Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re thinking. What the hell are ads doing on this blog? The very blog whose author professed an ideology of ad-lessness? I assure you that the past two postless months have been filled with much kicking and screaming, along with some good, ol’ fashioned “I don’t wanna!”

In that same time, I’ve watched my personal debts continue to grow (hurray for interest!), and my social interactions dwindle (hurray for trying to work for yourself!) For the first few months of working on this blog, the work itself was enough to keep me going. I was spending 12-14 hours a day, in some fashion, working on this blog. I finally felt like a “real” writer.

It was good while it lasted.

Quoting “artistic integrity”, I swore off of advertisements, like so many of the bloggers who had inspired me. Unlike those who had come before me, however, I had abso-frickin’-lutely no immediate plans on how I was going to, you know, buy food and pay the rent.

Oops.

“Eventually,” I kept telling myself, “I’ll come up with an idea for a book, and that book will add so much value to people’s lives that they will gladly pay for it, and everyone will win.” Unfortunately, books take time, and there’s no way to suspend metabolism so that you don’t die of starvation while pursuing your quest to “make it.” Double unfortunately.

Speaking of metabolism though, the past two months haven’t been exclusively suck covered in suck-sauce. That raw diet I started? Still going strong, and I’ve lost 15 pounds. I’m actually back down to my college low, and once again, none of my clothes fit properly.

That’s a mostly good problem to have.

This weekend, my social life climbed out of the nosedive it’s been in more or less since I lost my job. You see, “normal” people interact with others five days a week just by going to work. Are these ideal interactions? Perhaps not. But they are interactions, nonetheless. Myself? Well, working at home and having no income with which to justify leaving home (i.e. to be around people in coffee shops, etc.), means that I’m at the mercy of other people’s Monday through Friday schedules. Yup. I get to see them on their weekends, and I spend the other 108-ish of my waking hours during a given week sitting by myself—mostly sitting at a desk wishing I would write something. Alas, being a social creature with no social life tends to fry your brains. Fried brains don’t lead to a lot of writing.

This Thursday, however, everything started to change. I went to a party at a friend’s house (admittedly, after everyone bailed on my plans to go out); Saturday I went on a date that was more enjoyable than I ever could have anticipated; and Sunday I got a surprise visit from a friend who was passing through town on her way back from a camping trip. At the conclusion of this already awesome spurt of social interaction, another friend texted and asked how the writing was going, and followed that up with asking why I was being boneheaded and not advertising if I wasn’t making any money. Ergo the ads, and this post.

You can blame her if you don’t like it.

Chances are good that if you’re reading this, you’ve also read my post on non-violent communication, considering it brought in 50-60,000 hits that first month, and continues to bring in a fair amount of traffic. The friend who I was talking about in that post still hasn’t had much to say to me, and I don’t blame her considering how poorly I’d handled the situation. Unfortunately for my writing, she was the one I was afraid to disappoint, a la using the sunk cost fallacy to my advantage. Not that I don’t regret being a disappointment to all of you, but she was the one that was really in my face about making sure I maintained the blog, even on days that I didn’t feel like it. With her no longer being invested in my success, and after deducting our almost daily communication from my already dwindling social life, it was a pretty big blow to contend with. Just because you can use the sunk cost fallacy to great effect doesn’t mean it won’t backfire. The people who have invested in your success can always decide to cut their losses and move on.

But, I’m back, and I’m feeling hopeful. Granted, I feel that my financial situation somewhat limits my ability to write on the topic of fear, and that’s still a major issue to contend with. I mean, how many “I’m sitting at home, trying to make it as a writer” posts can I throw up before you guys get sick of it? Still, the ads may help balance out the financial situation, so long as you guys can bear with them. And, if and when that happens, I might actually be able to tackle the more interesting things. Like jumping out of airplanes.

On top of all of that, though, there’s the whole “telling it how it really is” aspect. Would it be fair to anyone if I only recorded my successes? If I made it look easy? Well, it’s not all puppies and rainbows. And I would much rather you be inspired by my perseverance than by some easy successes.

What about you? What challenges have you faced in the past couple of months? Were you able to overcome them? And have accomplished big goals, like weight loss, that you’re really excited about? Put it in the comments.

1 Comment »

For the past week I’ve been eating a raw food diet, save for the occasional hummus or tofu I squeeze in so I can try and use it up before it goes bad. But soon, my supply of cooked foods will be depleted and it will be nothing but raw. That’s right. The guy who likes to cook has been eating uncooked foods almost exclusively for the past week.

Why, you might ask?

When I went vegan 5 years ago (holy crap, has it really been that long?), I was suddenly opened up to foods I simply would not have experienced had my diet continued as usual. I had to learn new skills in the kitchen. I had to delve deeper into food chemistry so that I would understand what effect animal products were having on the dishes they were in, and thus know what non-animal foods could create that same effect.

I was able to veganize my family’s entire Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners (you know, when I was allowed in the kitchen).

But adopting a diet that was at the fringe of American eating put me into contact with individuals who were even further removed from the Standard American Diet—raw foodists, fruitarians, the paleo crowd, intermittent fasters, breatharians, and more. Raw food intrigued me, and I filed it away for further exploration.

