workaholic

a portrait of a man by that man

Hey all, I'm Tommy. This essay is the most patient, thoughtful thing I've ever written but also the hardest. Thank you for creating a space where I can share it.

And thank you

Alex Dobrenko`

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workaholic

The Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch)

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

— Mary Oliver 

3:26am.

My eyes snap open like the monster under my bed drove a tent stake into my thigh. 

I’m awake. Wide awake. No alarm clock. Lots to do. Let’s get going. 

I tear off my sweat-soaked sheets and frantically feel for my phone. Oh right, I left it right beside my head. Need to check notifications and read the Morning Brew and see how the market opened in Europe.

Wait, it's 3:30? in the morning? Shit. Three hours isn’t enough… is it?

Hopelessly, I drag myself back to bed. My mind is already rearing, ready to go like a racehorse in his stall. Instead of counting sheep, I start to compile a to-do list for the day.

Sheep won’t get my work done. Plus, with my eyes closed I can almost see my google calendar.

After an eternity, the sun rises and dawn light spills in strong through my dirt-flecked never-been-washed window. I’m groggy now, when it’s time to actually wake up.

But no time for sleep.

I pull on the sweater I’ve worn six days straight and stumble to the bathroom, trying not to wake up my roommates. Now to my desk. Headphones on, distraction out. Dual monitors revved up and ready for action. Can my piece-of-shit laptop load any slower?

It’s 6:02am, and I’m about to answer emails. 

Then, three hours of Probability II lectures to catch up on. At 1.5x speed. I copy what the prof writes but it may as well be Mandarin. I’ll learn it later. And he gave me a 57% on the first midterm. 57%. What in fresh hell is that? I mean, the average was 36% but all my roommates did better, of course they did, and I’m so screwed for this course. And if he uploads another surprise 10-page PDF of enigmatic proofs, I’ll strangle him. Math is fucked… seriously who invented this shit? Did they not have something better to do? God that guy is such a son of a—

Wait, how is it already 9am? I was supposed to finish this by 8.

I just wasted three hours and it still makes no sense. 

And that comp sci assignment is due today. Shit. I haven’t been to class in weeks. Thank god I got the solutions from someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ll tweak some variables, “a” to “b” or something, fiddle around with the order of code, and I’ll be in like Flynn.

Don’t have time to learn. Too much to do.

I check Bloomberg news while Slack messaging the investment club while firing off a few quick networking emails while scanning my schedule.

Three hours of mandatory lectures on Zoom, a meeting for this marketing project most of my group members are completely useless for I’ll probably just have to do the whole thing myself, and another useless meeting for this charity fundraiser, plus I gotta prep for my teaching session tonight and finish marking midterms by Friday, but I can speed through if I skim. And review candidates for the investment club. And make a slide deck for a stock pitch competition next weekend. 

I would’ve gotten ahead Sunday but I was hungover and still a bit high and then case team practice started at 9am and didn’t end till 6pm and then I had to finish market research for this consulting project for a homeless shelter to “help the community” but mostly to get enough points to win a school trophy.

4pm. Time has melted through me. I’m in the business building, hiding on the top floor so no one talks to me. Still a human resources report to draft, what a joke of a course I’m so glad I paid $2,000 to take, this financial math problem set due, plus I planned to do extra case practice so I’ll be the best on my team and stand out and get picked for the international team. 

Short break from my computer, rubbing my eyes raw. I can barely think straight. I’m so fucking tired. Quick pit-stop at the cafe because the vending machine is out of Monsters. But, no fear here because the cafe sells these Awake chocolate bars with as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. I buy two and mix them into the bottom of my coffee until they melt down into a molten-chocolate-caffeine-concoction. 

This is my favorite moment of the day.

Everything is gloomy and shadowy and confusing but after that first sip, in that instant, darkness is separated from light, water from land, heaven from earth. The world is made new again and so is this guy.

Delicious. 

My brain de-fogs, my heart picks up, my eyes sharpen. The pathetic, undriven, wants-to-nap weakling who’s been complaining in my brain is gone.

I’m back in business and, more importantly, back to work.

To be honest, not that I have much time for honesty, but now that I’m awake again and can think: this isn’t my first coffee. I had four cups at my desk this morning and a nitro-brew from Starbucks at noon. It’s just, plain old boring black coffee doesn’t do the trick anymore. It helps, but it’s not enough. Not really. Not like it used to. I’ve graduated. The times change and so does my tolerance and I change with it.

