Rethinking Past, Choosing Perspective

I. April 20, 2024. 3:15 AM.

What follows is the original entry, unedited.

I try to imagine telling you everything that has happened and that I've been through over the past year, and I just think, how the hell can so much happen to someone in such a short amount of time? It's exhausting just thinking about it. I wish I could just erase the past 12 months from my memory, and really from having actually even happened.

I sit here thinking how much time I feel was just wasted. Time that I could have spent with people that I care about. Then I really start down the rabbit hole, thinking about all the years that were just massive wastes of time. It's like I struggle so much with questioning my decisions, with asking myself if I lost a lot of great memories and experiences and connections with people that I have loved and cared about, for this deep desire that I've had all my life: to become this ideal, this great successful iconoclast that leaves a legacy or creates something that leaves its mark on millions.

Someone whose life was defined as a series of feats. The bold, the brave, the one who runs into the burning building while everyone else runs out.

And then you realize that there are just a few people who you may be fortunate enough to encounter along the way, and they are just as significant, just as important and valuable. To end up only being able to liken the feeling you have when they cross your mind with those of loss and heartache and lonesome despair, abandonment perhaps, the imagination showing you only what could have been — you start to question everything.

Then, what do you have?

Do you stay so that you can justify it all in the hopes of being able to one day say "it was all worth it," or do you abandon the years and brand yourself a quitter, to then live with that eating away quietly at you from deep within, for fear that others will see you the same on the outside?

The curse of a deep and powerful mind is that it can see so well one's own truth. They haven't the ignorance to hide from it. And the antidote to this madness is simply — perspective. In that, I choose to not languish in a paradox of bullshit, but instead bask in the brilliant light of positive possibility. We're only beginning, not coming to an end. Perspective is also a choice, and why would one not choose that which gives a beautiful shimmering brilliance, a fantastic and comforting warmth to the grand possibilities of the limitless future?

II. What I wrote next

I kept going that night. Another six thousand words, roughly, in one sitting.

I know exactly what's in them because I reread them recently. Life as a dance. Life as a canvas. Life as a compass being recalibrated. Storms that haven't lessened but that I've grown better at weathering. Every difficulty carrying the seed of an equivalent advantage. Waves that would once have capsized me now propelling me toward shores I'd thought unreachable.

It goes on like that for pages. It circles the same reassurance maybe eleven times. There is not one name in it. Not one date. Not one specific hour of one specific day. Nothing that cost me anything to write.

The first eight hundred words are a man at his desk at three in the morning asking whether he traded the only irreplaceable thing he had for a story about himself.

The next six thousand are that same man talking himself down.

I want to be precise about what happened there, because I don't think it was dishonesty and I don't think it was weakness. It was anesthesia. I had opened something at 3:15 AM that I did not have the strength to sit inside of at 3:40, so I reached for the nearest available sedative, and the nearest available sedative is the one our entire culture keeps stocked at eye level: everything happens for a reason, every setback is a lesson, it all works out, keep going.

I wrote myself a prescription and I filled it in the same document. And the tell is right there in the last paragraph of the entry, in the word "antidote." I did not go looking for an answer. I went looking for a treatment. Those are different errands and they do not end in the same place.

III. The lie in it

The lie is not "perspective is a choice." That part is true and I still believe it.

The lie is "each difficulty carries a seed of equivalent advantage."

It is a beautiful sentence and it is false, and it is false in a way that costs people their lives. Difficulty does not automatically convert. Pain is not a deposit that accrues interest while you sleep. There is no clearinghouse. Nothing about having suffered guarantees that anything at all was purchased with it.

Look at anyone you have known for twenty years and you already know this. Suffering makes some people wise and it makes other people cruel, and it makes a third group simply smaller than they used to be, and the difference between those outcomes is never the volume of the pain. Two men lose the same thing in the same year. One of them comes out of it able to sit with somebody else's grief without flinching. The other one comes out of it unable to be in a room where he isn't the one who's been wronged. Same input. The pain did not decide it.

What decides it is whether you have anything capable of converting the pain into meaning — and whether you actually run it through, which is slow and humiliating and involves saying true things about yourself in the past tense.

What I did instead was skip the conversion and claim the yield. I wrote down the conclusion that a person arrives at after years of honest reckoning, and I wrote it down twenty-five minutes in, at three in the morning, without doing any of the reckoning. Then I felt better, which I mistook for evidence.

Feeling better is not evidence. Feeling better is the most reliably purchasable sensation on earth. That's the whole business model of about nine-tenths of everything.

IV. What is actually true

So here is the version I owe that guy, thirty months late.

Yes. Some of it was wasted.

