Track 24: You Weren't Born For This

Do It Anyway

(Why this song? Because it’s not about flying. It’s about trying, with frostbitten wings, a busted compass, and no idea if you’re about to soar or eat shit at 10,000 feet. "A soul in tension that’s learning to fly." That’s it. That’s the line. That’s every time you launch while half broken, half ready, and fully haunted. This song isn’t a soundtrack. It’s a soul map. It’s the fox at the edge of the cliff saying: “Now. Fucking now.” Because yeah, you might be an earthbound misfit, but you’re still airborne. Let’s fucking go.)

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The Goddamn Fox

A while ago, back when my biggest fear was commitment and my biggest flex was how many push-ups I could do hungover, I went on one of those all dude trips. You know the kind: beer, chips, and absolutely zero emotional processing. At some point in the chaos, Jay said, “What if we saw a shaman?” And instead of laughing like sane people, we all nodded like that made perfect sense. Because when you’re dehydrated, half-naked, and spiritually constipated, the answer to everything is always yes.

Next thing I know, I’m in some kind of clay oven situation, a temazcal, which is basically a spiritual slow cooker for dumb men with unresolved daddy issues. It’s pitch black, 300 degrees, everyone’s sweating out their sins, and someone’s chanting in a language that sounds like time folding in on itself.

Then, ayahuasca hits. And by hits, I mean it crawls up your spine like a sentient snake made of every bad decision you’ve ever made. Time? Gone. Reality? Optional. Dignity? Misplaced somewhere between the first chant and the third panic attack.

That’s when the shaman appears. Or maybe he’d always been there. Or maybe I was hallucinating the ghost of Cheech Marin. Hard to say. He’s got this hand-rolled thing, some dried jungle shit that smells like your uncle’s garage. He takes a long drag. Real long. Then he leans in, eyes locked on mine, and blows that smoke directly into my mouth.

Not around me. Into me.

And because I’m apparently the type of guy who takes mystery smoke from strangers in a meat sauna, I inhale. Hold it. For what feels like seven fiscal quarters. Then I exhale directly into the shaman’s face. No one explains this part. No one tells you that blowing hallucinogenic jungle vapor into a man’s eyes is how you find your spirit animal. Your fucking TOTEM. But here we are.

He doesn’t flinch. He just closes his eyes, tilts his head like he’s tuning into a celestial radio station, and then he says it: “Zorro.”

TRANSLATION: A fox.

And I’m sitting there, soaked in my own sweat and delusion, thinking: You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I wanted something cool. Majestic. Noble. Give me a hawk, a lion, hell, even a misunderstood raccoon. But no. I got a fox. The smug little bastard of the forest. The fucking used car salesman of the animal kingdom.

I was offended. I was betrayed. I was high as balls. But the shaman just smiled. Like he’d seen it all before. Like he knew I’d come around.

He said: ”The fox sees where others can’t. The fox survives what others can’t withstand.”

And you know what? That line stuck. Because now, many years later, stripped of everything I thought made me strong: charm, the illusion of control, I fucking get it.
The fox isn’t flashy. He’s not the king of the wild. He’s the thing that makes it through.
Quietly. Cunningly. With just enough bite to stay dangerous.

You don’t choose your totem. It chooses you. And sometimes it takes more than a decade of wreckage to realize you weren’t cursed with a fox. You were gifted one.

What The Fuck Is a Totem?

Let’s clear the sage-scented, culturally appropriated air for a second. A totem isn’t just a cute animal you put on a vision board because it looks cool on Etsy. It’s not your horoscope in fur. And it sure as hell isn’t your excuse to act like an unmedicated wolf at dinner parties.

A totem is a mirror made of blood and myth. It’s the part of you that never got domesticated. The ancient, feral bastard living underneath your trauma, your taxes, and your social media highlights. It’s not what you want to be. It’s what you are, when the masks melt, the filters glitch, and life decides to stop pulling its punches. Your totem doesn’t care about your résumé. It doesn’t care about your therapist, your goals, or your curated spiritual playlist on Spotify.

A totem shows up when you’re cracked open. When your instincts start to short circuit. When you're naked in the jungle, literal or metaphorical, no signal, no plan, no more bullshit to sell yourself. It’s the beast that keeps whispering:“I’ve been here the whole fucking time, you magnificent bastard.”

And it doesn’t come with affirmations. It comes with teeth. And claws. And a fucking challenge: Are you ready to stop pretending you’re a human in control and start becoming the animal who survives, adapts, and remembers who the hell you were before the world started domesticating your spirit?

A totem is not a pet. It doesn’t work for you. It waits for you. To burn down the bullshit. To come home raw and howling. Only then does it step out of the dark. Only then does it say, “Let’s go. We’ve got shit to do.”

