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[lantay0m-blog]

Beginnings

This is the start of the rest of my life.

Listen to this post in audio

Right now I am in Thiailand because I think differently. This is a trait that many speakers at Horizons glorified, but it is hard. Developing an independent mindset helps creativity. It helps with following your own path, one that works well for you. But it is also lonely, in a lot of ways. People say I’m social. That I’m always full of energy. The truth is I’m (not clinically) much more manic depressive. Sometimes I’m very on, and sometimes I’m totally off–I’ll have intense bursts of creativity where I feel I’m unlocking the pieces of the universe, and a day later will question who I am and whether the things I do are worth it.

Following God (for which I affiliate with not one but many religions) seems to be the best thing for me. But sometimes God is stronger at certain times and places than in others. For me in San Francisco, God was weak for me. Horizons was incredible. Never have I been around so many driven and hard working people. But the San Francisco tech life is not for me.

And neither is the hippy life (unsure of good terminology here) that I have found among friends in the dance community in Durham and across the US. You see, I am a mixture of both those lives.

And this is hard. When I’m with my hippy and dance friends I feel overly businessy and when I’m with my tech and entrepreneurship friends I feel overly hippyish. My religious and familial friends always seem to accept me, which by the way I am incredibly grateful for. Not that my other friends don’t, but it’s different.

I am ridiculously ambitious. I’m not going to list my ambitions here, if you’ve heard me talk about it, you know. And that ambition is an absurd way to live life. I just got back from a week with one of my best friends Quinn who is objectively the most impressive entrepreneurial peer I know (also one of my best friends, not objectifying you). He has raised around $70k for his business while in college, has a kick ass relationship with his cofounders, a bomb team, a damn fair amount of traction, and a hell of a good posture towards life. Quinn is an objective baller.

I am an objective who-the-heck-knows-what in a lot of ways. I think mega deeply about psychology, but I don’t blog or write about it so probably few know. I have thousands of pages of notes on entrepreneurship ideas, insights, and self reflection, but again–not published so few know. I took (sorry for the social faux pas) easy classes in school so I could take time to learn things like programming and graphic design (although compared to many Horizonites my skill at these is nothing). And because I have these insights and these entrepreneurship ideas that I feel tap into the truth of the universe and an ideal that can actually work for everyone and bring real peace and prosperity to the world in ways very few others and nobody in power seem to have thought about or realized, I have ridiculous ambitions that far exceed anything fairly (vs unfairly) realistic.

Thank God for Google, Musk, and all these other lunatics telling us we can be anything. But my life is weird. And right now, the crux of it is beginning. In Horizons (the epitomy of the entrepreneurship/tech community for me), I was anxious but productive. At Recess (the epitomy of the hippy/dance community for me), I was depressive but at peace. And right now I’m in Thailand at 4:20am (coincidence) writing this piece from my heart (which is my favorite way to create) and honestly I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

There are billions of options. I could try to build community here in Chiang Mai and use my dance and yoga teaching abilities to try and bring people together. I could travel around Asia, seeing cool things and running into different people. I could be super spiritual and go to temples, pray, and get massages a bunch, and do a lot of reflecting and serve people in some way while I do it. After I feel rested from those things I could work on this programming course. Or on this consulting business. Or get my yoga teacher certification. Or so many other things. And what’s stressful isn’t that these aren’t good options–actually they are incredible because I am privileged middle class white male who despite having trauma from childhood (sorry Mom) has it pretty dang good compared to the rest of the world.

What haunts me, what keeps me up at night (besides jet lag) is that I don’t know which one of these paths will lead me to my ambitions. And it isn’t direct. So many people think psychology is simple–choose to be happy and become happy, and I can say with certainty that is not true. Yes there is that cognitive behavioral piece but there is also a psychodynamic relationship piece. An environmental one. An emotional reconciliation one–one of the most important in my opinion which is super hard to know when it’s working or not. And the thing about psychology is that I doubt anyone understands it. They understand it for themselves, they understand parts of it or a discipline’s perception of it, maybe a few tools here and there.

Behavioral interventions like developing healthy habits don’t work by themselves because if they don’t align with emotions we get burned out from them. Emotional reconciliation doesn’t work by itself because it can lead to depressiveness. Relational is tricky because people are fickle. And so there is no straight line. It is all a dance. And sometimes we move up and sometimes we go down and in general when on an upward spiral (which in my opinion is one of the only true metrics of privilege) things get better over time but what about when there isn’t time?

Because at 22, with the ambitions I have, I am embarrassed about how little I have accomplished. In some ways (another social faux pas) I could even call myself a fraud.

I keep so much in. Both because of my childhood trauma (sorry again) and my ridiculous ambitions, I am terrified of “giving up too much” what that really means is I’m terrified of giving too much.

I’ve always asked what’s in it for me, which is an incredibly embarassing thing to admit. I’m sure some of it (I’m going to stop apologizing but do know that I am sorry) is that my mom never really expected me to give back to her as a child, but it still is something I feel pathetic for not having overcome.

It isn’t as easy as deciding I’m going to start giving a bunch. Even when other people have said that and it seems to have worked there are so many other factors involved, and while short term change can be forced and ends up looking like incredible results, long term change takes time, effort, persistence, self awareness, inner strength, and luck (which can be influenced but still behaves on its own).

But I would like to try, in one way or another. This is a tired time, a time of rest after 16 years of school and the most intense summer of my life. But getting this on paper as if writing to an audience feels good.

I don’t like facebook. I think it could be better and would like to see it overthrown. But it does provide a platform that is a bit more private than a static website and is a place where I know many of those I care about can find my thoughts when I post them and that is pretty cool.

PS I’m leaving this in audio too so tone can be understood and in case you prefer to consume that way

PPS here are some notes I took after writing this – It’s all about what type of person you want to be. What type of person your heart wants you to be.

– PPPS hit me up on tumblr for depressive posts. Innovative and brighter ones coming soon to other platforms.