"Some Personal News"
A photo from when I went to San Francisco in December. I wore my Blue UP Hoodie way too much on that trip (Photo by Vicky Woodburn)
“…when somebody leaps from a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore, it’s that the alternative is so awful. And so then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful that leaping to your death would seem like an escape from it…
“It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis: feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false… and there was actually nothing. And that you were nothing. And that it’s all a delusion and you’re so much better than everybody ’cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you’re so much worse because you can’t fucking function.”
— David Foster Wallace
A Note From NGL
During a pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a century, I’ve thought a lot about why.
Why release this piece?
For starters, it’s pretty personal, and vulnerable, and — like seemingly everything I write — long. Past just that, though, there’s this:
I’ve been working on this story since December. It’s been difficult to write for a myriad of reasons, chief among them being school, personal life, and the content of the story itself.
The reality of the situation, though, is that I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the last seven months or so. It’s a cruel twist of irony, a privilege I don’t take for granted. While people working extremely important jobs deemed “essential” by the government — nurses, grocery workers, and mail carriers — are putting themselves in harm’s way every single day out of necessity, I get to hang out inside my well-stocked home with my loving family, writing about struggles that pale in comparison to what people are facing each and every day.
Nonetheless, one of my newfound guiding principles is to not feel sorry for myself, to attack every day with a renewed sense of conviction, of controlling my own destiny. Therefore, I hope this piece doesn’t come off as pandering, or an excuse to look for sympathy. It’s not intended to be. I wrote it because I think there’s a lot to learn from my journey the last several months, and by the end of the story, I believe you’ll appreciate why I decided to share my musings.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just come off as a pompous asshole. That’s cool, too, I guess. My personal belief is that we’d all be better off as humans if people were more willing to open up, have tough conversations, and be honest both with oneself and others. If I fail to accomplish these goals in a productive fashion, well, that’s on me, fam.
What’s the fucking point?
It wasn’t until late October when I first heard a little voice in the back of my head ask me this question. I don’t remember any specific event that prompted the voice to make itself known. I don’t really remember any string of events that did, either. Moreso, the culmination of a long summer was coming into effect, and it had taken its toll.
Heading into June of 2019, there was nothing I would rather be doing than working full-time on Unplugg’d, my media startup of two years. I had poured my heart into my work during my sophomore year of college. At one point during the winter, I went four straight weeks getting an average of four hours of sleep per night, all while travelling to Florida and California for ultimate frisbee tournaments and, well, doing the whole school thing.
While I knew this probably wasn’t sustainable, I convinced myself that I could do it. I just work better late at night, I thought to myself. I blasted Sunrise by Childish Gambino on repeat to the point where I’d feel the chorus — “while they be sleeping, I be onto that new shit” — coursing through my veins.
Plus, I had a firmly-held belief that drove me to always push for more, to never settle. I need to work for myself out of undergrad. This was a no-compromise deal vital to my north star. I knew how expensive my school tuition costed; therefore, I couldn’t waste a single moment I had on campus.
I needed to do everything in my power to make sure I never had to wear a tie.
So that summer, it was go time, do-or-die, in order to achieve my goal. No school, no homework, just open tarmac. I had won several grants and got to participate in a ten-week accelerator program with two teammates. While some of my peers across the country worked nine-to-five, by-the-books internships, I had everything laid out, right in front of me, the freedom to see my vision enacted into the world should I put in the elbow grease. I viewed this time as a gift, and any time I didn’t spend working was a waste of that gift.
And work I did, for 10, 12, 14 hours a day. I would do customer interviews and create business plans by day, and record podcasts and write stories by night. I was getting home and cooking dinner at 10 pm every day, sure, but I loved it.
I couldn’t dream of spending my summer any other way.
What followed, however, was foreign to me. I didn’t know how to feel when we won the pitch competition on the last day of the program, garnering universal praise from VCs and startup folk. In total over the summer, I had brought in around $18,000. I was nominated for awards; people wrote about the company, and me. I even went on someone else’s podcast to talk about my journey and visions for the future.
To most, these forms of external validation would’ve been remarkable. In the grand scheme of things, they were pretty minor — it’s not like I was getting magazine covers and televised interviews. And yet for me, I was so used to being the guy grinding away at my laptop into the early morning that I wasn’t sure how to feel about the attention.
