About the Song “All this Was Written” — Track 8 from Begin Again

Sometimes hitting bottom is deciding you're ready to be done digging. Sometimes its circumstances giving you an invitation to surrender that you can't refuse. Sometimes its finding you have nothing left to lose and that you're very very tired of how that feels. Some of these descriptions give the impression of a deliberate, conscious, even purposeful decision being involved. In hindsight, it often feels that way. However, when I put myself back in the shoes of the man I was when I experienced hitting bottom, I'm reminded it didn't feel that way at all. What I remember of it felt like some process within me other than an intellectual one coming to terms with my own thinking and actions being so fucked that they could no longer be trusted, and the decision, to the extent that it can be called one, was mostly deciding that I was willing to let others make the decisions for awhile. Thankfully, I found a group of folks in the rooms of a 12 step program in Chicago, and in particular a sponsor, that were people willing to help make those decisions for me and get my actions and thereby my thinking back to a place where it could be trusted, This is one way to describe surrender.

For me that was over 10 years ago, and though there have been other bottoms along the way, it's been my experience that as long as I can stay somewhat grounded and in touch with how that person felt, that totally fucked me, I can avoid becoming him again. As if there's a map in my unconscious that allows me to navigate away from that darkest bottom.

I've had friends in dark places in recent weeks and months, as I myself have been, and as I find myself trying to share the experience of what worked and what was useful for me hitting that darkest bottom, I have to question how the world has changed in the intervening years. I've taken some comfort that the tools I learned in those rooms in that part of my life as a result of surrendering to something greater than myself (at the time, I saw that as the collective wisdom and experience of the group of people in question, later that grew and changed) give me an advantage over someone trying to avoid hitting that first dark bottom… the place that has been characterized by "incomprehensible demoralization" – by neither being able to imagine things continuing as they are or things changing. There is a feeling that if one had the choice between the two, it would be impossible to choose, but that feeling also comes accompanied by a certainty that your choices will make no difference, that at most you can try to imagine fate taking you on some path where circumstances will force you to show you can be better than you have been. Many of us have spent years in that place waiting for this "fate" that never comes. Among the most powerful of the tools that I've learned and used that continue to keep me from having to revisit that darkest of bottoms is asking for help.

"Asking for help" is something that may seem simple on the surface, but I've found it comes with its own layers of truth and paradox. In the beginning, the struggle seemed to center around a willingness to accept the help I was given – even, and perhaps especially when it wasn't the help I wanted. There's a good deal of brain science around neuroplasticity pointing to why this phenomenon seems to work. I'm no brain scientist, and even convincing myself I understand these workings can be a little dangerous for my ego, but I recommend "The Brain that Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge as a place to start for the layman, if you're curious. The upshot – the important bit for me to remember is that doing things I *don't* want to do and doing them because someone who's looking out for my best interest (ideally, multiple people) suggests that I should, is part of why it works. This, incidentally, is also close to one of the most practical definitions of faith I've worked with. Faith is doing something that you don't know will work – maybe even that you believe is stupid or pointless – doing that something regularly and even with evidence to suggest it's not working, because something you're trying to believe in, something bigger than you has pointed the way, and like I mentioned earlier, you've surrendered or let to of the belief that your own thinking can do anything but harm you. I could use for a more concise definition. Faith is taking action contrary to your own wants and desires with a willingness to believe, based on the experience and care of something larger than yourself, that such action can lead you to something better. I'll keep working on the concise definition.

My struggle today is that in recent times I have spent a considerable amount of time and effort asking for help, and rather than receiving help, instruction, suggestion that is counter to my own wants and desires (as was the situation for me 10 years ago), my asking for help today has been met with mostly silence or polite apology accompanied by what appear to be mostly sincere and legitimate explanations of why help is not available. I've had this experience with institutions and individuals, friends and loved ones. As I sang in "Chasing Waves" – nearly everyone I loved and trusted turned away when I most needed help. I don't mean to ignore the help I have received which has been instrumental in my making it thus far, having a place to live, exploring opportunities for what's next with some amount of confidence that I have people either right out front, explicitly and in response to my asking, doing whatever they can to help; or sometimes behind the scenes when for whatever reason its not prudent to be up front, I trust and have faith that there are still some trying to help. Nevertheless, I've received more silence, friction, or outright rejection to requests for help in the past months going back to probably 3 years ago when I first started to see how deep I was in and how close that bottom could be if I didn't start to make some changes.

