Why I Don't Do Whatever the Fuck I Feel Like Anymore

I'm parked by the guardrails at the dead-end sign on Bay Ave. The clouds drift overhead and a sunbeam pokes through, lighting up the small ripples the wind is dragging across the water. The wind gusts past me. I sit still and drink in the quiet.

I ran away from this stillness for years. The thing I crave now — the thing that tells me what I need to do and how to do it — I used to run from like it was on fire. Sitting where I'm sitting today, I wonder how I got here.

The morning I broke my neck I was doing exactly what I always did. I'd woken up cloudy, frustrated, heavy in the body, the kind of anxious you can't think your way out of. So I went and jumped in the cold bay. That was the habit. The shock would scrub me clean for a few hours and I'd come out feeling like the noise had settled. I was quieting the voice inside me with a full sensory experience. Drowning out the feeling that was trying to tell me what I needed to do, and why.

Fishing was the same thing scaled up. I remember setting nets at midnight on the west wall of the Hudson Canyon in a gale, snow blowing sideways across the deck. It was all-encompassing in a way that drowned out whatever was going on in my head when things were quiet. And the intelligence in my body knew what to do. After a few seasons on the boat you'd put your feet down a half-second before the deck told you to. Snow would land and you knew the salt would turn it to slush, knew how to move through it without sliding. Then you'd pass out in your bunk so destroyed by the work that the noise didn't wake you, and you'd open your eyes in the morning to every cabinet hanging open and everything you owned on the floor. You'd just step over it and go.

And surfing was similar — a different version of the same drug. Find the biggest wave, fill up with that sensory experience, drown out the noise underneath. My body knew how to read the wave the same way it read the deck — knew where to put my feet, knew what the water was about to do before my head did. Spearfishing was the one I really loved, and looking back, my first real introduction to breathwork. Funny, because at the time I was smoking cigarettes and my lungs were not in great shape. I'd clip a knife to my leg in case I got tangled in monofilament and drowned. Figured that would be a safe bet.

Reading this back, I can see what I refused to see at the time. What's taken me years to learn and forget and stumble and relearn over and over: I needed everything to be loud, all the time. I had to set things on fire just to feel alive. What I was running away from was what the quiet was trying to tell me.

Here's the part that has taken most of my injury to notice. The body that knew the boat is the same body telling me what to do now. Same intelligence. There were never two of me — there was the loud me, and there was everything underneath, and everything underneath was reading the deck and reading my life at the same time. It knew the wave. It also knew which choices were going to hurt me, which things I had no business doing, who I was actually supposed to be. I was happy to take orders from it about where to put my feet on a moving boat. The rest of what it was saying, I needed gone — because it was telling me what I actually needed to do, and I didn't want to be an adult about it.

There's an intelligence in my body. It's the summation of my whole life, and it shows up when things are quiet. Taoism calls it original nature. It gives me a feeling — usually one with anxiety attached — and I have to be present to hear what it's trying to say. Where it's pointing me. What my decisions are about to do to my life. My subconscious, my gut, my body, all reporting in at once.

There's a literal organ involved. A thing in my gut called the enteric nervous system. Roughly as many neurons as the spinal cord. People call it the second brain. It's been running its own quiet conversation underneath my loud one the whole time. My gut, my subconscious, the part of me that knows things before I know I know them — these aren't metaphors. It's me. It's my tissue, and it's firing right now telling me what to do. I walk around assuming the narrator inside my head is me, but most of the time it's just the part that yells the loudest — the annoying drunk coked-up guy at the party who talks over everybody.

Six years into this body I can't feel from the chest down, I've been forced to sit with myself. Through health problems, near-death experiences, all of it — I just want my life to be easier. I haven't been able to run away from the feeling anymore. So I've started listening. It's become my guiding compass. In my breathwork, in my meditation, it tells me how to show up for myself. That's the part I had wrong before. It's when we stop showing up for ourselves, when we want to be the child instead of the adult, that's when we get in trouble.

Back then, I thought I was in control. I thought I was the part of me I could hear talking, and I thought the rest was scenery.

The injury didn't give me a second brain. It shut the first one up long enough for me to notice the second one had been driving the whole time.

So here I am at the beach. The sun is on the water now. I'm not flooding anything. I'm not seeking anything out. I'm not running away from myself.

I'm just listening. And I'm not being a fucking asshole anymore.