June, 2025

I know I usually get these out in the first couple of days of the month. Sorry for the immense delay. Honestly, I felt like I was in the middle of too many stories and I just didn’t know what to write about. I’m still in the middle of those stories, but I think I have a clue as to what I want to dive into: despair. 

Specifically, I want to talk about the moment when you become convinced that you aren’t winning a fight. When you think you can’t win a fight. I have heard a lot of cliche lines about noble sacrifices and how it’s good to die on your feet and whatnot. Today, I want to examine my understanding of the idea. It all boils down to one simple word: refinement. 

The more that I feel like the odds are against me in life, the deeper my motive becomes. And the reason you really want a deeper motive is because it’s harder to completely destroy. If you only did things that you could succeed at, you would make a mess one way or another. You could either, like me, believe you can do nothing and become obsessed with trying to figure out your odds of success before you ever try. From here, you would give up on whatever looked too big to handle, or had odds too low of actually coming to pass. There’s nothing wrong with paying attention to how dumb your ideas sound, but if you actually believe that you can predict the future that well, you haven’t really been living in the world. Life’s far weirder than that. 

On the other hand, you could become dangerously stubborn. You might even reach a point where you keep trying and trying at something that’s never going to happen. But isn’t that how dreams come true? Isn’t that how movie stars and rock-legends make it big? Didn’t they just keep pushing when everyone told them no? Yes and no. It depends on how specific you’re getting. If you were dead-set on getting signed to a certain label, or being in a certain movie, that stubbornness would wind up biting you in the butt. If you can’t take the individual no’s with a bit of grit, you’ll wind up burning up in your own frustrations. 

It’s in those times of frustration, of suffering from the weight of not getting what you really want, that you start to see why you’re still going. This month, the movie Scott Pilgrim vs the World came to mind. If you haven’t seen this movie then, first of all, I pity you. It’s a masterpiece. But, more importantly, you should bookmark this blog and come back to it after you watch it because I’m about to enter spoilersville. 

Near the end of the movie, the main character loses his girlfriend to a really bad dude. He rolls up to the guy’s club to get her back and gets his butt kicked. He dies and has some time to reflect in the afterlife. Our hero eventually finds himself more annoyed that he got his butt kicked by that jerk than he is about losing his girl. Obviously no one wants to be dumped, but if she had just wanted to go her own way, that’s one thing. But she was taken from him by some dude that didn’t deserve her. It was a move that was disrespectful to him. This jerk was basically walking all over him because he felt like it, and that’s not cool. 

Pilgrim winds up coming back to life and redoing the whole situation. Except, when he enters the club to fight the big bad ex, he’s asked a simple question. 

“You want to fight me…for her?” 

“No,” our hero’s voice asserts with a voice as firm as his gaze. “I’m doing it for me!” 

For me. What does that mean? What does it look like to do something for yourself, as opposed to for others? As opposed to for anything else, for that matter? I asked this question a lot this month. It started as I was writing about the matrix, and what makes us human. I found myself stuck on this idea that the cycle of wanting something and letting yourself have it is essential to living a real and fulfilling life. Whether or not it’s the essence of the soul or not is still up for debate. But something resonated with me about that idea, and I tossed it around in my head all month long.

It’s important to clarify, though: I’m not talking about greed or selfishness. I’m talking about something a little more…neutral. Things like saying “I’m hungry, so I’m going to go eat a sandwich,” and “I’m tired, so I’m going to bed,” are in this category. Self-interest gets a bad rap because we’re so scared of being selfish. It feels like we can easily throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

To me, the question of what it means to fight “for me” is to defend the things that make life worth living. I should keep trying to make the dream happen, because without dreams, life isn’t really living. Fighting for me is bouncing back from the failures and setbacks, even when it feels like all is lost. Not because I suddenly believe that next time will be the time that things actually work out, but because I want to keep on dreaming. Because living a life where I just try to survive isn’t truly a life at all. That’s just me trying to stay alive, and we all fail that goal eventually, so we may as well try for something deeper. 

