Hi everyone. This is a final update to explain what has been going on with my World's Greatest Shave campaign for the last several months, and to let you know that I am concluding this campaign on the 26th of October. I had actually decided for a little while now, and got my hair shaved a few months ago (it was shaved quite short, and the post-shave pictures are after a few weeks of growth).
But first I'd like to say some things.
(this is a pretty long read, though I've done my best to format each part into sections for better readability, similarly to the original piece for this campaign. If you'd like go right to the details of when I will be closing this page, please scroll to the bottom of this post)
My life has been run by illusion, dishonesty, and lies. Lies by myself and by people who knew better and were dishonest in their actions anyway, and lies that I have told and believed to myself.
Over the last decade I have undergone a lot of changes, and one thing I have learned is that making real meaningful change is hard.
What I do know for sure is that even when we feel extremely strongly that something is a certain way; right or wrong, good or bad, true or untrue, that does not make it so. There is a tremendous arrogance with human beings to believe that our perception or classification of things makes something what it is. At its best this way of thinking can allow us to create genuine meaning in many things, but at its most unfortunate these illusions can make us feel like something that scares us or might negatively affect us is true, even when it isn’t, and even when we know it isn’t true ourself. Not everything in a society is without its merits, but pretty much everything that we ascribe to — save for observed science, fact, and reality — is man-made and I think that’s something worth thinking about.
The truth is what reality is, and living life against it is like swimming against the tide. It is possible to do so, but it’s tiring and misguided, and ultimately brings mostly suffering and incongruity. Living this way is not just self destructive, it’s also potentially harmful to others, especially those closest to you and who care about you.
In regards to this World’s Greatest Shave campaign there are several things that are true,
My intention
- I have always aimed to do what I felt is right and what is true. When I think about or say something that I will do, and that I believe in, I mean it completely and have every intention of doing what I describe. But my enthusiasm or intent doesn’t always represent reality and in my actual decisions and actions in relation to those intentions I have often fallen short.
- I’ve talked about many ideas and created expectations not just for others but for myself, and disappointed when they haven’t gone anywhere, and sometimes let people down when they believed in me. I have behaved towards and treated people poorly but rarely realized it because in my mind my intentions were very different to what I actually did in practice. Sometimes I have simply tried and not succeeded, but more often, even when I have had that feeling in my gut that what I was doing wasn’t right I did it anyway, because the feeling of what I felt was true was so strong, and I listened to that instead.
- In a sense, as well as being truthful and genuine with others, I think honesty is about listening and being willing to act on that feeling in yourself when you know deep down it’s right, even when doing so is even strongly uncomfortable.
What happened
- From the very beginning of this campaign I have had every intention to do what I described I would do. However, when it came time to start organizing this campaign there had been a significant change in my life due to some things that happened as a result of my own actions. Because of this the original idea I had of spending my 30th Birthday with friends and walking around campaigning had changed, but I still wanted to start it on the day in some way.
- This wasn’t the biggest issue when it came to the 16th, as well as the following day; the kick off of the campaign itself, and I spent a lot of time getting my booklets and signs ready and had some really good chats with people about the cause.
- The next day did a bit more work on the campaign before taking the train back home - a fully packed train in the summer heat, in which I also did my best to talk to people about the cause, and had great conversations with people who told me some powerful stories about their own experiences with cancer. When I got to Traralgon, where I stopped for a couple of days at my Grandmother’s place, and then when I got back home Paynesville and around Bairnsdale, I printed some more booklets and walked around handing them in to businesses, and talking to people about the cause up until around Christmas time.
- I took a break from Campaigning for those few weeks, though I did speak to family about what I was doing and offering booklets for themselves to consider donating, or to share with others.
- I planned to get back to the campaign shortly after the Christmas, but due to some damage to my feet caused over the break I was hindered from walking for a few weeks. It was around late January when I was able to get back to it in earnest, and I walked around businesses and talked to people I knew, handing out more booklets. However it was different to the energy I had in those first few weeks when I started the campaign and I ended up extending the end date of the campaign until around June when I posted the update in March.
- Part of it is that I hadn’t decided what to do about the day of the shave itself, of which the plan was also to do with friends back in Wodonga. As I explained in the update back in May, this is when I received a phone call from the people at The World’s Greatest Shave, who were calling to offer their thanks for my participation in the WGS, and also to sort out when my campaign would be ending as June date had just about passed. Again I want to offer my sincere appreciation in return for the call, as well as the great chat we had and the consideration the person showed for my challenges in and outside of the campaign, and how it re-invigorated me.
- This is when I decided to start working on a new plan for the shave event, which was to be a live music night where I would organise for musicians around the area to play and help me raise donations for the campaign. It was an ambitious goal, but it wasn’t without some merit.
