Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  J.’s advice was not to think about it, to do it. “It sounds simple, but I know over the years when I’ve found myself flowing, I was writing, writing, writing, but then I hit what’s called writer’s block, and that’s when I found I was overthinking it, telling myself: ‘It has to be this. It has to be good.’ When I take myself out of that space and write down whatever comes to mind, I’m not thinking about if it’s good or not good. I’m just putting it onto the page.

  “I tell people it’s like meditation. It’s a matter of being still and listening. Writing is the next step in. ‘Okay, I’m still. I’m listening. Whatever I hear I’m going to write down. I’m not going to think about what I’m hearing. I’m going to write it down, and then from there, I’ll structure and rewrite and go back through it.’ Be free with it. Don’t have any expectations. Don’t have any reservations. Don’t give in to fear. A lot of people harbor fear, and that’s huge. It will get in the way. Often people are worried about what other people will think, but don’t worry about that. What do you think? Don’t worry about it being good or bad. Feel it. Whatever you feel, write that down.

  “I’ve found that if I feel it, other people feel it. If I like it, other people love it. It’s a matter of being confident and knowing that you have a gift. You have an amazing ability to put thoughts together. Be still. Listen. And write.”

  I loved that. One important piece of advice J. gave was not to worry what other people think. Many people, including me, will stop in the middle of writing because they begin to compare themselves to other writers. Learning to let go of that is huge. The other thing that works well for me is to write like today is my last day on Earth, my last day of being alive. Write with that kind of passion and abandonment. Pretend this is your last chance to sit down and write, so let it all out. Fuck what anyone else thinks.

  J. connected with what I was saying, too, when he worked on his verse for the song “Never Let Me Down” on Kanye West’s College Dropout. He asked himself, “What if I never get another opportunity like this one?” Writing out of desperation pulls something out of you, and it makes listening even easier. Another important piece of advice is not to let your ego get in the way, because your ego is the part of you that makes you think about what everybody will say. As J. put it, “If you can get the ego out, that’s another factor. Be free with it. That experience was a huge lesson for me when it came to writing, because after the record came out I went through a long period of overthinking, and the overthinking came from me having the idea, ‘Okay, now that this record is out, and now that it’s been heard by millions of people and I’m on a record with Kanye and Jay-Z, I have to do that again, or better.’ I found myself struggling with trying to emulate that, and my thoughts got in the way. After a long period of struggling, one day I woke up and asked, ‘What am I doing? I wrote that piece one day freely, having fun. That’s cool. But write something else now. The gift hasn’t gone anywhere.’ So yeah, overthinking will kill it.”

  Appreciating our gifts segued nicely into something else I wanted to explore with J.: gratitude. It was something he described as being very important in his own life. In the chapter “Fear Is a Hell of a Drug,” he wrote:

  In that moment I forgot to be grateful for what I did have in my life. I forgot to live in gratitude. I was spoiled by the success I had been experiencing, and falling off of that high made me feel so low. Not doing led to no money. No money led to isolation. Isolation led me back to feeling depressed.

  Depression led to not writing and doing what I naturally loved. With each step not being taken, I felt lower and lower. The negative spirits of old were haunting me again. Those negative voices were telling me that I wouldn’t amount to anything, telling me that I would fail like my father did. Those voices were whispering to me that my dad left ’cause I was worthless, ’cause I was nothing, ’cause I didn’t deserve to be loved. Those same voices were telling me that the world would follow suit and abandon me. Those voices were telling me to shut up, to stop writing, to stop performing, they were telling me that no one wanted to hear what I had to say.2

  That rang true for me because to this day, those voices still creep into my head—the ones that tell me, as they did J., that indeed I am worthless and don’t deserve to be loved. Sometimes they go a step further and become darker, saying the world would be a better place without me in it, and things to that effect. It’s during those times (on a good day) that I pull myself back into the moment and remember that I have so much to be grateful for, the least of which certainly not being that after all the shit I’ve been through I’m still alive and can be of service to others. Thinking about that, I asked J. to elaborate a bit more on gratitude and how that impacted him.

  J. told me that “gratitude is major. With gratitude, one of the things it does is keep you in the moment. If you’re grateful for what you have right now, then you’re in the moment. You’re not in the past harping on what did or didn’t happen, or who did what, or why life is a certain way or not. You don’t harp on it. Instead, you’re grateful in the moment. I’m grateful that I’m breathing, that I have life, that I have a beautiful wife, that I have opportunities and blessings coming my way. I have a roof over my head and I have food. I’m grateful that I have another day to create a world, to build on the steps from the past. I have lessons and knowledge and different experiences, and I won’t, hopefully, make the same mistakes going forward.

  “Gratitude is huge. I remember when I was writing my book, I was on a plane flying from Chicago to New York and I had the final version from the editor—when they send you the actual pages and you have to write on them and mark them up. I was on the plane and flipping through and taking notes, making sure everything was in order, and I reread the ‘Dear Father’ poem.