Besides, I hate the feeling of needing to sell myself. Always have. I despise it. I loathe it. It always felt like bullshit to me, and in the startup world, sometimes the people attracting the most headlines are the ones who are the best at spewing.
Nevertheless, I started to realize I was pretty good at it. I came off as pretty self-aware, cracking jokes about how all of that attention wasn’t really that important, which people liked. Here was some 20-year-old kid working on something I don’t quite understand, but hey, he seems nice, he’s won all these awards and money, and he goes to Northwestern! People thought I acted almost too humble, and that it was time to cash in on all of the goodwill I had worked hard to earn.
Within this swirl of newfound attention, however, a problem brewed, a problem whose seeds began to sprout just minutes after winning the pitch competition. As I walked to my team’s desk, giant check — and feelings of exuberance — in tow, another guy from the program walked directly up to me and exclaimed in an acidic tone, “Wow, you must be shocked that you won!”
Karim, Owen, and I on Demo Day, where we took home first place (Photo by Drew Wandzilak)
I was never a particular fan of this individual. I thought he embodied a lot of what I didn’t like about the startup space — the attention-seeking, the narcissism, the bullshit. But ever-cordial, I mumbled something polite in response, whisked myself away to celebrate with my teammates, and didn’t think twice about it at the time.
After all, I knew how much work I had put in over the course of the summer. What the hell did I owe this guy?
There was something there, though, that stuck. Something that had been bothering me for a while. Is what I’m doing…important enough?
My interests have changed a lot as I’ve progressed through my college career, and the problem space I began to find the most fascinating was discourse. The discord I observed on our platforms of communication — chiefly, social media — wrought real harm in front of my very own eyes, every single day. Therefore, it was only natural that the goal of Unplugg’d changed. We pivoted away from cultural commentary — in the form of content — and instead started to focus on fostering authentic conversation among young people. Change can’t come without dialogue, I’d preach. We didn’t have a solution; still, we aimed to tackle the thing head-on, even if it meant swimming upstream.
During this time, though, things became really confusing. First off, it felt like people cared about me more now because I had won a pitch competition and received awards and less based off of what I was trying to build, and what I had built up until that point. Oh, have you met Nate? He won Wildfire!
It’s not like selling offline, longform conversations to my peers was sexy. Plus, we had gone from creating awesome stuff —like interviewing NFL players and drawing up original IP— to iterating on what amounted to effectively be glorified discussion sections with pizza. Even if I thought we desperately needed the vision I was pitching, that we could create real change if we worked together and bought in, it didn’t matter if no one wanted what we were peddling. Previous fans were proud of what we had accomplished, and our new goals, but at the same time, they lost interest.
I saw it from my team, too, and felt like they were slowly losing belief in me, that the curtain had been pulled back only to reveal I was full of bullshit, and I didn’t know where we were going, either. I thought I could simply write a piece exploring the mission, and all of a sudden, it would all make sense.
It didn’t.
This made me question — was I actually building something I was passionate about? Or was I an impostor, desperately trying to sell myself for the sake of sounding like some brilliant innovator, to live up to sky-high expectations I had set for myself?
Additionally, I started to develop unhealthy thoughts and practices. I became obsessed with the idea that it was my responsibility to do something that truly “mattered”; therefore, I considered all of that time my peers spent doing consulting recruitment, reporting on sports games, “wasting” time playing video games or hanging out with friends, to be amoral. Simultaneously, I was so bombarded with the concepts of “scale” and business model canvasses that I thought any venture I took on needed to be a billion-dollar proposition that could change the world. I needed to be constantly pitching myself, proving myself. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth the time, and I wasn’t worth anything.
And it was suffocating. The problems I tried to tackle were too vast, too overwhelming. I felt guilty whenever I wasn’t working, but when I sat down to actually work, I was lost.
For someone who was driven by pursuing passions for the first 20 years of my life, I was no longer sure what I was passionate about. I was no longer making things, writing, podcasting, even printing t-shirts, things I knew I absolutely loved to do. It didn’t really register because I lost interest for those, too. I had gone from the guy who was so used to creating incredible things in the background to the guy who didn’t know what to do with his life. From the guy who put his head down and built something unique; to the guy who younger people looked at as just another bullshit artist.
It didn’t help that during this time, I suffered a partial tear in my hamstring, a hamstring I had first injured during the summer yet hadn’t bothered to fully take care of due to how much I was working. If you know hamstrings, you know that it takes a while for them to heal, particularly if you’re not taking good care of them. Given the problems I had been dealing with for months at that point, the sports doctor recommended a three-month period of rehab and recovery. This was good, because I would be avoiding surgery.
