After the Wasteland
Sometimes it sucks to be human
I love being human. I love the joy of creation and the fun of being with family and friends, connecting, laughing, eating food and chasing dreams.
I hate being human. Internal suffering, worry, hurt, anger and being misunderstood.
One of the things that I have learned during my work with my mentors and coaches is that sometimes the only way to get over something is going through it. I remember walking with my good friend Trevor Timbeck on a hike in Hawaii and we mused that sometimes the only way to a breakthrough is a breakdown. I hope we were wrong and there are ways to a breakthrough that suck less.
I don’t know if it is correct to sit through the wasteland. There may be more spiritual kind of folk who have figured that out. All I know is I did, and I do. I let my emotions become energy in motion and tell me what they want to tell me. Sometimes it takes a minute for me to hear what they have to say. Sometimes I just don’t listen. I guess it sucks to be me.
The thing I love most about coming through the wasteland is the clarity I have.
Yet oftentimes you don’t come out of the wasteland with answers. You just know how to access them without the ache of the thing that just unhooked you.
You also come out with less tolerance for the BS and self-judgment that kept you stuck.
These are all internal shifts. But the wasteland doesn’t stop there. It rewires how you show up in the world. Here are some of the ways that things have shifted for me.
Less tolerance for circling.
Not doing the thing you know you have to do. Not saying the thing you know you have to say. Circling looks like having the same conversation with yourself for the third week in a row. It looks like knowing exactly what call you need to make but finding seventeen reasons why tomorrow is better. It looks like clarity without movement.
Less tolerance for soft decisions.
Being nice instead of kind. A soft decision is saying “I’ll think about it” when you already know the answer is no. It’s keeping someone on the roster because firing them feels mean. It’s avoiding conflict today and creating resentment tomorrow. A sharp decision is clean. Direct. Done.
Less tolerance for being who you used to be.
Once you are free from the need to be okay and feel okay, you are free to be and free to act. I used to spend so much energy managing how I came across. Making sure I didn’t upset anyone. Making sure people thought I had it together. It’s exhausting and dehumanizing. And it also keeps you small. When you stop needing to be okay, you stop performing. And when you stop performing, you start creating.
Less tolerance for those who waste your time with theory.
Navel gazing becomes agonizing. I had a call last month with someone who wanted to talk about their vision. For forty-five minutes he told me what he was thinking about doing. What he might create. What could work if the conditions were right. I finally stopped him. “What are you actually going to do this week?” He went quiet. Then he said he didn’t know. That’s when I knew we were done. The wasteland makes you allergic to that kind of conversation.
My friend Kathy Putta wrote me something after reading The Wasteland that stayed with me.
She said she could relate to “cold plunging my way, exercising my way, meditating my way, AI-ing my way out of difficult spaces. And, the sooner the better!”
That line hit.
Because that’s what most of us do. We try to fix our way out. Optimize our way out. Breathe our way out. Tool our way out.
Anything but sit in it.
The wasteland strips that away. You can’t cold plunge your way out of five days of sitting with anger. You can’t meditate your way past what needs to be felt.
You just have to be there.
And sometimes it sucks to be there.
That’s not bitterness. That’s clarity.
When you sit with yourself long enough, the bullshit becomes visible.
And once it’s visible, you can’t un-see it. Once you can’t unsee it, it becomes intolerable.
So you stop tolerating it. You stop circling. You stop softening your decisions. You stop performing who you used to be. You stop entertaining conversations that go nowhere.
Not because you’re angry. Because you’re clear.
The wasteland doesn’t make you softer.
It makes you sharper.
And that changes everything.