Vocation: Presence Over Performance … Service Over Self
At first, I thought “vocation” meant chasing a dream.
Cooking was the vocation I had a fire for—I had the taste, the instincts, the skill, and the determination. I wanted to make food that moved people. And for a long time, I carried the titles I thought I was supposed to have in my life, and was doing the thing I believed I was meant to be doing.
Looking back, I was in service to other people’s pleasure. And I still believe there’s something sacred in that. Feeding someone well. Providing pleasure to a partner. Offering yourself for another’s delight—it’s intimate, human, and even holy. But when you do it while abandoning yourself, it stops being generous. It becomes a performance. Maybe even a transaction. Like touching someone’s body, making love … just going through the motions. Giving, but with a closed fist.
After ten years in professional kitchens, working under celebrity chefs, opening restaurants, pushing for perfection—I hit a wall. The competition, repetition, the egos battling, became unbearable. I once thrived on the stress, the culture and the pressure to keep producing. But, I was burning out. The very thing that once gave me pride and identity had become a source of suffering.
In the kitchen, discipline wasn’t optional. You showed up … worked hard … get shit done. And that kind of rigor suited me. A disciplined work ethic came naturally. But I started to realize that pulling off perfect service meant nothing if I was disconnected from my own center. Success wasn’t just about performance—it was about how I related to myself.
That was the harder work: resisting my own indifference, showing up without having to prove anything to anyone, learning to notice when my own self-indulgence or emotional laziness was creeping in. My real growth wasn’t in the technical or professional—it was in my personal habits, in developing the kind of self-respect that leads to peace of mind.
The beginnings of figuring out what it means to live a good life.
I was struggling with what to do next. Unemployed, going from one small job to another. Then I saw a job listing in the newspaper. A local community college was looking for a culinary instructor. These jobs almost never opened up, especially not full-time, not with benefits. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I applied … luck was on my side … Got the job.
I didn’t set out to become a teacher. But the truth is, I was already doing the work. Training cooks, mentoring staff, modeling how to show up—not just for the food, but for life. Responsibility, presence, integrity. These weren’t lessons on the menu, but they were part of what I offered. And something about that began to feel true.
And maybe it took my suffering in the kitchen—the burnout, the deadening repetition, the disillusionment, my quiet collapse—to make space for that truth to surface. I tried ignoring it and looking away. Masking my suffering through alcohol and marijuana had stopped working. And in that clarity, a new path opened for me. Not one born from comfort or ambition, but from the recognition: my life no longer fit what I was doing.
The discovery of my vocation revealed itself quietly through that ache of exhaustive suffering … the kind that comes from performing, pleasing, and avoiding pain for too long. Eventually, the cost of abandoning myself became too high. So I started turning inward.
I began taking responsibility—for my reactions, my past, my choices, the stories I told myself. Not to achieve enlightenment or perfection, but to feel whole again. And I’ve come to believe that’s where real vocation begins: not with external validation, but with inner integration.
Getting the teaching job wasn’t the end of my growth, it was just the beginning. The vocation kept unfolding in me, and through the students I taught. Teaching culinary arts became the doorway, but my real work was about something more.
Sure, teaching the cooking techniques mattered because that’s what I was being paid to do. But what was really shaping us were the things no textbook could teach: how to deal with our mistakes, how to adapt when food didn’t get delivered, how to receive public critique, and most of all … how to respond to the unexpected and uncontrollable.
Those were the moments that revealed our character … both for teacher and student. The moments that taught us more than any academic lesson ever could.
Suffering: The Doorway to Clarity and Initiation
The deeper truth is this: it wasn’t the burnout or the disappointment in my jobs that changed me. It was what the discomfort revealed. Suffering has a way of burning through illusion if we let it. Revealing what we’d rather not see. It asks more of us than most people want to give. But if we’re willing to stay with it, suffering becomes the doorway to seeing things more clearly.
At the time, I was just trying to survive. But looking back, I can see that the life I was living wasn’t genuine. My anger and reactivity were self-protections. The suffering was showing me what wasn’t working anymore. Not just in my job, but in my way of being and seeing the world.
