The Return

On writing, self-respect, and coming home after a very bad no good year

I. On sanctuary

Five months ago, in a moment of escalating personal crisis, I packed everything I own into one of those POD storage containers. With nothing but a small suitcase and a backpack, I left my life in Tucson behind, and headed to a monastic co-living community in the south of France.

I’ll be real with you, last year was a train wreck. Professionally, romantically, health-wise—everything went off the rails. I closed down a growing membership business with Ungated to work full-time for a startup, only to regret it and leave several months later. Not one, but two budding romances fizzled out, and an important friendship came to an abrupt end that left two hearts in tatters. To top it all off, my lifetime of food and body struggles, which I thought I’d put behind me, came roaring back in response to the compounding stress. I probably packed on 30 pounds from June to October alone. Not great. All of which is to say, when I left last autumn, I was in bad shape. Broken, numb, lost. The only thing that made sense was to seek sanctuary and put my life back together.

Bergerac turned out to be the perfect place. The Dordogne River, running through the heart of town, proved a steady and wise companion as I took walks of increasing length along its shores each day. First 2 miles, then 4, and eventually 7. The simple plant-based meals, sourced from veggies we bought at the charming open-air market, helped me reconnect to my body, which had for months been numbed senseless. I made a steady stream of new friends, and most days were punctuated by lovely conversations. Walk by walk, meal by meal, conversation by conversation, the burdens I’d arrived with began to dissolve. I joked with friends that I was dumping all of the emotional bullshit I’d arrived with into the river. In retrospect, I don’t think it was a joke. I weighed myself when I got back to Tucson two weeks ago, and I’d lost 52 pounds.

some lovely pics from france

As I write this, I’m sitting in my mom’s RV in central Tucson. I’ll be living here, in this long, cramped metal box, until I’m back on my feet. It’s not an ideal living situation, but I love it. It feels like a fresh start. A new chapter. There are so many unanswered questions about what comes next. I don’t know where I’ll be living in six months. I don’t know how my financial or romantic prospects will be looking. But there are two things I’m certain about. This next era will be defined by devotion to writing, and working daily to earn back my self-respect after losing it in catastrophic fashion.

II. On writing

I’ve been telling friends for years that writing is the most important practice in my life. They’ve heard many-a-grand-proclamation about how I’m finally going to write and publish consistently. “This time it’ll be different, I swear!” And then, like clockwork, I’d find clever new ways to avoid it. After my time in Bergerac, though, I can’t hide from the truth anymore. I need to write. It’s central to my wellbeing as a human.

Writing is, of course, the lifeblood of my vocation and livelihood. There’s always been a clear correlation between how much I publish, how enjoyable my work-life feels, and how much money I make. But it’s become so much more than that. Each day in France, I wrote morning pages—a pure stream of consciousness dump of whatever was heavy or alive in my heart. It became a form of meditative practice, almost like prayer, helping me sift through the chaos and find the stillness below. Writing, I’ve learned, helps me connect to myself and make sense of the world. It strengthens my discernment, helping me steer my life towards resonance and away from delusion. In order to break away from the painful patterns of the past in my next chapter, writing has to be at the center of my life. It’s non-negotiable.

Though some of my writing practice is private, I plan to publish prolifically here and in The Forest. But it’s going to look different from what came before. While I was in Bergerac, I started talking to a girl I’d met on twitter. After our first phone call—which lasted eleven hours (not a typo)—I was smitten in a way I haven’t been since high school. Soon after, I began writing poetry for the first time in my adult life. First a trickle, then a flood. On my daily walks, poetic lines and stanzas would land in my psyche, fully formed, as if air-dropped by divine messenger. From early December until she and I met in mid-January, I wrote and sent her a new poem every single day. Over 50 in total. This would have been inconceivable to me six short months ago.

