For the first time in 4 years I can see the light piercing through the cracks. The liminal box that encloses me has nearly decomposed and all of the sudden I am about to have a life again. I’m lowkey almost 24 now. I have a college degree. I’m founding a company full-time. And I just signed my first lease. It’s a brownstone in Bed Stuy and it looks exactly like the opposite of my box. I may not ever have to go back to school or work for someone else again, if I don’t want to.
In 2020 I quit the college track team to become a sort of hobo. My childhood dream of a fruitful career in long distance running had turned out rather drab in practice, so all of the sudden I needed a new dream. A pipe dream, a fever dream, a sweet dream, a bad dream, a borrowed dream, a day dream, a wet dream — it did not matter which, but I needed something new to orient myself around and respond to. Dreams lend themselves to purpose.
I had found myself as an undergraduate on a scholarship that would save my family from debt, and I was without anything or anyone to oblige. I wasn’t actually homeless or anything, but I was staring down a blank canvas. This is cool in theory. Also very daunting if you’re jaded enough.
I am certainly now jaded enough to have awareness of the wider jaded axis and my relativity to it, but if you ask me, that’s healthy. Let the record show that I remain full of mirth and joy. My whimsical ass picked the pipe dream once and I’m optimistic that this will be the last time I will have needed to. But let me tell you more about about this box.
Functionally, my choice meant I was jumping off of The Path and landing in one of those places that belongs to all of the weird transient people. “Woah it’s really empty in here… but I kind of like it?” sort of deal. Inside these boxes you are constantly faced with opportunities to exit and climb back onto The Path. That is always within reach. But the rumor is that if you stay in there long enough and wiggle through that stupid little pipe, you can eventually get out and kind of do whatever you want. Control. So you just meditate there. It feels like you are doing absolutely nothing until one day you start to feel like you are doing everything. That’s where I’m at now.
There are certainly box caveats, though. For one, it is so, so lonely in here. You get the impression that sometimes these boxes don’t ever actually open. You tell people you are in the box, fighting the fight and whatnot, and a lot of them don’t really know what the fuck you mean by that. It’s a whole thing. They are studying biochemistry and wearing Air Force 1s. They are on The Path. You are not. You are studying hippie counterculture and wearing the Mark Zuckerberg Adidas slides in a way that you think is kind of unique, but in reality, is probably not.
In truth, it is definitely not — but what matters is that you think so. You feel superior to The Path, or something. It’s an innocuous belief at best, a nasty cope at worst, and moreso than anything else, it’s insane. You will inevitably have to figure out how to reckon with that for a while. It’s like being suspended in mid air. You will lose Instagram followers.
If you sit there and tinker around long enough, however, in all of your perceived stubbornness, insanity, baseless superiority, and sweat-crusted Adissage slides, sometimes other people will come sit beside you and keep you company. Whether out of pity or attraction, during this time you can never be truly sure, but one thing is true: it always helps. I thank god for the people who have come to sit in my box with me. When I got into my box originally, I didn’t even believe in god.
Of course, some of these people have left, some are only here to kick it when they want to make a quick stop off The Path on the way home, and some are able to do this one-foot-in, one-foot-out thing. This is all fine. I am usually more than happy to share my box.
Another thing I should tell you is that I have still been able to meet friends, date chicks, drink beers, go on my phone, and make art inside my box. That is the saving grace — we have some creature comforts in here. It’s not like a deprivation chamber or something totally anti-sensory like that. It can still be nice. And while the constraints of the box might make it so that you are unable to furnish your apartment with anything other than a sleeping bag for a while, you don’t have to go full Walden mode. It’s just a bit isolating is all I’m trying to say.
I could never be anti-box. In fact, I’m rather box evangelical. But let me keep it a band with you: I’m thinking there’s probably another box outside of this one. Matryoshka style.
The multiple-box theory seems to be quite common from what I’ve heard, so please be warned if you are reading this and considering abandoning The Path for boxes and pipes. I have no idea how many boxes there might be, and it may end up being more than I can estimate in good faith, but as long as the next is a little bit less liminal, a little bit further away from The Path than the last, and comes with a few more places for my friends to sit, I think I will be okay.
The first box is supposed to be the hardest, anyway.
A true out of the box thinking man.
matryoshka style :)