However, this meant that in the immediate future, I couldn’t play ultimate. When I could exercise — mostly stretching and mobility work — it was painful. A source of joy I had cherished dating back to elementary school felt like it had now been stripped away from me.
I wanted to take a break, to just run away from everything. From the attention, from the LinkedIn posts, from the startup spaces and curious people asking me to give them my elevator pitch, asking to sell myself and my ideas only to nod politely when they realized I wasn’t really doing anything crazy innovative, or techie, or even interesting to them.
I was stuck. And I was depressed. And every day, I would wake up and have dark thoughts.
Like, really dark thoughts.
I couldn’t go back to what I had done in the past, writing silly articles about J. Cole and worrying myself with which movie had the best shot of winning big at the Oscars. I couldn’t focus solely on school, because at this point, I was pretty disappointed with my classes, and I had always saved my best work for my personal ventures, anyway. I couldn’t focus on ultimate, on endzone sets and my dead-lifting form and who was gonna make the ‘A’ team this year. I couldn’t spend my time watching TV shows on Netflix or drinking with friends like a “normal” college student.
That didn’t matter. None of that mattered. I had to focus on what mattered.
And yet, every day, I sat up in my ivory tower, pretending like I knew how to connect people, how to build a community willing to really talk with one another, when I couldn’t even communicate with anyone myself. Whenever I would talk to friends, I would feign listening, but I was never really there. I was never really present.
My mind was always someplace else, focusing on what mattered.
Up until that point, I had always loved Northwestern. Even as some of my peers voiced their displeasure over the years, I always loved the opportunities it presented, the connections and campus and its facilities. I loved the people, and I loved everything I had accomplished over the last two-plus years.
And yet, for the first time in my college career — for the first time in my life, really — I was miserable.
What’s the fucking point?
At this point, it’s mid-December. In the last year-and-a-half, I’ve only been back home in West Hartford for a grand total of five weeks. But here I was, sleeping in my childhood room, 1,000 miles away from school and the most challenging time period of my life.
I would finally be getting that break I desperately craved. Those thoughts that had chased me, however, didn’t remain in Evanston.
I started to feel guilty about even having those thoughts. I’m a straight white dude from the upper-middle-class suburbs, I told myself. I attend a private university and have a phenomenal familial structure. Other people have real problems. I don’t have real problems. To pretend like I do is to act like an entitled prick, and there’s nothing I despise more than entitled pricks.
This shouldn’t have even been on my mind. I was built to never stop and think about shit because I was always on to the next thing. All I knew was putting my head down and grinding. Throughout high school and into college, I skipped stuff like relationships and stuffed down emotions in order to pursue ventures, classes, athletics. My mantra was “Win the Day.” This is how you get shit done, and there’s no better feeling in the world than getting shit done.
Then why, after spending all of this time pursuing what I believed to be my passion, did I feel so empty?
One thing I had realized by the end of the fall was that all of the different things people told me, advice that people gave to me, had led to some of my confusion. I believe that when pursuing a venture, there’s a healthy middle ground between the two extremes: being too narcissistic— I know exactly what I’m doing, I’m better than you, and you all are wrong — and being too impressionable — This person has done x, y, and z; therefore, everything they say is right, and I should listen to everything they tell me. Confidence is a good thing, but mentorship is, too.
For me, I think I let too many cooks into the kitchen. There was one individual who — looking back on it — I don’t believe had any bad intentions. Nevertheless, he seemed very interested in us creating something that made sense while pitching in his class, and I felt as if I was iterating every single week in order to fit his ideals as opposed to sticking to my guns.
Like, in September, we were making — and set to make more — money. Real money. I was doing what I loved. I look back on the fall and think, Man, what would’ve happened if we had just stayed true to our plan we had built over the summer? How much more progress would we have made?
This isn’t me passing blame onto anyone else to shoulder by any means. Far from it. The reality was that I just tried to satisfy too many different people, to create that thing that sounded good and smart and innovative in a pitch instead of building the company we said we would.
In doing so, I lost the conviction that had gotten me so far up until that point. And if you’re building a venture, these things are vital. It’s that healthy middle ground I alluded to — you gotta realize that while you might not always be right, the thing doesn’t work if you don’t believe in yourself and your vision. You have to be your biggest hypeman.
