Dude, What Is Wrong With You?
Preface — My Mind as a Recovering Asshole
The original title for this series was "My Mind as a Recovering Asshole." After some reflection, I thought better of it. But honestly? It took some real mental yoga to talk myself out of it. That genuinely feels like the best title for this.
I'm writing this from somewhere in the middle of a climb up a big mountain, out of a deep canyon, a little winded, occasionally tripping over my own feet, and — if I'm being honest — sometimes still not entirely sure why I thought this trail was a good idea.
The short version: anger, anxiety, stress, and a need to control outcomes that would be impressive if it weren't so exhausting and destructive. That's what I'm working through. Not past tense. Present tense. Right now, pausing to breathe and stare at the peak above me that feels unachievable, knowing it's actually probably a false summit, and that there will be more past it. And yet despite that, I sigh, and press on.
The longer version is what this series is actually about.
Here's something I've noticed about the mind: it doesn't particularly care whether you have your life together.
It doesn't care if you're educated or successful, if people respect you or think you're a good person. It doesn't care if you have a loving family, a stable job, a faith you genuinely believe in, or a highlight reel that looks pretty good from the outside. None of that stops the 3 a.m. ceiling-staring. None of it quiets the voice that replays the argument you had three days ago and scripts seventeen different versions of what you *should* have said. None of it touches the low-grade tension that lives somewhere behind your sternum and never quite goes away.
The mind is its own thing. And sometimes — a lot of the time, for a lot of people — the mind is not on your side.
You know what I mean. I know you do, because this is just the human experience, regardless of what you believe about God or church or any of it. Anxiety doesn't check your theology before it shows up. Anger doesn't ask about your spiritual background. The need to control every variable in your life so that nothing catches you off guard — that particular flavor of white-knuckling your way through existence — that's not a faith problem or a secular problem. It's a *human* problem.
The battlefield I'm talking about is the mind. Not as a metaphor yet. Just as a fact.
Most of us are fighting something up there, and most of us are doing it quietly, because that's what you do. You manage it. You push through it. You find ways to function despite it, and some days functioning feels like winning, so you take it and you move on.
But functioning isn't the same as free.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further: you don't need to share my faith to keep reading this.
Seriously. If you're somewhere in the neighborhood of skeptical, or somewhere in the neighborhood of "I was raised in church but I have complicated feelings about that," or somewhere in the neighborhood of "I believe in God but I'm not sure what that means for my actual life" — you're welcome here. Come as you are. This preface isn't asking you to believe anything yet. I'm just asking you to recognize something you probably already know: that the most significant battles most of us fight aren't out there in the world. They're in here. They're the ones nobody else can fully see.
That's the starting point. Everybody gets to stand on that ground.
Now here's where I'll start to show my cards.
I'm a Christian. Not a perfect one, not a polished one, and clearly — given the anger and the control issues — not a finished one. But it's genuinely what I believe, and it shapes how I see pretty much everything, including this.
Ephesians 6:10-18. The Armor of God. It's one of my favorite passages in all of scripture — has been for a long time. There's something about it that has always felt less like poetry and more like a field manual. Paul, writing from a Roman prison with chains on his wrists, isn't dealing in abstractions. He's talking about survival. He's talking about what it looks like to stand when everything in and around you is working against you.
I've loved this passage for years. But I've never really *dug into* it. Not like this. And what I'm finding, sitting with it now — in the middle of everything I've been walking through — is that there's more here than I knew. Because when you're actually in the fight, really in it, the text opens up in ways it couldn't when things were fine.
So that's what this series is. A deep dive. An honest one. Into a passage I've always believed and am only now beginning to fully need.
I hope to work through this passage piece by piece — the belt, the breastplate, the shoes, the shield, the helmet, the sword, the prayer that holds it all together — and we're going to take our time with it. Not because I want to do an exhaustive theological study (though we'll go there when it matters), but because I think each piece maps onto something we're all actually dealing with. Truth and self-deception. Guilt and identity. The ground we stand on when things get hard. The voice in your head that's lying to you, and what it looks like to actually fight back.
We're also going to end with something practical: a daily prayer. Something you can actually use. Not a formula, not magic words, but a real, intentional way to start the day putting on what Paul says you need for what you're about to walk into.
But all of that comes later. For now, I just wanted to sit here for a minute and be honest about why I'm writing this, which is simple: I needed it. I'm still needing it. And I figured I probably wasn't the only one.
So if you're tired — if you're tired of the anxiety, the anger, the need to control everything, the way your own mind seems to work against you at the worst possible times — I'd like to invite you to stick around.
You don't have to have this figured out.
I certainly don't.