The Major Lift

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is poignant and beautiful for many reasons, but my favorite part as a music geek is this: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls, the major lifts — the baffled king composing hallelujah …” It’s meta on two levels. Cohen composed this verse describing King David composing a song. Each phrase describing the music is accompanied by the very musical construct it mentions: “fourth” and “fifth” are sung to the perfect fourth and perfect fifth of the key of the song; “minor falls” and “major lifts” are sung to the key’s minor and fourth major, respectively. It’s like explaining haikus using a haiku, or, one of my favorite examples, zipping up a hoodie that has the word “kern” spread across the front. (“Kerning” is the act of adjusting spacing between letters of a font; by zipping up that hoodie, you bring the letters of the word “kern” closer to each other. You can buy this very hoodie online.)

A big reason why I sought out the Amazon warehouse job was to jostle myself out of the depression I had sunken into. And indeed it did — the job, along with the twenty-plus hours it takes to write, record, and produce each episode of this podcast, lifted me out of the depression as I had hoped. I’d love to tell you how.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: The Major Lift.

Every once in a while you run into an associate in BFI4 who outworks you. Martin was just one such person. I spotted him one week nearly jogging with an empty pallet jack towards a cluster of pallets, each piled high with yellow plastic containers full of goods, while several associates stood nearby, one even leaning on the handle of his idle pallet jack as he talked. I wouldn’t get to work with Martin until a week later, but I remembered being impressed by his work ethic and hoping that I’d get a chance to work alongside him.

That opportunity finally came when we were both assigned to “bottoms” in the flats area — the job where you roll away carts full of bubble-wrap envelopes as soon as they’re filled and replace them with empty carts so that the automatic sorter above can continue its work. This job featured some high tides of busyness where several carts get full at the same time, and low tides of watchful readiness where all thirty carts that you’re monitoring have plenty of room.

It was during one such quieter period when I started a conversation with Martin. We worked our way through the three questions I try to ask every associate: Why Amazon? How long have you been here? Do you like this department and role, or would you rather switch to another? We gave the usual surface-level answers to each other. When he asked about my previous job, I was too embarrassed to say that I had been heading a small tech company I started, so instead opted to answer the question as if it pertained only to the past eight months. As a concession for this evasion, I went deeper into the past months instead of farther back in time for the answer.

“I was unemployed,” I said. I had been forcing myself to say that for much of 2021 because I felt embarrassed every time. The temptation was ever to instead sound like I had grand plans, that I was headed somewhere, if not amazing, at least upwards. Knowing that this was the temptation, and wanting through exposure therapy to force myself to confront not only the state I was in, but also to judge both myself and others less harshly in that state, I would just tell anyone who asked, flatly, that I was unemployed. The real teeth-gritting came right afterwards for two reasons. First, I always felt an urge to add a little something as an excuse. “You know, just trying to figure out what I should do next.” “Spending a lot more time with the kids.” Anything to lessen the blow. But second, it was because I couldn’t handle the discomfort such a revelation often caused the listener. I almost always wanted to dispel the cause of their awkwardness; there was usually a split second where you could see them debating exactly how to respond. “Oooh … I’m sorry.” “What happened?!” “I’m sure you’ll find something amazing.” But no, I took the more selfish route towards self-improvement and simply let their inability to respond amplify my own embarrassment.

Martin didn’t seem uncomfortable, so I dived in headlong. “In fact, I’ve been unemployed eight months, loafing around the house, because I haven’t been handling depression very well.” We both took a moment to eye the carts we were monitoring, letting work fill the gap in conversation that neither of us knew how to otherwise address.

Martin broke the détente. “Funny you should say that. I had been unemployed myself. Well, I was technically taking care of my niece in the daytime, but really, I was just unemployed. I struggled with anxiety and depression as well.” He tried driving Uber, but the problem there was that he would always procrastinate starting his job until it was often too late in the evening to do so. Amazon, he had decided, would force him to get up and give him no chance to procrastinate. “I also wanted — well, needed — the exercise. Not to mention, the job is perfect for my anxiety. I don’t ever have to make decisions. I just come here.”

