Want to express your sexuality better? Feel like there are darker aspects of your identity you can’t come to terms with? Want to know who you are, and how to live?
Life Uncivilized is a continual attempt to explore the spectrum of living. Whether this is relationships and sex, the darker aspects of our nature, who we are or how we live. It is a blog with one aim: to explore the way’s you can uncover yourself, in all his/her complexity.
Life Uncivilized explores ideas such as:
- The best life advice is PRACTICAL. The best self-help occurs in moments of honest CONNECTION between two people (in the case of this website – you and me).
- Self-improvement isn’t an act of construction but in fact an excavation. It’s about reverse engineering the effects of culture, anxiety, and ego to figure out what’s down there.
- To be alive is to be uncertain. That goes double for your identity and triple for your goals. You need to accept that you’re never going to know enough to be certain of anything.
- Perfectionism runs counter to the experience of being human.
- Nobody is special, and that isn’t a bad thing. We’re all just animals dealing with a cocktail of conflicting emotions, instincts, and beliefs.
Nobody ever gets it right, perfectionism is a myth. I believe true living is born from knowledge of who you are – what you really are. Or at least as close as you can get.
So if you’ve ever wanted to figure out who you are, maybe this is for you. Let’s get started.
But wait…Who’s writing this stuff?
I’m going to die.
That’s what was racing through my head whilst lying on the Hospital Bed. A blood clot had been found in my shoulder, right in the vein near the lungs. My chances were slim, and I was confused.
I couldn’t rationalize my reality to myself – that it was likely I was going to have a pulmonary embolism and die. I wasn’t even old, I was a young man. Too young for this right? Apparently not.
What’s a pulmonary embolism? It’s where a blood clot takes a road trip down to your lungs and kills them. Then you’re dead. You stop breathing and you die. Dead. Done. Finished.
Lying there on that bed I tried to make jokes to distract myself, to tell myself I was okay, that I’d survive; I tried to do anything to deny my current situation.
I was terrified.
But as the night went on, and the fear grew and grew, I realized that it wasn’t the dying I was afraid of, it was that I hadn’t lived.
I had no life to take.
So I made myself a promise.
………
A year later I stepped off the plane in Cartagena, Colombia. Wading through a bath of heat, people and disorganization I made my way to a Taxi rank and set off into a foreign country, on my own, without enough money and even less experience.
I didn’t have a clue. And I didn’t care because I felt alive.
I ended up traveling the whole continent for three months, meeting amazing people, learning a language, dating exotic women and figuring out one or two things about myself along the way.
I failed a lot, felt nervous, felt confident, felt shy, felt connected, felt alone, blew some chances, and nailed others. I did a lot of living.
In the time since surviving my stint in the hospital, I tried just about everything I could to figure out my life, and ultimately who I was. I dated a lot of women, read self-help trash, read an insane amount of philosophy and psychology, pushed my boundaries and comfort zones, had a couple of serious breakdowns, but ultimately came out knowing myself better – and feeling I had something to offer.
The entire time I was motivated by one simple promise to myself:
If I’m going to die, then it’ll be with the knowledge that I’ve lived, rather than wishing I had.
Whilst I harbor no morbid desire to expire, I am far more comfortable with how I’ve used my time and where I’m going. I think that’s all the comfort we ever want. Beyond ideas like success and happiness, what we truly desire is comfort born of humble acceptance. A knowledge that we’re fine just as we are.
………
This is a blog about identity.
This is a blog about figuring out what you are. About figuring out people. About figuring about what’s real and what’s not. It’s about looking in the mirror and seeing the good, seeing the bad, and having the courage to accept both. This is a blog about attempting to see the patterns in the uncertainty of living, about the patterns in our nature.
But mainly this is a blog where I write stuff. Stuff you hopefully like. Or alternatively you could read nothing and send me hate mail, that’s also an option.
Either way, welcome to Life Uncivilized. Take a look around, and see if we’re on the same page. If not, shoot me an email and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two.