In Pursuit of Wisdom #5: Doing It The Hard Way — Living
It was just my birthday.
May 16, 2021.
Twenty-three years old, if you were wondering.
The past year has been by far, even pandemic aside, one of the most eventful, “in-flux,” torrential, stormy, heaven-and-hell years of my life. In this one year, I have lived five.
I’ve always been devoted to the word. Books were my companions, my teachers, and my friends since I was a wee little boy. As good friends do, they tried to give good advice, and they gave it freely. Like a lot of youngins, being deprived of the nutrients of confidence or certainty in life, I devoured each maxim, aphorism, and proverb. For a time I thought myself better than all the other kids. More mature, more learned, more level-headed — because I read books.
The truth is, while it is undoubtedly possible to gain real knowledge from books, from the wizened authors of old, that knowledge will remain on the level of the intellect. Its power pales compared to the kind of knowledge that collects in the marrow of your bones, that informs each flexion of your muscles, and that hitches a ride onto your every red blood cell racing through your veins and arteries. This is the knowledge that comes as a result of experience, of actually seeing with one’s own eyes whether or not the words you’ve read have indeed successfully captured reality.
This is the knowledge and the strength that I have gained through a hard-fought year of living. Here is my May 2020-May 2021!
May 16, 2020.
I turn 22 years old, just before I graduate from college…not at my college.
Two months prior, staying on a deserted spring-break campus, we were told by the president of the college that the school was to be shut down until April 10.
I felt the slow strangling of my finances already creeping up against my desire to actually be at the college that I had paid so. much. money for. I cringed at the potential decimation of my bank account of buying yet another plane ticket from New York to home in Arizona…only to turn right back around a few weeks later.
I called my father to explain the situation, and with a stroke of clarity he simply said:
“I don’t think you’re ever going back.”
With that, I packed not one, not two, but three checked bags (never do this), a carry-on suitcase, and my backpack, with essentials and sundries alike still littering my college apartment after all was said and done.
I spent the next two months finishing my New York college semester from home in Gilbert, Arizona. I didn’t know that the last time I saw my college friends was the last time I was going to see my college friends. I still haven’t seen them.
Regardless of the tragedy of it all, I still managed to celebrate, to roar in Triumph at my accomplishment of a Bachelor’s Degree from Vassar College, shortly after my twenty-second birthday. I put on my best dress clothes, ate cake and good food with my immediate family, all while waxing just how grateful I was that the four years of hard work were finally won.
Next stop: the workforce.
Compared to many pandemic grads, my job search was absurdly easy. My mother is the office manager of a law firm, and she just happened to have an opening for a front-desk position right as I was graduating. It’s who you know, or in this case, who you’re raised by!
Within days of receiving my degree, I was sporting button-ups and slacks through five days of paper pushing ad nauseam, getting more in touch with what passes for order in this country: words on paper. Unfortunately, humanity got in the way.
My responsibilities at this estate planning and probate firm were to answer the phones, put together files for the attorneys, and generally be everyone else’s assistant to ensure smooth operation of the facility.
Fortunately, I learned that to be smooth was to introduce humanity.
In a field obsessed with what rules are imposed upon the way that we live our lives, it is easy to forget the lives that the law supposes to govern.
Naturally, estate planning and probate means to encounter death. The idea of death. To seek out the services of such an attorney, to even want a trust or a will, means that you have pondered your own death, or someone close to you has already met the fate.
I answered phone calls on a semi-regular basis upon which I was greeted with phrases such as:
“I just lost my son.”
“My mother is going to pass any day. I need your help.”
“I’m not going to be around much longer, so…”
If I didn’t take a deep breath and really hear the essential humanness of what these people were telling me, if I treated my job as a job, if I rushed to the security of paperwork, I would have robbed these people of being heard.
It took strength. I took time out of my day, sometimes as long as twenty minutes on the phone, to hear these people profess their love for those who had gone before. I learned how vivid a person can be, even after death. To me, it was like they were on the phone with us.
I consoled people for six months.
In the meantime, I would spend my days off work bench-pressing away the quarantine blues with my best friend in his 102-degree garage gym. I increased my strength by tens of pounds in each lift, spending untold hours soaking myself in electrolytes. It was really the only thing I had besides my writing and my job.
January 2020. Last winter break of college.
I pull out of law school applications after finally acknowledging the slow decay inside of me as a result of not doing what I was meant to. I had spent the past eight years acting on stage whenever I could, an entire childhood and early adulthood writing, and somehow I thought that those things could never actually sustain me like a “real” career. The illusion was broken, and in January of 2020, I made the choice to live an unreasonable life — the highest form of life.
Back to work in the summer of 2020.
Based on my January revelation, I spent my nights dreaming of starting my new career as an actor and writer in Los Angeles. I was also sorely missing my independence after living an independent, bohemian lifestyle in the hallowed halls of a New York liberal arts college, having since been relegated once again to my parents’ roof.