  “I became overwhelmed with gratitude. I started thinking about how I went through a lot and how I was grateful that I could come through it. I was grateful that my father and I did have a relationship when I was younger. He brought me here. He taught me a lot, even when he wasn’t here. He taught me things, and I learned from him; I knew he was walking with me on this path of Dear Father. I knew he was opening doors. I was grateful for having the ability to write this story and the gift of being able to get out and perform it and meet people and speak. I became overwhelmed as I thought about how if I hadn’t have gone through any of this and my life had been perfect, maybe I would have been grateful for other things, but I wouldn’t have been in this moment. I wouldn’t have had this story to tell. I wouldn’t have these experiences to share with people so they might help someone else. Gratitude is huge for me.”

  Like J., gratitude and forgiveness have been huge for me as well. When it comes to forgiveness, however, what is different in my case is that I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot more forgiveness than I’ve had to give; I suppose that’s what happens when your life is overwhelmed by drugs and alcohol. Fortunately for me, I’ve been blessed with the most incredibly compassionate and supportive family a person could ask for, something I know others aren’t so fortunate to have. I’ve also had some pretty incredible friends who’ve had my back through it all. The chorus from the song “Dead at Birth” by Connecticut hardcore band Death Threat sums up what I’ve felt for so much of my life: “I’ve got nothin’ but I’ve still got friends. / I’m fuckin’ broke but I still make ends. / I love my family / and all the friends who stood by me.”

  J. closed our conversation with some of the best advice I’ve gotten in a long time. “Stay lifted, stay positive. A new day is coming. Live in gratitude and be grateful for what you have. A long time ago, a buddy of mine said, ‘Pain is a temporary inconvenience,’ and the key word is ‘temporary.’ It isn’t eternal. No storm ever lasted forever, and it’s important that we remind ourselves of that. Better times are coming. Keep fighting for it. It can be a beautiful and fun fight. Just keep fighting for it.”

  PRACTICE

  Write Because Your Heart Demands It

  Journaling h
as been a hugely cathartic practice for J., me, and so many other people I know, so I’d like to share some thoughts (rather than instructions) that will hopefully help get you started if words are your thing.

  • Write like today is your last day on Earth, your last day of being alive. Write with that kind of passion and abandonment. If this was your last chance, what would you say?

  • Fuck what anyone else thinks.

  • Get out of your head. Sit in stillness and write what you feel. Write for release, for healing . . . maybe even for sanity.

  • Don’t force yourself to write every day if you’re not feeling it. I know this would be considered blasphemy by many writers, but this is my truth, so I’m going to share it how it is. This is something I learned very early on while writing songs. If you’re forcing it, it’s going to be ugly, if it happens at all. If that’s the case, leave it alone and come back to it when you feel inspired. One of the worst things I think a writer can do is force it.

  • If you feel you must write every day, I’ll be the last one to tell you not to, but if that is the case, you’re bound to run into times when the well is dry and nothing is coming out. When this happens, Google is your friend. Simply type in something like “writing prompts” or “journaling prompts,” and you’re sure to get a ton of websites that will provide you with enough writing ideas to last a lifetime.

  • Don’t write for money or fame. Please, just don’t. It’s almost guaranteed to come off as empty, soulless, contrived, and just fucking gross. Instead, write because you want to be heard, even if it’s only by yourself.

  • Write because your heart fucking demands it of you.

  • Write because it’s the only thing in that moment that will help you find any semblance of understanding in this screwed-up world . . . or don’t. What the fuck do I know, anyway?

  11

  RISING FROM THE WOUNDEDNESS

  CONVERSATION WITH JP SEARS

  Besides being the funniest man on the spirituality and wellness circuit, JP Sears is a dear friend and an incredible guide when it comes to working through difficult emotional experiences, particularly childhood pain. He’s known for his Awaken with JP video series, which is a YouTube sensation, and is the author of How to Be Ultra Spiritual. I went to him for help figuring out how the wounds of childhood affect our adult lives and how we can begin to uncover and release them, freeing years of pent-up suffering and negative emotional energy and preventing future relapse into destructive behavior.

  JP defines relapse as “when we slide backward into a recurring pattern of dysfunction from our past that we’ve been distanced from for a while. In other words, experiencing the shadow of the past in the present.” It’s that shadow I wanted to delve into and its connection to our inner child. Hold up: When I talk about “inner child,” I mean the part of our psyches we still carry from childhood—bumps, bruises, scrapes, traumas, delights, and all. For me, that might look like the kid who from his earliest memories never felt like he fit in and struggled to find his place in the world. For someone else it might be the child who witnessed his or her alcoholic parents fighting on a regular basis or endured physical abuse at the hands of a sibling.

  Our inner child can be wounded in so many ways. Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse come to mind first, but there are more subtle means of inflicting harm, like traumatizing religious teachings of fire, brimstone, and eternal damnation; cultural and toxic shame, such as having to be a “Perfect 10” or the smartest, fastest, or best; not to mention institutionalized racism and sexism, which scientific studies have shown begin damaging us from a very early age.1 Many of these wounds of childhood manifest in addictive behavior when we’re adults as we take the wrong path toward self-healing.

  JP had an interesting take on the whole concept of childhood wounds. “Because we’re infinitely creative beings, as children we create many ways to be wounded. I use the word ‘creation’ because all wounding is a matter of our perception. It has very little to do with what happened but everything to do with our experience.”

