The Only Good Fight There Is
"If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision, mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. IT'S THE ONLY GOOD FIGHT THERE IS." - Charles Bukowski, Factotum
For much of my life I had it all wrong. I embraced the idea of “going all the way” — and I mean I fully embraced it. This was around junior high age; I was sick of getting beat up by my older brother for much of my childhood and sick of the kids in my grade being better than me at stuff. At anything. So I decided to fight the good fight, which to me meant I would physically push myself beyond my perceived limits. Every morning I would wake up and do pushups and situps — hundreds upon hundreds in the basement of my family’s house. By the end of junior high I was still one of the slower kids in my grade, but I was also one of the strongest. I could do more pushups than anyone, and in the school cafeteria I beat my strongest classmate in an arm wrestling match. This felt good and right and strangely made me less shy (which I podcasted about here, on overcoming insecurity), so I pushed further.
I started running an absurd amount. To this day I don’t think anyone knows how much I ran. There was a dirt trail outside the high school I went to that wound its way for miles through the woods and a park. I would run that trail every single day. Sometimes I would skip lunch and run it. Each day I would try to get faster than the day before. On my runs after school I would go straight to the weight room and destroy myself some more. When I got my drivers license I found a new kind of freedom; I would drive to the high school track at weird hours. I would sneak out at midnight and run laps on the track until I would throw up. I can remember collapsing once because I physically could not take one more single step and rolling over on my back. As I was looking up at the stars in misery I thought, “No one does this stuff,” which I can translate now, in the words of the poem, to “I am fighting the only good fight there is.” That is how I thought of it all. Suddenly, almost overnight, I was the fastest kid in my 9th grade class. Then in the entire school. Then in the state at the 200 meter sprint.
This felt right because I wasn’t meant to be strong or fast, or so I thought. So, in my adolescent mind, I had willed myself to these things. Which isn’t even close to true, I should add, and I now know that. You can’t run a 4.4-second 40-yard dash based on willpower. It has to do with the composition of fast versus slow twitch muscle fiber, things I knew absolutely nothing about at 18. I mean those long hours didn’t hurt, of course, but they were irrelevant. Here’s why.
I was fighting the dead wrong battle. All of that time I thought I was overcoming physical inferiorities, but I was ignoring the real fight: that I was not able to express myself to other people. That I had an emotional inferiority. Looking back, I can’t believe I had a high school girlfriend who actually cared about me. I never told her how beautiful she was, and rarely how she mattered more to me than anyone. Sadly, in reality, my inability to express these things was the battle I should have been waging the entire time. I didn’t tell my friends how loyal or empathetic or impactful they were to me. Opening up in any kind of way like that would have been to subject myself to possible rejection. I wasn’t afraid to run until I was sick, because that pain was so momentary. But the idea of rejection felt like a lifetime.
We all have a worthy battle within us to fight. But I also think that, like me, most of us are fighting the wrong one. I see it every day around me now — the walls of defense we all erect as adults because of the accumulated perceived rejections we have felt throughout our lives. Those percieved rejections (they rarely are real rejections) may be different for each of us, but they have a similar impact. We aren’t able to be our best selves.
My best self isn’t someone who can run a lap around a track in 47 seconds. It’s awkwardly hilarious that I ever thought it was. It isn’t someone who can do 150 or however many meaningless pushups. My best self is the version of me who tells people how I feel about them. Who, when someone makes me smile, I let them know why they did. Why they matter to me. And it is still a struggle for me. But I get better with every month at this. Because for me, it is my real battle, and so it’s the only good fight there is.