Growing up I would never have said I was an especially tough kid, I’m not sure I would even call myself “strong” I was if anything a bit more on the weak side. Though I suppose that our spirits are always the same, maybe I just needed the confidence to push through the hard obstacles.
Which was part of the reason why I pushed and challenged myself to live in my van for the last 4 months . Another reason was saving money (which WOW without paying rent money adds up fast) but the big appealing factor was the challenge. There was something fulfilling about working 12 hour shifts serving, my co-workers complaining that they are tired and wanting to go home, meanwhile I’m thinking you fucks! I gotta go back to my van!
Of course I never said this and I wouldn’t either. No one needs to know what I’ doing and I don’t need sympathy but it was cool knowing that with circumstances that I bet most would fold under, I was trying to thrive, I was still doing art here and there, I was still having some fun.
But now that my time in the van is coming to an end in the van, with only 5 more days left and then I’m done, I’ve been reflecting on my experience and the major thing that I came out of this with is confidence in my ability to overcome difficult circumstances and NOT fold.
I walk away from the sliding doors knowing that I am a lot tougher and resilient than I thought I was. Challenging yourself in such ways leaves you with a little more bounce in your step than you had before, your head is held a little higher and you are more convicted in achieving your own success.
A lot of young men today seem to think that porn addiction is a dragon that must be slain and in my opinion porn is a very small thing in the scheme of what you must overcome in becoming a man.
Tom Brown (a famous survivalist / woodsmen) wrote one his books that he spent a year outside, living by his own means, from summer to summer. So he was outside for ALL of winter in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. In one of the chapters of the book he writes that such an experience was a rite of passage for him. He entered a boy and left a man.
Now, in my opinion that IS a rite of passage, probably even more than that but that’s why I get mad when people say “quitting porn is a rite of passage.” It isn’t. Shit like THAT is.
It’s a rite of passage for the men who haven’t really lived extreme lives, they haven’t experienced MUCH so quitting porn is therefore seen as a rite of passage.
I guess it is what it is, those men will never be daring enough to push into the more extreme trials some men go through like Tom Brown.
They will never as Goldmund said journey to the top of a mountain and take some mushrooms. They will never live as hard as that and can you fault them? Not really.
But I don’t think you can really be an interesting man without being extreme. Extreme personalities are interesting, phlegmatic types that do mostly safe things are not.
I don’t want to rag on these people though, they don’t get it and won’t.
Not really my audience anyways.
What I do want to wrap this up with this is a message to my readers.
“You may or may not be strong right now, or think you are not strong but deep inside you there’s a spirit that’s brought you all the way to where you are now. It was inside your ancestors when they were alive and through the generations it’s now a part of you. That spirit is strong and if you let it shine, it will. You are A LOT tougher mentally than you think you are. You wouldn’t be alive right now if you weren’t.”
Delacroix's Desk 