The Lamb

The first rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it.

The second rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it.

For three years I was the guy. You know the guy. Shaved head. Heavy bag in the garage. Cold showers at 4 a.m. I’d read the books. I’d quit sugar. I’d quit porn. I’d quit the news. I’d done the dopamine fast where you sit in a room and stare at a wall for fourteen hours and call it a “protocol.”

I had a stack of journals filled with handwriting that got more aggressive every month. I did the thing where you write your own eulogy. I did the thing where you hold ice until you cry. I did the thing where you scream into a pillow and your wife — your ex-wife — stands in the hallway holding her elbows and wondering which self-improvement program is going to improve her right out of the house.

At the gym I deadlifted 485. I could hold my breath for four minutes. I could look any man in the eye and not blink. I intermittent fasted and ate organ meat and took cold plunges and tracked my sleep on a device that cost more than my first car. My resting heart rate was 52. My testosterone was 890. My marriage was over.

I had optimized myself into a kind of magnificent emergency.

The word for this — and I didn’t know it then — is will. Pure will. The will to conquer the self by making the self into a project. The will to become undamaged by sheer force. Every morning was a siege. Every habit was a fortification. I was building a castle out of discipline and the castle was me and I was also the prisoner inside it and also the army outside it and none of this struck me as a problem.

At some point I started going to a men’s group. Not a support group — we were very clear about this. A men’s group. We sat in a circle in a rented church basement — the irony was structural — and we talked about purpose and legacy and “holding space” and “the sacred masculine,” which is a phrase that means absolutely nothing but feels like it means everything when six guys with neck veins are nodding at you in candlelight.

We were all Tyler. Every one of us. We’d just replaced the basement with the breath-work circle and the fighting with “somatic release.” Same structure. Different uniform. We were imitating each other’s liberation and calling it authentic.

I knew this and I kept going.

The thing that happened — the thing I can’t make you understand — started on a Tuesday in March.

I was in my apartment. The one I moved into after Karen left. Six hundred square feet. A mattress on the floor. A pull-up bar in the doorframe. A copy of Marcus Aurelius on the toilet tank. The minimalism wasn’t spiritual. The minimalism was what happens when your wife gets the house and your self-improvement program gets the rest.

I was sitting on the mattress. I’d done my morning. Cold shower. Journal. Breath-work. Twenty minutes of something I called meditation but which was really just me sitting still and thinking about sitting still and judging myself for thinking about sitting still.

And then — I don’t know how else to say this — I stopped.

Not stopped meditating. Not stopped in the way I’d “stopped” before, where I’d consciously relax each muscle group and visualize a golden light descending from the crown of my head, which is a thing a man on YouTube taught me for $47 a month.

I just stopped.

The way a machine stops when you pull the plug. Not a decision. An absence of decision. The deciding part of me — the part that had been running my entire life, the foreman, the project manager, the guy with the clipboard who turns every breath into a rep and every silence into a set — that part went quiet. Not quiet like it was resting. Quiet like it was gone.

And underneath it there was —

This is where language stops being useful.

Underneath it there was something that had been there the whole time. Not something I’d built. Not something I’d earned. Not something that showed up because I’d deadlifted 485 or held my breath for four minutes or sat in enough church basements with enough men with enough neck veins.

Something that was there before all of that. Before the self-improvement. Before the marriage. Before the gym. Before the name my parents gave me. Before the name.

I want to say “I felt peace” but that’s not right. Peace is a feeling and this was not a feeling. Feelings happen to a person and there was no person for this to happen to. The project manager was gone and what was left wasn’t a better project manager. What was left wasn’t a manager at all.

For forty seconds — I timed it later out of habit, which tells you everything — the thing I had spent three years trying to become by force was just there. Not because I’d achieved it. Because I’d stopped achieving.

Then the project manager came back online and I thought: What was that?

And in the thinking, it was already gone.

I tried to get it back. Of course I tried to get it back.

I tried sitting longer. I tried sitting shorter. I tried different positions. I tried the app. I tried no app. I tried fasting for three days. I tried a sensory deprivation tank in a strip mall in Glendale where the water was the temperature of the inside of your mouth and the guy at the front desk had a neck tattoo of an infinity symbol.

