The Night I Met God

It was a whisper

A big welcome to the 126 new subscribers to this newsletter. If you're new—hey, I’m Matt. I co-founded a YouTube channel, wrote a book about it, and now I live in Barcelona as a full-time writer.

A few times a month, I drop a 1-minute life lesson from my weirdly fun life. Glad you’re here :)

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Alrighty, here we go…

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(Photo cred: Nathaniel Drew)

I haven’t slept great the past week.

Five hours a night at best.

The health and wellness gurus like Andrew Huberman and Matthew Walker would probably stage an intervention.

They’d likely tell me that I’m now at a far greater risk of a heart attack, that my life expectancy is crashing by the minute, that every second I don’t spend in shut eye means something must be terribly amiss.

I’ve bought that narrative forever. That without sleep, I’m doomed.

Maybe because it’s been an issue most of my life.

Here’s how it works for me: for months at a time, I’ll sleep like a rock. 7h30 hours of beautiful rest, waking up feeling refreshed, clear, energized, positive.

And then something will happen. I’ll meet someone that radically changes how I see the world, I’ll realize that the path I’m going down isn’t what I thought it was, I’ll have an idea for a new project, and bam, sleep scatters like it was never there.

I used to hate this. But more and more, I’ve grown to understand it for what it is…my body’s way of communicating to me that things are changing and I need to pay attention.

The first time I recognized this was three years ago.

I was in the throes of writing the book and decided to rent a cabin for a month in the woods of Mt. Charleston, Nevada, in the middle of winter, far away from everyone and everything. I left my phone behind, wanting to quiet my mind, to remove all distractions in order to be at my creative best. There was something so mystical about writers like Thoreau and Kerouac who lost themselves in nature and came out with revolutionary manuscripts on life. I wanted that.

That is not what happened.

There was hardly any writing done. Instead there were long daily walks through the woods, playing guitar, making fires, meditating, pondering, and more than anything...losing my mind.

Why was I losing my mind?

You guessed it...I couldn’t sleep.

For the first ten days at this cabin I slept an average of three hours a night. I would go to bed at 11 pm, suddenly wake up at 2 am panting, then wrestle in my sheets till the sun came up. It was nightmarish and I was getting delirious.

Finally on the eleventh night, I had had enough. My body was collapsing on itself, incapable of functioning properly, unwilling to do what I wanted it to do. So I got up, walked to the living room, put on a fire and I...well, I started screaming…at God.

I didn’t believe in God at the time, there was no sense of connection to the universe, no proof of Higher Power. In fact, quite the opposite. I sensed nothing but betrayal. How could I feel so terrible if there was a God? How could the world be so brutal, so unjust? How could my childhood have been so chaotic, my body so constantly hyper-vigilant for so long? This is what I started to yell directly at the one in charge. Go F*ck yourself. You call yourself a God?! Hah! What a joke!!

I didn’t have neighbors, so I fully let loose for an hour like a madman. Finally, after an hour of primal screaming, I collapsed on my couch in complete exhaustion.

And then, the thing happened.

The thing I hadn’t known was there, the thing that had been waiting for me all this time.

It was the clearest whisper, like a small wave crashing in the distance.

A voice so subtle yet so crisp, so soft yet so firm, that simply said, “I still love you.”

It wasn’t my voice. My voice was pissed. This was some other source, some other thing, some gentle presence that seemed to come from a much simpler place.

“I still love you,” it said again.

With nothing left in my tank to resist the message, my head fell to my chest and I sobbed.

That night—or morning rather—I slept a whole eight hours.

And in the months that followed the solid sleeping streak continued.

But more importantly, ever since then, prayer has become an essential part of my life. It’s not a religious thing. Not an association with any particular denomination but rather my own personal relationship. Like a best friend, a mentor, a guide.

Funny isn’t it? Had I been sleeping well, I wouldn’t have had that moment. I wouldn’t have been desperate enough to express my truth, my anger. There would have been no breaking point, no change. And so, no response from the stars, which is what my body was ultimately yearning for.

In my personal life right now, I’m going through another major shift. I won’t go into the details yet, but something on a personal level is stirring up uncomfortable emotions.

But now—despite my exhaustion as I write this—I see the silver lining. Whatever’s on the other end of this internal stirring is more evolution. If I can simply allow myself to lean in, to ask my body what it craves instead of fighting it; if I can slowly but surely provide that to it, then maybe with time the lesson will take hold, and eventually I’ll sleep well again.

In fact, I’ll happily sacrifice some sleepless nights for transformation. That’s a pretty great tradeoff.

Something new is emerging like before.

The difference is, I’m now willing to listen.

Love,

Matt