Part Eight: The Main Event
The episode in which our hero faces his greatest (and most harrowing) challenge yet.
[Part Eight of a Twelve-Part Series, “A Roadmap to Freedom”]
As the fall of 2017 descended, and the New York nights grew crisp and cool, the inner friction I was feeling around my decision to get back together with Amy was reaching a fever pitch. I knew that staying with her was an acceptance of remaining stuck in the safety of my Gatsby identity: a world of running in childlike ways away from my own evolution as a man. But my attachment to her was too strong. At times, it felt motherlike—and leaving her felt no different than death.
In an effort to escape the overwhelming evidence around me that our union was ill-fated, I helped Amy draw up a Hail Mary move to Los Angeles. But on a trip to scout out rental homes, I awoke in our Hollywood hotel room before sunrise in a panic. An inner voice that seemed louder than ever screamed at me: When she wakes up, you have to break up with her. I cried watching the sun come up over the city. I cursed myself for my weakness. But when Amy awoke, I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I dismantled my life in New York, piece by agonizing piece, which began with putting my beloved lake house in the Hudson Valley on the market. The same place I’d reclaimed myself in Amy’s absence—where I’d reconnected to nature, to my feelings, and to new friends like Laura, Brian, Justin and others who understood me in a deeper and more intimate way.
It was these new connections I found it hardest to leave. At the going-away-party Amy planned at a warehouse space in Brooklyn, I struggled to hide the anguish and self hatred bubbling up inside me. I felt like a liar smiling and shaking hands and accepting gifts and congratulations on a move I knew was merely a giant cop out.
So I got drunk, and snorted cocaine for the first time in months. I serenaded the crowd to a Talking Heads tune. And as I came apart publicly for the first time since this whole debacle started, I caught a glimpse of Laura looking on, gutted and betrayed, her sadness mirroring my own. That night, my thoughts swirled and my heart pounded as I stared at the ceiling on my final day as a resident of New York City. I realized I was leaving the same way I’d arrived nearly a decade earlier: like a scared little boy—drunk, high, and lost.
Oh, Part Eight. It’ll bring us to our fucking knees, won’t it? The moral crisis within our hero reaching a crescendo as he faces his most daunting decision on the path yet.
“How did we get here?” You might be wondering. Well, Part Six and Seven found us living with the inner friction of spending time between two worlds, and the temptations of returning to what we knew. These stages tested us thoroughly. Maybe we succumbed — like I did — and tried to “fall back asleep” only to find that when we did, we realized, to our terror, that awareness does not function this way. We cannot unsee what we have seen. We cannot return to the ignorance is bliss moments of Part One or even Part Three, when we lived in our nice little ordinary worlds, free of the light of wisdom that makes staying in darkness nearly impossible.
Still, even with the hard facts presented like hors d'oeuvres on Death Row, the prospects of stepping over the threshold are terrifying. We are facing the death of our youth, our innocence, our limited visions of the way things were and these things do not die easily. No, they hang on as long as they can. Similar to Part Two, where we were invited to descend and opted to bail, we are faced again with a prospect of moving forward, or continuing to try to run away from the destiny bubbling forth inside us.
This creates an epic battle within us, or outside of us: It’s Luke and Vader, 300 Spartans vs. 20,000 Persians, the warriors of light vs. the enemy of the darkness. No less than an epic moral standoff within our character’s heart that will show us what he is made of and how far he has come. Everything is on the line. If we fail, we resign to a life spent denying our soul’s destiny. We turn from the manhood being offered to us in exchange for those sweet and soft comforts of what we know. Our soul withers on the vine.
We see men who have folded at this stage in the ordeal many times over. Michael Jordan’s condition in the popular Netflix series The Last Dance comes immediately to mind. After retiring from professional basketball, Jordan has been speculated to struggle with depression and addiction (his yellowing eyes and sagging demeanor in the series surely give this sad truth away).
Because of his inability to recreate himself as something other than a basketball player, Jordan never made the crucial leap into elder-hood. He became a shadow of his former self, unwilling to release his identity as G.O.A.T. and move into the next phase of his life, whatever that phase may be. In doing so, he eroded inside.
Can you blame him? After all, so many of us do given the stakes on the line here. Death has arrived at our door and he’s no longer politely knocking. He’s hacking away like Jack in the Shining, sending ripples of terror into our still-frail hearts.
Yes, The death of what we know looms now larger than ever: perhaps threat of a literal death, or the death of an identity we’ve clung to for so long. But make no mistake, when we try to evade death, we suffer even more unspeakable horrors. Joy is but a memory. Our blood runs cold. “Analysis paralysis” takes over. Mind and heart clash in an epic duel: This could be the moment we realize - no matter how much work we put in - our marriage is over. Or when we know, in our bones, we simply must quit our 9-5 job and pursue our passion fully. It could be the day we wake up and admit that all the messy and dysfunctional relationships in our life have a single common denominator: Us.