I lay this out not to shame anyone, to make people feel bad who I might have had an exchange like this with, or even to implore others to be willing to help. I share it because I know I'm not the only person having this experience, and because I wonder if in some ways it isn't part of where we are as a society. People seem less willing to stick their neck out for someone else, even someone they know and care about, much less an acquaintance or a stranger. People seem less willing to see and accept responsibility for the part their actions may play in someone else's life beyond the immediately obvious (several examples of this in the story I tell in "about the song" for "Chasing Waves"). People seem more oriented on saying their piece, doing their job to the letter and no more, washing their hands of situations whose outcomes they affect but have no direct control over, of writing off others who look differently; or live their lives differently; act differently; orient differently. Equally people seem less willing to listen, to trust, to forgive. Relationships seem more overtly transactional.

Maybe this is all my reacting to my circumstances, circumstances which I in large part created and need to take responsibility for. Certainly my perspective is biased. And I'm not suggesting, even if these observations are aligned with reality, that I have a solution or an answer or a way to make things better. I still see no better way to navigate from a bottom of incomprehensible demoralization than asking for help, but I need to consider for those I give that advice to and even for myself that asking for help may require more patience and humility than it once did. That looking for the responses to that asking may require more faith and grace – two words that when I was at my bottom seemed totally nonsensical and meaningless to me.

The message in this song surfaces in different parts of the record in different ways. "All this was written" is a nod to history – that there is much to be learned not only from where I came from, but from the lives, experience, mistakes, and successes of those around me. And though as a whole, I mean to challenge the listener to consider their actions through the lens of "If we exist…" – this is not without its own paradoxes. There are times when its advantageous, maybe even a necessary survival tactic to believe that I and my situation are not special. That stories like mine have been written and told over and over again and that if I want to change my life, if I want to open myself to being changed, that there is much to learn from what's come before. Sometimes shutting up and believing that "I" do not exist, in service of getting out of my own way, is the only way I can get better. That worse things have happened to better people.

These are guideposts at best, platitudes at worst. As I said, I do not have any answers. Though many have ignored or turned me down when I have asked for help… though some have seemed enthusiastic about helping until I enlisted and got serious and their response seemed to be to retreat… though sometimes I can't even trust the words coming out of my own mouth to be truth that I can believe in, I know… I have faith… that I am healing. With that healing, I can offer to friends and loved ones struggling with their own darkness, their own bottoms, I'll remind that surrender, letting go is not the same as giving up. My empty hands are shown as a way to indicate I have no ulterior motives, I'm not trying to sell anything or take anything from you, but I will reach out and try to hold steady if you choose to take my hands. I can't promise that asking for help will be fruitful for you in the ways it was for me, but I will offer to listen before saying my piece, to trust even though my trust has been abused, to forgive when most would say forgiveness is not warranted or deserved, to love without condition. I do these things not because of you, who you are, or what you need, I do them because they are what I am, or at the very least, what I aspire to be.

I am frequently looking at things from a perspective of how I can change the world and shooting high and wide, totally unrealistic about what my influence is or what my actions can achieve, but these simple things are ways I've found that I can profoundly affect the world around me, even if they end up hurting me, sometimes more often then not, I do them less for the immediate effect they may have and more for the potential they create for those close to me and for the person I could be, the person I aspire to be. I listen, I forgive, I try to temper my will with willingness. You may think you don't deserve love, but love is what I am, or what I aspire to be. I need to accept who I have been, where I am, and where the world is as a foundation for any of these aspirations to be realizable. I need to read and accept what has been written. If I can do that work, I can build myself on that foundation as I want to be, I can be what I'd like the world to be. Some would call this foolish… there's an old saying that fortune favors the foolish, it is also sometimes said as fortune favors the bold. If we are open, willing to be honest with ourselves about who we are, who we've been, and the world we live in; if I'm willing to learn from the patterns of history – my own and the world around me – to embrace the hieroglyphics and see that sometimes I need to not exist to get right with myself and the world – another paradox: when I choose to exist from such a foundation: what was written can be rewritten.