My first week home, I got all four of my wisdom teeth pulled out, so I had a lot of time to lounge around and get lost in my thoughts. And when I got lost in those thoughts, this is where I kept getting stuck.
I would never admit it out loud, but in the back of my mind, I grew up thinking I needed to be a millionaire by the time I turned 21 or else I was failing. There was no in between; this is what I considered “successful.” I thought this would come because of hard work, of conviction, of “winning the day,” every single day.
In the commencement speech I wrote my senior year of high school — and didn’t get selected to deliver — I had written about David McCullough, Jr.’s infamous 2012 speech, in which he told a graduating class one simple message: “You are not special.”
“The message was clear, yet shocking in its explicitness. McCullough proclaimed to students and parents alike that there were tens of thousands of school presidents and valedictorians, all as accomplished as the next one. If you are one-in-a-million, McCullough stated, that would mean that there’s 7,000 people out there, just like you.”
McCullough’s point was to preach the importance of hard work, that we should never look down on our peers or think we’re better than anyone else based on what school we go to or however much money we make. I had convinced myself back in high school that I’d internalized McCullough’s advice…and yet, here I was, expecting that I could spend a lot of time doing something and, poof, I’d be flush with cash.
Over time — though I understand you need it to accomplish your goals — money gradually became less and less important to me as a primary motivator. I knew that whatever projects I took on needed to do good, to have a purpose. Yet after the fall, I knew that solely leaning into doing something that “mattered” was a little dangerous, too. So if I didn’t want to be solely driven by the pursuit of capital — and I also wanted to ensure I was working on things I actually wanted to work on — then what came next?
Along with thinking way too much, I watched a ton of movies and TV while recovering from my oral surgery. Out of all of the content I consumed — Room was a gripping two hours that centered around perseverance and growing up, Almost Famous proved to be a joyful ride about the pitfalls of fame, and, yes, Succession lived up to the hype — nothing stood out more than The End of the Tour, the 2015 film based on a 2010 memoir based on the 1996 conversations between the acclaimed writer David Foster Wallace and the journalist, David Lipsky, who was sent to interview Wallace for a Rolling Stone piece that never got published.
Eisenberg and Segel in ‘The End of the Tour’ (A24)
The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel — yes, that Jason Segel — as Lipsky and Wallace, respectively. It’s a slow film that really just amounts to two guys driving around the Midwest and doing pretty much nothing other than, well, talking. It’s the kind of movie that nerds like me love and 95% of the world would probably hate due to its watching-paint-dry pacing.
But that’s what struck me so much: the brilliance of the conversations between Lipsky and Wallace — conversations that touch on so many facets of life, from career to passion to meaning — and the palpable chemistry of the ever-underrated Eisenberg and surprisingly-stupendous Segel.
Which leads to that quote from Wallace that I opened this piece with:
“…that you were nothing. And that it’s all a delusion and you’re so much better than everybody ’cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you’re so much worse because you can’t fucking function.”
Out of everything, this made sense. This resonated with me. This was the weird superiority complex I took upon myself, that I was in on the secret, and that’s why I couldn’t figure out how to get up in the morning and go about my day like seemingly everyone else.
This newfound feeling made me oddly content. Gleeful, almost. For the last three months, I had searched for a reason, an answer to the question of “What’s the fucking point?” Now, I had found one. There was no point, and given this new context, all of my inabilities to act, my tribulations — they were morally justified. I went around, satisfied, like I’d regained some of my moxie. There was no point.
So it was a slap in the face when my dad and I were driving back from visiting my grandma in the hospital, who was dealing with a cold. I told my dad about this super deep quote I had discovered. I read it out loud, and looked at him with a faint feeling of excitement, of sharing this brilliance, only for him to visibly look upset and completely rebuke it.
“I think that’s a terrible, selfish mindset from your friend Mr. Wallace there,” he said. Everything he did, he told me, was because of the people he loves. For me, my siblings, my mom, our family. Spending time with us — that was his purpose. It was all about the people.
He probably barely remembers this conversation because his answer was so immediate, and so direct. But it made me remember something important I had forgotten, again.
You are not special.
That slight reprieve, that jolt of energy I had felt, was misguided and flat-out wrong. While I still think there’s elements of truth to Wallace’s thoughts, the path I had started to go down was full of greed. There are too many people that care about me, I thought. For me to focus on just myself and my role in the universe, something I had convinced myself to be minute and insignificant, was selfish. It’s about the people.