I was so surprised by this serendipitous discovery — here was a man who had joined, no, chosen Amazon for the exact same reasons I had — that I followed up with a series of rapid-fire questions.

“Why Amazon? Why not Target or something? Employees seem to think Target’s a pretty good employer.”

Martin had worked a customer service job before. “Never again,” he said, “never again.” He didn’t want to deal with complainers, with all the people all the time. He chose Amazon specifically because its jobs are blissfully solitary.

“Do you have a degree? How long do you think you’ll be at this?”

Martin has an associate degree in Women’s Studies, but he’s not sure that’ll ever be useful. He joined Amazon just a week before me, so it’s really too early to tell how long he’ll stay. But so far, it feels like he’ll be in it for the long run. The job had been good for him, exactly what he had hoped.

This conversation with Martin lightened my whole mood for the rest of that afternoon, and in fact began to affect how I saw my own experience in the warehouse. I was not alone. If I had randomly run into someone who also joined for the same reasons, given I didn’t get many opportunities to chat with associates and certainly almost never brought up that I was depressed, surely the warehouse must have many associates in the same situation. It feels wrong to say that I was happy about this, but the truth is that I was. One’s suffering is eased — perhaps perversely, but nevertheless eased — simply by knowing that there’s at least one other person in the world who understands exactly how you feel. Martin was that for me.

Moreover, when Martin described to me how Amazon had rescued him from his couch, from the idle pointlessness of his life, I not only recognized exactly the same pattern in my own experience, but more importantly, I felt a sense of relief around my guilt surrounding this entire endeavor. Unless Martin had parlayed his Women’s Studies degree into some serious bank without telling me, here was a man, not a millionaire plucking out his own feathers looking for the thrill of pretend-play bootcamp to pull him out of hopelessness, just an ordinary man, who not only sought Amazon out for the same reasons but also reaped the same benefits.

I had been wondering this whole time, as my mood improved week over week, whether the emotional benefits of joining Amazon were only possible because I did not need the job, because I could walk away at any moment without consequence, because it was swashbuckling adventure that I could regale my friends with at parties. (Here you should be imagining three people sitting around a table about to start a board game, not Kendall Roy throwing a multimillion-dollar fortieth-birthday blowout featuring Jay-Z and one of the Kardashians.) But no. At last, proof positive, no. Here stood a man who tried desperately on many days to work up the energy just to sign into his Uber Partner app, much less get off the couch, into a car, and drive — drive people, people who talk, people who complain. A man for whom this job is not a passing whim, a life “experience,” a stint whose very existence would be debated for exclusion from one’s LinkedIn profile. This — deliberately seeking the most grueling period of an already-unpleasant job — was not a play of the rich, the prince as pauper pleasantly surprised that no, it was he who benefited from the exchange. This must be a common thing.

I wasn’t doing this because I was wealthy. I was doing this because I was depressed. And, as with Martin, I was grateful my leap of faith had worked, that the unyieldingly merciless twin arms of commerce and industry had caught me in their transactional embrace. We had floundered — lost, drowning — until we, of our own volition, surrendered ourselves into the ever-welcoming bosom of that great Babylon, the soul of unfettered capitalism, the lady in scarlet. She’d welcome all. “Come. My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” She winked at that clever last-minute improvisation. She knew as well as I that it was not so. But how much weeping can a man do? “Now, now,” she said as she exchanged my invisible yoke for her all-too-tangible stocks — my unrelenting despair for her contracts, her metrics, her minutes, minutes, always minutes. That engine will run, with you its coal. By God, it’ll run.

Her yoke was not light. Not light at all. But lighter.

