John talks about the death and rebirth of BRIDGE LIVWAT.

Full monologue:

Hello all, sorry it’s been so long since I’ve done an episode. A lot going on. Work has had me travelling a lot and I’ve been really focusing on my family when home.

Through all this time of focusing on my real life, I reached a sort of mental health crisis. I was never in any real danger, but I did fall into a deep depression, plagued in self-doubt and I felt like no one was in my corner. It was rough and it was exhausting.

For much of my life I have either believed I was deeply flawed or immensely gifted, with very little in between. I think too deeply, I feel too deeply, I’m constantly daydreaming. I really thought I had the answer when my psychologist told me that I am gifted and that is the reason no one understands me completely, in addition to that I found out I’m an enneagram 4, emotionally driven to develop an empathic understanding of everything, also: I was told by an insightful loved one that I have this unique gift and desire to work at understanding different perspectives.

I was quite happy with my delusions of grandeur that resulted from this. My gosh though, if someone didn’t take what I was doing seriously, it was frustrating at times and I would cope by sort of looking down on those who did not understand. “Those poor things, they cannot see the brilliance of what I am doing.”

I understood different perspectives on everything. I was open to discussion about anything and everything. They say that cognitive dissonance legitimately creates a physical pain for people. I craved that pain. It was like a sort of working out from an emotional perspective. I wanted to see how much I could stretch it.

But then COVID happened.

I couldn’t really understand what was happening, but it became so difficult for me to play both sides of the issue. The best I could figure out was that my job is health related and I am working hard to understand disease and disease prevention in hopes of getting my designation as a certified industrial hygienist so I have to buy into the science it is based on.

Any sort of rejection of public health measures is an attitude of “let’s just let everyone get the disease”, which is the opposite of what I am trying to do in my occupation. I couldn’t entertain that.

Initially, my freedom loving anti-lockdown friends would share all kinds of stuff on natural immunity and law, conspiracy theories about the great reset and I would try to pay attention, but at some point I just couldn’t tolerate it.

After a while I would get very frustrated with how I would get attacked on every post I made about COVID. The problem was that if I defended any public health measures, I would be expected to do all the homework to defend it against every challenge these movements made against it. I began removing people from my feed, I began blocking and unfriending people.

It felt so good to have those people out of my life. I tried to reduce the controversy of my posts.

My posts on Facebook were once a great place for discussion, but I now had to be very selective of my topics, and even then there were people who would attack my character. “John is a troublemaker”. That really bothered me. My intention is to be a bridge builder. I did not want to have to defend my character. If my character does not speak for itself, maybe my feed is not for you.

There was a good time period where I removed Facebook from my phone altogether. That was nice. It helped for a period.

But then came a very stressful day in which I had a very long in-person discussion about COVID-19, systemic racism, socialism, and gun control with an individual who differed from me completely on those issues and some of the things that came out of that person’s mouth were so absurd to me, I legit had a grin on my face and was not respectful. I could not affirm an antivaxx stance and I made that very clear and this person could not understand why no matter how much I explained. I came off as a total A-hole.

This person was the one who was wrong though, right? They were not thinking of the marginalized and were more concerned with being called selfish than the fact that they might be selfish themselves.

Multiple times I had conversations with people close to me and they would say “you’re just and opinionated person” and one individual even said to me “you are not happy unless everyone agrees with you”. That caused me to lose it. My character was being attacked again.

My self-esteem is not tied to being right. My heart is to understand, my heart is to love, my heart is to build bridges.

This was why I created the public persona BRIDGE LIVWAT in the first place: i want my public persona to be a bridge to living water for all people.

I felt like there was this huge attack on everything that BRIDGE LIVWAT was.

After days of contemplating this and not being able to let go of so much of this, it dawned upon me: I need to kill BRIDGE LIVWAT.

He believes he is the bridge to living water. He believes that he has a fresh understanding to share, which may actually be rendering everything anyone else says meaningless to him.

Whether his heart was all wrong on this or not, clearly his heart was not communicated properly because there was this overwhelming sense that he was seen as a trouble-making, opinionated egomaniac and you know what? That’s on me.

I remember hearing an interview with my favorite author Malcolm Gladwell, in which someone asked him if he is annoyed with all the people who misunderstood his 10,000 hour rule. A rule many have taken to mean anyone can become proficient at anything if they practice it for 10,000 hours. His answer was “no, if they misunderstood it, maybe I miscommunicated it.”

Maybe I had communicated my heart incorrectly. So I decided to kill Bridge Livwat.

I had no idea how long I was going to do this for, but I shut it down. I stayed off social media. I stopped paying attention to the news. I stopped trying to understand all of these big issues and after a couple of days I was feeling way better.

I began to become more interested in actual people than the grandiose ideas that were supposed to save them.

Gradually I returned to social media, but with a new rule: I am not going to go too deeply into understanding contentious issues. My emotional understanding will be reserved for actual individuals, not groups of people as monoliths.

I’m still figuring out what my boundaries are and it’s difficult to articulate, but for sure I am not reading news articles and I am certainly not reading the comments sections.

My emotional energy is now saved for those in my life.

Through this, I’ve realized that my job is not to save the world. My job is to save my world.

Bridge Livwat is back, but his mission is more about understanding people than ideas and this Bridge will be way more healthy for me and for those I influence.

What about you? Do you need to lose your life and find it again? Do you need to unplug and reevaluate what plugging back in looks like?

I hope that somehow I can be an example of a journey toward personal betterment for the sake of service to my sphere of influence, to make positive change in my world and those whom my world touches.

Thanks for listening. Much love, everyone.