BASTARD VEGAS HAMSTER WHEEL

It was the world series… of poker in Vegas, I was there for a month and I was not down with the get down.

I was not growing into anything, just a surviving human in a pretty jacked up situation driving into the brightest lights and the saddest souls. I just knew this was not the story I was meant to live. Surely the world is made of more beauty and purpose than the exchange of way too much cash, the hustling of sex and the illusion of a party.

The vibe pushed down on me, it made me sad for everyone who lived to work, worked to party and partied to escape work… and the hamster wheel rolls on and on. We are infinitely capable human beings, can’t we jump off of that wheel and choose our lives? We can choose to live better, to value people and not things, to cultivate with intentionality all of the things inside of us that we breathe in and out into the world.

Vegas came to an end, I got back to Nashville and broke up with the dude that insisted I go to Vegas in the first place. From there I flew to Hawaii, and began working on a project meant to help people that feel stuck in life. I met with athletes who had been cut from their teams and lost the one thing they believed gave them value, a father who had lost his wife to cancer, girls in abusive relationships, people in office jobs that were making them feel pointless and depressed, drug addicts. So many people, so many stories, so many untold stories from people no one would have thought were struggling. I found that people hadn’t told their stories, or really talked to anyone about what was really brewing inside of them because there is this pervasive idea that people only like and want to spend time with happy people.

I wanted to challenge this idea. I wanted to find a way to give purpose to the pain.

Film can make things seem real; exposing the reality and the isolating idea that you are the only one struggling in a particular way. It can challenge ideas we’ve held about people we haven’t understood, and help us explore a deeper connection to each other. So, let’s just say working in film beats Vegas all day everyday.

(Originally written for http://www.fancyrhino.com)

What satisfies

“It’s all good, i’m in Hawaii B****.” That’s what she said.

I remember thinking that this just seemed like a lie, because we know that this doesn’t really matter, we know that a location isn’t changing your internal makeup. Sure people are having fun, and it’s beautiful, but i notice something happen when i would talk to people about my project. I would see something change in their eyes, and there was this visible shift.

It went like this.

Person: So why are you here?

Me: Well, i’m mostly here to work on a documentary called “The Unstuck Project.”

Person: What’s this about?

Me: “It’s basically meant to feature people that feel stuck in their lives in a variety of ways. Primarily addiction, loss, stuck in a job, abusive relationship, difficult past etc. Anything that causes someone to feel despair, like they will never get out of where they are, like they don’t know how things will ever be better or how they will ever be “ok” again.”

That’s pretty much it, sometimes i would explain a little more but mostly that’s it. Here in the Mainland i can explain this film, and people will most often say that it’s a cool idea, but you know… for OTHER people. I get that glassy eyed stare where i’m pretty sure people think i’m talking about their life, and i feel them get a little uncomfortable, like they don’t want it to be them. Because it would just be too awful to be where you are. What i found in Hawaii was vastly different. I give my answer, and very often from every corner of the world people told me the truth, and with ease. It wasn’t weird or uncomfortable, it didn’t make me like them less, which is all i can imagine for why so much of the time we don’t tell the truth about what’s going on. I think we make it a big deal, or maybe a lot of people really suck at responding to reality when someone is brave enough to share theirs. But it’s really not that weird, because nearly everyone has a been at a place in life that cannot be sewn up to look better than it is, and what ends up happening, is that we don’t tell the real story of the real us because that is too scary, but we end up telling on ourselves with our actions… usually. Somehow that is more comfortable. But i just prefer the real story about your life, and i’m really glad you weren’t ashamed to tell it and i’m impressed, legitimately impressed that you giant former pro European athlete dude sat down with me at a party and told me the truth, and the man who lost his wife to cancer and is now left with two children told me the truth, and the brilliant girl who is transitioning out of homelessness told me the truth, and over and over and over again.

 All in all i’ve found that you are where you are in your mind. You think you can’t feel failure, loss, emptiness, loneliness, abuse, addiction because the weather is great, and because the ocean is spot on? Or that the the girl, the guy, the drugs, the drink, the attention is going to heal you up until it doesn’t and you just need it all over again. 

Everyday you are seeking, sometimes it’s just this auto pilot thing where a lot of you is seeking/controlled by an impulse managed by physiological pathways that you’ve created based out of habit. But i bet we can live better than this. I bet fulfillment and purpose are more than base desires, and grasping at the temporary.

I don’t want people to feel helpless, to hide, to lose life in a battle with shame or even sometimes just not knowing why we feel so empty at times. While traveling and learning people’s stories I really just came to love people more, you almost can’t help it when you get the chance to really see people. It’s like the veil has been lifted, and you can see and now you just have to do something with that sight.