—

The job does get easier with time. You find ways to save energy, ways to move and lift that don’t hurt as much. There’s a part of Ship Dock where large yellow plastic crates full of products are unloaded from conveyor belts and stacked onto pallets. When I first worked in that section, it annoyed me that so many people simply dropped their crates the full three feet from the conveyor belt onto the ground, each time resulting in a loud crash that justified the bundles of earplugs on offer throughout Ship Dock. It had seemed so carelessly destructive. But I learned quickly after working there a few hours that the dropping isn’t about laziness — it’s about one’s inability to continue lifting crate after crate in rapid succession for hours without throwing out one’s back or crumpling from exhaustion.

I kept up my diligent gentle unloading of every crate the first few hours, congratulating myself on my industriousness and my sense of civic responsibility towards our fellow citizens’ various Christmas gifts, until I was forced to admit that I could not continue at this pace, not like this. The first time you deliberately drop a crate full of goods feels transgressive. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Well, they definitely noticed, because the sound of hard plastic crashing on concrete is thunderous. What I mean is if anyone cared. But of course no one did. The new guy had just learned the right way to do things.

Once I overcame my initial reluctance, it became positively joyful to drop crates loudly onto the floor, onto pallets, onto each other. It’s like the time when Tanya and I, as enthusiastic and inexperienced twenty-something homeowners, decided to remodel a tiny bathroom in our duplex ourselves. There’s much trepidation and breath-holding the first time you intentionally swing a hammer hard enough to punch its head through drywall. You look at each other as shocked awe turns into smiles. Then, like barracudas recovering from the initial surprise that one of you had actually taken a bite — bitten a piece right off that grouper! — we dove wholeheartedly into tearing up the entire bathroom, hammer and crowbar in hand, splinters and chips of various construction materials bouncing off our goggles but sticking to skin, until all that drywall dust mixed with our sweat and caked on our cheeks.

So you start dropping a few crates to conserve energy. You start focusing on the right form, lifting with your thighs and not your back. You don’t ever sink so low as to do a “team lift” — that is, ask a buddy to lift something with you the way that managers in the dock keep reminding you is an option, no doubt instigated by lawyers trying to reduce L&I claims. But you do all sorts of other things to make it easier. Headphones. Slipping off to lunch five minutes early so you might get a seat exposed to natural light. (But, of course, leaving lunch five minutes early as well, because, come on, principles.) Even getting up at 5:40 a.m. is no problem if you treat it like you’ve moved to a different time zone where everything’s shifted.

Far more importantly, I began feeling better even starting Day One. Well, upon reflection, even starting the moment I clicked on the button to apply for a job, because at last, after so many months, something might change. And how can I expect to feel different if I don’t change anything? The hope of Amazon was itself the beginning of my salvation. Then on Day One, that hope became incarnate. I couldn’t help but feel giddy, all the while somewhat incredulously repeating to myself the famous refrain of Penny Lane in Almost Famous: “It’s all happening!”

As the excitement of the novelty wore off over weeks, I was relieved to find that the benefits of the work didn’t. Days when I worked would never be thought of as wasted. Sure, I wasn’t convinced that my tiny drop of effort was noticeable within the deluge of the cardboard pipeline Amazon had built connecting factories in China directly to American porches, but six tons of boxes is six tons of boxes. Fifteen thousand bubble-wrap envelopes is still a lot to have personally processed in a day. Compared to sitting on a couch and occasionally driving out to buy a bubble tea, days at Amazon definitely felt more purposeful, even despite some reservations about consumerism and my employer. And what of the days off — two days a week, never consecutive? A close friend, Wayne Chang, ended a video call by wishing me a good day off. “Wayne,” I said. “In this job, every day off is a great day off.”

And it’s true. Rest is sweet when it’s earned; even more so when it’s desperately desired but forcibly withheld. A $5.99 pumpkin pie tastes amazing when your employer, who otherwise docks you an hour’s pay if you’re late even one minute clocking in, gives it to you free, a dessert worth 21.5 minutes’ work. I couldn’t figure out a way to say that last sentence without sounding Stockholm syndrome-y, so all I can tell you is that I am being completely direct here, not trying to make some clever backhanded compliment.

