The Choices We Sleepwalk Through
A car with no brakes.
It's an obvious danger. And yet so are many of the choices people seem to sleepwalk through every day.
By now it's well known what cigarettes do to our bodies. And still, I see young people choosing to smoke. So I ask: why?
Is it to look cool, to fit in with your mates? Is it a quiet rebellion? Is it to calm your nerves, to feel steadier inside?
When I smoked as a young person, it was to look cool — to be like everyone else. Later, when addiction took hold, my arm simply needed to hold that cigarette. It became a kind of comfort. A connection. A false sense of safety.
Yikes.
There are other ways to feel comforted, connected, and soothed — ways that don't slowly kill you in the process.
I've made choices in my life that harmed both myself and others. Not out of malice, but because I was asleep to what I was really doing. Unconscious.
Unconsciousness will probably always exist in humanity. But I hope, deeply, that awareness keeps breaking through it more and more as time goes on.
That's what consciousness is about.
Because without it, you might wake up one day and realize you've wasted your life — drowned in unconsciousness.
This pattern is explored throughout The Witness, a memoir about fear, shame, and the long path toward emotional repair.