Meanwhile, I felt awesome. My weight plummeted. I was a poor college student and couldn’t afford a new wardrobe, so I had to walk around holding my pants up since even my belt was insufficient to keep them on. A guy I shared a class with during fall term stopped me on my way to a class during spring term to ask me about my weight loss.

I peaked at an uncomfortable 295 pounds in high school, but by the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I was down to 205. I looked and felt amazing compared to just a year prior. And meeting people like vegan bodybuilder Robert Cheeke gave me the motivation to keep going—after all, if he could build muscle on a plant-based diet, then all of this talk about needing protein from animal sources was clearly bunk.

But then something went wrong. Especially during my senior year, I started packing the weight back on. It’s common for people to eat a lot of high sugar and high fat foods during periods of high stress, and that’s because our bodies know how to prepare for hardship. The only problem is that fats and sugars are more concentrated in our diets than in nature, and lots of things stress us out that have absolutely no bearing on our survival. Oreos are not survival food.

Finally I graduated, went to work, and wanted to start focusing on my health again.

After doing some reading up on what diets were in vogue, and what science had to say about them, I ended up cutting processed sugar and grains from my diet. The weight started coming off, but I plateaued long before I hit my previous weight of 205.

What had I done differently during my freshmen year that had helped me lose so much weight?

I realized that while I was on a school meal plan, I was eating a large amount of raw food. For breakfast I would get a large fruit cup. For lunch I’d get a veggie burrito, which except for the beans and tortilla, was filled primarily with raw veggies: tomato, lettuce, onion, jalapeno, avocado, cilantro, etc. Dinners were all-you-can-eat, but vegan fixings were slim. I’d get a small veggie stir fry and then get a huge salad at the salad bar, loaded with everything.

There were slight variations from day to day, but the truth of the matter was, I was eating a largely raw diet and didn’t even realize it. I was simply eating what was available to me as a vegan from the cafeteria.

After I went off of the meal plan and became responsible for my own food preparation, I began to stir fry the hell out of everything, and grains became the largest source of calories in my diet, namely rice. In fact, right before I went raw this week, I realized that with the exception of the occasional slice of tomato and leaves of lettuce or spinach on a veggie burger, I was eating essentially no raw food at all. I cooked everything.

I don’t know how it started, but as I surfed the internet this past week I found myself looking at raw food recipes, and watching raw chefs on Youtube. Eventually I got it in my head that I was going to give it a go.

Even though lots of people claim that a vegan diet can’t work, I learned from experience, from observing others, and from studying traditionally vegan cultures that it is possible to thrive on a plant-based diet. One of the biggest challenges as you diverge from the mainstream is that you have a lot more people speaking in pseudo-scientific gibberish about the very thing they’re promoting. When the language surrounding a lifestyle is irrational bunk, it’s easier to pass it by than to figure out why it might actually work.

But, I had anecdotal evidence that it can work, and that was at least good enough to give it a try.

• Big names in raw foodism have been eating raw for decades
• Some cultures consume little or no cooked food, like some of the small villages in vietnam, etc.
• People who claim to be eating a 100% raw diet are successful bodybuilders
• Our closest relatives, the great apes, thrive on raw food
• I looked and felt healthier when my diet consisted largely of raw foods during my freshmen year
• Personal development blogger Steve Pavlina did a 30 day trial with raw foodism, in which he measured weight, blood sugar, temperature, and his general mood/feelings, and found that he felt better on raw food overall.

Since Steve’s 30 day journey into raw foodism is some of the more rational writing on the topic, I decided to modify my diet to more closely match his. And, I’m happy to report many of the same benefits that Steve reported: weight loss, increased energy over all, improved mood, random bouts of euphoria, and increased muscular endurance—usually when I over do it at the grocery store, I have to set my bags down and regroup a few times between the bus stop and my apartment, but yesterday I was able to walk the whole distance with minimal fatigue.

Will I stick with this diet indefinitely? Maybe not. But so long as I continue to experience positive effects (Steve experienced withdrawal/detox effects for about 2 weeks, and I’ve experienced some of those as well), I imagine I’ll stick with it. This diet also agrees with the agricultural leanings I developed as part of my research as an undergrad, namely with regard to forest gardening, so if the diet works, that would just be one more piece that fits the puzzle about our interaction with the world.

Now I just have to figure out how to hang out with my friends. They’ve gotten used to the vegan thing, and now I pull this.

4 Comments »

There’s an irony in writing a blog about fear when you are a very fearful person. Any blog is, or at least can be, a stressful endeavor. Blogging creates the expectation within yourself that you are an expert on the subject you write about.

I am an expert.

On experiencing fear.

On understanding fear? On mastering fear?

Not so much.

I got well over 50,000 hits last month, thanks to the popularity of my post on communicating without fear. Fifty thousand. Wow. That’s nearly twenty times the amount of hits my blog had received in the rest of its existence combined.

Those hits were very concentrated though. I got over 10,000 hits several days in a row, and then traffic to my blog started waning. I did the natural thing. I started obsessing about maintaining that level of traffic.

