Truth begins in terror.
In the absolute certainty in your own disbelief that anyone truly cares.
Here’s a truth: I was alone for years because I carried a secret truth in my soul that I knew with every morsel of my being, was worth risking it all for. A life that shined like some beacon in the distance, a life worth waiting for, worth fighting for. I knew this, and felt the terror, but believed anyway that that life was the one I was meant to be living. A life lived fully. An unwritten life.
Todd Anderson knew this in Dead Poet’s Society, and I remember him shaking, his quivering breath as he looked down at his own desk. Vulnerability, in the end, and a crippling fear of it, was the thread that linked him to his friend Neil. Neil didn’t make it to the end of the film, Todd did, and I always was so struck by that contrast.
There is a cost to living your life fully, and I know this now. Took years at this discovery, took going through more things than I thought my little vulnerable heart could handle, but I got here, I’m here, now.
What took even longer to understand, however, is there’s a cost to not living it fully too. Both have a price, but I believe we are only able to afford one. The other, it turns out, is far too steep, it’s more than we can ever pay. This is what Neil knew in Dead Poet’s Society, this is what took him from this place, hollow and haunting as it may sometime seem.
Keating knew the opposite, and so too did Todd Anderson, only too late to save the pair of them, Keating from his dismissal, Neil from his irreversible act of self-harm.
A refusal to live a life less ordinary, to transform yourself and the machinations of your own soul to fit into the machinery of someone else’s invention. To quiet the thumping heart within your chest, costs everything, it turns out.
To live fully can sometimes cost our jobs, our friendships, our stability, our vulnerability, our ego, our own sense of who we were before we refused to concede a moment longer. Todd saw this after Neil’s death, after he could not live a life fully as himself, and chose his own path that he knew would end so tragically early. Todd saw, and stood on his desk anyway.
He stood, first.
I didn’t know where I wanted this entire four-part saga through Dead Poet’s Society to go when I thought it up. I knew the film meant more to me than I knew how to say, so I thought I owed it to it, to myself, to try to say it anyway. To speak of these costs, to speak of the terror that comes with truth, as it so often births it. I’m ending it here because it’s where it must end, not in sermon but in sharing of the simple truths I’ve learned after 45 years of living, those that came from refusing to live anything other than fully.
There were years of heartache, of a loneliness that can only come from watching others live the life you believed you were supposed to be living. There were years of sickness, of frustration, of stillness forced upon me like handcuffs no key was ever created for. At the end of them, as there is always an end to them, it was there but faint, there but still shining.
The great big beauty of a life fully lived, the consequence of the courage to choose it.
I created this place, this home to the rattlings of this curious mind, because I wanted there to exist a place that granted everyone who came the permission to feel EVERYTHING. The permission never needed, but somehow fed to us like a pill we did not wish to swallow.
I created this place to offer reminders, to offer little winks across the expanse of this universe that could shake you as though sleeping, to gently place my hand on your slumbering shoulder, to whisper you awake.
This is the cost of living with your heart wide open, I wish to say to you, Sometimes it takes everything, sometimes it’s almost more than we can pay, but, but…
There is no other way.
This time of year messes me up, to put it as ineloquently as possible. It shakes me every time, with its Autumnal scents and the sounds of leaves underfoot, the first lighting of wood fires and the smoke that rises like sage stick to smudge the evil spirits from this valley, this home. School returns, but not for me, not again, but I am transported back in time to a version of me that felt some shaking silence inside, that, like Todd Anderson, felt the tingle of vulnerability, the sensation of it clawing at the inside walls of you, wanting out, wanting freedom.
I just wanted to pay tribute to that film, to this season, to the yearly reminder that I cannot live a life anything short of fully. There are no halfways, no part-ways, no almost-theres. It’s all, or it’s nothing. It’s in, or it’s out. It’s everything, it’s everything, it’s everything.
I will not sermonize you on how to live, I will not push you to do the same as I do, I will not give you an optimized list of how, of why, of the pros or cons or whatever the hell else performs well on Substack and Notes and Social Medias that rot our souls, I will not, I cannot.
I will just be in this place, this strange unicorn of a place I made to give a home to all those who refuse to live a life written by someone else, who refuse to cower to the terror in truth, bow to the bombastically boring insult that is normal.
I will be here, and I will be waiting.
For you.
I love you all.
Be good.
Live a life fully
shout against anything less.
Stand upon your desk.
