Hi everyone.
Prepare yourselves.
Today, I am going to give you an overview of what my life was like when I decided to take a leave of absence from my job as a law professor in April 2022. Otherwise known as finally waking up to the 🚨🚨flashing lights and blaring sirens🚨🚨 and applying the brakes mere seconds before I careened into the abyss.
Picture one of those scenes where someone falls asleep while driving a car, meanders off a coastal road - foot still on the accelerator, and, oblivious to scores of people waving, shouting, screaming at the driver to WAKE UP and STOP THE CAR, plows through curbs, guard rails, and DANGER - CLIFF EDGE signs before she screeches to a halt with the car perched over the edge of the cliff.
The car rocks back and forth on the precipice — it’s touch and go — but at least it has come to a stop.
The driver might be able to wriggle out of the car and crawl back to safety, the car teetering all the while. Or, the car could plummet to earth or sea, as the driver upsets the precarious balance in her desperate attempt to escape.
We just won’t know until the ill-fated driver is on solid ground.
I think you probably see where I’m going with this, but please indulge me as I explain why I see myself in this dire scenario.
Here goes…
Who’s the driver?
Uh, that’s me, of course. The inner me, the deep self of me, the source of my truest intuitions, knowledge, and feelings.
What’s the car?
The car is every part of me other than my inner, deep self. The ‘car’ includes my physical body and its performance, the ‘outside’ parts of my consciousness like my intellectual activities, the performance of my job responsibilities, making conversation, sending emails, giving presentations, taking basic, survival-level care of myself and my family, sporadic interactions with friends and colleagues.
If the driver was me, what does it mean that I was asleep?
It means that I (my deep self and intuition) was not in control of the car (the rest of me). It means that my deepest self had been silenced — that I had delegated the steering of the car to others. In other words, I (the car part of me) was running without an alert and conscious driver, rotely pursuing other people’s interests and goals, steered by their values.
How was my foot still pressing the accelerator even though I was asleep?
Honestly, I don’t know. One would think that a car couldn’t operate for 40+ years without a conscious driver. Somehow, the car kept running at high speed for an astonishingly long time, despite being starved of genuinely enriching fuel, being low on every kind of fluid, being dinged up and crushed by all the stuff it ran into, desperately needing an oil change, and running hot because no one pulled it over to cool off the engine.
What were the warning signs and guard rails hit by the car?
Boy, were there a lot of these…
It’s hard to pick a favorite, so here are some from within the year before I finally pumped the brakes.
Subsisting on Coca Cola, bean and cheese tacos, donuts, ice cream, and basically every possible high-sugar food or drink available in Texas.
Sleeping only a few hours every night because I couldn’t turn off my brain.
Never exercising and having a hard time getting out of bed.
Relatedly, gaining lots of weight.
Relatedly, having high blood pressure and cholesterol, low Vitamin D and Vitamin B12.
Relatedly, having stiff, painful joints, ‘freezing’ when in a sitting position, and getting treated for inflammation.
Relatedly, suffering amaurosis fugax (basically having my vision in one eye temporarily go black), being taken to the hospital by ambulance, and being evaluated overnight for a possible stroke. (No stroke, thank goodness.)
Relatedly, having short-term memory issues and problems finding my words.
Relatedly, failing to meet countless commitments, both in my personal and work life.
Relatedly, having a complete inability to make myself finish academic papers for publication, or to prepare for presentations or classes until the very last minute.
Relatedly, zoning out while driving or in drive-throughs, being extremely irritable with my family, being unable to respond to emails, and withdrawing from friends and colleagues.
Relatedly, spending half of spring break 2022 in an Airbnb I rented to finish my miners as intermediaries paper once and for all. Except I didn't finish it. Instead, I bought out all the junk food at the Kerrville HEB, and gorged on it, and cried, and watched Downton Abbey. Then I spent the rest of the week throwing up from starting methotrexate to treat my joint inflammation and stiffness.
Seriously, these are just the tip of the iceberg for my warning signs, and again, this is just a one-year period. I’m honestly amazed that I’m still alive.
I barreled through a heck of a lot of guardrails before waking up.
How did the car travel all over the world, up mountains, and through mud, without a conscious driver?
As best I can tell, the car was fueled by fear (of rejection, disappointing my parents and others, failure, lack of prestige, hell) and steered by standards, values, and goals set by others. Apparently, these can carry you pretty far — testifying to Congress, advising Cabinet members, consulting for the John Oliver show (yes, this is kind of braggy, but I’m trying to make a point)— but ultimately the journey ends at the abyss or when the driver wakes up and stops the car.
When did I fall asleep?
I’m still trying to figure this out. I think it was in stages, but a big chunk of my inner self was stifled as a young child. I grew up in a very Catholic, traditional household, and the sin-based morality structure imposed on me helped to create a lot of fear, inhibition, and perfectionism. This meant that I stuffed the real me in a box to meet the standards set by others.
I fell deeper asleep in college at Harvard. I absorbed others’ ideas of success and jumped on the law school track. I then jumped on the large law firm track, followed by the in-house counsel track (a slave to prestige, the first place I worked was in the Harvard general counsel’s office), and concluded with the law professor track.
Could other people tell I was asleep?
There were certainly outward signs that the deeper me was below the surface and yearning to break free. I am sure quite a few people picked up on it, including my students at various moments of vulnerability or connection in the classroom, or my Crypto Twitter crowd.
There was the fact that I never went to a bar association event or conference in the 21 years since I graduated from law school. The fact that my academic publications are more common sense than law. The fact that I never went to class or read during law school and just crammed for the final exam. The fact that my best days as a law professor were when my class and I dressed up in costumes for Halloween, or when we talked about big philosophical questions in my Jurisprudence or Crypto classes, or when I got to hang out with technologists and people from countless other fields at crypto events. And I shouldn’t forget the fact that I died my hair purple at the beginning of the pandemic when I didn’t have to teach my law classes in person, not to mention my side-eyed profile pic on Twitter.
So how does it end? Do I fall into the abyss or get back to solid ground?
Wouldn’t we all like to know.
I haven’t fallen into the abyss yet. 🎉
I think I’m at the part where I’m climbing out of the car and heading back to the clifftop. I’m feeling pretty good about my odds of getting there now. 💪
If you are or have been in a similar situation, where you feel like your life is out of control, I hope that hearing my story may help you feel less alone. Over the coming months, I will continue sharing my experiences as well as resources that I’ve found helpful in taking a real pause and moving forward in a healthier way.
I can relate to this so well. I too spent decades pursuing a narrowly defined vision of success, chasing after countless accolades that were supposed to reaffirm that I am smart and not a failure (carrot chasing, as I call it). As the son of a biology professor, I was expected to bring home the “A”s from a very young age . This later translated into chasing prestige in the form of turning down the college I really wanted to go to for the more prestigious option and then entering a history PhD program because this was the next logical thing to do. This all ended with washing out of an academic labor market that has become a vehicle for transforming bright but naive young people into cheap labor. (Wow I have become pretty cynical lol.) So I gave so much just to become a unit of cheap labor. I have been searching for more authentic and soul affirming experiences more recently and it’s still a work in progress.
If I had truly followed my inner voice earlier in life …where would that have led me? I’m not really sure.
To any of us comfortable people, detachment sounds like losing, but it is actually about accessing a deeper, broader sense of the self, which is already whole, already content, already filled with abundant life.
—Richard Rohr