Shit. I have a teaching session tonight. My class of 30-first year students. Shit, I forgot to prep. Shit it starts at 8pm and it’s… 7:30. Shit. I guess I gotta do it on the fly, like improv. No big deal. My life is a joke anyway. Plus, I got slides and stuff.

Back at my desk, mid Zoom session, explaining market segmentation, kinda, laughter erupts 10 feet down the hall. Christ, can my roommates shut the hell up? I’m trying to teach here. If they worked harder and actually pushed themselves, maybe they wouldn’t be drinking on a Monday. 

Alright lecture over. That was ugly. God, I’m tired. I answered most of the questions, “I’ll double click on that and circle back to you.” Although I won’t. But that usually works.

9:30pm. God I'm so fucking tired. But time for tea and interview prep. Bain just gave me a first-round but my mental math isn’t fast enough and I keep freezing on the frameworks and I’m just gonna embarrass myself and waste everyone’s time.

But wow, that job. That job would be the dream. 

This day feels like it’s lasted an hour. Nothing is done and everything is fucked but it’s whatever. Just gotta finish a few things. I never called Mom back but she doesn’t get it. Her life is figured out and happy and settled and simple. She cannot understand how far away I am from where I need to be and how intense this shit is and how far behind I am. Besides, telling me to write a list of everything I need to do would be like telling a drowning person to try the backstroke.

I didn’t submit the comp sci assignment. Shit. Don’t need to change too many variables, really, it’s no big deal. 

If today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices... can't today's vices become tomorrow's virtues?

Midnight, hunching in my desk chair, the blue glow from my screen throws shadows across my wall. My eyes hurt again. Worse.

I'll be more productive tomorrow if I sleep now. After 30 minutes of laying in bed, listening to my heart race, I should fall asleep. Maybe. 

I swivel around, take three steps from desk to bed, and collapse.

Wait, did I eat today?

back to the beginning

My Dad says I’ve been “like this” since the first grade. 

By 6pm, he’d come in the front door. See five-year-old Tommy sitting at our dining room table, decked to the tens in a GAP fleece and brown corduroy floods. Cow-licked hair still light brown, haloed gold under the incandescent glow of the lamp. Papers spread out everywhere. Tongue creasing the corner of my mouth, scribbling extra notes in the margins of my Hilroy notebook with a dull Dixon #2. 

“Tommy, we have to go to hockey practice,” nudging. 

“I can’t go,” not looking up. “I have to work. This thing. School”. 

“Well… When’s it due?” softly countering. 

“Three weeks.” 

Still not looking up. Not thinking this changed anything. 

training myself to win (at school)

In grade 10, I quit hockey after my decade-long love for the sport slowly twisted into a neurotic obsession. 

My game-day superstitions had piled up into a precise cadence, from when I woke up until the drop of the puck. I would wear the same clothes, eat the same meals, say the same things (when I did speak, which was rare). My family tiptoed around like I was a landmine. Any threat to my routine was a tremor to my very foundation. Even the sports psychologist(s) couldn’t help. 

I was no longer having fun. But I didn’t have time for fun. I wasn’t talented enough for fun. That wasn’t the point. I had to get better. I had to win.

Eclipsing my pain was my drive to play at a higher level. I didn’t quit hockey because I was miserable. Which I was. I only quit when my leap of faith to go semi-pro turned into a freefall and I refused to go back to my old team. I refused to stagnate.

Relief didn’t come for a few weeks. Once the conviction that I was a complete failure passed, quitting felt like permission I never thought I’d give myself to climb the stairs, close the cellar door on my monster, and leave him in the dark. 

I felt like a prisoner who discovered his jail cell was never locked.

But by next Fall, I heard from a classmate in the cafeteria that universities could see my grades. 

With a 30-hour hockey-shaped-hole in my calendar, I had time on my hands and watching reruns of Friends had become my enemy. 

I forced myself to sit down and study. At first, I would’ve rather watched dry paint. But after the first month of agony, I got into a groove. By month two, agony became absorption and absorption was delight. I liked the feeling of getting consumed by work and loved the feeling of having the highest grade in my class. 

In grade 12, I wore out the wood of our dining room table in my studying spot. It was smooth and dark mahogany, except for my corner seat, facing the wall, which was a riveted and bumpy yellow. My mom was not happy.

But, finishing with a 98.4% average, I had my choice of school—enrolling in a double major math and business program with a 10% graduation rate—and won enough awards to pay tuition. 

My friends were impressed. My teachers were full of praise. My parents were proud. 

