Words are the first step.

That’s the thought that comes when I see what my friend has written to himself. The words are bold and black and scrawled on a sheet of paper stuck to a bathroom mirror: “Change who you are. Become who you want to be.”

I’m a writer. My passion is telling stories, using language to capture life. I’ve spent a long time working at it, and I think I’m pretty good.

…but I never could have written a better story than those ten simple ones in messy Sharpie on a bathroom mirror.

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How do you change who you are? How do you become who you want to be? How do you grow up? How do you grow…up?

My friend’s story revolves around these questions. My story does too. So does yours. And yeah, those questions still apply even on days you feel like you’re winding down, turning in, burning out.

They’re more important than ever, times like that.

…when you realize you’re not a kid anymore. When the lightness of your youth seems to dim and in its place the weight of a life you feel beholden to. A monument of personality and habit that you’ve spent years building and are terrified to take down. Because what are you then? Who?

Times like those…when chance has turned from a welcome to a threat, these questions — How do you change who you are? How do you become who you want to be? How do you grow up? — they become more important than ever.

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What is it about middle age that’s so terrifying and often paralyzing? That gives rise to terms like “midlife crisis,” “mental breakdown,” and Eckhart Tolle’s famed “dark night of the soul”?

I can look at my friends and myself and the sum total of other people living in the world and see something that might be answer, or a step towards one: middle age is the point most of us leave behind the familiar structure of our childhood lives. The nuclear family. The fold of organized education. Collective sports. Debate club. These environments that you understand so well tend to fall away. One day you skip out the door as a kid and can’t bring yourself to come home when mom calls – a growing awareness of a wider world demands you strike out on your own.

There’s something out there, and what it is you can’t even begin to conceive.

It’s always been a sacred human rite to leave the familiar behind and venture into the strange in order to test the bounds of your spirit.

There are things to discover beyond the confines of your accepted life. You sense that real, deep freedom is one of them. But if that freedom is there then real, deep fear rides alongside.

The brighter the light the darker the shadow. There’s truth to that.

Let go your pillars of support, and you realize that living and surviving here in this place is a trial the likes of which you can’t even comprehend. Life, you find, is full of the incomprehensible: look up at night, wonder for a second at the immensity of what you can see, the mind-numbing scope of what you can’t, and then come back to your body to the realization that your heart will pump ocean volumes before it shudders out years from now in a future that, to you, doesn’t yet exist.

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.

When you’re young you intuit order. Follow the rules and you’ll be protected. But beyond that childhood you begin to understand that the only rules are the ones you make. No arbiter, judge, or father figure can lay the path for you. You do that. And laying down commandments that guide you rightly requires a drastic growth of awareness and the resolve to challenge the world to a fight. Faced with this demand, most of us are like unsupervised kids with crayons in a white-walled room. We make a mess of things. Some do better then others. All of us, however, feel the same drive of inadequacy, of incompleteness. It’s what keeps us going, after all. The inner mantra of our hungry souls clamor always for one thing: Change who you are. Become who you want to be.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Step away from the structure and you place yourself on perilous footing. Learn quick or be bowled over by forces outside your control. Develop a stronger awareness and you’ll be better able to see deeper into the external world, deeper into the people around you, and deeper into your own nature. Flaws included.

This last bit can be terrifying or disheartening. Especially if what you discover about yourself is incriminating. Maybe you discover that you don’t like parts of yourself. That revelation will come like a hammer-blow and leave you wishing for the blind naivety you once had.

…but there’s no turning back now. Your circumstances have shown you how to look deeper than you could before, and there’s no forgetting or denying the new world before you.

Self-awareness. It’s a state of mind that deepens with time. Develop it enough and you begin to see the great reach of your actions. You see that you are powerful. You feel that you’re powerful. But it’s a great strain to keep moving when you know, beyond doubt, that each step you take destroys even as it creates.

The choice is stillness or motion.