At the risk of casting even more doubt on that claim, I tell you this: when working at Amazon for $18.55 an hour, it feels deeply rewarding to occasionally bring home takeout costing several multiples of that. Watching my kids dive ravenously into the Red Robin bag, each finding their own burger orders, chattering with anticipation — I feel like a contented observer looking through the window at a Norman Rockwell scene. Before, I largely ignored prices when ordering out; my concerns were more around whether the kids might take our many comforts for granted and not strive to earn their own. Now, there’s a joy in giving them something that really cost me something. I scanned and moved 4,800 pounds of boxes for these burgers. I sorted 6,000 flat packages for this meal.

I don’t need them to know this. The pleasure is in the giving. The happiness could only run this deep when you know the cost, not because you’ve now bestowed on them something that cost you significant effort to obtain, but because doing so afforded you the opportunity to prove to yourself what you value. I would exchange this soreness, this tiredness, this pain, for something you’d enjoy, and I would do it every time, because I love you. And for a man to be shown that he loves — that he’s not only capable of feeling it, but that, at his best, he can do so selflessly — that is the joy in giving.

Don’t all go quitting whatever jobs you have to go scurrying into BFI4, though, much less so at Peak. As Oliver Burkeman says in Four Thousand Weeks, his excellent book on rethinking our productivity-obsessed culture, facing reality might not necessarily make for a happier existence, but it certainly makes for a realer one. By facing the reality of what will soon become the most commonly held job in America, I wouldn’t go as far as to say I was happy, though I was certainly no longer depressed. But things definitely felt a lot realer. Days were not spent worrying about whether I was too old for tech, wondering whether I could even hold a job anymore without collapsing into my depression and giving up, turning off the dim bulb of hope in the room of my future and wrapping the quilt of my wealth around me, its comfort that I’d likely never want for food or shelter turned cold by the realization that money offers no solace for the hollow, omnipresent feeling that it’s all for nothing, all bread and circuses.

Instead, my days were real. Time was real: first, the urgent need to be somewhere or else; then the realization upon accidentally glancing at your watch that it wasn’t even 7:15 yet, that morning break was still two hours away and you had only worked forty-five minutes so far. Only forty-five?! The packages were real: heavy enough to form the base of the newest box wall you’re building in the truck, heavy enough to hurt others’ feet if dropped. (Not yours, of course, and I promise this’ll be the last time you’ll hear about those clowny Zappos composite-toed shoes which no one else seems to be wearing.) The work of your hands, the pleasure of rest, the relishing of food: it was all real. And real saved me from the world of the abstract navel-gazing that I was trapped in, a “man of leisure” revealed to be more a “man of purposelessness” or a “man of loneliness.”

—

I’m a little skeptical when I meet people who talk excitedly about the FIRE movement: Financial Independence, Retire Early. There’s an almost cult-like following of young people aiming to burn the candle every which way in their twenties while employing all manner of clever strategies and life hacks. To retire by thirty — wouldn’t that be wonderful! To paraphrase Inigo Montoya: You keep wanting that life. I don’t think that life means what you think it means.

There’s a way in which no one who’s retired early can tell you this and have you listen. The most common response is some form of, “Speak for yourself. Gimme your money and watch me!” The second most common response has similarities with how people earlier in their careers react when I mentor them that the level, title, or role they’ve vectored their whole life towards won’t be satisfying. “Easy for you to say” — this is from an actual conversation I had with someone in Facebook’s London office — “You’ve already reached it. You can adopt a ‘been there, done that’ mentality, but what about the rest of us?” Now I’m definitely not here crying boo-hoo looking for sympathy because my left leg has gone numb sitting atop my mound of gold coins. (They’re uneven, you know?) Money will eliminate many worries, unless you’re the type for whom no amount of money lets you sleep easier at night. Money will open the aperture of choices in your life. Money can give you the option to pay someone else to do the things you don’t like, or to simply stop doing the things you don’t like.