My mind looking squarely ahead, I signed up for LA acting classes — not being in LA! On Zoom (ugh)!
Despite having already acted for eight years, these classes, these virtual classes, changed my life. My teacher challenged me not to put on the mask of a character — my teacher challenged me to have the courage to be myself, to be emotionally naked in a room full of others to bear witness.
Going hand in hand with my January decision to tell the world that I was not going to settle for stable or what others thought might be best for me, I was freed by my teacher to act not from a place of what I assumed people wanted to see or what I thought would produce a reaction, but from a place of truth, from a place of my inner being.
It was so uncomfortable that I considered quitting about halfway through the intensive (twice a week, five hours each session, for a month). It came from the switch from performing, to just being and letting my honest and human reactions to imaginary circumstances come through with full force. It was a good day when I realized that this didn’t apply to acting alone — it applied to life. For, in the great words of my teacher: “When you work on yourself, you are actually working on your acting, and when you work on your acting, you are actually working on yourself.”
As I consoled the mourning, as I greeted my coworkers with morning coffee, as I visited my family for dinner, I acted from a place of newfound authenticity, freed from the constraints of what I assumed other people wanted from me and my life. With love for myself and others, I started to let things be.
A brief detour: I didn’t just consider quitting acting class — I thought I needed therapy. The class revealed a tragedy: the unfortunate fact that I was finding it hard to be totally and completely myself around others, even doing something that I love so much.
While I had made great mental and emotional strides up to this point through reading books of spirituality and philosophy, adding the combined effect of their words’ healing salve to my ailing mind, I had been doing it all on my own. I had been struggling with anxiety, insecurities, and mild bouts of depression for years — on my own. By this point, I thought I was doing a great job. But the acting class exposed a need to make sure.
I went to two sessions. I managed to make breakthroughs in just two sessions. But what was most important, is that I discovered the joy, the life-affirming joy, of having someone really listen to you and say, “You’re okay.” My therapist helped me work on some trouble spots, but for the most part, he believed that I had been doing an excellent job finding healthy coping strategies for my mental woes.
This came at the same time as I enrolled in a meditation class, actually offered through the acting school I was attending. This class arguably has made me a better actor than the acting classes themselves! I went from not being able to do a session of sitting for longer than ten minutes, to now, to this day, doing one-hour-long meditation sessions every Saturday morning! Both of these life changes combined gave me the strength to continue with my acting training.
If you have been thinking about therapy, and maybe aren’t sure if you actually need it — go. Anyone can gain something from therapy, from being truly heard. Maybe you’ll go for years, maybe it’ll just be a couple of sessions as in my case, but regardless, there should be absolutely no stigma, insecurity, or hesitation when it comes to treating your mental health the same way you would treat any other aspect of your being — with love, respect, and attention.
I took a total of two months of class, but I was astounded at the changes in both my acting and my general personality by the end. I felt freedom, all the time.
Now, while I have been writing since I was a kid, it had been mostly poetry. (Some of which is featured on my Medium page, check it out!)
However, few endeavors in life have felt more natural than holding a pen in my hand or rhythmically slapping keys on a keyboard. My natural affinity for writing has never left, but during much of high school and college, it was buried beneath the sheer ecstasy I found in performing on stage, hearing the clapping of hundreds of people following a successful scene.
Ironically, the acting class in teaching me to be unabashedly myself, lead me away from acting. I thought to myself, if I love acting, if I love plays and movies, and writing, why aren’t I writing scripts?
I started writing my first script in September of 2020, finishing 110 pages by December 31, 2020. I am now more than 50 pages into my second screenplay, with another project in the development phase. My writing soul burst to the surface of my being in September of 2020 with very my first intention to sit down and write a script, and it has never left me since.
October, 2020. I told my mother that I had enough of safety, enough of security, enough of sanity: I was going to move to Los Angeles, from Phoenix, in the middle of a pandemic.
Desperate to regain my independence, desperate to “start my life,” as soon as I found an affordable place and I had a parachute of savings, I was on the road. I didn’t care that the film industry I so desperately wanted to break into was in veritable shambles or that the pandemic rules were supposedly more strict — I wanted to live!
There are many aspects to living, as it turns out. One is struggle.
I was unemployed for a solid two months, frantically attempting to shake my parachute into catching any drift, any breeze at all, but I kept tumbling towards the horrible stereotype of a broke twenty-something artist.
Despite my financials, I was able to make contacts with tens of producers, actors, writers, and directors that had also attended my swanky college. Hours of conversation, equal parts disillusionment and enlightenment later…a producer told me quite bluntly — “Yeah, I get that you literally want any job in Hollywood just for the experience but…more than two-thousand people have been laid off in our industry, starting at the bottom. Try again next time?”