I thought more about the first week of December break, when I had gone on a school-sponsored trip to San Francisco and checked out the inner workings of companies like Tesla and Slack. At that point, I wanted nothing more than to be away from the startup world; talks with tech-obsessed employees dressing up their work to my wide-eyed peers didn’t really do the trick. Yet at the same time, I really enjoyed time away from the pressures and responsibilities of Evanston, spending all my time exploring the city with one of my best friends and making new ones along the way.
I also considered what I’d learned from two books I read over the course of break. The first, Adam Grant’s Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, told stories of innovators and confirmed something I already knew — that I’m someone who wants to chart my own path. However, plenty of the originals Grant analyzed were able to create change across a slew of industries; sometimes, it was actually easier for them to identify solutions to problems by first taking a paycheck from someone else. From this, I realized that just because I’m someone who tends not to conform doesn’t mean I had to succumb to this startup environment I’d found to be quite suffocating.
The second, Bobby Hundreds’ This Is Not a T-Shirt, was a memoir of his twisty-and-turny journey in creating his part-streetwear-label, part-magazine The Hundreds. Bobby’s main message was this: a t-shirt is a blank canvas, and you as the designer get to tell your story through that canvas. When someone buys one of his t-shirts, though, they’re not telling Bobby’s story — they’re making their own unique connection to his brand and broadcasting that message to the world. While he may have started a company selling t-shirts (which, he admits, probably won’t ever make him a billionaire), he’s cultivated a passionate following and community that’s building The Hundreds right alongside him.
It’s about the people.
As my mind started to shift, I thought about a good chunk of my friends. I thought about seeing Instagram stories from friends who worked high-paying computer science jobs at companies like Facebook and Amazon during the week so that they could go rock-climbing on the weekends.
Some friends and I exploring Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco (Photo by Vicky Woodburn)
That always seemed so…small to me. Clocking in and clocking out, just to go do the thing you actually wanted to do. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Yet, who the hell was I to judge? Lots of people are driven by stability, of working hard so they can raise families and travel and do things they love. Plus, just because someone was “working for the man” — my words — didn’t mean that they didn’t enjoy their work. How could I possibly look down on people for chasing their version of happiness?
So I rebooted. No longer would I foster an unhealthy mindset towards career or life decisions. There was nothing wrong with working for a big company, especially if you believed in its mission. I wrote out a list of companies I could see myself working for, like Nike and The Ringer, and set up strategies for how I could get my foot in the door.
I also decided that, while I still felt a burning desire to tackle the problem of Gen Z discourse, it was a bit too big and overwhelming for someone pursuing a college degree. If I can’t function, I certainly won’t be able to help anyone else.
I vowed to get back to the things that I knew deep down, I still loved, determined to expand on my portfolio of awesome stories and design new shirts and merch. I was excited for a coding class in which I’d be learning HTML and CSS; also, with the ultimate season fast approaching, I went hard at rehab, all while spending more time focusing on my relationships with friends and family.
It’s about the people. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I had a direction.
What’s the fucking point?
It was well into winter quarter at this point. I was sitting in my car, in the parking garage below my apartment building, for about thirty minutes.
And I was bawling my eyes out.
I don’t cry often. In fact, at this point in the quarter, I’m struggling to remember the last time I have. I’m kind of used to just holding in my emotions. I don’t want to speak for other guys, but personally, I think it’s been conditioned out of me from a young age. Playing competitive sports will do that to you.
But on this cold winter night, I just couldn’t help myself as saltwater streaked down my face.
For the last two-plus months, I had decided to really take my physical health seriously. I went to physical therapy and the trainer every week, and I was doing mobility work and stretching for thirty minutes every morning and night. Slowly but surely, my hamstring — along with the rest of my body — began to heal. I felt stronger than I had in a long, long time, and I was able to start practicing again.
During this time, too, I realized that I had to take a break from Unplugg’d and the startup world that had consumed me. At the beginning of the quarter, I promised a lot of things to a lot of people — content, t-shirts, and more — but I quickly decided that the smart play was to save all of that for the spring, and to commit to me.
This allowed me to focus on both my physical and mental health, things that are directly correlated to each other, as well as look into summer work and start thinking about my next steps after college. Also, I spent more time with my friends and roommates, because those were good people that I felt like I had skipped out on in the fall.