Of course it won’t make you happy, or at least it’s certainly not guaranteed to. But could it make you lost, unfulfilled, depressed? Now, before you shut off this podcast or send the inevitable snarky email asking me to just PayPal you all my money, you’d be willing to do that kindness for a fellow human being, etc., etc., I’m asking you to seriously consider that question. Not from a surface-level, “Mo Money Mo Problems” perspective, the classic bits about family hitting you up all the time, friends being shallow, not knowing what anyone’s agenda is, not being able to date anyone with confidence of their real intentions. Those things aren’t real problems, at least in my experience, with “just” several million dollars. I suspect those are eight-figure, or maybe even three-comma, problems.

I’m just talking about self-inflicted problems, problems in your head. Not the type of flamboyantly profligate personal problems like drug or gambling addition, necessarily, though for some this may well be a real issue. Might you start misattributing your success 100% to your talent and hard work, and if so, might that subtly shift the nature of your relationship with others as you begin to judge them for what seems to be a lack of the same initiative? Might you gorge on hobbies only to discover what you’ve known at some level since childhood, that eating way too many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups one Halloween can cause you to never eat them again, ever? Might all your newly discovered free time allow for a little too much introspection: ruminating about past mistakes, worrying about the future, or wondering what any of this, all of this, even means?

I think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that pyramid worshipped by athleisure-wearing influencers and yoga-retreat-attending tech billionaires alike, is all wrong. I don’t think it’s a pyramid at all. I think it should be Maslow’s Iron Maiden of Human Psychology, its twin plates of spikes embracing humanity from both the bottom and the top. No one doubts that lacking food and shelter is incredibly painful, if not deadly. But spending all your time pursuing self-actualization, persistently feeling you couldn’t possibly have reached it, that reaching it couldn’t possibly feel like this? Could that pursuit conceivably also, if you just see it in the right way and imagine all the implications, be incredibly painful?

What if staying in the middle was the real secret? For millennia, religions and philosophers alike have been asserting this. There’s Buddhism’s Middle Way. Or the inscription over the entrance of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, “Nothing in Excess,” second only to its most famous admonition, “Know Thyself.” So why can’t we seem to internalize it? What if, like any well-designed game, the struggle itself is the satisfaction? Too hard is clearly no fun. But too easy? Do we readily accept that a game too easy is a game not worth playing, a game you should quit; but life — a life too easy — that’s somehow an unalloyed joy, definitely worth continuing?

The cynic who hasn’t genuinely considered the possibility I’m proposing here, that the freedom that money buys can also sap the motive and challenge that make it worth getting up on any given day, will naturally ask here why I don’t just give it all away, if I’m asphyxiating under an avalanche of hundred-dollar bills. The answer is that we, Tanya and I, have — twice in our lives.

When we were in our mid-twenties, in a moment of contentedness when we realized that we truly were fortunate enough to have everything we needed, we gave all of our savings to charity. It was a small amount, being only in our twenties, but it was everything. When Facebook IPO’d, we suddenly found ourselves with a windfall million dollars. It had been a lifelong dream of mine to one day be able to give a million dollars to charity, something I had wanted even in high school. But such a thing always seemed like a near-impossible aspiration to build one’s entire life around, something one might at last accomplish when liquidating everything upon one’s death. I found myself in my mid-thirties unexpectedly in the situation of being able to realize this dream. Tanya, who has always been far more generous than me, fully supported my dream, and we together gave 100% of what we made when Facebook went public to charity. Once again, we flushed it all.

The surprise came only two or three months later, when I became crestfallen upon finding that the warmth and high of having done a significantly selfless thing, of having accomplished what I thought would be a lifelong goal before I was even thirty-five, had already faded. Even now, even in saying this, I cannot work up a fraction of the feeling of well-being I had from giving it all away. I was the same Philip Su, a million dollars lighter.