What became clear was how much of my energy had gone into managing my image: competent, reliable, and in control. A man society told me I was supposed to be. But underneath that facade was a mess of avoidance—emotional bypassing, substance use, perfectionism, and a low-grade diminishment of self-worth I had no idea how to name. The gap between how I looked from the outside and how I felt from the inside was widening. The light and darkness in me were no longer playing well together.
These realizations didn’t come quickly. What I’m describing now happened many years ago—but I remember the shift like it was yesterday. And as I build a new life in Thailand, I find myself revisiting this process again. Not in the same form, but with the same essential question: Am I still willing to live honestly—with myself, and with others?
There’s not enough talk about our inner duality—the ways we split ourselves.
The images of ourselves we show the world, and the one we carry in silence when the mind turns against us. The part that appears strong on the outside, and the part that’s quietly crumbling on the inside. But suffering doesn’t care about our polished performance. It strips us down until all that’s left is what’s real… and that, in the end, is rarely as harsh as the voice in our head would have us believe.
What I came to see was that I was learning how to live in alignment with myself. I had mastered output and control. But internally… peace of mind? Emotional honesty? The ability to hold pain without fleeing? How to ask for what I wanted? That was all still ahead of me.
As I began to slow down and feel my life more clearly, I started seeing the deeper ways I had been hiding—from myself, and from others. Not just in my professional life. But in love, family and sexuality. I could spot the avoidance in others because I was beginning to recognize it in myself. It was a harsh reality I needed to follow.
So many of us say we want love and connection. We want deep relationships, fulfilling sex and real intimacy. But we won’t speak our truth. We don’t ask for what we want. Staying vague, polite, emotionally distant. We use humor, caretaking, or silence to sidestep being vulnerable. And then we wonder why we feel so alone.
The more I sat with and faced the pain born from my own true feelings…. the more I saw how much of my life had been shaped by escaping. Avoiding the confrontation within myself. Ignoring my desires. Not acknowledging my grief. And I started to understand that suffering wasn’t just something to get through—it was the teacher that helped me stop hiding.
This was my real initiation. The beginning of a more genuine, undivided life. One where I could ask for what I wanted without apology. One where intimacy meant honesty—not just comfort.
And that realization—that suffering could open, rather than close—changed everything.
From Clarity to Vocation: The Call to Service
For me, this didn’t just happen in isolation or through journaling. Once I realized I was not living my best life, an authentic life—once I could no longer deny the disconnection between who I was and how I was living—I began to seek out the people and places that could hold that transformation.
I went to retreat centers, to ashrams. Sat meditating in silence for 10 hours a day. Joined men’s circles, where the masks we wear around masculinity were stripped bare. I did sexual healing work—not because it was trendy, but because I needed to face the places in me that had been distorted, hidden, or numbed. I wanted to understand what a healthy relationship looked like. What intimacy really was. I was ready to stop pretending.
These spaces weren’t comfortable, but they were real. They helped me confront what I had avoided and integrate parts of myself I had long denied. These people and places weren’t escapes from myself—they were containers where I could show up as my full self in all my suffering and perceived brokenness.
These experiences became initiations into a life I had only dreamed of living. And I walked into them willingly, because I knew that what I needed wasn’t another goal to chase, but a more honest relationship with myself.
The more I returned to myself, the more I stopped trying to accommodate, avoid conflict or perform according to someone else’s standards. And the more I could offer my unique self to others … not through unsolicited advice or ready-made answers, but through pure presence and undivided attention. A willingness to sit with others, to stay with what’s hard and not turn away. So the answers that live deep within each of us have the space to reveal themselves.
Once we demonstrate we can truly show up for ourselves, something shifts. We begin to show up for others—not because we want to be needed, but because we want everyone to find their own way back to themselves. To find their own peace, like we were able to find.
This kind of service doesn’t come because we feel guilty about our past. It doesn’t come because we want to avoid our own pain by tending to someone else’s. It isn’t about fixing others, or performing like the culture wants us to in order to earn our place in the world.