Things were going well. I was gaining my confidence and my conviction back, both in my body and myself.
This photo isn’t very relevant in the story. I just like it, and it represents the season (Photo by NGL)
And then, at ultimate practice one night, we were doing a one-on-one deep drill. It’s pretty simple — offense cuts in a straight line, defense trails and tries to catch up as a handler throws the disc long. As I sprinted with a defender following close behind, the disc started to curve to the left. Even though my hamstring felt great, I was still hesitant at this point to jump off of my right leg, the one I had injured. Therefore, in this moment, I bent my left leg, ready to explode up into the air.
Except I never made it off the ground. It was an awkward angle, and before I knew it, my left knee crumpled beneath me, and I was on the turf, with my shirt over my head as I tried — and failed — not to tear up.
I got help off the field, and someone brought me ice. I’m really grateful for my coaches, too, who sat next to me and talked. They could tell how visibly upset I was. For the rest of practice, though, I pulled it together. I stood up and slowly started walking around. This isn’t too painful, I thought.
But then I drove home. When I parked, and started to get out of my car, I felt an immense shock of pain shoot up from my knee. So I did the only thing I could think of: I closed the door, and let the tears come out.
One of my biggest fears is tearing my ACL, or any other ligament, really. You always hear stories of athletes who played through things for weeks, even months, before realizing an injury was more serious than they thought and required surgery. I had struggled with problems in my right knee in the past; the left one, the one currently in pain, was supposed to be the healthy one.
While I sat in the car, a rush of emotion hit me, and my mind started wandering. Did I just tear my ACL? Am I gonna need surgery? What does rehab for that look like? I can’t go through rehab again. I just want to be able to practice and exercise and do the things that I love doing.
Am I ever going to be able to run again?
I started to fall deeper and deeper. I worked so hard to get back to this point, and yet, here we are. If I can’t exercise, and I’m taking a break from Unplugg’d, what do I pour myself into? Do I change tune and pour all of my energy into my classes? What about this summer, and what I want to do after college?
I then felt guilty for admitting that my physical and mental health had taken precedence over grades and career. Why am I here? What the fuck do I do with myself? And even if I figure that part out, what’s the fucking point?
I vowed to play through everything, even if I no longer had confidence in my body. I couldn’t miss more time. That would devastate me.
The next morning, I paid a visit to the sports doctor, who assured me that luckily, I only had a minor sprain in my LCL. It might be really painful right now, and walking up stairs would be difficult for a couple of weeks; but after three days of icing and Advil, I should feel fine.
Looking back on it, I can now say I overreacted that night. I think it was a combination of a lot of things coming to a head. For whatever reason, I decided to stick it out with another entrepreneurship class, even though I had promised to move away from the startup world for a while. I would contribute to my group, but I just couldn’t pour myself into someone else’s idea past the grade we were receiving in the class, and I felt like I was letting the team down.
Plus, this was the first time since high school that I wasn’t working on Unplugg’d in some capacity. People were paying us money — real money — and I felt guilty, like I was sitting on my hands, promising but never delivering. When fans of the brand asked “How’s Unplugg’d going?” (which they had every right to ask), I had to grind my teeth and make excuses as I figured my life out.
What was I gonna say — that I was depressed as fuck in the fall, and I’m trying to avoid being in that place again?
I felt like I was on the precipice of another spiral down, which was scary. I wasn’t sure if I was prepared for it. There were, however, several other positive things that happened.
Throughout all of this, for the first time ever, I realized I had feelings for someone. Like, really strong feelings for someone. And she had feelings for me, too.
In typical me fashion, I was prepared to stuff those feelings down and focus purely on working like I always do. Relationships aren’t for people who want to accomplish things, High School Nate shouted in the back of my head. Plus, it was a complicated situation for a lot of different reasons — that’s a story for another day.
But I knew these feelings were too true. This was someone I loved spending time with, someone who shared my interests and made me really happy. I could open up to her about my emotions, and my struggles, things I never talked with anyone about. I started to think, Maybe all those people spending time with significant others aren’t that crazy, after all.
One day, I picked up the phone and called my brother. When we chat, it usually consists of exchanging memes and talking about movie trailers. This time, though, I opened up. I talked about the fall, and where I was at now, about school and career and this girl I liked. I’m glad I called him, because he did a good job of listening, as well as offering the perspective from someone who’s known me my entire life.
