A letter to My Younger Self
Seek God with everything you have. It will change your life.
Preface: part of what I want to do with my life is to help people who are in a similar situation to what I used to be in: young men, who feel like they've been dealt a hard hand in life and who are really struggling with things like anger, addiction, a sense of worthlessness, etc. I think a lot of the advice that society gives these young men is broken and doesn't actually work, which is a shame because these folks really need our help. Here's my attempt to distill some of what helped me.
Dear Julian,
As I write this letter, you're about 27 years old. And you need help.
First: you have a lot of anger. Actually, that's too tame a term for what you feel. What you have is a fury so intense you might burn the world down with it. You lie awake at night with rage pulsing through your body, obsessing over and over again on the latest perceived slight: how a coworker or a prospective date or a friend wronged you and what you should have said to get back at them.
It's eating you up inside. It's making you miserable.
I'm not one to tell you that your anger is wrong. Society's fond of telling angry young men that, and I think it's bullshit. I will say that your anger is misplaced.
The truth is that you're furious at the person who abused you when you were younger. But you can't face that, and so you direct your anger at everyone else. The pretty girl who decided she didn't want to go on a date with you. The coworker who didn't laugh at your joke. The friend who didn't invite you to game night.
I'm here to tell you that you need to face down the root cause of your anger. You're playing whack-a-mole instead of addressing the root cause, and nothing in your life is going to get better until you can find the courage to look reality in the face: you were abused, and you hate the person who did that to you.
That's alright. The hate will pass in time, but for now it's important to understand two things about that reality:
1) That's a perfectly natural and healthy response.
2) Your anger won't stop eating you up inside and destroying all of your current relationships until you actually move it. Work your ass through it.
Don't just talk about why you're mad. Take action. Do something physical. Buy a punching bag and beat the shit out of it. Break it. Buy another one. Break that one. Learn your lesson and buy something heavier-duty, something that the pros use. Pound on that one. Every day. Blast some Linkin Park or Eminem and really let yourself feel the anger as you hit the bag. Let it move through you…and let it move out of you.
This will take some time. But it's the only way; and as impossible as it may seem right now, on the other side is peace. On the other side is joy, and love, and actual happy relationships once you stop self-sabotaging.
Let me put it another way. You're a warrior, and you're either going to turn into a sheepdog or a wolf. Pacifism isn't in the cards for you. It is vital that you channel your anger, your desire to protect people, and your capacity for violence into being a sheepdog. If instead you just try to neuter yourself and turn into a sheep—because you think that anger is bad, that protecting people is unnecessary, that masculinity is toxic—then you're going to turn into a wolf. And the biggest victim of your fangs will be you.
Here's the second thing I'll tell you. You are massively depressed.
You hate yourself. You feel like there's a demon in your head that's trying to kill you. A lot of nights you fall asleep and wish you wouldn't wake up. The pain is unbearable.
That's not news, obviously. Here's what I'm actually trying to tell you.
Most of the coping mechanisms that psychologists have advised you to adopt were created—forgive the sex stereotypes here—with women in mind. Drink tea. Go for a long walk. Write yourself a letter. Practice gratitude. Love yourself.
None of that works for you. To paraphrase psychologist Adam Lane Smith, what you need right now isn't to feel loved. It's to feel powerful.
Go to war with your depression. Channel Jocko Willink:
"I hear from people sometimes who feel there’s nowhere else to go — there’s no way out, and they don’t have any more options. And they are considering taking the only way out they can see, and that is they want to take their own life.
And to anybody out there that’s in that place. I don’t really know what exactly to tell you, but I can kinda tell you what I think. I think No.
I think No: don’t save that last bullet for yourself. Don’t save it for yourself…
"You lock and load that last bullet and you shoot it at your enemy [depression]. And when you’re out of bullets, get out your knife and attack with that. And if you lose your knife, you grab your enemy by the throat and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting — no matter what.
And you never quit. You never, never quit."
You're in a cage match with a voice that wants to kill you. Go kick its ass.
Here's the second, related, thing I'll tell you about mental illness.
Large segments of society will insist that, because of your depression and the abuse that you dealt with, you should probably learn to aim low. Don't try to beat your depression, they'll say; that's not really possible anyway. Instead, just learn to cope. Your past and your mental illness combine to create a low ceiling made of the strongest steel, a ceiling which you cannot hope to bust through. You should adjust your expectations of life with that ceiling in mind.
This. Is. A. Lie.
There is no ceiling. Not now, and not ever. Skip the well-meaning coddlers and go read people who have actually overcome adversity. Read David Goggins. Start with Can't Hurt Me, where he makes this lesson explicitly over and over again in chapter after chapter. Read Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. Read anyone you can find who was dealt a hard hand in life and still managed to win.
What one man can do, another can do. Don't let the darkness inside of you hold you back. Learn how to transmute it into rocket fuel.
Here's the third thing I'll tell you: seek God with all your heart and mind and soul.
In some ways, you're lucky. Because of the brutality of your world, you have a more acute sense than many people that there absolutely has to be something more—something better—than this. That's not a lie, and it's not wishful thinking. It's your soul yearning inchoately for something that it knows to be true.
Do whatever you can to tug on this thread, because this is what's going to actually save your life. This is what's going to transmute your pain into joy, your sorrow into peace, your scars into healed flesh. A level of healing is on the table that you cannot imagine right now.
So tug on that thread. Read Eckhart Tolle, and start meditating. Go to church (find one that leans more into God's love than into how we're all sinners. You already think you suck way too much). Listen to Prem Rawat. Read Sadhguru. Read Richard Foster. Seek out anyone and everyone who can help you to calm the maelstrom between your ears so you can start to hear the still small voice.
As you start to hear that voice, tug on that thread harder. When you hear it saying leap, leap. I promise you won't regret it. That voice might feel like a tiny candle at first, but you can blow on that flame until it turns into a raging bonfire inside of you. God will burn away more fear and more shame and more guilt than you ever thought you could let go of, and then He'll do it again. And He'll replace them: with peace, with love, with joy, with connection, with wonder.
You feel terrified of the world right now. God can change that. He can give you peace. He can give you the courage to do things you never thought possible. You're scared of water slides; He can give you the courage to move to Kenya for a year. You're terrified of falling asleep if there's a spider in your room; He can give you the courage to shrug at weekly bomb threats.
You're terrified of pretty girls. He can give you the courage to find the most beautiful girl in the world and ask her to marry you.
He can do more. Today you feel an acute sense of shame. You feel worthless, and sinful, and defective. He can change that. You feel like no-one should ever love you; but He loves you more than you can possibly understand.
You feel like there's a gaping hole inside of you. That's why you watch so much porn and feel so insecure. He can show you that there is no hole. There never was a hole. You were never worthless, for the simple reason that God does not make worthless things.
He can transform your life more than you ever thought possible.
So, if you heed nothing else I've said today, heed this. For your own sake—because you are beautiful, and radiant, and wonderful, and you deserve a good life—I invite you to do something. It's not an order, or a threat; just an invitation.
Seek God with everything you have.
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