But why not forcibly introduce that friction, the various struggles of the everyday, back into your life, you say. Forget the good feelings — in fact, don’t even expect them — from giving away the money. Just do it for yourself; make life challenging again. A few reasons. Donating money is, in Jeff Bezos’s parlance, a “one-way door.” You don’t get to ask for it back when a course of cancer treatment costing over $300,000 isn’t covered by insurance — true story, former coworker. There aren’t any do-overs, stepping off that ledge. I’m also not sure if the friction I want or need is financial anxiety and a world where far more doors are simply locked. It’s not at all like James Howell, the Welshman who threw away a hard drive in 2013 containing bitcoins now worth half a billion dollars that he’s trying to recover by digging up landfills. His is the agony of potential money. Mine would instead be the potential devastation of having had the money and thrown it away.

The truth is I’m too scared to do it. I tell you I’m losing my way. I tell you I suspect it’s due to the all-too-easy idleness and comfort that wealth buys. But I just cannot pull the trigger because I lack the conviction. It’s a credible proposition — I’ve done it twice before — but call it the conservatism that comes with age; call it the loss of the optimism and fearless idealism of my youth. Call it a sneaking suspicion that it works both ways: money clearly won’t buy happiness, but perhaps giving it away won’t either.

And so I go on, unsure whether the ghost that haunts me comes from the fortune of my circumstance, or whether, as it were, “the calls are coming from inside the house,” whether the seeping darkness that makes me curl in bed for hours, wishing only that the day would just end, is a darkness all my own, a despair that does not disappear simply by writing a check.

—

Enough navel gazing. After all, that’s probably what got me into all of this in the first place. What can I do? In fact, what can you do? Since the launch of this podcast, many of you have reached out to express that you feel some of the same feelings. Perhaps you’re not in the exact same circumstance, but you can see the faint possibility of retirement on the horizon. But without exception, those of you who expressed similar thoughts are also considering whether what you need is a job with enforced rigor, one where you aren’t asked to make decisions all the time, one that you can’t take home with you and mull over before you fall asleep; a job that heightens the senses and makes you take notice, really take notice, of the many things in your life which are little pleasures and little joys, if you could but see them that way; a job whose very undesirability makes you empathize with the proverbial boat owner who says that the two happiest days of boat ownership are the day you buy it, and the day you finally sell.

I am not going to bill an Amazon job as some sort of upper-middle-class panacea, something you go do just like you go enroll in survivalist camps or silent retreats. The job can be dehumanizing, physically wearing if not outright painful, and mind-numbingly boring if you can’t invent little games for yourself while lifting 300 boxes an hour for eleven hours straight. The job has been incredibly rewarding to me, far beyond what I had expected. It saved me from a downward spiral that I just could not get myself out of. But it’s no dream job. I want out of there as soon as Peak ends; I do not want to stay a minute longer.

But I will say this. If segments of this podcast appeal to you, if some of the feelings I’ve described are relevant in your own situation, I cannot recommend enough that you give serious consideration to doing a stint at Amazon. If I had it my way, tech workers wouldn’t take sabbaticals just to climb Machu Picchu or see Antarctica — some subset of them, the set for whom the malaise I’m describing resonates, would instead take their sabbatical at an Amazon warehouse. Think of it as a sort of walkabout, or a real-life version of City Slickers, the movie where three friends pause their cosmopolitan lives in New York City to join a cattle drive. Along the way, Phil, Ed, and Mitch learn not only to respect the difficulties and challenges of driving cattle all the way from New Mexico to Colorado, but also to see their lives in New York with newfound appreciation.