That story is still unfolding. Perhaps I’ll write about it properly some day, once the ground beneath our feet has settled. But I share this as an example of how the writer that went to Bergerac last October is not the same writer who’s typing here today. If you’re reading this, you probably followed me for my conceptual writing about marketing or business or filmmaking. But truthfully, that approach to writing feels increasingly lifeless to me. What feels alive now is expressing the weird messy humanity that’s been simmering beneath the abstractions all these years. I’ve long used intellectualism to hide myself, but I’m tired of that. I want to share who I’ve been, who I am, and who I’m becoming. There will still be plenty of business writing here. I’m no less captivated by the intricacies of 1,000 true fans as a business philosophy than I was a year ago. But there will also be memoir, poetry, and earnest, honest exploration of my own messy path.

Speaking of which, let me unspool a bit more of that mess. The real shit.

III. On self-respect

One of the gifts of my time in Bergerac—though it certainly didn’t feel like it—was that it gave me some dispassionate distance from the decisions I made in 2023. And boy, an honest assessment of my actions last year is not flattering. I’m a bit hesitant to publish this next paragraph. But fuck it, we ball.

I joined the startup not because I thought it was a sensible business with a bright future, but because they’d raised money and I was tired of feeling financially insecure. My intuition had been sending me red flags about it for over a year, but I decided to go all-in anyway, mostly for a semi-reliable paycheck. Similarly, I threw myself into romances that made sense in some ways, but didn’t feel passionate or alive, because I felt unworthy and unconvinced that anything better could be possible for me. Then I became best friends with a married woman. Nothing physical happened between us, but we became emotionally entangled in a way that was deeply unhealthy, and out of integrity for both of us. The cherry on top was my continued, accelerated use of food and television and compulsive spending to numb myself into oblivion. Oof.

In retrospect, 2023 was defined by letting my insecurities run amok and call the shots. It’s little wonder I ended the year clawing my way out of a deep well of shame. I have genuine compassion for the Rob of last year. That dude was suffering more than he even realized. But I cannot say I respect the decisions he made. With a bit of distance, I’m honestly a bit mortified. There’s not much use in wallowing in mistakes of the past, or letting them define us. But there is use in brutally honest acknowledgement, lest you keep playing out the same patterns in perpetuity.

The more I strive to know myself through writing, meditation, somatic practice, etc, the more I’m able to discern the parts of myself laying dormant beneath the accumulated layers of insecurity and ego. I sense the writer and storyteller in me, yearning to be set free through devotion and practice. I sense the business leader who strives to embody a countercultural story to today’s growth-centered ideology. I sense the loving husband and father I know I’ll be one day. Hell, I can even sense deeper, more primal energies like the king, the warrior, the magician, the lover—those ancient archetypes of the mature masculine. It’s all there, just beneath the surface, whispering to me in each moment. The real question is: will I listen and heed their call, or will I keep running away to hide in compulsive numbing? Will I keep taking the lifeless path of least resistance, or will I trust myself at the deepest levels? This, for me, is at the heart of my journey to earn my self-respect.

I expect this to be a life-long journey—something always in flux depending on the season. But right now, I have a vivid sense of what my life looks like, and what I need to do, to wake up in six months proud of the man I am. It looks like earnest devotion to my writing, both private and public, day in and day out. It looks like getting right with food and exercise (again). It looks like getting right with money (for the first time). It looks like shedding my people-pleasing and conflict-avoidant tendencies and cultivating mature masculine energy within myself. And of course, it looks like navigating all of the above with grace, compassion, and humility. I know that when I’m rigid and perfectionistic, my ideals slip through my clenched fingers and I fall back into insecurity and numbing. It’s happened more times than I can count. So the most respect-worthy trait I’d like to embody going forward is something akin to loving groundedness. The ability, when I’m inevitably blown off course, to re-center myself, hold my imperfections with love, then get back on the path. One foot in front of the other, towards what matters most.

It’s good to be back, friends. See you soon. 🫡