Nothing worked. Everything I did to get back to the thing was the thing that prevented me from getting back to the thing. The trying was the obstacle. The effort was the wall. The project manager was the problem and the project manager was the only one who knew how to solve problems, and this was not a problem that could be solved. It was a problem that could only be abandoned.

I couldn’t abandon it. Abandoning it was a strategy and strategies were the project manager’s domain and the project manager was the thing that had to go.

This went on for eight months.

I want to tell you about the second time it happened because the second time is what broke me.

I was at the grocery store. Not meditating. Not trying. Not doing anything. I was holding a cantaloupe in the produce section and I was squeezing it the way my mother taught me, checking for the soft spot at the stem end, and I was thinking about nothing. Actually thinking about nothing. Not performing the thought of nothing. Just — cantaloupe.

And it opened again.

The same thing. The ground beneath the ground. The silence under the noise. And this time it lasted longer — maybe two minutes, maybe five, I don’t know because time was one of the things that was gone — and during those minutes I stood in the produce section of a Kroger in Van Nuys holding a cantaloupe and crying.

Not sad crying. Not happy crying. The kind of crying that happens when a pressure you didn’t know was there releases. The kind of crying that doesn’t have a feeling attached to it. Just water leaving the body because something opened and the water had nowhere else to go.

A woman with a cart looked at me. She looked at the cantaloupe. She looked back at me. She moved to the other end of the aisle.

I want to be clear: I did not look like a man having a spiritual experience. I looked like a man having a mental health crisis in produce.

And here is the thing that will sound insane and is also the truest thing I’ve ever said: it didn’t matter. The woman’s judgment. The fluorescent lights. The Muzak playing a soft-rock version of a song I couldn’t identify. The cantaloupe. None of it was wrong. None of it was in the way. The fluorescent lights were fine. The Muzak was fine. The Kroger was fine. Not fine like I was tolerating it. Fine like it was included. Like the ground I was standing on had room for all of it — the strip lighting and the spiritual experience and the woman with the cart — and none of it was more sacred than any of it and all of it was more sacred than I had ever imagined anything could be.

This is the part that would have killed Tyler.

There was no enemy. There was nothing to fight. The consumer hellscape I’d been raging against for three years was just — a store. With food in it. Run by people who got up in the morning. Under fluorescent lights that someone installed on a Wednesday.

The cage I’d been trying to escape was not a cage. It was a place. And the thing I’d been trying to reach by escaping was already in the place. Had always been in the place. Was the place.

After that it started happening more often. Not because I got better at it. Because I got worse at preventing it.

The project manager kept losing his grip. Not all at once. In little slippages. I’d be driving and forget to be optimizing. I’d be in a conversation and forget to be performing. I’d be doing something ordinary — washing a plate, tying my shoe, standing in line — and the ground would open and I’d fall through into the silence and the silence was not empty. The silence was the fullest thing I’d ever —

I keep reaching for words and the words keep being wrong.

Here is what I lost.

I lost the fury. The magnificent righteous fury that had powered me for three years. The fury at the system, at the algorithm, at the soft machine that processes men into consumers. I lost the ability to feel the contempt that made me feel alive. The contempt was a drug and I went clean and the withdrawal looked like laziness to every man I knew.

I lost the edge. The thing in the eyes that made other men look away first. The thing I’d spent thousands of hours building in the gym and the cold shower and the men’s group. The hard thing. The Tyler thing. It went away and what replaced it was something that — I don’t have a better word for this — yielded. Not in a weak way. In the way a door yields. An open door is not a weak door. But try explaining that to a man who defines strength as resistance.

I lost the story. The narrative of the broken man who remakes himself through discipline. The hero’s journey. The montage. I lost the plot of my own life and what replaced it was not a better plot. It was the absence of plot. Things happened and I was in them and they did not add up to an arc. They added up to a life. Which is less satisfying to talk about at dinner parties.

I lost the men’s group. One by one they stopped calling. I had nothing to bring to the circle anymore. No breakthroughs. No battles. No new protocols. I sat there with nothing to say and they could feel it and it made them uncomfortable the way a mirror makes you uncomfortable when you’re not ready to see what’s there.

