“…A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
— Duke Leto Atreides, David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
Can someone truly start their life over and live a different lifestyle after age forty?
I write these words hoping to find an answer that question. Twenty-eight years ago, I began sliding into a deep depressive period, one I am still desperately struggling to climb out of. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was fleeing from my problems — and from the much larger issues in the world around me, crises that I had no control over and no idea how to cope with — by retreating further and further into myself, a process that felt very much like falling into an incredibly deep sleep. Though this depression began for me at age sixteen, I didn’t fully drown in this inner darkness until after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
I didn’t start waking up from this internal somnambulance until a few months after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even that was merely a brief stirring from slumber; I fell back into sleep the moment my personal struggles grew too cumbersome to deal with mentally. I simply put my brain on autopilot and allowed myself to coast through the next several years as I stumbled about through the world trying to scratch out a place in it without truly understanding it.
I’m sick to death of sleeping. It’s time to wake up.
Over the past thirty years, I have lived a lazy, haphazard, unfocused, self-centered, barely-sustainable existence. While I have achieved a few meager and unnoticed accomplishments of note, I performed these feats while I was practically sleepwalking through life. What could I have accomplished if I’d have actually put some effort and focus into my projects?
Some days, I feel like nothing I ever do will be good enough, and it gets easy to fall back into old bad habits…
I’m done with all that now. I don’t want to be this person or to live his lifestyle anymore.
With each passing day, I grow increasingly frustrated and weary of the way I inadvertently mismanage my daily affairs, from the projects I fail to work on and the minor mistakes I make daily to the people I flake off on or fail to help when they need me. I find myself more and more aggravated with every aspect of my existence, from my terrible, half-hearted writing to my screwed-up financial planning. I do not want the few remaining decades of my life to be dominated by the problems I face today, whether the problems were caused by circumstance, by others, or by myself. The depressive sleep I fell into long ago has become a strangling waking nightmare, and I’m long past done with fighting my nocturnal demons.
I don’t know if I need to take the Red Pill or the spice mélange, but whatever I have to do to wake up from this inner hellscape, now is the time for it.
I want to live a more joyful and sustainable lifestyle devoted to spreading the Gospel of the Messiah Yeshua and attaining the goals I feel drawn toward achieving instead of maintaining the dreary, isolated “wage slave” humdrum I know all too well, stumbling and shambling through an existence of silent desperation. I want to reconnect with the creativity within me, with Creation outside me, and with the Creator beyond all.
The time for stumbling about in somnambulant depression is over. To quote the 1984 film Dune…