By June, I was walking around the halls with a swagger. School was a game and I was winning.

But the monster hadn’t left. Only hid for a while. 

Then, he came back.

you gotta lose yourself 

In the first few weeks of undergrad, all I could think was, “Wow this is intense”. 

I was at the bottom of a pit. Surrounded by a bunch of overambitious smooth-talking high-achievers (like me) all jostling for position. Ready to climb over each other to get up the ladder with a balding, button-stretching, middle-aged manager from Deloitte at the top, dangling an offer letter for a summer internship on a fishing rod. 

The competition in the air was palpable. First suffocating. Then like oxygen—invisible and only adding fuel to my fire.

I knew I had to seriously up my game if I wanted a competitive GPA.

I was at the gym by 6am, then rotated between classes, libraries, silent study rooms, and bonus mark sessions, until 10pm when my brain quit on me and I stumbled back to my dorm for six hours of sleep. I stopped calling home. Maybe once a month. Mostly a few scattered texts and spontaneous Snapchats (that my Mom would always screenshot). My parents joked they only knew I was alive through my brother. 

The week of a math final, I would sit at my desk for seven hours straight. Looping Swimming by Mac Miller on my Sony noise-canceling headphones, mumbling along to Self Care, doing each textbook problem a second time. Take my first sip of my green tea but grimace because it’s bitter because it’s stone cold because I made it 45 minutes ago. 

Before each exam, standing in a long snaking line—the air alive with nervous chatter, students sweatily gripping at crumpled notes, praying to God (for the first time since last exams) for salvation—I’d pop a caffeine pill for energy and a L-Theanine pill to smooth out the jitters. Adding more molecules to mix with the cortisol raging through my veins. 

I don’t know if the pills worked or if it was placebo, but I liked the seriousness, the devotion. Like it was a sacrifice up to the GPA-gods.

One lovely Spring Saturday, I bought Ritalin in a ziploc sandwich bag from some grown man in an apartment complex, to study for 16 hours straight for my Mathematical Proofs final that Monday. I got an A. 

Business school was chaos but, rung by rung, I was climbing the ladder. 

One night, studying in the business building, I overheard a student gush about “this guy” who won the school-wide consulting competition and got a 95% on the business midterm, the one almost everyone got wrecked on. Not knowing they were five feet away from him. 

A twisted grin tugged at the corners of my mouth. 

I was satisfied, but not satiated.

ash in my mouth

For the first two years of university, I only wanted three things in life: an investment banking internship, a spot on my school’s case competition team, and a teaching assistant position.

The three most prestigious things a business student could want. It was a curious coincidence. Which is to say, definitely not one.

So I jumped through all the hoops with the verve of a trained dolphin.

And then, it happened. My work paid off.

It culminated in the Fall of 2020, the beginning of third year. Eight months of a day-to-day routine approximating hell. Buried in work, knee-deep in the muck of misery, crushed by stress and anxiety and my own inadequacy. Eating little, sleeping less, and consuming enough caffeine to get an entire Olympic track team disqualified. 

Stable as a three-legged table but refusing to let any balls drop. Taking whatever shortcuts I could just to stay afloat.

Living in a shipwreck of my expectations.

I had spent my entire summer drilling equity value vs enterprise value questions and building financial models and grinding LinkedIn coffee chats (although no coffee was ever involved?) to land an oh-so-coveted internship at a big bank. I built a 265 row Excel sheet listing everyone I spoke to, with 14 columns tracking their title, contact info, and every date of touchpoint. After months of work, a crucible of interviews, and hours of anticipation, I received an offer. An $85,000 salary at 19 years old. An option to return full-time, make more money than anyone in my family ever had. The pinnacle of business student status. But, I felt nothing.

Every Sunday morning, the case competition coach told the team we were the “cream of the crop”. The elite. The top business students in the school—all pitted against each other like gladiators to see who wins. My roommates spent Sundays golfing and goofing off and getting ahead on schoolwork, while I was cramped inside on Zoom calls, decoding a 30 page Harvard case about a dish detergent company appealing to millennials. Unfulfilling at best, soul crushing at worst. 

As a TA, I had to kiss ass just to spend an extra 30 hours a week locked in my room on lesson prep and meetings and grading and mandatory Zoom socials (which are quite possibly the worst thing ever). All while putting up with pressure and politics that edged on insanity.

I got what I wanted. Worse, I worked so hard, spent hundreds of hours, to get those three positions… And I never felt worse.

