WHEN I CAME BACK from Thailand last week, I was feeling all types of ways. Complex emotions added to the stress of preparing for the next chapter of my life.

It all felt unmanageable.

I got this on a podcast from one of my favorite people, the comedian and podcaster Theo Von. As a past addict in AA’s 12-Step Program, he learned to use “unmanageable” to describe his circumstances when first getting clean.

I like that a lot. It doesn’t matter who we are, life often feels unmanageable.

Saying it out loud takes the pressure off, as if it’s okay to feel this way.

While we can always do our best, we’re human, and we gotta be easy on ourselves.​

Travel affects me deeply.

It’s what I love more than anything, for the people I meet and the places I experience pierce my heart and soul; I feel a responsibility to do something with my newfound understanding gleaned from my adventures, and until I do there’s this weight on me.

I feel it’s my calling in life, for this pressure comes from a place of intense sensitivity, love, and purpose. I feel destined to peel back the layers of our world, and it always takes time for me to process my experience.

I felt emotionally taxed after my red eye flight home last weekend. When I came back to Japan I slept all day, feeling unable to face the world.

The second day I got outside. Staying in my apartment is not what I needed. The thoughts just brew with nowhere to go.

I need sunshine, people, life and wind and movement to remind me it’ll all be okay, that life goes on, no matter how we’re feeling.

What helped the most was exercise and talking to my friends.

More than the body, exercise heals the heart and soul. The body’s gotta move for the mind to release; I crave the combination of music, sweat and endorphins, and when I’m back in the gym, I feel grounded.

If you’re ever in a funk, get moving. Go for a run. Swim in the ocean if you can as far as you can. It changes everything, and it’s not even about getting in shape.

Yet, changing the body inevitably follows when you fall in love with changing yourself within.

Exercise is the best medicine there is.​

Yesterday I could barely stand up straight, but I walked to the nearby park. Even when I’m laid low, getting fresh air always helps.

I watched a group playing soccer, and emotion washed through me.

The night before, I dreamt of playing soccer with my high school friends, a dream I often have. I’m playing basketball, lacrosse, soccer or surfing carefree in my dreams. Pain free.

Yet that hasn’t been me for a long time, the entirety of my twenties.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t get jealous of watching others playing sports without thinking about their back; but that jealously quickly fades.

There’s nobody to blame, it is what it is, and we all got something we’re dealing with.

But living in a state of pain messes with you.

I find myself watching actors in movies, wondering how their backs feel. I even watch animations, comedy specials, literally everything wondering about people’s pain — it’s wild.

Before joining the Back Ability Blueprint — the program created by one of my mentors, Brendan Backstrom, to heal chronic back pain — I wondered if I’d ever play sports pain free again.

I wondered if I’d ever have a pain-free day again.

I’ve already had them during the past nine months while in the program, and while I know deep within my heart of hearts that this is the path out, I’m aware that the journey isn’t linear, nor is it an overnight fix.

I gotta share when the path gets dark, too, so the light feels real.​

Faith, as I see it, is the belief that the future will work out in ways we can’t possibly imagine.

Faith is believing without evidence, trusting that the work, the attitude, the action we’re taking now will yield a future that surpasses the present.

But the present is all there is.

says Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter.

This pain has made me want to help people see how beautiful life is, pain-free or not, right where we are, because we’re all going through something.

This is life, and life is hard, yet I think it’s so important to try and appreciate where we are now, even in the lows.

We gotta maintain faith especially in the lows, for our ability to persist through adversity with our spirit intact actively forges who we’ll be when things turn around.

The present is everything, so powerful if we open our eyes to its sundry lessons — but this is not my state forever.

We’re here to grow, to step into a brighter future, and for that we may call on our imagination.​

“You cannot believe in possibility without believing in yourself,” says scientist, speaker and author Dr. Joe Dispenza on the Modern Wisdom podcast.

“And if you believe in yourself that means you gotta believe in possibility. That means you have to do something. You have to get off the couch, you gotta get up and get engaged in your world. You have to be a creator in your life instead of a victim in your life. Invest in yourself and invest in your future. Do it, and get uncomfortable and know that that’s normal. That’s natural. That’s the unknown.”

Recently I was listening to Dr. Dispenza’s morning meditation. I envisioned the moment when I was out of pain, healthier and stronger than I’ve ever been.

In the vision I was hugging my dad.

It’s over, I told him. I beat it, once and for all.

I started to cry as I laid there on the floor. I felt the emotions as strongly as if it was really happening.

The point of the meditation is to feel, deep within your being, the emotions of your desired future. Put yourself in that place, in that setting, in that frame of mind; what would it really feel like?

“What is real and what is imagined are both experienced similarly in the brain,” says the writer Robert Greene in his book The Laws of Human Nature.

“This has been demonstrated through various experiments in which subjects who imagine something produce electrical and chemical activity in their brains that is remarkably similar to when they actually live out what they are imagining, all of this shown through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Reality can be quite harsh and is full of limits and problems. But in our imagination we can voyage beyond these limits and entertain all kinds of possibilities. What we imagine has almost the force of what we actually experience.”

We can use our imaginations as an escape, or as fuel.

I’m a dreamer, not because I’m living in an illusion, but because I believe in myself, I believe in possibility, and I believe in the work necessary to get there.​

It takes faith. It takes persistence; and hell, it takes some delusion in the highs and the lows, just to stay at it.

It doesn’t come easy — every day I wake up and my mind lays out the laundry list of things to do, my problems or inadequacies.

That doesn’t make me unique — we all do this. We have to take control. We must start the engine, own our day, and say not today.

I’m sure life always feels unmanageable, right? I love that phrasing.

It’s not bad, not good, just unmanageable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t face what intimidates us with all the courage we can muster.

Control is an illusion. We just learn to dance in the storm and ride the goddam lightning, or we let it keep us indoors.

I got faith, man. I got my friends, my family, and I got you. And you always got me.

I ain’t going anywhere.