Every man has a Part Eight in his journey and every man knows what choice he has made. There are only two:
Follow your gut, your soul, your intuition, your destiny, your inner knowing
Or swallow the truth of what you know deep down in your cells, perhaps forever.
This is the choice. And although only five steps remain on this quest of all quests, they make up the majority of the journey. Because it is only when we have faced our greatest fears and truly looked ourselves in the mirror, that we can commit to our destiny — and manhood — in earnest.
Questions that will arise at this crucial point include:
What is my heart/gut telling me to do that my head is too scared to do?
If my life was a movie, what would the hero do now? (As Joseph Campbell said, knowing what the hero would do at any moment is ingrained in our DNA. We always know.)
What is trying to end in my life that I’m refusing to let go of?
What patterns are being shown to me now with increasing intensity?
Where is my edge?
What scares the shit out of me?
What leap(s) am I avoiding taking?
What is my destiny?
How am I avoiding it?
A stunning road trip through the American Southwest - from Austin to Los Angeles via Marfa, Sedona, Taos, Santa Fe and Abiquiu with Amy served as a brief respite after leaving New York. In Durango, I tried to enjoy the blazing yellow Aspens, even as the truth inside me threatened to burst forth from my chest.
In reality, it would be another two months before I cracked. And that crack would be helped along by a silver-haired therapist and men’s work facilitator named Stephen Johnson. I sat in his Beverly Hills Office and felt immediately at home, immediately returned to my truth, my memory of who I was at my core. Good men do this for us. “I’m scared to let go of Amy, but I know I have to,” I told him. He promised to support me.
Stephen put me in a men’s group. My first. I was fragile and intimidated, but within the first two meetings, I had vowed to my new group mates that I would split with Amy, and also quit drinking and drugs for good. The booze and coke were easy. Leaving Amy not so much. But when she left for a business trip back to the East Coast in early December, it hit me that now was the time—I had enough clarity to make a decision from a grounded place. I picked her up from LAX, and ended our relationship before I could chicken out. It was ungraceful, and brutal, and the house was filled for weeks with the sounds of our intermittent cries of grief from separate rooms. We held each other, we cursed each other, and in the end, when Amy packed up and left to return home to the Midwest for Christmas, I was alone in the silence of what I’d done. Horribly sad. But Triumphant. My spirit lifted again.
I spent the holidays selling off what remaining items of furniture and objects I had brought from New York on Craigslist. As people came to buy them, I knew the old me was walking out the door, too. The letters I wrote to friends, and the bittersweet phone calls I had with Laura, Brian, and others to tell them of the breakup and my new life in LA served as further evidence that I had said Goodbye to much of my old world. When the fire sale was complete, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Echo Park with a mattress, a rug, and a newly purchased Martin guitar. I would learn to play it in the coming years, as I would learn to play the notes and chords of my new life.
I would also have some cosmic help in turning the page after Amy’s departure: Stephen introduced me to a shamanic healer named Amanda Foulger in Topanga Canyon, a spiritual, mountain enclave outside Los Angeles. Alone for the holidays, I booked an appointment with her for Christmas Eve.
I remember that winter afternoon in Topanga vividly: the way the silence of the canyon appeared like a new promise. As I watched two grazing horses outside Amanda’s house, my soul felt at peace. Amanda had me lie on the couch covered in blankets as she worked above me for over an hour - rattling, drumming, chanting, swishing feathers, and waving smoke. When it was over, she told me: “Your heart has been closed for a long time. For the next day or so, you will experience what it feels like to have it open.”
Later that night, I sat alone in a little Thai restaurant in Ojai, emotions pouring out of me as I thought about Amy, how much I loved her, how much I’d hurt her, and how much I had hurt myself in trying to hold onto her. I was flooded with compassion for myself and for all the people I’d known — my friends, my enemies, my parents — and how blessed I was to have experienced them all. I knew I was entering a new, unknown phase of my life. And I knew it would be the greatest and most daunting adventure yet. Perhaps most importantly, I felt the incredible freedom that one feels when he faces his greatest fear to-date and comes out the other side.
This is the prize of Part Eight in a man’s journey— we find out what we are capable of letting go of. And it changes us forever.
(Part Nine will be released on Nov. 14th)
Thank you for sharing your journey. It’s helping me make the big life decisions that are necessary at this point.
Glad you have the courage to let go and start fresh.