I OFTEN WONDER if writing is really the thing I’m meant to do with my life. I’m coming off a peak life experience, and when these happen, I’m always flooded with sundry emotions that affect me for a week, a month, often longer.

My mind runs as the dust settles.

Whatever I feel — whether heartbreak or longing, dazedness or sheer joy — I write to make sense of things.

What I feel is a tapestry of emotion that just mean love, because what is love? It’s everything. Love gives so much. It also hurts. Love for friends and strangers and kindred souls I miss.

Love for a moment in time that comes and goes then stays with me, lingering in the clouds and sunny rays as I return to normal life, wondering what’s real — that or this?

I can’t explain what I just went through, but it’s more than just an escape. I don’t want to escape from life; I just know that there’s so much more to it than what we see.

Perhaps there’s a time and place between that and this, a liminal space of existence. We throw ourselves into something strange, and in it we awaken.

When we return, things aren’t the same. We’re lost, looking to feel as deeply. But what is it we miss?

I believe through life-changing experiences, we see ourselves in altered light. When we return, we wonder if that was really us. Maybe out there on the other side of the threshold, we took a chance. Was that me? Fuck ya, it was.

Maybe that’s it; maybe we take from that and come back to this, seeking depth and finding freedom not only through novelty, but through looking at ourselves in that altered light; the light is darker, sharper, revealing contours we didn’t understand about ourselves yet which were exposed on our journey there and back.

Now, what do we do, knowing the contours of who we could be? We let the flame of what we feel burn away the past, what we thought we had to be. We return from where we’ve gone and don’t discredit what we’ve felt, what we shared, who we became.

We embrace the strange and dig within, and we shine as we’re meant to.

I’m a writer.

I know that because something’s off if I don’t write. With my brain foggy, my body battered, my beard long and my tears fresh, I think about the page and what I long to say.

And this is it: I don’t know.

I don’t know how to make sense of it all.

I’m visiting home in California for a bit, and part of me is afraid to leave again — to be alone. I didn’t know how badly I needed to see my family and friends.

I miss my people and having conversations in English. I miss the connections. I miss this feeling of home; but I know there’s something else I long for.

I crave adventure, and that passion can hurt. These decisions we’re supposed to make, stay or go, conform or be you.

There’s no roadmap to being you. It’s intrinsic and takes heeding our intuition. Yet, there is a general roadmap to conformity. You fit in; you have a direction; you know where you’re going because others have gone there before and are going there now.

And that makes me afraid. I know that sort of life won’t make me happy. With opened eyes I see reality, and it scares me.

There’s an alternate way to living that sets my soul on fire; it’s why I travel, why I long to live in foreign countries, and why it just doesn’t feel right to stay in California long term.

I love my friends more than life itself. But out there in the unfamiliar, my pulse quickens in daily life. My chest thumps faster.

When traveling, I get the same invigorating feeling in my body that I get from peak life experiences, doing nothing but watching the sun go down over a foreign boulevard or dusty road.

Being afraid is part of it, as is being alone; we can’t have it all, but I know what makes me feel alive — that’s a start, and I’m gonna continue chasing it.

I turned twenty-nine this week.

Last year was the most challenging and transformative year of my life. For the past six years I was in constant physical pain, and it crescendoed this past year while living in Japan. I was battling a lot of emotional turmoil.

These things were entwined, but I didn’t know it. I hit rock bottom four months ago, and it was an absolute blessing.

Through a stroke of fate, I was guided to several exceptional human beings who helped me see that the pain is a mindbody symptom, a distraction caused by the brain to protect me from what’s going on inside.

I started therapy back in Tokyo and began digging into my past, my childhood, my emotions, my dreams, all the shit I’ve held inside causing physical pain in my body.

Everything began to change and I’m better than I’ve ever been. There is no timeline to being one-hundred percent pain free. It’ll happen when it happens.

I’m back to doing everything I want to do physically. More importantly, I’m free from the prison in my mind of not knowing what was happening in my body. The mental struggle was worse than the physical pain.

Each setback has been a setup, each tear leading me to a rebirth from the ashes; I enter my twenty-ninth year in extraordinary fashion, starting with my first Burning Man.

Just keep going. Carry on, dear boy.

Am I at a crossroads or am I just alive, trying to find my way forward? Life is an endless crossroads. Sometimes we stop and take no road at all.

Sometimes we go, and maybe we don’t go in precisely the right direction, but what is the right direction? A single step forward down a road. Something will come no matter the direction, so take the step and see where it leads. Things will be okay.

In the blue sky and light of day, life feels normal again. There’s nothing wrong with this, as the mundane is beautiful, too.

But every so often, we have an experience that removes us from the mundane. Our ship is rocked, and it’s difficult to return to what can often feel like a sedentary existence, empty of the same substance.

We may question why we’re doing what the hell we’re doing. It takes time; we sway; but eventually we stop rocking, taking with us a lesson, a thought, a memory of the storm.

Back home last night, I went outside and gazed upon a starry sky.

It’s often at night when thoughts of the abnormal imbue our world again, as there’s no distraction like during the day. That’s a good thing.

We think we’ve left the extraordinary behind, but when we look into the empty night, we realize the stars are always there above us.

Maybe we just notice them when the world is dark, when we need the light to make us stop, wonder, and reconnect to the mystery.

Fuck, man — just look up. There are stars. There’s a glowing stone called the moon. You’re doing your best in a world that makes no sense, so be easy. Cherish the not knowing. Embrace the challenge and laugh through it with others who are just trying to find themselves, too.

There are stars above us, a return to the abnormal, perhaps what we thought we lost by coming home. We are the stars, strange and wild, shining and mysterious, trying to fit into a familiar and sunny world.

But maybe we, too, need the darkness to shine.

There’s loneliness and fear and dissatisfaction, even beneath the light of day; there’s magic and so much love, deep in the eternal darkness. The stars connect us, for nobody knows what tomorrow will bring in a world so full of light.