Here’s another way to explain it: I once heard a story about the famous philosopher, Socrates. Near the end of his life, he was thrown in jail for some stuff he didn’t do. He was innocent, so some friends tried to spring him from jail so he could avoid his execution. Even though he was innocent, he refused to leave his cell because he would be breaking down the idea of law and order. In a way, fighting for yourself is like that. When you compromise on stuff like your pride or how much you’re allowed to get kicked around, you’re breaking down the idea of you. You’re letting other people change what they think about when they think of you. And, even deeper still, you’re letting other people change what you think about when you think of you. Do you look in the mirror and think of a loser, or do you see a superhero? A lot of what you wind up seeing is how you react to how people treat you. 

Ask yourself this question: what’s important to you? If someone were to pick one thing about you that they would know you for, what would it be? When someone tries to keep you from that thing, what will you do? Will you shove them back when they try to take what makes your life worth living? Or will you let them take everything shy of your next breath? 

This last month, my thing has been dreams. Not sleep-dreams, but passion-dreams. The things you want to do with your life before it’s over. I reached a point where I said, “even if I have no shot of making this happen, it’s better to fail burning for the dream than to try to survive with this ache in my chest.” It’s the idea of dreaming that drives me. Defines me. I like how Johnny 3 Tears from Hollywood Undead once put it:

If you can’t sleep then you can’t dream. If you can’t dream, then what’s life mean?

What’s life mean? Without dreams, my answer is a bleak “not much.” So I swing, and swing and swing again, not because I believe things will suddenly go well, but because to keep on existing in any other way is meaningless. But this leads to my other observation: I’m far more hopeless than I realized. I actually started by writing the word, “pessimistic,” but then erased it because I believe it runs far deeper than that. I’m not cranky about the temperature or sweetness of my coffee. I’m not bitter about having to get up at 4am during the week. No, deep down, I don’t believe I have any power, any ability to change things for better or worse. What happens in this world happens, whether I like it or not. Whether I’m there to tip the scales or not. I’m not fat enough to tip those scales in either direction. Life just kinda…goes on. I’m Peter Bailey, blind to ripples that I may or may not have made in this world. 

So the hope of changing a life or helping someone through their own journey rarely motivates me, because I rarely believe that I’ll make a big enough splash to accomplish such a thing. Yep, the blog too. I do it for my own growth. Y’all are just a byproduct of it all. Even as a Christian, I find myself a ghost, floating through the walls and corridors of this forsaken world of ours. I ask myself often why it is this way, but I’m yet to get an answer. But it’s in this motivation, in the ferocious fight of defending everything that I see as beautiful, that I find the drive to keep surviving. Whether I’ll ever succeed in those dreams, I may never know. 

This may sound a little depressing, but look at it like this: it’s planting seeds. If you were dirt, farming would feel weird to you. I mean, some dude pulls up out of nowhere and starts hitting you really hard, pulling everything that you know and love away. That doesn’t sound like fun to me! But eventually, you’ll get a bunch of it back, and something new will start to happen over time. It doesn’t make the process fun. Heck, I have even questioned whether or not it makes this process survivable, but I’m still here, so I guess the answer is still “yes.” Well, at least, “sorta.” 

But mind stuff matters. It feels weird sometimes. It may even feel like magic. And those things that we find when life gets hard re-arranges who we are when we come back out. Of that, I have no doubt. I’ll be honest: I’ve got a good five or six rabbit trails that I still want to go down based on these ideas that I just mentioned, but that would make this post really long. For now, I’ll just say this: hold onto that thing that you can’t imagine living without. It isn’t a bad thing, you just need to learn to use it in a good way. Eventually, your time to take off will arrive. You will one day take those broken wings and learn to fly. Take heart and keep fighting!

Until Next Time

May Peace be your guide.