That semester, I remember sitting on my bed with a close friend, near tears, saying, “Man, my mental health is so bad right now”. I never felt further from my ideal, despite how close to my goals I had come.

I tasted the fruits of prestige turn to ash in my mouth. 

Don’t get me wrong, a part of me loved it. That I was working myself to death. That I was so much busier than my friends and family, my time was so much more valuable. A part of me believed I was better than others because I worked harder. Because I was more connected. Because I made more money. That part saw everyone and everything as an obstacle and had no problem elbowing and lying and cheating, as long as I won.

On paper, my time in university was a “success”. Perfect GPA, prestigious internships, podiums, the president of clubs. A resume that dazzles. Hireability. 

Last year I won a gold medal for graduating in the top 1% of my class, but I didn’t show up to the ceremony to get it. 

I didn’t feel like a success.

11.72/12.00 converts to a 4.0 (basically for every A, I got 3 A+’s)

work is what i know

That Fall was almost four years ago. 

So much life has happened since: I started to write online, I entered a relationship, I graduated, I left said relationship, I traveled the world. I look back at that guy and shudder.

But the heartbeat of that life echoes through me. The workaholic still lives. 

Every day, I wake up by 6am. I protect my morning hours for work like a mother bear. I sit at my desk to write, the hours fall away too fast, it never feels like I get enough done. I get lost in the doc. Then resurface and gawk at the time, disgruntled that work demands so much. I track words written and hours at the keyboard. I don’t track compliments given or quality time with friends.

Work always anchors my day. 

My phone stays buried in a drawer and never leaves Do Not Disturb. Before 7pm, you’d have better luck contacting the Pope or the President or getting them both on a shared facetime call. My Dad jokes that when I actually do answer, he’ll run out and buy a lottery ticket because it’s his lucky day. Hilarious. Even when I call back, he feels bad keeping me too long. He knows I have a lot on my mind. He can sense my restlessness. My pull away from the shallow monotony of the phone call and back to the nourishing depths of work. 

My last girlfriend would sometimes get upset on Sunday mornings. She’d want to stay in bed for a bit, relax, while I’d want to get up, get going. I’d try to stay. To make her happy. But the seconds felt like sandpaper. I needed to get my day underway. Laying there awake, the bed felt Procrustean¹. 

One bright afternoon, after reading an essay on the importance of play, I sat down at my kitchen island, cracked open my leather Travelers journal and, at the top of a fresh page, scribbled, “What do I do to play?” 

I love reading books—there’s no amount of money you could pay me to stop reading—but it’s not play. I read to get smarter, wiser, become a better writer. I workout every day, but it’s to get stronger, run longer, stay sane. Even with photography, I’m constantly comparing my photos, trying to improve.

I closed my journal. 

In public, I snort at the people glued to their phones. Swiping through Snapchats, TikToks and Tinder dates with ferocity. That is, when I can find the time to close my laptop and go out in public. Rarely. 

Even traveling, I squeeze in sightseeing after 4pm. I can’t put my work on pause.

When I see strangers working in coffee shops, I scan their screens. What are they working on? Should I be working? Why am I not working?

And I hate the beach. Never mind the sunburn and the sand superglued to my feet, I hate just sitting there. Idle. Can’t do it. 

This year in Thailand, I had three whole weeks away from my laptop. It was a nice break, but as time dragged on, the days felt dystopian. Removed from reality. Hollow. I was itching to return to something more meaty, meaningful. My reading and writing. My work. I missed the feeling of direction, progress, forward motion. 

There’s this constant unrelenting tug: get to work, get to work, you could be working right now. Everyone and everything that stands in the way feels like an obstacle. I hear myself responding: I KNOW, I am TRYING to get back to work. Any moment caught standing still, my ambition pokes and prods: Shouldn’t you get going?

It's like I can't feel complete unless my work is… And it's never complete.

I don’t depend on people—to make me happy or fix my problems or regulate my emotions—but I do depend on work. 

It pulls me under like quicksand. Shields me from the harsh, trivial, mortal realities of everyday life. When I’m working I forget about everything else. I’m not happy per se, but I’m also not sad or anxious or scared. I’m working. My mind is fully absorbed, stretched to its limits. 

It’s the bucket I pour my unease, my doubts, my fear into. The sharper the pain I won’t write anything memorable, the clearer the conviction I’ll never be as good as the authors I revere, the scarier the realization my career plan is to write about my emotions on the Internet, the more I’m driven back to the keyboard. It doesn’t fix the fear, but quiets it a little. 