Fucking Survival Instincts

You were born with a blueprint. Scream when hungry. Cling when scared. Flinch at fire. Run from pain. Survive first. Think later. That’s the deal your nervous system signed in blood before you ever learned how to spell your name. But here’s the problem no one mentioned: Sometimes survival looks exactly like death. The quiet kind. The cubicle kind. The “I’m fine” kind. The kind where you wake up ten years later and realize the person in the mirror is a very polite hostage.

See, instinct is useful when you’re being chased by a bear. But when it’s your shame chasing you? When it’s your grief wearing your father’s voice? When it’s your patterns disguised as “this is just how I am”? That’s when instinct becomes the cage.
A soft, padded, beautifully lit cage with Wi-Fi and self sabotage on tap.

So what do you do?

You break it. Not gently. Not with a self-help workbook and a turmeric latte. You tear out the fucking code. You become something post-human. Something feral and holy and unforgivingly awake. You stop flinching. You start choosing. You endure. You sit in the fire until your skin forgets it was ever meant to burn. You peel off your programming like cheap wallpaper in a haunted house, and underneath it, there you are, glowing. Un-fucking-recognizable. Alive. Not because you followed your instincts. But because you outlived them.

LISTEN YOU BROKEN MOTHERFUCKERS, PLEASE DO BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT: You weren’t built for this version of you. You made it anyway. Shining. Sharp. New. Survival was the prequel. This? This is the goddamn sequel. And it’s better than anyone expected.

The Problem With Programming

You come into this world with a script: Don’t touch the fire. Don’t fall too far. Don’t love too hard. Basically: don’t die and try not to embarrass your ancestors. That’s your first operating system. Fear-based. Efficient. Outdated as hell.

The problem? It works. Too fucking well. You flinch at failure. You avoid risk disguised as “logic.” You pick safe love. Small jobs. Familiar pain. Because instinct tells you: If it hasn’t killed you yet, it’s probably good enough.

But what if “good enough” is the thing slowly killing you? What if surviving the same day 10,000 times is just another kind of slow death, dressed in routine and direct deposit? That’s the glitch in the matrix. Your spirit animal might be a fox, but you’re still running rat mazes designed by ghosts: parental patterns, childhood scripts, broken instincts that whisper “stay here, it’s warm and predictable.”

Fuck that.

You don’t become the fox by thinking like a rabbit. You don’t shine by obeying your fear. You become the fox when you learn to outfox yourself.

Endurance Is a Dirty Word

People love to romanticize endurance. Slap it on mugs. Tattoo it in cursive. Preach it like it’s noble. "Endure, and you will grow." "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."

FU-CKING Bullshit. Endurance doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you harder.
It makes you colder. It makes you bury pieces of yourself so deep, even the people who love you can’t find them. You don’t endure because you’re brave. You endure because somewhere along the way, you learned the world doesn’t give a damn about your softness. You endure because vulnerability got you hurt. You endure because love left.
Because someone taught you that crying was weakness, asking was begging, and needing was shameful.

So you stopped asking. You stopped feeling. You started gritting your teeth through every fucking storm like a champion of denial, holding your breath and calling it growth. But here’s the truth no one tells you: Endurance is survival. It’s not life. Endurance is treading water with a smile while your soul quietly drowns. It’s swallowing fire and pretending it tastes like peace. It’s carrying your pain like a medal, until one day you realize it’s a noose.

So fuck endurance. Not forever. Just as a religion.

Because the goal isn’t to be the one who takes the most hits. The goal is to be the one who knows why they’re still standing after the last one. The goal is to stop calling suffering a virtue and start calling it what it is: A teacher. Not a home.

You want to endure? Fine. But make it mean something. Don’t just survive the pain, build with it. Use the scraps of every heartbreak, every fuck-up, every lonely night, and turn them into armor you don’t have to wear every day, just when it matters.

The fox doesn’t endure to be noble. The fox endures because it has a job to do. A future to hunt. A self to rebuild.

Heart and Wings

Some days, you’ll feel it. The lift giving out.The engines stalling mid-dream. The air too thin, the fight too dumb, the landing gear still in therapy. And you’ll think, Fuck. I should’ve stayed on the ground. But you didn’t.

You launched. You burned. You tried. And somewhere between the ascent and the crash, you realized something they never tell you on fucking Tik-Tok or the Instagram reels: Not all flights end in glory. Some end in heartache. And some? Some don’t end at all, because your wings tap out.

But your fucking heart? That stubborn, reckless, red-muscled maniac keeps going. It earns the inches your body can’t take. It signs the checks your soul can’t cash. It finishes the sentence even when the story's already on fire.

So if you’re here today, wings tattered, breath shallow, mid plummet. Good. You’re closer to the truth than most.

Because what your wings can’t reach? Your heart will earn. Or die trying. And that, my friend, is where all the beautiful things begin.

And yeah, this whole fucking thing? It’s about heart. And wings. Fucking heart. Fucking wings. And I know, I know: Foxes don’t fly. But maybe, like everything that’s had to survive long enough to evolve...I’m becoming one that does.

You’re not broken. You’re airborne. Even if it feels like falling. Let’s fucking fly.