Chapter 33
“She’s a shiny penny, I get it. But that’s not who we are.” —Quinn, Unreal
“Find your own truth. It will lead you to the things you love.” —Jax, Son of Anarchy
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” —Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
If you manage to stumble around long enough without getting yourself killed, eventually, you might get over yourself and end up with something that resembles a life.
For me, that process started when I got off drugs and made a wild guess at a career—truck driving. Terrible guess. I had no business being behind the wheel of a big rig, but somehow, that detour led me toward something better: my health, a sense of meaning, and a bit of authenticity.
People like to say, “Yeah, but you read a lot of books.” So what? Meaning isn’t some intellectual Rubik’s cube you can solve by thinking hard enough. If anything, the more you chase it, the more it slips through your fingers. Authenticity is the same way—part of being authentic is admitting, I have no idea what authenticity even is, and then fumbling around until you start to figure it out.
I didn’t know anything about anything—not at first. And the books I read didn’t exactly prepare me for life; they just helped me make sense of it in hindsight. The real learning came from a personal anarchy—the chaos of throwing my own shit against the wall—falling into love, friendship, purpose, and work. Somewhere in that mess, my place in the world revealed itself.
Today, I know where I belong. I belong in a shelter or a treatment center, around other addicts—somewhere close to where I came from, where I don’t have to censor myself, where blue jeans and a white shirt are basically the uniform, and where my job includes breaking up fights, lifting weights, and helping a bunch of addicts form lifelong friendships after trying to kill each other with vacuum cleaner attachments during chores.
That’s my thing.
Žižek has this line he likes to repeat—“The truth is out there, like The X-Files.” I think what he’s getting at is that if you find the right existential crack to wedge yourself into—some little point of excess that ignites your obsession—you can live inside of it, feel alive, and maybe even do something remarkable. Now, I can’t claim I’ve done anything remarkable (yet), but I’ve found a few things in this world that I can obsess over without ruining myself or dragging anyone else down with me. And until those things stop being interesting to me, my head stays buried in the sand, no matter where I am or what’s happening around me. I have found my Jüngerian Anarch.
drink your milk 