Later that same day, I also reconnected with a friend, Jeremy Larkin. He’s been through the ringer, dealing with all sorts of injuries and setbacks; and yet, this guy always gets back up, with a big ol’ smile on his face and a hopeful disposition.
We caught up, talking about life and motivation. He drew out a pyramid and explained that for the thing to stand, he had to pursue each block — which represented different values — each and every day. He needed to do the first row in order to support the second row, and so forth.
I pointed to the top block. What does that one represent?
“This one,” he said, “represents the main thing that drives me — the pursuit of happiness.”
You don’t have to feel guilty for chasing happiness. In fact, you can use it as a motivator.
I regained a lot of that confidence I had felt at the beginning of the quarter. I felt…comfortable, almost more at ease with myself. I recommitted to my relationships, not just with my friends but also with my professional network.
My best pufferfish impression while playing Cincy at Florida Warm-Up ’20 (Photo by Stephen Kindseth)
I credit two meetings with mentors in particular as seriously helping me out from rethinking my approach toward school and career. They both observed that I needed to start taking a whole lot of pressure off myself, and focus on my strengths. You’re great at storytelling, and you have a passion for the business world. Why don’t we look at opportunities in a brand strategy and content role? We looked at how I should prioritize my time and how I could “work the LinkedIn connections” to get to where I want to go.
I can’t thank those two people enough for their advice. They reminded me that there are people out there, in positions of power or influence, who want to help you. Who want to open doors for you, and want to see you succeed. It’s easy to think that you’re going at it alone, but there are those who care about you.
It’s about the people.
By the end of the quarter, I thought I’d grown a lot — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, more comfortable at opening up and less comfortable holding it in. My knee started to hurt less and less, and I felt really good after playing at a tournament in Missouri. Things were going well with the girl I liked, too, and I was excited for whatever came down the line.
And even if I wasn’t actively working on Unplugg’d, I was always thinking about it, plotting my next move. I prepped for my relaunch during spring quarter — I had all of finals week to work on stuff before I was set to drive down to Austin for an ultimate tournament and spring break trip.
After a long six months, I felt like I had figured everything out.
What’s the fucking point?
At this point, it’s 2am on a Saturday in April, and a pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe.
I’ve rewritten this story five, ten, maybe twenty times in the last four months. Every time I wrote it, I wasn’t really sure if I’d ever publish it.
It’s not the right time, I’d rationalize.
People will think you’re weird for sharing something this personal, I’d tell myself.
No one wants to hear a privileged, ungrateful white boy talk about his so-called problems, I’d think.
This story started as a story about me. It was meant to serve as a pseudo-memoir of the last six months, a riff on the “Some Personal News” cliché, where I shed social media flexing and actually talked about some very vulnerable, personal news. Also, my writing often serves as a point of organization, of catharsis, for me — I find explaining my thoughts and ideas on the spot to be difficult, and in a culture that prioritizes brevity and immediacy, talking can get frustrating.
In this regard, I think writing the damn thing, well, worked. I still want to build things, and make things, but I’ve also discovered that there’s a healthy and unhealthy way to go about it. I’m in a much better place now, too — I feel a determination, a confidence in what I want to do long-term, but I also know I can’t burn myself out. It’s not selfish to focus on me, my health, or my relationships; it’s also not immoral to work on things that aren’t “important,” especially if they matter to me.
Again, you certainly can’t change the world if you can’t function. For me, right now, I’m focused on what’s feasible: I want to tell stories, I want to foster good conversations, and I want to make cool shit. I want to grow a community surrounding my work and values, all while building a platform that will help me tackle the problems that really drive me down the line.
Look, I understand my privilege to say these things, and give my thoughts on life and career. I really do. Due to the way I look and the family I come from, I live in a system where I’m set up to not fail.
I had to reframe this idea of privilege, though, because feeling guilty of having it doesn’t help anyone, and can lead to paralysis. I don’t think that’s a very healthy way to live. I’d like to believe that I’m a good person, and I want to do good. Therefore, I think it’s my responsibility to read and talk to as many people as possible, to explore and support perspectives and experiences different than my own. To listen.
These are things I’ve striven to do my entire life, and I think it’s something we can all do, no matter our background. My sister said it best tonight after talking through my story — empathy is one of the strongest forms of intelligence.
It’s about the people.