- For years now, I have been in and around local music scenes through friends, family, and the connections I’ve made speaking to people in music shops. When I started thinking about new plan I talked to Morris, the longtime owner of the local music shop Marban Music here in Bairnsdale (a great, genuine place for music btw) an experienced musician himself, who suggested several good ideas for the potential event, as well as provided me with some names and numbers of local musicians who I could contact.
- I talked to people and did research on possible venues, as well as ways I could get the word out such as public/community events I could attend or the local newspaper. And I knew the man who runs the Floating Tin Shed, a well-loved local attraction which has musicians and all their gear set up to perform on a small floating vessel which goes around the waters of the Paynesville-Bairnsdale area on special occasions.
- While I had already been having difficulty with campaigning, I do my best work when I have a strong direction and I was very excited about this new plan. It would be a lot of work, but with time and planning it was achievable, and it wasn’t the reason it never happened.
What changed
- A few days before the 16th of December, when I was going to begin the campaign, I had reached out to Aiden to ask permission to include his story and picture in my campaign. Aiden is someone I have known for a long time, my younger brother Jordan’s best friend when we were all kids, and the reason I have thought about The World’s Greatest shave and wanting to help the cause since that time. During our messaging, Aiden told me a lot of things about his experience with Leukemia which I hadn’t known before, and we connected on this topic more strongly than I had expected; the last time we had spoken to each other was about 5 years ago, and from what I recall we didn’t speak about any of this. But when I asked to include his story in what I was doing with this campaign, he told me how much the Leukemia Foundation did for him and his family and it really seemed to mean a lot that I was asking him about it.
- Later, on the day after my 30th Birthday and the first day of the campaign, as I was heading out to get something to eat after working on the campaign all day, Aiden called and asked if I wanted to join him and his friend John for dinner at one of the local pubs. They both were kind enough to buy me dinner and a few drinks to celebrate my 30th — something that I am very grateful for. While there, through random conversation about where we were living Aiden told me about something he remembers from when we were both young, a time in which Aiden frequently hung out with his closest friend - my younger brother - and was at our house a lot.
This information shed a significant amount of light on something related to my own personal challenges of my mental health. My personal great illusion.
It wasn’t the first time someone had brought up these issues or that I had considered them, and the blindfold that had kept me in the illusion of what I believed was happening with myself, and how I was living my life had been slipping for some time; in part because I simply didn’t know, and partly because I held it there myself. But with Aiden’s anecdote, the blindfold was finally off.- I had a good time spending the rest of the night hanging out with John and Aiden, and the next day did a bit more work on the campaign before taking the train back home — a fully packed train in the summer heat, in which I also did my best to talk to people about the cause, and had great conversations with people who told me some powerful stories about their own experiences with cancer.
- When I got to Traralgon, where I stopped for a couple of days at my Grandmother’s place, and then when I got back home Paynesville and around Bairnsdale, I printed some more booklets and walked around handing them in to businesses, and talking to people about the cause up until a few weeks before Christmas.
- I planned to get back to it after the Christmas break, but this was the last time I would campaign as I had in those first few weeks. For most of my life, my understanding has been that my mental health conditions are things that I was born with or that are innate to myself and myself alone, and that in order to keep moving, I have to always just push harder and harder. This is the illusion that I had been living under.
- With what I now knew after having spoken with Aiden, the energy and motivation in which I had been living by — but energy borne from illusion and not in line with reality — was gone and the way I was when I'd started this campaign had changed. I still felt just as strongly about what The World’s Greatest Shave meant to me, as it does now, and why I wanted to campaign for the cause. But the physical and mental capacity that gave me the drive to travel to Albury, to sit in a hot hotel room designing, writing and printing hundreds of booklets, and to get out and talk enthusiastically to strangers was now different.
- In some ways the illusion was beneficial, in that it had given me things like that kind of drive. But alongside the belief which allowed me to continually keep moving, there have also been many challenges in my life that I never seemed to be able to move past no matter how hard I pushed myself. That is because the notion that everything in my life was a matter of just pushing and trying harder wasn’t real, and the illusion created by an incomplete understanding of my own mental health had obscured the reality.
- Since that time I have been working on exploring and figuring all of this out, and as the case often is with big changes, things are harder before they get better. The more I’ve gone through this process the clearer it’s gotten that the possibility in which several people, and then ultimately Aiden’s anecdote had alluded to is true. To give some idea, it was nothing physical, but enough to severely impact the developing brain of a child and young teenager.
- While I believe that uncovering and coming to understand the truth is the best thing to do, like taking a worn bandage off an open wound in order for it to heal, things can be harder before they get better. That doesn’t mean I feel it was bad for me to learn this, just that my ability to do things as I always have is different at the moment; if you have experienced trauma you may know what I mean.
