If You Want To Change And Feel Like Your Friends Are Holding You Back, You Need To Read This
No Bullshit Newsletter (3.6)
One of the hardest decisions I ever had to make was to distance myself from my old friend group. I got a DUI when I was 18. I was drinking a lot, doing drugs every weekend and had become identified with being “the crazy guy” at the parties. I grew up in a small town where chasing big dreams and stepping outside of the normalcy of the weekend warrior was often met with judgement. Of course, I was 18 so pretty well everything at that point was met with a fear of being judged by my peers. I didn’t quit cold turkey or anything after my DUI, but it certainly shaped my future.
Along that same time period when all my friends were planning to go off to college, I decided that wasn’t going to be the road I would take. I knew that if I went to school, I would just party and waste the money that my parents had saved up for my post secondary education. My mom told me I didn’t have to go to school, but I had to have a plan. I loved fitness and was training at the gym 5 days a week. I had a co-op placement there and one day while sitting at the front desk probably flirting with the girl who worked alongside me, the idea hit me: I could be a fuckin trainer!
Pretty quickly I was enrolled in courses that would shape who I’d become as a young man. I took an alternative route. I learned about meditation, spirituality, chakras, holistic nutrition, and every other thing I could get my hands on that seemed to be so much different than the world I had previously known. My friends would say behind my back that I was lost in left field. To them, I was a gonner. I stayed in on weekends to read. I woke up early to do tai chi at the park. I’d go to the farmers markets and search for organic food. I changed everything. I made my own food, grew a beard, experimented with fasting, would go on solo 10 hour barefoot hikes through the forests and trails in my area and even did barefoot hikes in the winter. My friends thought I was weird, even my parents wondered about me. I’d love to say I didn’t give a shit, but I’d be lying.
It was fucking lonely for a bit. I felt like I didn’t have friends to relate to, nobody to make plans with. How does a 19 year old guy ask a girl to go to the farmers market, meditate and go for a hike? Seems kind of silly now, I guess I could have just asked to do exactly that, but when you’re clouded by insecurity that only goes away when you’re alone, everything becomes more complicated than it needs to be. My only real salvation could be broken down into 3 main areas:
How good I felt. I was fucking beaming with energy. There was one point in my early 20’s where I would wake up in the middle of the night hoping to God it was late enough so I could go start my day and study. Nope… only 1:30am. If it was close to 3, I would always get up. My lifestyle felt like the best drugs I had ever taken and there was no come down.
I felt like the information I was learning could change the world. This is not an overstatement. I honestly believed I could change the world. There’s a part of me that still does, but as you grow up, the world calluses you a bit. I think that’s good though in some respects. You learn a lot about yourself; at least I did. I still have dreams of being famous, filling out arenas with presentations. You know what, fuck it. I still think I can change the world.
I noticed things about myself that I thought could never change, change. One of them being my temper. I always thought having a temper was kinda cool. People didn’t fuck with me and I liked it. But as I studied more, meditated more and gained exposure to people with very different perspectives on life than what I was used to, I realized that everything is change-able. We are the way we are because of our habits. We can change our habits. When I stopped and looked at how much had changed, it would leave me wondering how much potential was left.
I think the main thing comes down to this: At some point you have to quiet yourself enough to be able to notice when something just feels right. It’s not a thought, it’s visceral. Whenever I have had that feeling, I just chase it. I don’t ask questions. I don’t worry about what it will look like, or even how other people will feel. I just go. I think too many people spend way too much energy worrying about how they will look or what others will think of them, so much so that they can never decipher what that visceral feeling actually feels like. I think we can become numb to it. It’s akin to a muscle we have to train. If we repress it, I think disease can set into the body. I felt this intuitively for most of my adult life, and then it was confirmed when I studied Gabor Maté’s books. But that’s for another day.
Here’s the summary: If you feel like you need change, just fucking do it. You’re probably scared. What if I fail? What if I lose all my friends? What if I upset someone? What if people think I’m weird? There are an infinite amount of what if’s. And a lot of them are probably right. You probably will lose friends. You probably will feel alone for a little. You probably will upset people. You will most likely feel like you failed in the beginning stages. But here’s the thing: Eventually you won’t. You will grow. You will meet new people. You will learn that you can be whoever the fuck you want in this world. You are limited only by your own beliefs.
It’s been 10 years since I made that tough decision. And if you think I spend one second regretting it… well, I don’t. Ever. The only thing I regret is not stepping into it even harder. I regret ever letting people’s very mediocre view of the world limit my potential. I regret letting their voices make me think I wasn’t confident enough to speak my mind. I regret nothing about being more of who I was and everything about not being more of who I know I am.
And you will too. So just fucking do it.
Ty.