With my kid strapped into a high chair, fully bound and restrained, I had the chance to zone out, to fully reflect on the last few days of my life. The last five days to be specific. Shitty ones. I had broken my nose in two places the week before and had to get it fixed. The reason I had to get it fixed was because the broken nose had deviated my already deviated septum to the point where I got zero air in through my right nostril, which is something I don’t really like. I want air through both of my nostrils but havent been able to get it for years.

So, I’m sitting there watching my kid try to eat cereal, just spilling it all over herself like a chud, and I zone out and think about the process of recovering from what’s supposed to be a pretty low-key procedure, something that’s not that serious in terms of medical things.

But that wasn’t my experience.

I fucking suffered dude.

God damn had my nose cut open, bored out, bones reassembled and what not. Part of the recovery entailed jamming these silicone splints up each nostril which rendered my nose functionally nonexistent for six days. If you’ve never experienced this I pray you never have to.

These are the things I’m talking about btw. Imagine them up your fucking nose. Especially if you’re out there thinking, “Shut the hell up Matt. Ya crybaby bitch!”

Sure, there are worse kinds of things that can happen to a fella, but fuck. We can add this to the list of stuff that sucks as well. And of course that’s just me talking now, I’ll probably be glad once I’m getting big fat rips of air through both nostrils. I’ll stand on the other side of time like, “ehhhh, that wasn’t that bad. And maybe I’ll recommend the procedure to anyone with a deviated septum, but either way…this isn’t about that. Do your own research and do what your septum as you see fit.

This is more about the nature of suffering.

Because that’s what happened for these last six days. I just suffered. No breaks. My nose hurt. My ears popped whenever I tried to eat or drink. I kept hacking up the bloodiest grossest mucous. Couldn’t sleep. My teeth hurt. Couldn’t help my wife or play with my kids. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t go outside really. I was stuck. Thinking about nothing else than how much my nose hurt, how constipated I was from the shitty tramadol they gave me, how badly I was sleeping, ect.

The first two days were def the worst, the day of surgery and the first day of recovery. I literally hated every second of it. And all I could think about was how it was gonna be six whole days before I got these things out if my nose. The time span was unbearable for me. Again, not the end of the world. Not at all. But it was enough to end my positivity. I became glum. Sullen. I started to worry. What if the procedure didn’t work and I just sat here like this for nothing? Suffered for nothing? What if I’m just a huge sucker who bit the lure, suffered like an idiot for six days, putting a strain on my family and my nose just reverts back to its old deviated self? (which can happen btw).

So there was the time span crushing me, the physical discomfort of barely being able to eat or drink anything, barely sleeping, my kids seeming depressed/afraid when looking at me, and I was also on some shitty pain medication that made me feel like one of those albino twins from the matrix.

I would lie there and try to mentally dominate my pain, to totally accept the situation for what it was and just let it go, let all of it go and instead focus on each passing second.

Like David Foster Wallace says in Infinite Jest: “No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering… He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all…But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like…clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”

So, there I lay equipped with this sick ass quote, telling myself to hunker down in the space between my heartbeats, to make a wall between each second and live there like DFW said…lol but my damn head hopped into the wall with me and blew my shit up. Told me I was fucked and how this shit fucking, defacto, sucks.

And goddamnit…I agreed.

But day by day I got a little bit better. And before I knew it was day three. I was halfway there. Day four came I was a little better yet. Then day five and god damn I was one day away from getting these dumbs ass tube things out of my nose. My depression was lifting. I could read again. Focus on stuff. Write again. I even got blessed by my wife that day when we woke up. And that morning as I sat there watching my one-year-old eat her breakfast while my wife got my other daughter ready for school, it struck me that all of that personal distress and uncomfort was nothing but a sweet little gift from the universe. In fact, I hadn’t suffered that intensely in a minute. Sure, I’m always stressed about shit and suffering mentally in my own way like everyone else, but this was physical. Visceral. I was fucking sad, tired, and defeated for what felt like a long time—and yeah, do I sound like a big fat 37-year-old brat? Yes. But Goddamnit that’s what I am. A big fat brat who wants everything to be good all the time.

But, the reality is that shit isn’t good all the time. In fact, it kind of sucks the majority of time. And that’s one of life’s shitty little secrets. That most of your life will be dull, boring, and irritating.

And it hit me that this shitty, sloggy, perpetually unfulfilled dimension of our existence is like mud. Plain old dirt covering every square inch of our lives. It makes up the bulk of our experiential landscape. And yet out of this landscape little things pop up, sweet fleeting moments springing out from the cracks of our desolate and seemingly pointless dirt-bulk of reality.

And in that moment, I literally laughed out loud to myself, which luckily for me one-year-olds are completely cool with that, and I got struck with the realization that there are also diamonds in the dirt. Utterly invaluable people and experiences just lying there in that god forsaken crust we call our everyday lives and the only way we can find those diamonds is to keep digging in that shitty, annoying dirt. In fact, and this is what made me laugh, no dirt—no diamonds.

I started to think about how a person can either sit and complain about the dirt all day, or go on a diamond hunt instead, and hell, maybe even smile at all the dirt from time to time, even while in the thick of the nastiest craziest shit—maybe even thank the dirt too. Because without it, we wouldn’t have shit.

The dirt is reality and reality is nature. And nature, whether we like it or not, moves exactly at the speed of patience.

Become a pig for the dirt.

Roll around in it.

Because this dirt is all we got.