You may — in fact, you will likely — choose to return to your way of life, your tech job with its free food, emphasis on continual self-improvement and life hacks, and relentless pursuit of “making a difference” or “having an impact.” But in returning, you will have willingly done so, actively made the choice to return to that life — and by so doing, see many inconveniences and difficulties in a new light. The food will taste better. The meeting, no matter how boring, is at least seated. As is the goal of many an effort at meditation, your senses will be heightened to notice and appreciate even small things, to reframe big things from a more positive perspective.

Reboot your hedonic treadmill. Instead of researching all the ways you could dial your life to an 8.5 when you’re already at 7, consider the counterintuitive benefits of dialing it all the way opposite, pegging it at negative 11 for a period. Make headroom for an increase in your happiness.

One morning while heading south in the dark on 405 towards work, a meteor lightened the sky before me. It was the brightest I had ever seen, traveling much faster than anything that size on Earth, its trail lighting up the sky in multicolor hues like a bride wearing a train made from the aurora borealis itself. The light, the trail, it all disappeared just as quickly as it had come, leaving me holding my breath, fully expecting, given its apparent size and trajectory, to hear and see a loud explosion upon its striking the Earth.

I sat expectantly still for an unnecessarily long time, much like a man unsure when exactly it’s safe to return to the firecracker he had lit but which had not exploded, until it was abundantly clear there’d be no impact. It had burned away in the atmosphere like most, ending millions of miles of travel in a blaze of glory. It traded all those years — thousands, conceivably even tens of millions — of travel through the infinite dark for one amazing moment, trading its eons of life for a few seconds to be seen, to be known.

This was so unexpected, so beautiful, that I spent minutes afterwards driving in relative stupor, almost daydreaming. The wonder of it all, for me to have been there at that time, in that place, facing precisely that direction, when an event that had never before happened in my life, and would likely never happen again to me with this magnificence, flashed for mere seconds. The splendor, the awe, the inarticulable, ineffable beauty — I could never convey it properly to you, my talents so grossly unmatched to its reality. Perhaps I’d show you a white plastic bag gently swirling, flitting this way and that in front of a brick wall? The memory wells up and wants to burst from me, but nothing will do.

Is there a parallel to be drawn here? The sky my career, BFI4 its meteor? That’s definitely not right. The morning dark my depression, with Amazon shining ever so briefly a reprieve, but leaving its imprint long after? Closer, but still not right. Perhaps the night sky is my life, but serves in this case as just as a backdrop — a few stars here and there, but mostly just darkness. Morose, but that’s not important; once again, just a backdrop.

The meteor might then be my mindset: the feeling, though factually inaccurate, of eons of dark followed by an unexpected burst of hope where suddenly everything was clearer, lighter, a kaleidoscope of possibility. Then just as suddenly, it was gone, leaving me to conjure up, to recall, to desperately try to replay it in my mind in moments of despair to remember how it could be, how it once had been and might be again. Sure, it’s darkest before the dawn. But, as Hannibal from the A-Team said in an oft-misattributed quote, “It’s also darkest before it goes pitch black.”

I’m so afraid this feeling won’t last. Can’t it be a sun, not a meteor? A warmth that periodically comes and goes, but a warmth I can count on to return on its own, not a flare or fizzle I need to chase desperately after? Is my life, looking forward, going to comprise cycles of depression punctuated by stints of signing up for various grueling jobs in order to restore a sense of hope and purpose, like a man with weights tied to his legs who can only get his head barely above water if he periodically gathers all his strength to thrust towards the surface?

My arms were getting limp and shaking from exertion when, unexpectedly, a raft of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap floated near. I climbed on and laid down, surrounded by arrows, each curved into a smile, grateful for what respite the raft would afford me, trying not to guess how long I had before it might disintegrate.

I closed my eyes and rested, for the first time in a long time, letting the raft carry me under the stars. For now, this was more than enough.

Coming next week: All’s well that ends well. The conclusion of Peak Salvation, this beautiful mess, the adventure you’ve so generously joined me on these past few months. I’d promise there’d be cake, but you already know the cake is a lie. But will you be entertained? Bread and circuses — that I can promise.