Right! So you realize that your life needs to change and you go out and drink less, drop 20 pounds, join an ashram and live happily ever after, correct?

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there tiger. As it turns out, creating authentic and sustainable change is an arduous, laborious and often painful process.

It’s a lot like pulling weeds, in fact.

When I was 12, our family moved into a new house with a big backyard. Biggest in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the previous owner hadn’t maintained it well. So it was covered in weeds.

My brother and I were recruited¹ for the job and we had an incentive. The faster we could get rid of the weeds, the sooner we could reclaim the patch of land for the things that made us feel alive. Like baseball.

It was a big patch of land and the weekend days were hot and some of the weeds were spiky and I was too damn eager to get to the baseball. So I rushed the process. I pulled multiple weeds at once. I skipped the compulsory gentle tug on the weed to see how stubbornly it would hold on to the ground. And I did these things knowing full well that if I missed a root here and a root there, the weeds would inevitably grow back.

Sure enough, they grew back. And because of the half-assed weed pulling (and other things out of my control²), it took nearly two years for that yard to be cleared.

If I had been delicate and intentional with the way I pulled each weed, it would have taken half the time.

Similarly, I approached my own inner garden after the Painful Realization in the same manner.

I was so desperate to clear myself of my self-perceived ugliness and reclaim the terrain for something beautiful, that I reverted to some good old tendencies of impatience, intensity and impulsivity.

In a matter of a two months, I:

• Quit my job in New York City
• Stopped drinking
• Moved back to LA

Holy shit!

It seemed like the only way at the same. Go big or go home. Yet, I should have known something was off when some people would say “Wow, you quit your job, moved and stopped drinking all at once? That sounds like so much!”

Whether they realized it or not, they knew what they were talking about. Because things like your job, your people and your recreational pursuits are extremely intertwined with your emotions, your habits and memories. These things don’t just get pulled out of the soil of the soul easily.

Thus, using the “Kill em’ all, sort out the casualties later” to address radical life shifts leads to the same outcome as when using it for pulling weeds. Here’s what ended up happening:

1. Quitting my job

Funny enough, this one worked out well.

Because the job had felt stagnant for so long and because it took up so much of my time and identity, clearing it out created a lot of space very quickly.

More importantly (and unbeknownst to me at the time), I was eliminating a security blanket. By taking guaranteed money out of my life, I was putting myself in a position to be more willing to resort to more drastic measures to survive. And the more drastic things were, the more I would be willing to explore new avenues.

That said, I also didn’t just burst into the office and say ‘I quit’. I thought about it for some time and, when I decided to make the leap, I gave my boss plenty of notice.

2. Stopped drinking

This is where things started to go awry. I wasn’t a derelict of a drinker, but I knew that I’d been using alcohol too numb my pain enough that something would have to change.

Quitting the job provided a convenient reason to teetotal: one of my cardinal rules for years had been “If you don’t work, you don’t drink.” And I had been very good about that.

But the fact was, I wasn’t ready to give up drinking completely. I loved drinking. Not the getting fucked up part (I hated that), but the camaraderie.

As I would eventually learn through introspection, loneliness is one of my default states of feeling. Beginning in college and reaching a fever pitch in London, I associated drinking with revelry, camaraderie and warmth. In other words, all of the things that loneliness isn’t. To me, the pint is an international symbol for “let’s put our differences aside, our guards down and have a fucking laugh.”

Not drinking was easy 95% of the time. But, whenever I faced a situation where festive, carefree consumption had been a part of the environment – namely Christmas and a trip to Europe – I crumbled. I got angry. I threw fits. I put people through hell. Every day was a white knuckle ride. It created a lot more problems than it needed to.

I’ll broach this more in another post, but in short – I hadn’t yet made the connection between the act of drinking and what it meant to me. I had underestimated how deeply rooted it was.

3. Moved back to LA

California was technically home, but it hadn’t been home for about a decade. A lot had changed in that time – I had matured, developed a stronger sense of self and crafted tastes that were a bit at odds with the circles I was used to here (the way I characterize it is “I’m a Mexican whose crew is J. Crew”).

When I made the move, I knew instinctually that I would need some time and freedom to carve a new space for myself. Home, friends, lifestyle, community, identity.

Yet, I ignored the logic. I moved in with my then-girlfriend and put my desire to solidify our union ahead of my need to adapt to my new environs.

What I would later learn is that I hadn’t learned to properly assert my own needs. This stemmed from childhood (more fodder for another day) and was self-aggravated – my other half was very supportive.

Being in her home felt like the walls were closing in on me. And, like anyone who feels threatened does, I went on the defensive – against an enemy of my own creation. I left a few times, I grew depressed, I got needlessly angry.

Once again, this deeply-rooted facet of my life required a lot more intent and care.

– – –

Like the boy who thought he could clear a backyard full of weeds in no time, I took on too much at once. And I think we have a tendency to take on too much sometimes when we want to rid ourselves of our perceived faults.

We rush the process because we are so disgusted by those “ugly” things that have inhabited our metaphorical gardens that we can’t bear to look at them for a second longer.

Yet, when we dedicate the appropriate amount of time, energy and care to change, we get to see firsthand what the roots of the things we want to change are.

They certainly aren’t pretty: think hate, loathing, fear, sadness. Yet, when I actually was able to take a closer look at them, I realized that they weren’t so malicious or ugly after all.

You see, weeds don’t bloom in our yards to scorn us; they’re simply the product of innocuous conditions that they have no control over: rain, sun, soil and wherever the seed lands.

It’s the same with the things we want to change. They appeared in our lives for a reason (for the third time, more fodder for another day), as a result of not-as-innocuous-but-still-innocuous conditions.

These things may no longer have a place in the soil of our souls, but that doesn’t mean we should break out the Agent Orange. Giving ourselves time to understand how deeply rooted these things are and the type of effort required to release their grip on us will help ensure they come out a bit more smoothly.

I learned this at age 12 with the weeds and fucking hell, I’m still learning this today.

– – –

¹By ‘recruited’, I actually mean ‘forced to.’ The beauty of the ‘Honor thy parent’ mentality of Latino culture is that your children make for great low-cost labor. Even at age 32, I will still do yardwork when my father asks.

²Papucho (the beloved nickname for my father) is great at starting projects. Finishing them…not so much. We cleared the garden, he was supposed to put in sod – and didn’t. So the next year, we had to start from scratch. Cheers pops.