You're Not Broken: A Warrior's Take on Loneliness
You're an adult who is alive during exceptional times.
A Warrior's Birthday: When Loneliness Becomes Initiation
Some of you have been called to big shit. Not career-big. Not trophy-offspring of the bloodline big. I mean big according to God and God alone. New. Not simply "next." If that's you, stay put. What I'm about to tell you matters.
Yesterday I turned 37, and I cried until my bones ached.
One month. That's all it took for my life to crack wide open. I walked away from a corporate job I genuinely loved, went from jet-black to ice-blonde, severed friendships I thought would bury me, quit my vices cold-turkey. The cosmic chessboard got tired of my cautious moves and upended the whole damn game. Tar and feathers hosed off in the town square, leaving me naked and shaking and new with more down the pipe.
I forgot to make birthday plans. Or maybe I didn't forget – maybe some deeper part of me knew I needed to face this day alone. Because here's the truth: no one on earth could understand exactly what was churning through me. Only me. Just me.
The loneliness hit like a freight train. It filled every corner of my apartment, pressed against my skin, followed me into the streets of Brooklyn like a shadow with teeth. I know this feeling. God, do I know it. It's the one that's sent me running – 2 days up and down the PCH, 14 days in Big Sky, a month in Brazil, 6 weeks in Spain, 4 months in Scotland, 7 months wandering Western Europe. I realized for the first time, this feeling has been trying to have it’s way with me for ages. Dozens of knocks at the door followed by dozens of these side quests, always searching for refuge from gravity itself, always room enough for me to slide out thru some crack in the pavement.
But this time? This time the loneliness had fangs, and rope to tie me down. I knew contentment itself was under attack because I couldn’t slide away, couldn’t distract myself. Loneliness knocked me to my knees, and for a few terrifying moments I thought: this will be the one that breaks me. This loneliness is too colossal, too complete.
A Second Voice
And then – right when the terror peaked – my inner Goggins woke up. My inner Sith. The future me who's already walked through this fire. I was suddenly, violently, viscerally done with something and I was not allowed to know what it was yet.
In this moment I was reminded about what I love most about myself: the ability to recognize and bow to a battle with an outgoing version of my story. And, that I know how to dance with loneliness. Life was offering me something raw and real. And it happens like this you sit in it like it's holy, because it is. It's a gift that hurts and pulses and pumps out blood as proof of life, as the realest blessings do. You grab that anchor and let it drag you all the way down to the seafloor.
I also know enough about life to know that when it’s serious, you don’t get to know how it ends because knowing is a distraction. You are not going anywhere, you are only being forged, so the destination doesn’t matter.
And that was it, the thing I was outgrowing in real time: contentment, and the illusion of knowing. Understanding was the sinister temptress to momentum, to . Contentment the sinister temptress to evolution. Finely disguised ambivalence and complacency, respectively.
So I sat with all of this on my birthday. I wasn’t being antisocial. I was doing something not everyone is called to do. Certainly, even if these initiations happen concurrently, there isn’t a warm comfortable support group to help us thru it because that would be dishonorable to the gravity of moments like this. These moments only mean deciding to be done with the lower rungs of my own existence, and doing it properly.
I also know what skipping steps feels like, insulating myself from the consequences I laid for myself brick by brick, and therefore elongating time on that tortured road. A friend called me in the middle of this shuffle. She saw me going into my mea culpa, Goggins vibe, heard the distress, and tried to comfort me. She warned, “Vanessa, not all leaders have to sacrifice to become leaders.” That isn’t true at all. I barked as much back to her. That isn’t true at all. She apologized immediately and said, “I know. It’s just that you clearly have your marching orders. I don’t. So, I don’t know what to say.”
Another gem for me: I was done consulting with versions of myself that want comfort more than growth, and with the dynamics in which those reluctant versions thrive. No tea no shade to my friend trying to support me. All tea all shade to the version of me that even answered her phone call in the first place, in the middle of this herculean moment. Right then, on the floor, I could feel my higher self at war with my comfort-seeking self. And I knew – with a clarity that tasted like blood – that I was about to win this fucking battle. I hung up the phone. On my terms. Leaving behind the confusion within my corporeal form in favor of something belonging to the mystery, a future that can only be built and defended with our higher, feeling selves.
A Third Voice: The Warrior’s Path
This wasn’t ordinary loneliness. This was the loneliness that comes when you're at the front lines of your own life, standing, finally, at attention, with the posture of gods. And so, not loneliness at all.
The warrior's path isn't about rejection or self-torture in the name of atonement or strength. It's about surrendering anything, everything, that inhibits a deeper relationship with God, with yourself, and, if you’e an artist, with other people. And what you find on the other side isn't some titanium strength, not exclusively. The comedy is that what you discover is actually a tenderness that trembles. Featherweight tenderness like this, this intoxicating lightness of being, the paper thinness of us gently, barely shrouding an unapproachable light, is actually what it means to be human. Sit with the obviousness of that truth, a truth you forgot, for as long as it takes. The paper thinness of us gently, barely shrouding an unapproachable light.
Without feeling, one cannot be a warrior at all. This sensitivity, this tender-heartedness that feels like a wound but absolutely is not, is actually our greatest strength. It opens us to every whisper of life, makes us exquisitely, expertly aware of the texture of life, it is how we navigate the terrain of this dimension like Gods. Who else would be a warrior, risking their life and privacy at the vanguard if not the person who feels pierced by the beauty of every flower in their village? Tenderness like tastebuds, and felt experiences that allow us to lick with the soul, to devour, and be devoured.
Artists need this lived expertise. Revolutionaries need it, too. Artists in revolutionary times need it more urgently than the others, receiving every moment with such clarity that even ordinary things – raindrops, leaf shadows, distant laughter – arrive with stunning force. The force that surrounds us all and binds us together, and then carries you, the new you, to do something about it.
And so we learn to move through the world with what feels like a broken heart, but is actually a heart so full it can barely contain itself. A heart that's grown too large for old comforts, old hiding places. And that’s the goal, the capacity of your own heart being shattered in favor of the next draft, or the arrival of a new world, or both. And both the new draft and the new world will need to be created by warriors with big hearts. Tenderness isn’t at all something to mourn. It's something to celebrate. Because this vast loneliness, this ache that feels like emptiness, is actually the first breath of a bigger you in an uninhabited world.
Here, you are so new that you have no enemies. Remember that.
——
If these words resonate with you, I invite you to join my Book Club, Starting Feb 16th on Zoom.
Archive 004: Artist as Warrior explores ancient teachings of warriorship and sacred devotion through the lens of creative living. We're talking Shaolin, Bushido, and Jedi wisdom – think Bruce Lee and David Goggins, but for art. Join us for discussion guides, community conversations, and the encouragement you need to fuel your creative fire.
Paid Subscribers can enroll free below, or thru my website