I then resolved to get any job that I could (along with every other unemployed person in the city), which resulted in me initially being forced to quit a job after one day (there’s a first!) but then ultimately acquiring the most quintessentially LA job I could have imagined — working the front desk at a membership-only, concierge 24/7 medical clinic in the heart of Beverly Hills.
It had only just opened in October, but word had spread quickly among the rich and powerful of the possibility of bourgeoise-ifying medicine. During my time there I exchanged words and looks with multiple celebrities — one’s you would have heard of — sometimes barely managing to keep my giddiness contained.
While the job was glamorous and paid well, everything outside of it was…exhausting. The area surrounding my apartment was littered with the homeless, despite not even being considered a “bad area.” The sheer destitution, the horrific state of these people, next to some of the richest neighborhoods in the world, caused equal parts sadness and rage.
Every indoor activity you could imagine was deemed too dangerous for participation by Governor Newsom — and sadly, he was right. Halfway through my LA sojourn, Los Angeles County became the deadliest, most devastated area in the country for COVID-19 deaths and cases. Being close to immunocompromised people, I rarely left my apartment.
I have always thought of myself as a sensitive person, one who feels and thinks deeply, but at the same time, one who can be resilient. I lean into my suffering, whether that’s through meditation, deep pondering, therapy — I find my ways to bounce back.
That’s what this whole series is about, after all! How do we find the wisdom to weather the inevitability of suffering?
The wisdom was not enough to weather complete isolation, in a brand new city, with no hope of actually breaking into the field that I had moved to that city in pursuit of. I felt choked by dread, by despair. Somehow perpetually sunny LA even seemed unusually overcast during the entire period — just for me.
I couldn’t help but think of leaving after just two and a half months. Leaving the place that I thought was going to lead to the life of my dreams. Of course, I knew that the pandemic was still going and that severe restrictions were in place before I had moved, but I thought I was strong enough. I wanted to get ahead of myself (literally) and force my life to be what it was not. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced real depression, but I’m sure my experience in LA was the closest I have ever come.
After enough suffering, I woke up, decided I was wasting my time, and set back out for Arizona in mid-February 2021.
Something felt right, crossing that Arizona-California border, basking in miles of sun and highway.
A cousin of mine once said,
“We are ill where we don’t belong.”
My metaphorical sniffles started to clear.
Just before leaving LA, I learned that my best friend of seventeen years was having some relationship troubles. Eight-year long relationship troubles.
I took up the obligatory best friend's responsibility and absolute honor of consoling him. He and his significant other lived together, and of course, the end of a relationship is not at all conducive to sharing living space in a civilized manner, which certainly helped out my newfound lack of a place to live.
In March of 2021, I moved in with my best friend of seventeen years! It’s been pretty good, to say the least. He’s not a roommate, he’s a brother — and as most do, I’ve got plenty of experience living with family. It’s been a dream.
Through a good word from the lead attorney at the law firm I worked at during the start of the pandemic, I was able to land the perfect day job about a month after my return to Phoenix: an assistant to a judge at the downtown court — criminal division.
Not only do I get to take advantage of my previous law firm experience and knowledge that I had scoured for actually once applying to law school, but I also get to use that knowledge to be of service to my community, doing what I can to make everyone’s time in the criminal justice system a little more efficient, a little more dignified, a little more fair — and hopefully, a lot more human.
While it’s ultimately yet another desk job to keep my writing ambitions afloat, each push of paper is imbued with meaning when I take a moment to ponder the stakes of what I’m doing and the institution that I am upholding. Our system is flawed, but I hope that by being within someone within the system that acknowledges that we can in fact do better, I can do my part to be that little wisp of positive change.
Well.
That’s it, everybody.
It is now May 17, 2021. This was a year of life. I’m grateful for it. Truly.
I have never experienced more growth, more tumult, more enlightenment, or more life in a single year before. Lived in three states, worked three jobs, explored therapy, built a meditation habit, accelerated gains in physical strength, wrote one-and-a-half feature-length film scripts, all while trying my absolute best to be a good friend, brother, and son during that whole time.
I’ve learned many things from this past year, some of which I have already outlined in this article. But what remains at the forefront to me is this:
It’s all just experience.
I could have resisted the flow of life, my desires, others’ wishes, but I chose to yield to that flow. I didn’t comfortably entrench myself into one spot — I ran after life. Most of the time, I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next, what joys or suffering were going to await me.
LA could have crushed me. I could have crushed myself by forcing myself to stay, giving myself some grandiose speech about “paying my dues” being the only way to live my dream. But I wasn’t crushed because I couldn’t be. I became one with what was crushing. I surrendered to myself, and what was happening to me.
You can’t judge experiences, even the seemingly negative ones. The second we think we “know” life, what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, the next experience can throw that all into question. So, just live them. Live experience fully, the good and the bad. For it’s all just experience. Let it all happen. It is only when we fully accept the experience of what’s happening to us that we are able to gain the clarity to make effective change.
We’re going to be okay.
Here’s to another year of life!
