You want to know about the “path of awakening”? Christ. It’s not a path. It’s a goddamn train wreck. It’s the most peculiar, beautiful, ugly, and completely inevitable experience a man can have. It’s the discovery that you’re changing, and the whole goddamn world around you is staying exactly the same.
It’s like you’re a goddamn lobster.
No, I’m serious. A lobster, that beautiful, stupid, and completely honest animal, it grows. And its shell, the thing that’s been protecting it, its goddamn home, it becomes a prison. A beautiful, tight, and completely soul-crushing cage. And to grow, that lobster has to crack its own goddamn shell open, wiggle out, and stand on the bottom of the ocean, completely naked. Soft, vulnerable, and looking like a free lunch to every other hungry bastard in the sea.
That’s you. You’re the soft-shelled lobster.
You’ve outgrown your shell. The job, the marriage, the quiet, respectable religion, the whole goddamn American Dream. It’s all just a cage that’s too small, and it’s suffocating you. And you’ve finally, beautifully, and completely busted out of it.
But here’s the problem. You’re standing in the middle of your living room, naked and raw, and your family, your friends, your colleagues… they’re all still happily inside their thick, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing shells. They’re still worried about the mortgage, the PTA meeting, the goddamn quarterly reports. And these concerns, which used to be your whole goddamn world, now seem… trivial. Pathetic. Beside the point.
And you can’t tell them.
You can’t just walk into Thanksgiving dinner, clear your throat, and announce, “By the way, I’ve realized the self is an illusion and our entire lives are a fraudulent performance built on a foundation of fear. Pass the fucking gravy.”
They’ll look at you like you’ve just taken a shit on the pumpkin pie. And in a way, you have. You’ve lost the “conventional mind.” You’ve seen the wires behind the puppet show. And now you can’t unsee them.
So you get quiet. You’re living in two worlds. The “real” world, where everyone is playing their parts, taking it all so goddamn seriously. And this other, quieter, uglier, and more beautiful world that’s pulsing just underneath it. You’re trying to speak two languages, and you’re not fluent in either one.
And this is the danger. This is where the isolation begins.
Because they sense it. They smell the change on you, like an animal smells a storm. You’re not one of them anymore. You’re not playing the game with the same beautiful, stupid enthusiasm. And that scares them. Because if you can just walk out of the prison, maybe the prison isn’t as solid as they thought. Maybe their whole life is a goddamn lie.
And they’ll react. Some will try to pull you back in. “You’ve changed,” they’ll say, and it’s not a goddamn compliment. They’ll call you strange, selfish, irresponsible. They’ll do everything they can to squeeze you back into the beautiful, tiny, and completely suffocating box you just escaped from.
Others will just… disappear. The conversations that used to be easy are now a beautiful, awkward, and completely honest kind of torture. The phone stops ringing. The friendships just wither and die, a quiet, pathetic, and completely necessary little death.
And some will get hostile. You’re a heretic. A goddamn traitor to the Church of Quiet Desperation.
So you’re faced with a dilemma. You can’t go back. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. But you can’t go forward without burning every goddamn bridge you’ve ever built.
You could, I suppose, live a double life. A lot of people do. You put the costume back on. You go to the barbecue, you laugh at the stupid jokes, you pretend to care about the goddamn Super Bowl. But it’s exhausting. It’s a 24/7 performance in a shitty, off-Broadway play. It’s inauthentic. You’ve found a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest treasure, and you’re keeping it buried in the backyard while you pretend to be just as broke as everyone else.
Or you can do the other thing.
You can just… stand there. Naked, soft-shelled, and alone in the goddamn wilderness. The “dark night of the soul,” the mystics called it. A pretty name for a goddamn hangover that lasts a year. It’s the lonely, quiet, and beautiful stretch of road between the prison you just burned down and the… whatever-the-hell-is-next. You’ll feel like you made a mistake. You’ll miss the cage.
But here’s the one, simple, ugly, beautiful truth they don’t tell you: that loneliness isn’t a sign you’re lost. It’s a sign you’re finally on the way.
You’ve left the village, you’re in the dark wood, and the dragons are real. But the treasure is real, too. And the treasure is your own goddamn, authentic soul. You have to be willing to be misunderstood, to be rejected, to be a goddamn ghost to the world you left behind.
And here’s the final punchline: you won’t be alone forever. The old tribe, the caterpillars, they’ll fall away. But you’ll find the new one. The other butterflies. The other soft-shelled lobsters. The other beautiful, broken bastards who’ve also decided to crawl out of their own skin. They’re out there, in the quiet, hidden corners.
The caterpillar must die for the butterfly to be born. It’s a messy, ugly, and completely necessary death.
But the thing that crawls out of the slime?
It’s the only part of you that was ever real to begin with.
