The Painful Realization took place in the Spring of 2015. By October, my then-girlfriend Amy and I had a decision to make: either she move to New York or I move to Los Angeles, where she lived.

In my heart, I knew that New York City wasn’t the place to start my search for an authentic existence. So after a few months of sendoffs, reflection and discarding most of my material goods, I landed in Los Angeles on December 18, 2015.

I was scared shitless about what to do next.

Thankfully, the holiday season was buying me time. “Because no one does anything serious over the Christmas,” my brain said. “And besides, after a year of dutiful work and a period of physical upheaval, don’t you deserve a break?”

That old cohort – logically justifiable procrastination – was still serving me well. Because the preliminary task I had set for myself was among one of the most monumental (and needlessly pressure-filled) objectives I’d ever contrived:

FIND YOUR PURPOSE.

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We Millennials talk a big game about ‘purpose’ these days. This is a fabulous development because it implies that we collectively see something more to our existence than a six-figure salary and two SUVs in the driveway.

However, finding our purpose takes a very particular set of skills. Not ones that will find you and kill you, but ones that require a Neeson-esque level of precision and poise: the patience, sensitivity and astuteness necessary to listen to your soul.

Liam reminds you to go after your calling like a fucking assassin.

The soul speaks truths. The mind speaks what it has acquired. The soul is steeped in an instinct that defies all logic. The mind speaks in a logic that is often cultivated, groomed and polished by a variety of external forces: society, culture, our peer groups. The soul says “wear pink whenever the fuck you please,” the mind says “wear pink as long as you don’t get ostracized.”

Like so many others, I had spent the majority of my life learning the rigmarole of logic as a path to achievement, success and all of those things I thought would bring me fulfillment. I had an immense amount of curiosity (hence the abundance of pink in my closet), but I had yet to learn to not play by the mind’s rules.

Thus, I did what one probably shouldn’t do when seeking their purpose: treated it like a fucking job.

With the same trepidation that the much of the masses face on a Sunday evening, I was extremely anxious – read SCARED – about digging into this inner work. Because it felt like work and not an adventure, I tried to put it off as long as possible.

This anxiety spilled over into the holiday season, which felt tinged with self-induced misery. I tried to bury those feelings to portray an air of cool around Amy’s family in Palm Desert. The immensity of those feelings, coupled with the absence of my perennial Holiday Dance Partner, champagne, blew right back up in my face in the form of a nasty depression. I spent one evening slumped on the floor of a minivan unable to coax myself to fawn over homes decked in Christmas lights. The same night, I sank into a deep malaise at the dinner table when I had my Scattergories answer shot down. It was ugly.

No amount of effort would delay the inevitable, however. So on January 4 (taking full advantage of the weekend…because no one works on the weekend), I marched into the John C. Fremont library in Hollywood, full of a superficial sense of wonder and cheer. The world had to see that here I was, a modern day masculine Mary Tyler Moore in search of his purpose! Yet, on the inside, I was trembling.

Initially, I wanted to focus on depression, namely around the stigma of depression and other mental maladies amongst men. Like many males, I had grown up in a household and a culture where emotional matters were often met with disdain and/or silence. Oftentimes, especially among my Latino friends and family, it took us breaking down a 30-pack of beer before we could break down our insecurities. Over the years, I witnessed so many of us seemingly strong men buckle from the unnecessary weight we carried because of an unwillingness to be vulnerable.

The intention came from the heart, but I was still used to using my brain as my primary tool. So instead exploring with a sense of curiosity, I did what I thought would lead to the most correct outcome. Or, rather, would force that outcome.

I opened up my laptop and started perusing through a variety of mental health organizations and charities. I halfheartedly examined websites and scoffed at the absence of information tailored to men or women. I took notes like I would have if I had been watching a webinar on fixed income securities in my last job. I read all of the pages that looked consequential, even if they had little to do with what I sought. I captured all of the information that I thought was “important” instead of the things that interested me. I made comments like “Ha! I could improve upon that without actually giving substance to what it was that I could provide.

Oh my fucking God. Two hours felt like two days. I caught myself glancing over at the clock at the corner of my laptop, watching small chunks of minutes peeling away at an excruciatingly slow pace. “This is what the grind is all about though,” I told myself.

And then it was done. Freedom. I went home. I never opened that notebook again.

The next day, my attention had diverted to a new exercise that would most certainly help get me on the road to purpose: rigid structure.

I had just listened to the Rich Roll podcast episode with Jesse Itzler, serial entrepreneur and budding spiritual seeker. I was drawn to Itzler’s curiosity and gung-ho manner – and upon hearing his approach to structuring his days to incorporate time for family and his personal search, I felt that this model was just the sort of drastic shake-up that every successful seeker seemed to deploy. So I followed along.

I opened up Google Calendar and created a series of categories – ‘Career/Mission’, ‘Fitness & Family/Intimacy’, ‘Lifestyle’, ‘Provision’, ‘Social/Interpersonal’, ‘Spirituality’ and, of course, ‘Fun’ – color-coded them, allotted a set amount of hours per day based on my objectives and structured the next week. I also created a chart to track these hours.

Are you tired yet? Because writing that last paragraph felt exhausting. The four hours I spent building that framework felt exhausting. The next four days I spent trying to adhere to that calendar felt even more exhausting. Here I was, emulating the rigor of a young Chas Tenenbaum when none of these things ever reflected the endearing qualities I did possess: curiosity, carefreeness and a joie de vivre.

A fine example of a young man not seeking his purpose.

After three weeks of these types of exercises, I felt even more lost and confused.

Meanwhile, all I really wanted to do was just read. All damn day. I had recently picked up Andrew Solomon’s opus on depression, The Noonday Demon, and was just fucking fascinated. Entranced. I learned so much from those volumes – where depression stems from, how we’ve treated it throughout the course of history. 30 minutes with Solomon was worth 30 days of random Internet research.

I had spent so many days in New York daydreaming of having entire afternoons to read. Now, I had all of the time in the world – and yet, I’d only allow myself maybe an hour a day to read, seldom without immense guilt.

The path seems as clear as day in retrospect. “Duh Daniel, why didn’t you just let yourself read all damn day?” Because I wouldn’t give myself permission. Because reading felt like fun, not “work.” And I was still primed to believe that something as monumental as finding your purpose had to be daunting, not exuberant.

Things are different today. I have less time for reading, but I allow myself to flip through whatever the hell excites me, almost whenever I want. One day it’s a mystical text like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, the next it’s just a piece of humorous fiction like A Man Called Ove. Once in a while, I’ll spend an entire day reading.

It doesn’t matter what I read because if it excites me, I take away some lesson or insight or realization that further reveals the path ahead and turns up the volume of my soul’s voice a decibel higher. It is through reading that I’ve learned that my purpose, as it turns out, isn’t to combat male depression, but something different. And that causes great joy, not trepidation.

To get here, I had to unlearn my old ways of thinking and realize that when you pursue your purpose, it can’t feel like work. Sure, it will take work and it will make you nervous like work sometimes does, but it has to involve a sense of curiosity, play and freedom that ‘work’ doesn’t often allow.

I had to give myself that freedom. And I may preaching to the choir here, but it is pretty damn okay for us to have that freedom. Because finding purpose – or any calling of the soul, for that matter – is a pursuit that requires us to go far beyond the limiting realms of logic.