a letter about trust
Poison is a substance capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism when introduced or absorbed.
About three years ago, I developed a fondness for a very specific poison. An awful poison that deteriorated the body, altered the mind and temporarily killed off the identity.
For a few sweet hours, you'd be overcome by waves of artificial euphoria, crawling up your spinal chord, into your frontal lobes, dictating your every action and reaction. During those ecstatic hours of intoxication, you no longer had to be you.
There is a sinister beauty to this particular poison. It will either build you up to be the most confident version of yourself that you can possibly imagine, or it will break you down and damn you into a deep pit of misery and chaos.
Yet, our wonderful Irish government, doctors, citizens and the seemingly law-abiding vendors of this devilish substance, wouldn't dare label it as poison.
They call it Galahad.
It's the bottom of the barrel, cheapest of the cheap, scummiest of the scum, pure shit-water beer that's somehow legally sold in Irish supermarkets.
Naturally, for a group of three 18 year old's on their first cross-country expedition away from home, it became holy water, the ethereal glue that bound us all together.
On the 14th of June 2020, I woke up feeling spritely.
I hopped out of bed, slithered into my Citroen C1 and lugged it across the entire width of Ireland, to a small west-coast surfing town called Lahinch where my partner in crime, Tom, had been waiting for me.
The only hostel in town was run by a Cornish, long-haired, semi-professional surfer who liked to say "dude" and would give us fist-bumps every time we walked into the building.
He was a really nice guy.
It's a shame that we had no choice but to completely defile his sacred space, twisted on alcohol and high on that first taste of freedom.
When Tom first brought me into the hostel kitchen, I was confronted by a large, hairy child who appeared to be about my age, laughing hysterically at what I now think must have been a story that he was telling, about himself.
Is he just a funny character or a complete lunatic? I couldn't tell, but to be safe, I introduced myself to him and joined in on his demented laughter.
It turns out, he was indeed a funny character. Probably, to this day one of the funniest characters I've ever met.
That first night, we consummated our newfound friendship by getting outrageously drunk and going moonlight skinny dipping with a group of sweet country girls we met in the hostel.
From that night on, we had come to the stark conclusion that we were, without a doubt, the coolest guys in the country and therefore the three of us had to quickly become best friends in order to maintain this holy status.
This new character, who I had first met in the kitchen, told me that he was a student, studying History and English Literature in Dublin. A fine academic. He would share stories about his experiences going to lectures, meeting people, sleeping with chicks and going to college parties, etc...
Myself and Tom soaked up every word because we were yet to experience any of this, we had just finished secondary school and this was our first time venturing away from home. We were amazed by the idea of someone who was older and supposedly more mature than we were.
Each day we'd go out surfing, explore the coast, visit the local towns, play music on the streets, and have an overall wholesome time. My grandmother would've been delighted to see what we were up to.
But come sundown, everything changed.
Each night we'd turn into monsters, taking on spiritual assignments, guided by Galahad, testosterone and whatever women happened to wonder into our line of sight each night.
The kitchen, the showers, the dorm rooms, the back garden, even the local off-license was kicked down a few notches in terms of respectability cross the 32 nights that we spent in that hostel, before we were kindly asked to leave.
See, when you embark on a 32 day booze bender, the men that you march into battle with each night become your brothers. You begin to develop a certain understanding for each other. You pick up on certain behaviors' and mannerisms that otherwise would not be comprehendible to the naked eye.
You become comfortable in their presence. You no longer need to use words to communicate. Petty arguments and snide remarks no longer leave the emotional scars that they might have, if someone like your mother were to say these sorts of things to your face.
Perhaps it was the strict diet of potato waffles, baked beans and southern-fried chicken fillets that had numbed our brains to the point where we were mentally unable to truly determine the quality of our friendships, but that didn't matter.
We were on a mission to enjoy ourselves.
