Boy oh boy, woweee.
Shoutout to the 1 dude (Hey Watson) for joining this week, unfortunately no dudettes.
Without further ado:
Question of the week:
What was the moment where you felt most grateful?
Image of the Week:
To borrow an image from Tim Urban:
Essay From Me:
The Glasses on your Head
Is the person who walked into the pandemic the same person who came out?
Despite being in the same body, albeit with a slightly better ability to grow a moustache, the same city and same job, not much about me felt the same.
Gone is the young, naive, whipper snapper. Hello soul-searching, pandemic veteran.
The excitement, the buzz, the energy that once defined me appeared a distant memory. Replaced by a rushing over-thinker. The social butterfly that once flourished in large groups, could be found leaving engagement parties early, succumbing to the anxiousness of being misunderstood by friendly faces.
After so long, this new Nic felt normal, as if this was simply who I was now.
However, call it my soul, my gut, whatever that thing is that innately makes you, you. It was driving me to behave in a way that reflected someone who was missing something.
Every minute of every day served a purpose. Whether it be getting a project done for work, building Rudder or going to the gym, I even tracked how often I caught up with my friends. My desperation reached a pinnacle when I caught myself cursing about training starting four minutes late and how our time had been wasted.
There was only one problem. I didn’t even know what I was striving for.
By every external metric I was “living the dream”. A loving family, a place to live, a beautiful girlfriend, respectable job, friends.
Yet something was off, something missing, something ill-fitting about the skin I was in and circumstances I found myself in.
Circuit Breaker
In an attempt to break free of the bind, I escaped to Thailand for a month.
No, I didn’t go full Jordan De Goey. No discriminating footage will emerge. I’d be lying to say if my girlfriend and I didn’t poke our head into one ping pong show. But after seeing a gold fish fall from a place that no gold fish should ever be we quickly turned around.
Rather, I became a digital nomad, working my Australian job from Thailand.
The third week I was blessed with my Dad’s presence. Not only because of his card which paid for us to go white water rafting and mountain biking. But because he’s one of the only people who has seen every chapter of my life. From a wispy-blonde hair child to teenage footy star to party boy to whatever this post-pandemic Nic was.
I won’t divulge the details of our conversations, or why there were tears on at least one occasion. I’ll only share the last thing he said before he left: “I hope you find what you’re looking for… I think your glasses might be on your head”.
Cognitively, I understood. I do have everything that someone could appear to want. But that made it all the more infuriating. I felt like there was something wrong with me. That I was simply ungrateful.
While my gut screamed “continue searching”, my head exacerbated, responded “WHAT FOR”.
Finding Answers
On my last day before returning to Australia, still lost, I decided to go for a hike.
After half an hour I found myself at a buddhist monastery nestled into the side of a mountain. I perched up on a rock and started journaling:
I feel like I’m a playful person but there’s been no space for me to play.
I feel my appreciation for life has been lost by this constant striving.
I feel trapped and rigid in my body. As if my spirit is trying to break free but I’ve reigned it in and put it in a cage.
Throughout Covid my drastic transformation saw me go from someone who chased the cheap thrills of life to someone seeking fulfilment. To cater for this change and prove to everyone around me I no longer jumped off roofs or butt chugged. I lost what made me, me.
I lost the Zest that previously defined me.
Cage of Fear
The question became what is the cage I put my spirit in?
A cage of fear.
I feared being misunderstood for who I was now. I feared being isolated. I feared the embarrassment of no longer being accepted.
As a result, I became a bad impersonator of the person people used to know and a shell of who I was now.
I found myself isolated anyway. But rather from it being strong in who I was now, it was a self-imposed sentence.
Sitting on that rock I realised what I was searching for was myself.
The person who a few days earlier went to a writing meetup and got told by the sixty year old American host “there’s something about you, you’ve got a great energy man”.
I realised, in Thailand where there was no expectation of who I was, I felt free to be myself.
My feeling of lostness in Sydney was based on a fear of judgement by people I knew.
The Antidote
At first I thought the antidote was to simply move away from Sydney. A space for me to start my narrative afresh as my re-found self, free of fear. I even began the hike back down.
But before reaching the bottom, a recent learning from a coaching course struck me.
There’s two places you can be in life: cause or effect.
People at ‘effect’ have a reason for everything. They take no responsibility. They’re simply reacting to the situations they find themselves in.
On the other hand, people at ‘cause’ take full responsibility. They don’t have reasons, they have results.
Only people at ‘cause’ have control of their lives.
I realised by blaming my environment, I was living in ‘effect’. In fact, part of me ever since April 2020 when I felt myself change, had been living in ‘effect’. Rather than continue to be my Zestful self, albeit with different behaviours, I let fear put me in a straight-jacket.
Going forward, I recognise, to live at ‘cause’ my environment is what I make of it. Something I could have done since the beginning.
My glasses were indeed on my head. It just took a climb up a mountain and some sweat for them to slip back onto my nose.
Weekly Fail:
On Friday everyone at work received the following scam email:
An email from our operations team quickly followed reminding us to be diligent. Myself feeling cheeky, decided to reply:
Unfortunately, our COO, who’s on holiday didn’t see the funny side reaching out to me directly:
Admittedly, not sure what’s more of a fail, getting called out by our COO or him not knowing how to spell my name correctly.
Until next week,
Cheers,
Nic Hurrell
https://rudder.life/
Beautiful essay Nic!
Resonated with the frustration of logically knowing you have everything and should be extremely grateful, but still feeling something is missing and searching for more.