  Then he took it further, saying: “It’s essential that we become wounded.” That struck me as strange until he elaborated. “I know that sounds a bit Jeffrey Dahmer–ish, but I want to pay great respect to the sacredness of being wounded. If as children we didn’t unconsciously invest in creating wounding perspectives for ourselves, how the hell could we ever grow and get strong? One of the paradoxes of life is if you want to grow strong, you must be wounded. In other words, wounding is where we feel weak. Weakness is what gives rise to strength. Just like if you go to the weight room and want to build stronger biceps, you physically wound your biceps when you’re lifting weights. You’re wounding your muscle, breaking it down. As children, we make a sacred agreement at some level: ‘Yes, I will go through this experience so that I can perceive trauma, pain, suffering from it.’ That is a gift that the child gives its future self, because its strength arises out of its wounded-ness.”

  He added a caveat: “I don’t think any of us need to go out and intentionally or consciously create wounding experiences. From the innocence and naiveté of our child self, we take on the appropriate level of woundedness in our formative years. It takes a long damn time to process it, to recover from it. And this is probably one of the reasons that life takes so long, because we pack in a lot of density of experience that we might call our wounds—it takes a while to sort through. Our wounds can occur in the vertical dimension of time, so someone might inappropriately touch us and the act might take five seconds, but to a significant degree, it impacts us based on our perception of the experience. So much so that we’re not going to heal it in five seconds; it might take five months, five years, or five decades.”

  JP paraphrased Carl Jung as saying: “There are two principal wounds, two principal perceptions that create a wound: As a child I perceive that I am either overwhelmed or underwhelmed, which is the same thing as abandonment.” JP added to that: “When we’re overwhelmed, we’re perceiving our boundaries, our sense of self as being violated, and if we can’t process what’s happening in the moment, then the emotions get stuck and create psychological scar tissue—that’s the wound.” I’d never heard of this overwhelm/underwhelm concept before and found it fascinating.

  It works in the other direction as well. We may be underwhelmed, “which is not feeling close enough. We may not have our sense of self validated when we need it. There’s too much distance between self and others, so typically what happens is we walk away when we’re underwhelmed, abandoned, with a sense that we don’t matter, that we’re not enough. Part of how the wound is created is we typically assign a sense of ‘it’s my fault.’

  “Whatever happened, whether we were overwhelmed—physically, emotionally, mentally, sexually—or underwhelmed, we harbor a sense of ‘this is my fault.’ We internalize it. It’s a way for us to feel control over that which we perceive to be uncontrollable. If wacky stuff is happening and it’s overwhelming, it’s painful, and we can’t control it, we look for what can give us a sense of safety, because being out of control is fear. Often what gives us a sense of safety is to anesthetize that fear.”

  I knew where JP was coming from. There were so many times when the only way I could cope with my self-loathing was to drown it in a bottle of cheap vodka or overindulge in sugary and processed foods. Anything that gave me even the slightest sense of relief from having to be me for a little while could become a remedy.

  JP explained how to move that blame in a new direction. “If I can say, ‘It’s my fault,’ and I get to feel a sense of control within the context of that which I cannot control, the degree to which I need to have a sense of control out of making this my fault is the degree that I internalize my felt experience, my perceived experience, and my thoughts about what’s happening. I internalize it to a deep degree, so it’s buried inside. It’s hard to access, hard to process, and that’s part of what makes a wound a wound, rather than a painful challenge that’s overcome in
the moment.” He made the distinction between a challenge—“this was tough to go through, but I got through it”—and a wound—“this is tough to go through, but I haven’t gone through it yet.” It may take weeks, months, years, or lifetimes to turn challenges into wounds.

  JP’s insights into challenges and wounds made me think about how when it comes to kids, they’re going to get wounded, even if they’re growing up in what would typically be considered a healthy household with loving parents, positive reinforcement, and all that. What can those of us who are parents do to potentially lessen this wounding? I was curious, because for so many people I’ve worked with, particularly those dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, the issues are predominantly rooted in childhood, and aren’t just big things like molestation but can be seemingly minor or innocent—such as being ignored by your parents or spanked as a punishment—and yet weren’t experienced that way by the child. When I spoke with Gabor Maté (chapter 2), he shared his belief that all addiction stems from childhood traumas, noting that a trauma is not always a big event like most people consider it to be. How can a parent take a preventive approach to these wounds?

  JP had a great suggestion: Don’t try to avoid the issue. “Avoiding it means we flip-flop. For example, a parent might say, ‘When I was a kid, my parents lived through me, and boy, that was painful. I’m not going to do that with my kid. I want to avoid wounding my kid like that.’ In defiance of how they were raised, parents reverse polarities. They think they’re not going to wound their child with overwhelm, but their child will likely perceive a wound of abandonment. Trying to avoid wounds just inflicts more wounds. Make space for wounding and know that even if you are a perfect parent, that too will wound your child because they need to be wounded” to grow both mentally and spiritually. Think about it like removing the dead foliage from a plant—if you don’t “wound” the plant by pruning it, the plant can’t grow.