I don’t know how to take on less. I don’t know how to ease off, relax. I’ve never been good at balance. I tell my friends, “I'm an extremist.” (They've asked me to stop saying this so loudly in public). 

My jaw tires, but my hunger doesn’t. 

There’s a part of me who wants to pull back, facetime friends every weekend and text family back faster. But there’s another part of me, the workaholic, that says “Fuck that, it’s going to pull you off your game. They want me to ease off so I’ll be average. Like them.” That voice skips like a broken record: “I need my work time. I need it. They don’t get it. They don’t know what it takes”. It gnaws on all these things that I haven’t done. The projects left unfinished, the tasks overdue, the work incomplete. 

I'm scared to take my foot off the gas. I’m scared of who I am without my work ethic. I’m scared to meet the person I am now, if I glanced down from the image of where my work will take me. 

Really, I’m terrified of what I have to show for myself without the work that I do each day. 

Work is what I know. 

I’ve concretized a way of being that I don’t know if I can break.

“this is work”

One morning at my desk, typing away in another google doc, an old man walks past, nods and says, “Morning, son. How’s the work?”

I keep typing. But eventually, I look up from my screen and think, “What the hell is work?”²

That’s my fear.

That work is my default state. My frame of experiencing reality that’s so totalizing, so enveloping, I don’t even realize it’s not reality. That my life gravitates so strongly around work, I’ll never escape its orbit. That relentless forward motion is woven so tightly into my identity, taking it out would pull me apart. My worth is forever fixed to what I get done in a day.

I’m afraid that I can’t let go. That I will always have so much to get done that I haven’t. That I will always feel behind. That my life will be a continual race to get to the next thing. A treadmill of to-do’s and hills to climb, trying to play “keep up” with my desires. Weighed down by everything that’s left undone. 

I know I’ll miss out on the most nourishing parts of life if I let my work hardwiring pilot my life. I’ve read enough stories of men who chased ambition but missed raising their children or watching the sunset and lay on their deathbeds drowning in money but starving for love. 

I know the only people who will remember I worked late is my family. 

“wow, you’re such a hard worker”

Despite their remoteness in time, I have crystal clear memories of every time I fell short as a kid. I didn’t test gifted. I wasn’t the smartest in my grade. I got cut from my town’s top hockey team.

For some reason, I couldn’t just be average. I couldn’t just be me and have fun. I had to choose the most difficult thing and I had to win.

At a young age, I decided that I couldn’t control my intellect, my athleticism, my raw ability, but I could control my work ethic. I knew that would be my royal road to victory: I’ll just work harder. 

I’ve been called a hard worker for as long as I can remember. 

It’s the first, often only, compliment I get. From classmates and teammates. From old girlfriends. From professors and coaches and friends. Not “talented” or “gifted” or even “smart”. Just “wow you work so hard”. Like that’s the one you say when someone tries hard, but just doesn’t have it. 

Even if I do succeed, I have to scrape and claw and fight for every inch. Despite my effort, I’ll never be as good as others because I’m not talented enough.

Any success is easy to rationalize away. If it’s just my work ethic, it could’ve been done by anybody. Not God-given, but man-made. 

Wow, tight-around-the-collar personal here, but one summer close to the end of university I was sitting on one of those echoey aluminum benches behind a baseball diamond, staring out and savoring the sunshine. 

Out of nowhere, I realized: My ambitions outstretch my abilities. 

I’ve always wanted to be able to do more than I can do. To be better than I am. To be more. 

Despite my effort, I see a string of disappointments.

I wanted to be a D1 college hockey player, but I just wasn’t good enough. 

I wanted to be a top math student, but I just wasn’t good enough. 

I wanted to be on the international case team, but I just wasn’t good enough. The coach said so.

It’s like there’s this invisible bar above my head I’m stretching towards. Within my reach but outside my grasp. Near the top but never there. Close enough to tempt but far enough to taunt.

Hard work is my attempt to close that gap. To compensate for the natural ability I’m so sure that I lack. To combat the painful fact that I’m just not good enough to do the things I want to do.

Sometimes I think my gravestone should read: “He Tried”. 

Even now, I want to produce exceptional writing, but I just don’t feel like I’m good enough. 

If we could talk in private, just you and me, brain to brain, if that’s OK: this very essay—the one you’re reading right now on your phone or your computer, or maybe in print, if you liked it enough to print it out, that would be cool—feels mediocre. Despite how hard I’ve worked on it, I’m convinced no one will read it. Now we’re over 5,000 words in, no one will see this very sentence. Like when my friend buried a stat about LeBron James being the most dominant power forward in the NBA in his Hamlet essay and the English teacher never noticed (especially impressive because you would think a word like “LeBron” stands out). Yet, at the same time, I’m expecting some glorious response. Readers to realize my genius, launch my subscriber growth into the stratosphere.

