16. THE ULTIMATE PLAN

My whole life, I’ve been held back by weakness.

By the end of 2016, I was ready to be done with it.

And just to be clear what I mean by “done with it,” I mean done with it; not make a few changes here and there, not reduce the amount—my goal was to get rid of it all the way.

This is the eight-part story of my most earnest attempt to become a juggernaut.

If you want your body to be strong, you can force it to become strong by lifting weights. Pick up the weights, the body becomes stronger from doing this, now it can pick up heavier weights, now it’s even stronger, eventually it’ll be able to throw trees at cars.

And it just seemed like there should be a similar thing I could do to become emotionally stronger. Fear reps or something.

However, the gradual approach wasn’t producing very fast results. To have a chance of becoming invulnerable within my lifetime, I’d need a more extreme plan.As extreme as possible. No more reps. The emotional equivalent of powerlifting the whole amount of weight in one burst.

I’d only have to do it once.

I chose the most extreme plan I could think of, which was to consume a huge quantity of drugs, watch scary movies, and then strand myself outdoors all night.

The hope was that forcing myself to endure such challenging conditions might cause me to become permanently hardened, like a gladiator. Which is a fairly ambitious goal, but it sort of felt like my only option.

To ensure I followed through after taking the drugs and watching the movies, I reckoned I would need to be at least 6 miles from home when my escape reflexes kicked on.

So I took half of the drugs, watched scary movies until it got dark outside, then walked until I felt about six miles away.

Then I took the other half of the drugs.

Approximately 45 minutes later, I was in some field somewhere. I looked around to see if anything seemed scary yet, and there was a little clump of grass up ahead. I saw it and thought, Hey… a thing.