Failure is Your Adventure, Empathy is Your Reward

A long time ago, maybe when I was 16, I realized I wanted to be an artist. I felt strongly that nothing other than my discriminating taste and love of reading entitled me to anything less.

Then I grew cold with the reality that I was embarking on a life that few others had truly committed to and would be able to sustain.

I thought of my future friends in their office cubicles, wiling away the hours like the wall-clocks they were staring at while they collected paychecks, bought flat-screen TVs, went on cruises and got married to people who vaguely resembled them. They had decided to compartmentalize themselves into discrete units, like the money they felt they needed in their pockets. Then I remember feeling lonely. There they’d be, compartmentalized into discrete units, and there I’d be, formless and asymmetrical.

I had had that experience already in the 3rd grade when I thought it was a good idea to use my ability to draw anatomically correct humans “to teach” my homies what humans actually looked like.

I was found out and suspended. Later under the interrogating light of my parents’ kitchen, my father pulled out all the drawings I had made. Smirking, he asked as concerned as he could, why were all these naked people skiing? I felt shame at first, but not because I had drawn naked people skiing, but because I hadn’t adeptly illustrated perspective to indicate how slanted the slope was against the hills in the background and went right back to work. My dad didn’t discourage me but he also didn’t get it, even though I tried to explain my intentions.

Needless to say, by high school I had given up trying to explain myself to others. Consequently, I was bored, in class, during lunch, talking with friends in the hallway, listening to the creaking noises of their ever-maturing personalities taking shape into newer versions of their lame-ass regular parents. I started to write, more as a frustrated conversation with another person whom I dug.

I deemed this self-imposed seclusion a sign of my discipline and my ability to protest what I viewed as the poor taste around me: I could find no solace in dances, pop music, academic achievement or the titillation of puppy love. I wrote every single day and read more, fine tuning my exhaustive arguments and becoming a judgmental asshole in the process.

But at least I was letting my voice be heard. And I grew addicted to it.

Moving deeper into my own introspections, I soon realized that I was becoming a genuine misanthrope. This flew directly in the face of the deep pain I felt when I came across someone suffering or feeling alone. I’ve often gravitated toward loners, the discarded few who couldn’t figure out why they were so fucked up; if someone, say, was slumped in a corner after having gotten beat up, I felt in some way responsible to at least help out.

So I made a choice. To fulfill my potential as a human, I needed to transcend my now hardened ego through understanding the suffering of others so intimately that I could no longer judge anyone.

It’s been a long time, a period in which I almost forgot the initial reason for this undertaking.

To launch, this empathy transfusion required repeated visits to Greece during high school where I was totally rejected by the same girl twice. I’m not sure I even liked her, but as a budding artist I knew heartbreak was essential in knowing what the hell people were talking about when they talked about (unrequited) love.

Finally, after a long summer dazing into the ocean to find the right words to articulate my infatuation, I said to hell with it, marched eight miles to her parent’s house in the midday sun and woke her whole family up out of a siesta. Though she looked puzzled standing in her yard and told me it could never be (she had chosen some square-headed dude from the village up the hill), I’m still very proud of risking my dignity and not shrinking away from the moment. The audacity to voice what felt true to me was what led to that.

Naturally, after this I spent time as an inclusion advocate with other people who needed to hear their own voices be heard: The differently-abled, the elderly, the disenfranchised. During college I worked in a number of people-centered roles applying this rule of audacity more generally. The lesson here was simple: When given a sense of agency, people can usually discover all the confidence they’re ever going to need to navigate their own perilous adventure.

But my judgments were still hard to wear down. So, inadvertently completing the circle, I devoted time to being a business dude–a period so misaligned with my interests it felt like I was a larper who had stumbled into a digital media conference at SXSW. But I needed to know what it was like to care about collecting paychecks, buying flat-screen TVs, going on cruises, etc. So I stuck around, hoping to understand what so many seem to care about.

I learned the pursuit of material gain is a chance to live a life of faultless, average routine–the same average life that crushes people. But crushes them so incrementally as to lull them into thinking they’re normal along the way.

Unsurprisingly, in every office I’ve worked in I have also found a moonscape barren of empathy.

There was always some version of the lonely account manager who had moved so far away from his/her small town to prove something, her only friends were usually the people we worked with. Sentences like, “we are a family here,” would sputter out during heated arguments over who would take the blame for a client fuck up. Then she’d proceed to backstab everyone, her cognitive dissonance on full display.

I’d usually have to hang back late plugging in my billable hours to clients. It was then I could see her resolve crumble in her wallowing loneliness faced by an empty computer screen, as everyone else had already filed out promptly at five or six to go on a date or hang out with friends or be with their family.

Then, moments later, she’d amble by and intimately say, “hey, today was crazy, wasn’t it?”, in the kind of croaking voice you’d hear in the morning after a long night of fighting and crying.

“I know,” I’d say, feeling in the pit of my gut what her loneliness felt like but never taking the bait; I’d rush out before I could be invited for a beer or whatever as I had taken on my own distractions.

It was in these lost souls I was most tested because they usually came from happy, nurturing families I couldn’t relate to, so they freely exerted a human’s natural proclivity for shittiness in the workplace without understanding the toll it was taking on the environment. If it wasn’t gossiping, whining, bullying, or lying it was straight up intimidation with some self-serving cry for help tied in. These professional psychopaths would become notorious, sauntering late into the office every morning because everyone was looking, only to find themselves alone again at sun down.

I learned the pursuit of material gain is a chance to live a life of faultless, average routine–the same average life that crushes people. But crushes them so incrementally as to lull them into thinking they’re normal along the way.

They’d often text me (perhaps sensing my fascination with their arrested development, like I was their Nick Carraway or something) with, “why don’t you fight me more at work?”. Every time finishing the thread by wondering aloud why I wasn’t doing as well as him, “seriously, bro”. They were equally as baffled by what motivated me as I was by what motivated them; what a shock it was to feel so alien among…aliens.

Needless to say, we couldn’t learn our respective languages and so I started to learn their native tongue to at least adapt to my surroundings. Stupidly, in an effort to expose some commonality that could buttress a deeper empathy, I ended up almost forgetting what my language was.

Back home, people can be flattering, telling you that you’re an adventurer and that your scars look cool. They’ll get lost in the funny stories and the minutiae. But that’s a sure sign of someone who’s been lost too. So I’ll show them instead where they seem to be headed. And if they confirm they’re as off course as I was, at least now I might understand enough about them to get them back home.