That, to me, is the mark of someone living their vocation: they carry a quiet integrity.
They’re not chasing identity or a title or a career. They’re simply becoming more aligned with their truest self … and from that place, they bring a willingness to be with others in their truth. Because they’ve finally stopped running from themselves.
And that’s what I believe real service is:
not an escape from the self,
but an offering that includes the self—
refined, scarred, softened, and awake.
The Quiet Labor
My heart gravitates to people who have taken responsibility for themselves… their emotions, behaviors, past mistakes … and who have done and continue to do the work necessary to become a more integrated human beings. One breakthrough at a time, over the course of a life. Because the learning doesn’t end … unless we return to behaviors that numb us from reality… or we die.
We evolve in layers, becoming more aligned with our unique self-nature. And then there is a moment, after the clarity, after the alignment. When you look around and realize—not everyone is coming with you.
Not because they are bad, or because they don’t suffer like you do. But because this path—of turning inward, taking responsibility, facing truth, and letting suffering shape you— asks more than most people are willing to give. And for good reason. It’s easier to go numb than to face reality. Most people don’t want to feel. They’d rather keep performing. They’d rather stay comfortable, keep up appearances, and avoid anything that might undo the life they carefully constructed.
The Offering We Make
But once you’ve stopped pretending—allowing life’s suffering to humble you—you stop needing to prove anything. There’s no more chasing approval or admiration. Only the quiet pull to live a genuine honest existence. And from that place, being useful to other’s becomes the priority. Not because you have anyone’s answers, but because you’re no longer trying to be someone you’re not.
People can feel your authenticity and that’s what makes you trustworthy. In my own life this began to take shape during my years as a teacher. I realized I wasn’t just passing on techniques—I was helping students navigate failure, pressure, discipline, and self-respect. I was teaching them what it meant to show up for themselves—not just for their work, or for their boss, but for their own lives.
That kind of service isn’t limited to the classroom. It can show up anywhere. In kitchens, offices, families and friendships.
The roles we play for each other begin to change. They become less about achievement or status, and more about something quieter: raising each other up, human to human, in every contact we make. That might mean reminding someone they’re not the worst thing they’ve done. It might mean seeing through their defensiveness to the part of themselves that still wants to grow.
It’s not about rescuing anyone from their pain or negative self-talk. It’s about believing in people—especially when they can’t believe in themselves. Not indulging the self-pity or blaming we may fall into, but helping each other remember that they’re still worthy of becoming who we’re meant to be.
Walking the Path of Service
And eventually, we begin to start living for something different.
Not for success or approval. Not for safety or self-image.
But, being of service to one another.
Not to become a savior or to fix the world’s pain.
The service I’m talking about isn’t self-sacrificing. It’s doesn’t require losing yourself or carrying the weight of others’ pain. Instead, it’s the quiet, humble kind of confidence that comes from knowing who you are. From living in alignment with the person you’ve come to know yourself to be. And from realizing that nothing—nothing—matters more than presence, honesty, and the capacity to walk alongside others in their own becoming.
That’s what suffering gives you, if you let it: not just personal insight, but a devotion to each other. A sense that presence—more than answers—is what matters. That the real work of this life isn’t to prove anything. It’s to show up. To make space. To accept life as it is.
And to offer yourself—not from a place of hierarchy, because none of us are above or below one another, but as someone unwilling to turn away from anyone’s suffering.
And no, not everyone will walk this path with you.
Many will continue to hide behind their own illusion of control, false positivity, bliss masks, or pain.
But once you’ve found that deeper place in yourself—the one beneath societal performance—you stop expecting others to accept you or to come with you.
You just keep walking. And when someone else reaches their own edge, you’re simply there beside them.
That, to me, is what it means to live a meaningful life… and to be of service.
We haven’t done a good job teaching our children how to be kind, generous, and respectful—or even helping them want to be. Instead, we’ve encouraged selfishness and competition, rather than teaching self-restraint and guiding hearts to care about how their actions affect others.