Not all of it, and not in the way he feared at 3 AM, when everything looks like a total loss because it's 3 AM. But some of those years went into things that returned nothing, and no amount of narrative reframing turns them into tuition. Some of them were spent building things that no one ever used. Some of them were spent proving something to people who were never watching, which is the most expensive activity available to a certain kind of man and the hardest one to quit, because the audience being imaginary means it can never be satisfied and therefore never dismissed.

And the people. That part he had exactly right, and the six thousand words were written specifically so he wouldn't have to keep looking at it.

There are people I lost by being unavailable. Not by fighting with them. Not by wronging them in any way I could point to and apologize for, which would at least have given me something to do. I was simply somewhere else, for years, in a room, working. And the distance that opens up that way doesn't announce itself. There's no rupture. There's just a slow decline in the frequency of contact until one day you notice that you're a person they used to know.

There is no equivalent advantage in that. There is no seed in it. It is a straight loss, it was mine, and I made it in installments, freely, on purpose, one Tuesday at a time.

The myth is what made it feel reasonable. The iconoclast. The one who runs into the building. I did that for a living once, so I know the actual shape of it, and here is what the myth never tells you: those men have crews. Nobody goes in alone. The entire romance of the solitary figure charging into the fire is a photograph taken from the wrong angle, cropped to remove four other people who are the only reason he came back out.

I spent a long time trying to be the photograph.

V. And yet

Here's where the essay is supposed to turn and tell you it was all worth it after all.

It wasn't all worth it. Some of it was, and I can't yet tell you which parts with any confidence, and I've stopped requiring the answer before I'm allowed to continue.

Because that was the actual trap in the 3 AM question, and I didn't see it for two years. Do you stay so you can one day say it was worth it, or do you quit and brand yourself a quitter? Both options in that sentence are the same option. Both of them are asking the verdict to come first. Both of them make today's work contingent on a judgment that can only be issued at the end, by someone who isn't here yet.

You don't get the verdict. That's the deal. Nobody gets the verdict. The men who look from the outside like they got one are simply men whose results arrived early enough that they got to narrate backwards, and they will tell you it was worth it in exactly the confident tone you'd expect from someone who was handed the answer key.

So the reason to continue is not that it converts. I don't know that it converts. The reason is smaller and it holds better: the work is the only place the thing in me has anywhere to go. That's it. That's the whole reason. Whatever it is that has had me up at 3 AM since I was a kid does not have an off switch, and it is going to come out as building or it is going to come out as damage. I'd rather it came out as building. That is not a triumphant reason. It has never once let me down.

And the correction — the actual one, not the one I wrote at 3:40 in the morning — was never perspective at all.

It was contact.

Every hour I have spent adjusting my interpretation of the last ten years has changed nothing about the last ten years. A single phone call to a person I haven't spoken to since 2019 changes something real, immediately, in the world, at a cost of eleven minutes and the specific unpleasantness of admitting I let it go this long. Perspective is free, which should have been the tell. The things that repair anything all cost something, and what they cost is almost always the same currency: being seen not doing well.

I wrote six thousand words that night about the dance of life and the interconnectedness of all things and lifting each other up. Beautiful. Nobody's phone rang.

VI. Perspective is also a choice

I'll give the man at the desk the last line back, because he was right, he just hadn't finished the thought.

Perspective is a choice. But there are three of them on the table, not two, and he could only see two.

The first is despair: it was all wasted, there's nothing left, don't bother. That one is a lie because it's globally false — not all of it was wasted, and the 3 AM version of any life is a distortion produced by the hour.

The second is the sedative: it all happened for a reason, every wound was a seed, the storms were making me stronger the whole time. That one is a lie too, and it's the more dangerous of the two, because it feels like wisdom, it quotes well, and it lets you skip the part where you change anything. It is the reason I got another two years out of the same pattern. Comfort is not neutral. Comfort that arrives before honesty is just a slower version of the same loss.

The third is the one that costs something. Some of it was wasted, and I did that, and some of what it cost me is gone and is not coming back, and the correct response is not to reinterpret it but to stop doing it, starting today, in specific ways, with names attached.

That third one doesn't shimmer. There's no beautiful warmth in it. It won't make you feel better tonight, and it's the only one of the three that has ever changed a single thing about a single day of my life.

I don't wish I could erase those twelve months anymore. Not because they turned out to be secretly valuable. Because a man who erases them is a man who gets to keep his story about himself intact, and I've had about enough of that story. It cost too much, it wasn't true, and the crew was never in the photograph.

Perspective is also a choice.

Choose the one that costs you something. That's how you'll know it's the real one.

August Brooks
El Paso, Texas