Shit. That was an excellent post! I actually had concrete information for people to use to deal with their communication problems. Now all of these people are subscribing to my blog thinking they’ll be able to get that kind of post twice a week! I’m not an expert on facing fear! I can’t deliver that!

Finally, I sat down last night with my copy of Fearless Living by Rhonda Britten, which I’d picked up at a local used bookstore as research for this very blog. In the very first chapter I came across two quotes that completely summed up what I was feeling.

It’s hard to follow your own act and keep topping yourself. There’s always the nagging fear that you’ve peaked and won’t be able to keep this up.

and

You become convinced that this success was an accident.

You may have noticed that I missed my scheduled postings these past two Thursdays. Even the posts that I have managed to get up have been absolute shit. I’ve been managing the fear that, on the one hand, if I don’t maintain the schedule I’ve promised to uphold, then I will disappoint my readers, and on the other hand, if I do manage to post something but it isn’t as good as or better than my communication post, then I’ll be a disappointment anyway. And ya know, it’s really hard to get inspired with that kind of pressure, so you end up with a frothy mix of crap posts and missed deadlines. The Santorum of blogging.

You  really shouldn’t Google that.

It was accidental that I came up with such a great post. No it wasn’t. I studied eastern philosophy and communication, and had been specifically trained in non-violent communication. I knew exactly what I was talking about, even if the impetus for writing it was a failure to practice what I wrote about in that post.

There’s no way I can write something that great again. Certainly. If I have that attitude, and I let it keep me from writing at all, then I will not be able to top that post. And then there’s the question of whether I should be trying to top that post. Whether I should be chasing numbers. Are numbers, in this age of LOLcats and autotune, any indication of quality?

Gold and jade fill up the room
No one is able to protect them

This quote from the Tao Te Ching reminds us, like much of the other language therein, that the one who has the most has the most to lose. If you are a writer, then accumulating a large number of readers is just a larger number of readers to lose. Buying more stuff is just more stuff you have to worry about maintaining, that you have to worry about getting broken or stolen. Having is the possibility of not-having. We can always lose everything. And we either have to strive to not-have, or we have to find comfort in the ebb and flow which occurs without and within us.

Nothing in the world is softer or weaker than water
Yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard and strong

The lesson for me, then, is to find comfort in the ebb and flow of traffic. Write what needs to be written. If it gets traffic, it gets traffic. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. No biggie.

And these is what we all need to do with our fears. Accept the ebb and flow in our lives, or else be consumed by it. Try or try not, there is no do.

But for me, there is also that twinge of guilt. “Sorry I took a turn for the douche in that ‘conversation’ we had, but it made me internet famous, so it actually turned out great for me.”

I understand, of course, that it was my drive to improve myself, my drive to ensure I didn’t repeat those same mistakes, that lead me to write that post. I wasn’t going out of my way to create drama just so I’d have something to write about. But, the popularity of that post makes it hard to see it that way.

This is one of the fundamental problems of human existence. We can’t think about raw experience. It’s not possible. By the very act of thinking about something, we are filtering it through our history of experience, our biases, our culture. Only in retrospect can I invent a guilt over that post doing well, and that guilt must therefore have no basis in fact.

Rhonda Britten does talk about how our fears filter our experiences. Others see our successes, but we see our failures. If someone tells us that we did a good job, we’re more likely to not believe them, and we’re more likely to come up with evidence for why they’re lying to us. Don’t they remember when I accidentally sent that email to the client? Don’t they remember when I accidentally scheduled two important meetings for the same time? I got lucky this time. I’m not as good as they say. They’ll eventually find out that I’m a fraud.

I do feel like a fraud. I’ve set myself up to be a source of inspiration for others. Every email I get where someone tells me how much I inspire them feeds the pressure to be someone who does inspirational things.

But, I am a chicken shit. That was the entire premise of the blog.

Going into this project, I had so many ideas about what I’d be doing as cool examples of facing fear, which would inspire people through my writing. I was going to travel. I was going to learn languages. I was going to go skydiving. Puff up your chest and just do it. Show these people what they’re capable of. Instead, I’ve become paranoid about spending money on doing all of these things, not knowing where my next paycheck is coming from, or how long my savings will last.

It feels like a kick in the teeth.

Which, I suppose, is appropriate. As much as I feel like I should be an expert if I’m going to address the topic of fear, none of this would have a basis if I were not a fearful person.

Losing my job was a great catalyst for trying new things, but now that I’ve settled into unemployment, it’s become easy to feel comfortable with doing as little as possible. Only what I need to do to get by.

This blog would be useless to you if I was innately fearless. My project is about learning courage, not having it innately. This is about you right along with me.

Fearless Living is starting to look like a good read, and it promises plenty of “Fearbuster Exercises,” so hopefully I’ll learn something in reading the book that will benefit you as well as me. Together we’ll learn the techniques necessary for facing our fears.

Do you ever feel like you’re a fraud? Do you tell yourself that you can’t top some previous effort? That you’re not as good as other people think you are? Do you feel guilty about your success? Share it in the comments.

9 Comments »