After we were booted from the hostel, we began to really explore the west coast of Ireland. We strapped the surfboards to the roof of my car and used it as our portable hotel. Around that time, we slowed down on the poison (thankfully) and spent more time surfing and exploring the beauty of Ireland, without the burden of a heavy head in the mornings.
It was (for the most part) the picture-perfect road trip.
We would have the occasional tiff about money, wetsuits and whether or not we should get more alcohol. This was to be expected, one cannot spend 24 hours a day with another, eating only processed food and drinking shit-water beer instead of real water, without having the well-needed back and forth slagging match to blow off some steam. But every time, when it was all said and done, we'd hug it out and apologize.
"I still love you bro"
"I know bro, I love you too"
This newfound friend of ours had to leave the road trip early, about a month before the rest of us. He had committed to doing a charity skydive and was determined to follow through with this promise.
It was some time in early August when he asked me to give him a ride to the nearby bus stop so that he could head on home. He said his farewell to the rest of the gang and we hopped into my car.
"Louis, can I be honest with you here?"
I looked over at him.
This is not the sort of thing you want to hear while doing some early-morning driving down Irish country roads with a slight hangover and a serious hankering to crawl back into bed.
"You know all that stuff about me being in college and everything?"
"Yeah"
"Yeah, well I made that all up. I never went to college."
"..."
I stayed silent, taking my eyes of the road to look deep into his soul, expecting a punchline or at least a smirk, showing me that there's more to come.
There wasn't.
That was it.
He had lied to us.
The man that I had just gone to hell and back with over those previous three months on the road, had just told me that everything I thought I knew about him was a complete and utter lie.
He had created an entire new identity.
Why?
To impress women.
"No girl would fuck me if they found out I was still in secondary school"
What a sad outlook on life, I thought to myself. This poison had gotten a serious hold on him.
We still had a while to go in the car before we reached his bus stop, so I mostly sat in silence and asked him a few questions to try to piece together the story in my head. Turns out there wasn't actually much to piece together, he had lied to us and that was about it.
After I dropped him off, I got angry.
How could he lie to us like that?
How could he construct an entire identity and play us like complete fools for over three months?
How could we possibly fall for this sort of psychotic behavior?
I went back and told the rest of our cohort as they themselves were crawling out of bed.
They were all just as hungover, shocked and confused as I was.
Anyway, I didn't write this letter to complain about this anonymous fiend, we've actually since reconnected, he has apologized, he's is now in university studying History and English Literature and we actually get along really well. No doubt he'll be reading this letter.
I wrote this letter because there's a lesson to be learned in all this, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.
Don't trust others.
This was the first lesson that came to my mind, while thinking critically back on what had happened.
This is not a good lesson.
Taking a lesson like this from an experience like that would not improve one's life in any way, shape or form.
If you took that to heart and actually diminished your trust for the rest of the human race, that would simply catapult you into a frenzy of paranoia, anxiety and depression.
That's the last thing we want.
So, what wisdom did I extract?
Don't trust poison.
Don't trust yourself.
More specifically, don't trust the way that you see the world.
Your perception is your reality and unfortunately, your perception is completely subjective…
Especially when interwoven with delirious bouts of intoxication.
You don't see reality for what it is, you see it for who you are.
Reality will only present itself to you through a lens, heavily distorted by your beliefs, opinions, ideologies, axioms and paradigms.
The further out of line that your beliefs are with objective reality, the more subject you will be to internal suffering.
It wasn't my friends fault that I was angry with him. He didn't cause my suffering.
Sure, he lied to me, my friends and he played us like fiddles, but ultimately, it was my fault that I was angry.
The suffering was on me.
I was too attached to my perception of reality and when he shattered it, my ego was not impressed. It kicked up a fuss and tried to blame him for the emotional pain that I was in.
You see my friends, we cannot control what happens to us, but we sure as hell can control how we react.
My advice, don't get too attached to what you believe to be true about the world, understand that what you see is not the ultimate truth.
Be open to having your beliefs shattered at any minute and accept that when they are, you've just gotten one step closer to the truth.
All the best,
Louis