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I passed through Portland recently. It’s a young city. One whose reputation is hitched to vitality, eccentricity, and, put bluntly, recklessness.

I love it for just those reasons. Where else could you find a rock climber living on one side of your lot and a tattoo artist on the other. It’s a place of experimentation that goes out of its way to not spend extra tax dollars on hand rails. Walk the winding mountain path and fall, well that’s on you. Here consequences are steep. But people still take the gamble.

If you’re wondering, “What the hell does Portland and gambling have to do with midlife crises?” Rest easy, parallels are coming. There’s one big one. And it’s this, a story that starts with a kid in school and ends with a Portlandian:

Just yesterday you were fifteen sitting in the front row of math class. Teach was asking who’s got the quadratic formula memorized and fifteen of you spit it out before she could call on a raised hand. You’re all quick to jump to the answer when you see it. It feels good to get something right. Simple question, simple answer.

Just the next day, when you’re twenty-five and drifting, you realize that the simple question, simple answer is it’s own reward. It’s been a long while since you felt like you found a solution to a problem that felt right in the same way it used to. Answering math problems doesn’t do it for you anymore. The world you see now is bigger. More complicated. And the more you see the more you realize there ain’t one way that’s right and another that’s wrong. There’r five right ways, ten wrong ways, and ten million ways of solving your problem that exist outside your tiny sandbox of tools.

And furthermore, four of the five right ways lead to solutions that might cause someone else some trouble down the line so you can’t go that way.

And the one that seems right might not actually be right.

And isn’t a prerequisite of being a good human to acknowledge your lack of knowledge so you don’t muck things up and Jane Doe doesn’t see you as some arrogant, know-it all prick?

So you’re twenty-five and just now beginning to see that the problem is more complicated than a math equation.

About now your sense of control is wearing thinner than a coat that’s seen too many winters. A bit of chaos – just a tiny problem really, but one you struggle to grapple with – worms through a hole in the fabric.

That sets you shivering right quick. You start to worry you could freeze to death out here.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet, kid. You’re living in the tropics. A homeless guy in a colder climate, say Portland, would kill you for your coat-with-one-hole. His is a ragged patchwork of threads that couldn’t be rewoven into an oven mitt. Your life, with it’s tiny taste of chaos is a paradise in the Bahamas to him. You’re floundering in the shallow end while he’s cross-legged in the deep end trying to learn to breath water.

Portland is full of men and women like that guy. Bridge dwellers and dream divers and lost ones. The ones who went deep sea fishing for the wildest of life’s experiences and got hit by a whale that took all their line and then some. Forget mid-life crises, most of Portlandia eats, breathes, and lives in a full-life crisis.

The thing is, though, that kind of craziness is inevitable in life. And in Portland, they learn to swim in it. You’re not always in control. And if you think you are now, there’ll come a time when you realize you’re not. There’ll come a time you realize that control is a kind of selective delusion in this world of incomprehensible happenings. And when that happens, you can do what the Portlandians do: You admit you don’t know what you’re doing walking the mountain path without handrails, but you prepare your best, take the gamble, and do it anyway.

Because the alternative is a lifetime of wondering if you could’ve walked the mountain path. A dream without solidity. Endless thought without action that manifests as paralysis, stillness, fear, and slowly, inexorably, finally, it manifests as physical death. If you wait for total control and understanding to act, you’ll wait forever.

So instead, try to learn to swim in chaos. There’s a current to your life, even if it’s sometimes hard to read. You’ll never understand that current completely. Not really. But you don’t have to. And you don’t want to. Total understanding is boring and overrated. It smothers spontaneity and stifles creativity.

Learning to swim in chaos is a hard thing. But it’s a lesson life will continue to drive into you.

It’s a hard thing to do. But it’s a simple thing, too.

All you have to do is keep kicking…and we all learn how to do that before we’re even born. Our mothers can attest.

My friend is kicking. So am I. So are you.

Keep at it.

— Nomad