I took Jeremy’s advice and made my own pyramid, and you better believe chasing happiness was at the top. For me, though, I’ve never derived happiness in creating things for myself. No, I derive happiness in creating things that other people can enjoy, things that they can draw happiness from for themselves.
When I first got home during this quarantine, I found it extremely difficult to accept this new reality. I felt like I had worked really fucking hard to figure my life out, only for the entire world to upend itself and the future to be filled with uncertainty. I always liked coming home, spending time with my parents, and relaxing; nevertheless, I couldn’t shake feeling like a tourist, almost like I was in the way.
I’m not supposed to be here. I still haven’t even unpacked my suitcase.
Moms in our town were taking their kids on “teddy bear scavenger hunts,” so my mom did this in our window sill, which I thought was pretty adorable (Photo by NGL)
Some days, everything was fine. I would sit down to work — like my second week back, when I banged out a thirty-page roadmap — and take advantage of all this time, the open tarmac I hadn’t had since the summer.
Other days, everything was not fine. I would sit down to work, and everything felt like it would come crashing down. I missed my friends, my life, and school, but I also missed my apartment in Evanston, of being responsible for myself. I missed walking around campus, and Chicago. More than anything, I missed feeling like I was where I belonged.
Nevertheless, I can’t really control the situation we find ourselves in — pretty much no one alive has ever experienced a global pandemic, after all. Also, I am acutely aware that I’m in a well-stocked home, with my loving family and work to do. There are many, many people in the world who are struggling right now, people who have it far worse than I do.
So, I’ve decided to control what I can control. I remembered my pyramid, determined to chase what makes me happy, which includes working on projects that can help people during these scary times. And in the last week or so, that pyramid really hit home.
In talking with a lot of friends and peers, I realized just how hard this pandemic has hit everyone. We’re already dealing with a mental health crisis in this country; yet social isolation, increasing death counts, and economic instability certainly isn’t helping.
Therefore, if you’re struggling right now, whether it started five weeks or five years ago, just know something: you’re not alone. And if I can help even just one person realize that, I feel that based on my pyramid, I’m on the path to success.
This story might’ve begun as an account of my journey, but it’s certainly not how I see it now. This isn’t about me, this isn’t about my life, and this certainly isn’t about Unplugg’d. Because, quite simply, it’s about the people.
When it comes to my life, my career, my ventures…whatever it may be, that’s what I’ve figured out. That’s the value proposition. It’s about the people.
Sharing my experiences and this story has helped me because, quite simply, it‘s helping other people. Two close friends of mine have been in very dark places recently, and they were both shocked to realize that I had gone through similar things, too. No two people’s experiences are the same, but I believe that in being extremely vulnerable with them, they both left the conversation feeling a lot better, that people cared about them.
Now, I say this not because I want to create a community focused solely on mental health. I’m no expert on the topic, and besides, there are awesome communities and resources in this vein that I would love to point you to should you be interested.
No, I’m saying this because I really think it’s important to show people, look, you’re not alone. There are plenty of topics like this we just don’t talk about, that get swept under the rug. Topics from data rights to voter purging to the value of content. Topics where we skip out on depth, and context.
Who knew the best burger in the country was in Northeast Ohio? (Photo by Vicky Woodburn)
That’s my focus as I relaunch Unplugg’d, to build a community willing to talk about those things. Personally, I believe we’ll all be better off as people if we participate in these conversations, and that discourse will be better for it.
However, I don’t believe that as human beings, these are the only things we can and should talk about. I want to show people that I’m willing to be vulnerable and authentic and engage in the dialogue that people aren’t having, to celebrate the wins of life both big and small…but I also want to joke around, to debate Key & Peele sketches and design cool hoodies and raise money for causes I believe in and just engage in the human experiences of being involved in a community.
In the end, the last seven months were really tough for me. When life hits you hard, though, I think it’s on us to persevere, and come out stronger on the other end. For me, it came down to figuring out my north star, and placing the top block on my pyramid.
As I focus on our relaunch, the prospects of building this thing get me really, really excited. Even if it all crashes and burns, I don’t feel like I have to be upset, that I failed, because I’m learning to balance life in a way I didn’t before. I know what I want to do, and I know that there’s lots of professional opportunities I’d love to explore outside of just my own. I have a plan, I have a motive, and I have a why. It’s about the people.
Cause without the people, what’s the fucking point?
Interested in reading more longform from us? Check out UNPLUGG’D MAG! Also, for more work from NGL, click here.