Three Fifteen in the Morning

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?

· · ·

I wrote that at three fifteen in the morning and I meant every word of it. I want to test the last part, because it is the part that lets me off.

Perspective is a choice. That is true, and it is also the most convenient thing a man can believe at three in the morning with the ledger open in front of him. There is a version of choosing perspective that means looking at the same facts and finding the more useful reading. There is another version that means deciding to stop looking. They feel identical from the inside. Both produce relief, and relief is a poor instrument for telling them apart.

So before I take the comfort, the bill.

· · ·

Here is what the pursuit actually costs, stated plainly, without the softening.

It costs calls you did not return, and then did not return, until returning them required an explanation you did not want to give. It costs the slow discovery that people stop asking. Not dramatically — nobody announces it. The messages just get further apart, and then one day you notice the last one in the thread is theirs.

It costs the specific quality of a friendship that has been kept alive on catching-up rather than presence. You can still call that person. They will be glad to hear from you. But you are now updating each other rather than knowing each other, and the difference is not something an apology fixes.

It costs occasions. They do not accumulate anywhere you can see. They just are not there later.

That is the ledger, and none of it converts into anything. There is no exchange rate. The work does not buy those back at any price, and the honest thing to say is not it was worth it — the honest thing is those were spent, and they are gone, and the thing I bought with them may still turn out to be worth nothing.

· · ·

Now the trap in the question itself.

Was it worth it cannot be answered by the person who paid. Not out of cowardice — structurally.

If the work lands, I will look back and find the sacrifice necessary, and I will be lying, because a man who wins does not audit the cost of winning. Every hard year becomes a chapter with a purpose in it. The story writes itself backward from the outcome and calls itself insight.

If the work fails, I will look back and find the same years wasted, and that will also be a lie, told by the same mechanism running the other direction.

Either way, the verdict is produced by the result rather than by the facts, which means it carries no information. Waiting for it is waiting for a number that will be filled in by whatever happens, and then presented to me as though I had discovered something.

So I will not get to know. That is the actual answer, and it is not a comfortable one. What I can do instead is stop asking a question built to be unanswerable, and ask a smaller one that has a real answer.

· · ·

The three-in-the-morning mind constructs a fork with two prongs, and both of them are catastrophic. Stay and grind until the vindication arrives. Or quit, and wear the word quitter on the inside where it can work on you quietly.

Look at that fork in daylight and notice that it is a fabrication. Nothing in the situation requires either. The cost was never the pursuit; it was the way the pursuit crowded out everything with no deadline attached to it. That is a scheduling failure wearing the costume of a life-defining choice.

The unreturned call is repairable this week. It costs the work almost nothing — an hour that would otherwise have gone to a task I will not remember in a month. The friendship that has thinned to updates thickens again only through repetition, and repetition is available. None of that requires abandoning anything.

The fork is a lie the exhausted mind tells because a catastrophic choice feels more important than a small correction, and at three in the morning importance is the only currency that registers.

· · ·

And the word quitter deserves a harder look than I gave it.

Notice the shape of that fear: not that stopping would be wrong, but that others would see it. That is a fear about an audience, and the audience is smaller and less attentive than it feels. Almost nobody is tracking the arc of another man's ambition closely enough to render a verdict on it. The people who are tracking it are the ones I have been neglecting, and their verdict, if I asked for it, would not be about the work at all.

Then the harder part. Sometimes stopping is the more difficult act, and calling it quitting is how a man avoids doing it. Persistence has a good name, so it makes an excellent hiding place. There are years spent continuing precisely because continuing required no decision, and the word quitter stood guard over the exit the whole time.

I am not saying I should stop. I am saying I do not currently know whether I should, and I have been using a word to keep from finding out.

· · ·

One more thing, about the line I am proudest of in what I wrote that night.

The curse of a deep and powerful mind is that it can see so well one's own truth. I still think that is right. But seeing your own truth clearly is not the same as seeing it accurately, and at three in the morning the two are indistinguishable.

What actually happens in those hours is that the mind builds a case, and it builds it fluently, and the fluency feels like insight. It is not. It is the same machinery that produces a confident explanation for a choice you never made. I have written about it elsewhere and I am not exempt from it. The clarity of a verdict delivered at three fifteen is a feeling about the verdict, not evidence for it.

Which does not make the night worthless. The splinter that woke me was real. It was pointing at something true — that I had let the wrong things become urgent. It was the interpretation that overreached, not the ache.

That is the correction I would offer the man who wrote those paragraphs: trust what woke you. Do not trust what it told you.

· · ·

So, perspective as a choice — yes. But not the version that arrives as warmth and shimmer and limitless futures. That one is available on demand, which is exactly what makes it suspect.

The version I will take is narrower. I choose to keep the ledger open rather than close it in my own favor. I choose to hold it was worth it as a question that will not resolve, instead of an answer I award myself for endurance. And I choose to stop treating the small repairs as beneath the size of the problem, since they are the only part of it I can actually do anything about.

That is less beautiful than what I wrote at three fifteen. It has the advantage of being true, and of surviving daylight.

We are only beginning. I still believe that. I would only add that beginning again does not require the last stretch to have been necessary — it just requires the next one to cost less than it did. That much is up to me, and it is due now rather than at some future point when the verdict comes in.

The verdict is not coming. There is only the next year, and who is in it.

— August Brooks