- As a result, the way I am and my ability to function has gotten a little more unfamiliar and challenging. I’m very much in the early phase of this process — which I believe is towards something better! — and there’s a lot of work for me to do on myself, so my capacity for other things is lower.
I sort of wanted to deny it, or at least not stop doing things I care about like raising support for The World’s Greatest shave and I’ve kept the intention to do everything I planned to, even doubling down as I did with my idea for the live music event. However I have known that it’s not the right time for me to push myself at the moment and that has only gotten to be more the case — Another thing I have learned over the last decade is that how you feel and what you want doesn’t change to be in line with your capacity to act on them simply because it would be convenient.
now.
In regards to the shave itself, as I mentioned at the top I actually got my hair cut several weeks ago, and was planning to do this update and close the page around the same time. I've still got the hair clippings ready to be sent and will take them to the post when it next opens.
- As well as all of this, I have struggled with the fact that my work for this Campaign is supposed to be about a cause that helps other people, not about myself or my personal hang-ups. But as much as I wanted to just put my issues aside, they have affected my ability to do the work and ass a result of these conflictions, I have been neglectful of this campaign and my responsibility to it and to the people who have supported me. If I didn’t want to continue because of my health, then I should have simply told everyone that I’m changing the plan to end the campaign early, get the shave and closed the page.
- Instead, due to those same conflicting feelings I felt guilt and shame that I was giving up on my original intentions and that it was because I was caught up in my own stuff, so I doubled down by extending the completion date and stating plans for something even bigger.
Things continued this way until eventually the reality of the situation of course won out. - But even when I had decided to make this final update and close this page, the things that affected my ability to continue work on the campaign, have naturally also affected my ability to do this. And so I have found it hard to work on it, changing the end date on the page more than once to give myself more time.
- Then some of the people in my life, reminded me of what I actually was doing. Particularly Suzy who I have been doing life coaching sessions with for the last year, and whose support and advice has helped me in so many ways while managing this very challenging time. She reminded me that I was helping raise support for something bigger than either of us, even if I didn’t succeed completely. And that it’s good to help, but it’s also important to be kind to myself.
- In regards to my own process, as well as the way it has affected my capacity, I've gone through other changes, especially in acceptance with the help of people like my life coach. Even a year ago when there were notions of the truth coming from various people, I was resistant to believe things that were plausible, or even likely, but not confirmed; something I did, I think, that kept the proverbial blindfold over my eyes.
Acceptance is still something I struggle with, but at sometime more recently during this process I finally understood that sometimes to be the best version of yourself and to have the life you could, you might have a different relationship than you would want to with some of the people in your life.And I realised that I don’t like the person I am when I compromise myself in order to avoid it. And that living under illusion is not the same as living under a lie.
The truth
As I said on my page, there are several reasons for why I decided to start participating in the World’s Greatest Shave, and similarly there are several reasons for what has happened and how, and for why I am ending this campaign now.
The conclusion of this campaign and this final explanation has been very difficult for me. It’s been difficult to decide what to write, how much, and how to say it.
I know what I have written here could be too much, but I also know that I want to be open and honest, and that the truth is complicated — and it's likely that some of why I feel that way is because of my trauma — and thought about making a quick, casual message to just wrap this up.
But nah, fuck that. This is the truth, this is me and to do otherwise would just be furthering illusions.
Thank you everyone
Thank you all for your understanding and patience, I appreciate you for taking the time to read this, for allowing me to share something important to me and indulging me in this. My gratitude goes out, for myself and on behalf of the WGS cause, to anyone who shared or donated to this campaign for your support, and to my friends and family who generously gave donations the cause and who have helped me throughout this process — your support has meant so much to me. And especially thank you to Aiden. When I started this campaign and in relation to my 30th, among my reasons I was perhaps looking for something. As well as his openness and encouragement to be included in my write-up, Aiden’s kindness to invite me out, as well as his honesty and genuine care affected me in ways I didn’t expect, but has helped me a lot.
This campaign didn’t end the way I planned, but this experience had a profound effect on me all the same. I have decided to stop because I am finally being honest with myself that my ability to work on this cause in the way that is important to me is not good right now, as is the case with a lot of things in my life.
However, when I am able to, I fully intend to do so.
now.
In regards to the shave itself, as I mentioned at the top I actually got my hair cut several weeks ago, and was planning to do this update and close the page around the same time. I've still got the hair clippings ready to be sent and will take them to the post when it next opens.
I have made one final donation to the campaign myself and will leave this page up for a bit longer, closing on the 26th of October, to allow time for people to view the page and read this update, and to share or donate if they wish.