I’m supposed to publish this tomorrow. Initially, I planned to in December but kept pushing it back because it wasn’t good enough. Even now it doesn’t feel good enough. Especially compared to the long-form essays I’ve read on Substack, and those writers almost certainly didn’t pay a coach $600 and spend 8 months writing and rewriting 12 separate drafts, 60,000+ meandering words, and then cut 90% of it. 

All this work just for something this mediocre.

This essay is partially me and partially the monster. I am both and both are true.

The monster created a detailed doc with reams of thorough notes and sat me at the desk for three hours every day to write and told me to rewrite until it glistened and fed me more ideas at all hours of the day. 

But he also still hates it. He says it’s never going to be good enough and, like a century home, the foundation is rotten and needs to be scrapped. 

Finishing this is letting go. It’s letting the monster work and refine and rewrite but not allowing him to take hold. Forcing him to release. Accepting it’s not perfect or the best and will never be. And hitting publish anyway.

i got dreams but i can’t make myself believe them

I dream of golden days.

Waking before dawn and feeling the responsibilities of the day still miles away. Sitting calmly, drinking coffee, not being rushed. Reading or chatting or ruminating.

At my desk by 8, working diligently. Accomplishing a full day’s efforts by noon and eating lunch with a clear conscience. Infinitely satisfied with what has been done. Okay with all that is left unfinished. My sense of enoughness divorced from the world of wanting and doing and achieving. 

Afternoons reserved for patient, savory slowness. Indifference to the time. Long walks in untamed places. Reading a timeless text on the veranda. Main street coffee with old friends or back alley tea with new acquaintances. Planting tomatoes in my garden or building a bookshelf or baking bread or splitting logs or doing nothing. After all, doing nothing with someone you love is never doing nothing, is it?

I envision crisp Fall mornings wearing some weather-beaten coat, picking red delicious from the orchard and feeding the chickens and gathering wood. Warm and windy summer afternoons on a cozy blanket, watching clouds float by, gazing at that line in the distance where the grass touches the sky. Cold winter nights, stoking the embers of a wood-burning stove, staring into the flames. 

My mind at rest. 

Being embodied in my living. Feeling flickers of bliss. Making room in my worldview for wonder, mystery, faith. All that is left unknown.

I still spend most of my day working. Seeking an ever-receding horizon, falling for the future, in love with the land over the next hill. I still can’t close my laptop at 12pm. I still hate the beach.

But I’m growing. Sometimes sideways. Sometimes backwards. Sometimes I question whether I’m making progress at all. Yet reflecting on my past, even in the last year, I’m a victim of my own optimism.

Maybe we are all distant from the hope we have for ourselves.

And maybe that’s okay.

And maybe the very fact we see the distance means we’re closer than we think.

We're all just circling ourselves, learning to grow in spirals. 

wait, love?

In Thailand I met a monk who told me: “There’s no reason you shouldn’t love yourself like crazy.”

He made me realize my struggle with work is a projection of my struggle to love myself. I didn’t start to love myself until I admitted all the ways I didn’t. The ways I didn’t feel worthy of existence if I didn’t achieve something great and win and rise to the top. If I’m not the best. 

But work or no work, I’m still the same person. With everything I’ve done, or plan to do, stripped away, I’m good enough to live a good life.

Perhaps that’s why I wrote this essay. 

To tell the five year old boy sitting at his dining room table with all his papers spread out, and the status-crazed business student, and the aspiring author that—regardless of his grades or internships or essays—he’s worthy of love. He doesn’t need to be something more than he is, or somewhere else that he isn’t. He’s not behind but exactly where he needs to be. He's making good use of his life. 

Love requires a lifetime of effort. Good thing I’m a hard worker.

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“Love yourself. Then forget it.

Then, love the world.”

― Mary Oliver

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You got all my love,

Tommy

1. In Greek mythology, "Procrustes was a robber who killed his victims in a most cruel and unusual way. He made them lie on an iron bed and would force them to fit the bed by cutting off the parts that hung off the ends or by stretching those people who were too short". A Procrustean bed is enforced conformity—trying to force something to be something that it's not. 

2. A play on the two fish parable that DFW famously uses as a bookend for his commencement speech "This is Water".