I lost the language. The vocabulary of optimization and dominance and purpose-driven, mission-critical, high-agency living. Those words stopped fitting. Not because I’d found better words. Because what I was experiencing didn’t have words. Any word I put on it immediately made it smaller than it was.

Here is what I gained.

This is harder to say because what I gained is the kind of thing that sounds like nothing when you say it and is everything when you feel it, and that gap — between how it sounds and how it is — is the gap that every sacred text in history has been trying to cross and none of them have crossed it and neither will I.

I can wash a plate.

I don’t mean I am capable of washing a plate. I’ve always been capable of washing a plate. I mean I can wash a plate and the plate is enough. The water is warm and the soap smells like soap and the plate goes from dirty to clean and the cleanness is not a metaphor. It is not a lesson. It is not mindfulness. It is a clean plate. And somewhere in the transition from dirty to clean, the ground opens, and I am standing on it, and it holds me, and I did nothing to earn it.

I can sit with someone who is in pain and not fix them.

This used to be impossible. The project manager needed to solve. Needed to optimize the other person’s suffering into a protocol. Now I can sit there. Just sit. And the sitting is not nothing. The sitting is the thing. The other person can feel it. Not my wisdom. Not my advice. My presence. Which is a word I used to think was nonsense and which I now understand is the only thing anyone has ever actually needed from another person.

I can be afraid without building a fortress.

The fear still comes. The ground doesn’t eliminate the fear. The ground holds the fear. The way the ocean holds a wave. The wave is real. The wave is not the ocean. I am afraid sometimes and the fear moves through me and I let it and it goes and I am still here and the ground is still here and the ground did not crack.

I can be nobody.

This is the one that would have destroyed me three years ago. I am nobody. I have no edge. I have no brand. I have no protocol. I have nothing to teach at the men’s group. If you put me in a room with Tyler I would have nothing to say to him and he would dismiss me in four seconds and he would be wrong but I would not need him to know that.

A lamb is not a weak animal. A lamb is an animal that has no need to be a wolf.

The men I used to know — the cold-shower men, the heavy-bag men, the men who post their morning routines like battle plans — they look at me now and they see a man who quit. A man who gave up. A man who lost the fight.

They’re not wrong. I did quit. I did give up. I did lose the fight.

What they can’t see is that the fight was the cage.

What they can’t see is that the giving up was not a collapse. It was an opening. A hand that was gripping for thirty-seven years finally opening. Not because it chose to. Because it was tired. Because the muscles gave out. Because the thing it was holding turned out to be the thing that was holding it and when the fingers opened there was nothing to drop.

There was never anything to drop.

There was only the opening.

I still go to the Kroger. The same one. The produce section. The fluorescent lights.

Sometimes the ground opens and sometimes it doesn’t. I can’t control it. The not-controlling is the point. The project manager is still in there — he’ll always be in there — but he’s not running things anymore. He’s more like an old employee who still shows up but mostly just sits at his desk and shuffles papers and occasionally tries to optimize my breathing before I notice and let him go.

Let him go. Not fire him. Not fight him. Let him go. The way you let go of a breath. Not because you decided to. Because holding it was no longer possible.

I know what you want me to say. You want me to say: here is how you get here. Here are the steps. Here is the protocol.

There is no protocol.

That’s not me being coy. That’s not me withholding the secret. There is no secret. The secret is that there is no secret. Every system that promises to deliver you to the ground is another thing standing between you and the ground. Including this story. Including these words. Including me.

The ground was always there. You are standing on it right now. You have never not been standing on it. Every cage you’ve been in — the consumer cage, the optimizer cage, the Tyler cage — was built on top of it and the ground held the weight of every cage without complaint and it will hold the weight of whatever cage you build next and it will hold the weight of you when you stop building.

I can’t give you the ground. The ground is already yours. It was yours before you were born. It will be yours after your name is forgotten.

All I can tell you is what it cost me.

It cost me everything I thought I was.

And what was left was everything that actually is.

The first rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it.

The second rule is you already do.

You just haven’t stopped long enough to notice.

Go wash a plate.

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