29: getting out of the car
recently, i've been feeling that i may have peaked in college.
at 21 years old, i was earning $30k/month in sales. deadlifting 500lbs. and for the first time in my life, i had a girlfriend i actually liked.
i was, on paper at least, the happiest and most successful i've ever been.
so how did it all come crumbling down?
the simple answer: i lost my ability to get out of the car.
"getting out of the car" was a literal metaphor that my friends and i coined during our time doing door-to-door sales.
d2d is no joke. knocking 100+ doors/day, in 110F Dallas summer heat, getting screens slammed in your face and cops called on you...
but what i found was that the hardest part of each day wasn't the 100th, 50th, or even knocking the 1st door.
it was getting out of the car.
getting out of the car was a "Crossing the Threshold" moment where once you were out, you weren't getting back in.
departing the cool embrace of my air-conditioned Honda CRV, into the ruthless and chaotic world of a suburban Texas neighborhood.
among my peers, i particularly struggled with this. i'd often delay my inevitable fate by striking up a convenient conversation with my friend right as we were about to park the car, or stopping at 7-11 for a gratuitous "snack break" before the workday had even begun.
there were days where i felt the weight of the world pushing back against me opening that car door, every fiber of my body begging me to stay inside. a few times i broke down in tears, feeling as though i failed before the day had even begun.
eventually it got to the point where i had to quit. i couldn't keep going for even another day. even though i was making more money than most college kids know what to do with, the mere thought of knocking another day seemed like a certain path to some spiritual crisis.
i packed my bags, and a week before my birthday, flew home alone.
but doesn't that all sound a bit...dramatic?
wasn't it just a summer job, after all?
i brushed it aside for a while.
maybe i was just "burning out" like most therapists would say.
maybe i just needed time to get back into the game.
well...nearly 2 years i'm still figuring out how to do that.
after graduating, i stumbled into a cushy tech sales job in SF, which seemed like a natural progression. from the trenches of blue-collar outside sales, to an AC'ed office, free protein shakes, Michelin dinners, and monthly yacht parties. "VC money, baby."
i lasted 5 months before burning out again.
today i was watching a video about stuckness when something clicked.
i realized that my battle of “getting out of the car” was about much more than just closing deals and knocking doors...
what i realized was that it was even more literal of a metaphor than i could've imagined...that this "little quirk" might very well be at the dead center of all of my adult emotional patterns.
the following is what i texted myself as this realization unfolded.
three months ago i did an anger release workshop as part of the AoA Great Decisions course. i felt rage course through my body that i haven’t felt in over a decade… since i was a wee elementary school lad.
one particularly striking image that came up as i was doing the anger exercises: a memory of me curled up in a ball in the backseat of my dad’s car, wailing, “i don’t want to go…”
i was forced to do a lot of things as a kid that i didn’t want to do. play piano, go to chinese afterschool, study for additional math and english certifications, apply (and leave home) for boarding school.
but this instance, as far as i can remember, was about going to soccer practice. soccer practice was probably the most contentious of them all.
my dad loved soccer growing up, but it seemed like he always wished he was better...not just at soccer, but at life. and, unbeknownst to my 10-year-old self, his internalized feelings of insufficiency were projected all over me such that they became the very air i breathed (or, to invoke DFW, the water i had been swimming in all my life). for the longest time, i thought i was just a worthless, incompetent, POS.
i had always thought the difficulty of getting out of the car was just about doing hard work when i didn’t feel like it. i thought it was a discipline issue...but it couldn't have less to do with discipline.
getting out of the car was — and has always been — about facing the impossible standards that were placed on me. it was the inflection point of a fantasy of perfection contacting the reality of my ordinariness.
as soon as my dad stopped forcing me to play soccer, in middle school or so, i spent most of my free time playing video games or surfing the internet. tens of thousands of hours of my life dedicated to escape. to this day, my internet usage continues to be a thinly veiled attempt to avoid taking action, to avoid confronting reality as it is.
because for most of my life since, it’s been much easier to stay in the car.