharper than they were five years ago. I began a friendship centered around the exchange of exotic psychological theories. I joined a company building an AI girlfriend because I genuinely believed that I was morally grey enough to stick it out and make some money (wrong). I visited my old friends in Japan, climbed Fuji, and sang the nights away. I read a few dozen books and started to understand the joys of adventure, the nature of masculinity, and the mysteries of the unconscious. I wrote twenty-five blog posts; I’m proud especially of Welcome to hell, Singing softly, and Phlebotomy. I had a few months of limerence with a girl I met online and learned that there’s connection, and then there’s connection. I’m grateful to have glimpsed the real thing.

Gratitude has been a salient quality of the last few months. For many years I viewed my circumstances as an ornate frame around a blank space of unfulfilled potential. I cursed a world that had repeatedly knocked me down. Recently I began to investigate those tired stories, and I realized that for almost every person who stuck a leg out to trip me another had been there to catch my fall. I had never noticed. And the times I hit the ground hard were not the tragic defeats that I had made them out to be. I seem to be blessed with an almost inhuman capacity to stand up again. Misfortune—no. I am lucky.

The overarching theme of this year has been the ongoing restructuring of my mind—eliminating anxiety, discovering a sense of purpose, opening up to empathy, freeing myself from negative stories, and triangulating the source of vitality that makes certain moments suddenly pop with color. The process is largely motivated by a fierce conviction that I already know how to live, that the knowledge of what truly matters is written in my flesh, that I will chew glass before I let a two-hundred-year-old society tell me, a system built and proven over a million years, that I am the one who is malfunctioning.

So don’t be surprised that the main thing I want to say about mental health is the opposite of what everyone else says: if you’re sufficiently motivated, you don’t have to seek help. Instead, meditate, read some books, and relentlessly polish every facet of your mind until it gleams. Don’t assume that pain equals brokenness; some things just hurt. Don’t trust any teaching or person blindly; analyze everything and follow your nose. Be wary of (but not absolutely opposed to) the idea that you have to change some material aspect of your life to feel better. If you’re truly relentless, and allow the light of the sun into deepest crevices of your mind… well, no guarantees, but it’s been good for me.¹

The other reason I’ve remained committed to constant experimentation and analysis over years is that I find the mind fascinating. The sheer creativity of the ego defending itself, the automatic navigation of complex situations while carefully preserving the suppression of the unconscious—the pervasive belief that humans are irrational creatures is pure ignorance. We are beautiful machines.

I’ve been thinking about adulthood recently, and what that means in practice. I suspect that the essence of adulthood is found in one’s response to ambiguity. It is easy to spin motivating stories about fighting for what matters, refusing to give up, and returning to the arena after each crushing defeat. But life is not a boxing ring. The constant fight between good and evil—the one that plays out in human relationships, in the news, in our minds—does not exist. It is gift-wrapping over all the nuances nobody wants to think about. In my opinion this desire for simplification is the fundamental characteristic of a child. Adulthood, on the other hand, is found in the navigation of muddy waters. No person is purely good or evil, most endings are neither victories nor defeats, and life is dizzyingly open-ended. Adulthood is interpreting experience in many different ways and delighting in the coexistence of opposites.

In this awareness we can notice again that the world is old and splendid. There is not a day that I forget that our hands are derived from the bony fins of the Sarcopterygii, that in waking up each morning we testify that they lived. Insofar as fish can hope we are their hopes incarnate. The “childlike wonder” that many speak of so wistfully is peanuts compared to the adult mind’s capacity for awe.

I’m twenty-six now, and boyhood is squarely behind me. The Sun approaches the zenith. It is time to meet the world as a man.

1. Don’t interpret this paragraph to mean that I’m perfectly content. I have bad days all the time. But I’ve found a sort of ease and lightness even in suffering—the wind and the waves lack the force they used to carry.