Dark Nights of the Soul and Everyone that Lifted Me Out
Life Updates: four moves in four years; two layoffs. A shift towards community-weaving—and an endless well of gratitude to too many people to name.
Y’all! If you’ve been following closely, you know the last four years have been a period of deep personal unrest and spiritual growth for me. I’ll admit, I’ve been a hermit for a lot of this time—so maybe this is the first time you’ve heard from me in forever. I’m eager to sum it all up and finally feel ready to reflect it back out. It’s four years worth of change and transformation in one newsletter—and yes, it is an Evan Blaise Walsh musing after all, so you know it’s not going to be short. Feel free to skim for the pictures and the headlines; I won’t judge. Or call me for the TL;DR. Just know I miss you tons.
On Finding My Way by Losing the Path
On my 27th birthday, August 2, 2022, it was 92 degrees, 80% humidity, and I walked the trails alone on a quiet morning at Wissahickon Valley Park in Philly. I’d just been laid off for the second time in two years. I forced myself to get up and move. I remember thinking: I’m not giving up at this—but I surrender.
The first layoff in 2020 had been fulfilled tears amid the shock; a spirit of family and community undergirded the unexpected shift. I lost my job and a second family in a time where such things were happening to everyone, a communal loss we all made sense of together as a team and a society. I moved back home to Philly from New York. I swore I’d come back to New York as soon as I could—I never did.
Around the time I had just been able to plant roots in Philly, there I was getting laid off again. The second one cut a million times deeper, a double arrow. During that time, I nearly started to believe dangerous stories about who I was, almost welcomed them into the narrative of myself. But so many of you took care of me, helped me stay steadfast. You reminded me who I am—and who I could become.
Three birthdays before that, in 2019, I remember joy bubbling up in me on my Brooklyn rooftop as I looked off to the skyline. Manhattan…where Richard and Seth and I had just spent the summer sleepless in the streets of New York for World Pride. Those were sweaty shirtless nights; sunrise taxi rides home to Crown Heights. I’d finally broken through years of calcified complex trauma by starting to go on long runs in Prospect Park. A way of getting mind and body to be in sync for the first time in over a decade. One day under Sailor’s Arch, heaving for air, I came to. Have I really been detached from my body all this time? I had just begun to know true healing. Not the conceptual, intellectual kind—no, the embodied kind, the kind of something that rises up from beneath you from a place ancestral and primal and hidden. Of that time, at 23, I wrote:
7/1/19: I’ve been learning that we find ourselves and lose ourselves over and over again, that sometimes we become ghosts to ourselves and that’s OK. I’ve been reminded over and over again how challenging—and rewarding—it is to live from the heart in yourself that you sometimes want to forget. I’ve watched the sun come up, sky orange in the blue light after nights dancing in the red.
Sometimes when I see all of us moving in the dark of the dance floor, I find the answer to the question I always asked myself when I was younger: When will you find it, the life you’d been dreaming of? Sometimes when I see it, there’s always that voice inside to tell me it’s a lie. Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong, but then I take the cab home and dawn is rising on Brooklyn and I am sleepwalking. But it’s not a nightmare; I find my way home. I wake up: I run on the Parkway now, have been learning how to move my body and not be afraid, have been discovering that sweating can make me love the summer. I still search for myself when the rain just falls on the roof, I stand there in the grey and close my eyes.
Still it brings me to the old life I once felt trapped in—I’ve been learning that it’s not forgetting that’s important, it’s the way we emboss and embolden ourselves with every time we circumvent (circumnavigate?) a memory. I know I’m stronger. And I’m standing on the corner, shirtless in the streets: Tonight feels like dreams that do not cede to the daylight. I swing my arms through the air, shake my head to the ceiling, close my eyes to the bass of the night.
During this era of my life, I felt deeply immersed in a creative community that fed my soul, mind, spirit. Outside of those red nights with Richard and Seth, the For Freedoms crew filled every weekday and weekend it felt like. Our world took me over almost too much at times (love y’all LOL), so much that later, I had to re-learn how to have multiple lives in one—professional, personal, romantic. All the same, our crew and network filled my life with radiance and inspiration. They had grounded me in a sense of family and community that I’d lost somewhere along the way in the years prior to New York, only to regain it tenfold there below 14th Street.
In February 2020, the week before For Freedoms Congress, I called Hank—I remember telling him how I brimmed with gratitude at the world our team was creating together. I raised my head to the sky at the top of a hill in Echo Park, closed my eyes. Then—how deeply struck the feeling of love and safety, washing over me. He told me: Trust yourself most of all. I carried that with me at FFCon, overwhelmed by the buzz of the creative community coming from all 50 States, DC, and Puerto Rico. Mere days before the pandemic lockdowns: I could see us, our potential, my future.
Then the crescendo of change began. Everything unraveled so much. By the time I got to that humid August morning of the second layoff… Freshly 27, after four years of rapid loss and shifts, I knew better then what I could lose. My apartment in Philly, a refuge I’d fought so hard to shape for myself and my chosen family after years of instability. Time with my new gaggle of gay best friends in the city, who had given me hope after I lost touch with so many of my childhood friends from Philly during the pandemic. The energy and capacity to invest in my queer flag football community in Philly, which gave me the accompaniment and the embodiment to heal and to remake myself in a third space I’d become so embedded within. My health insurance, which meant after three years of committing to trauma work that I’d have to stop going to therapy.
Life stripped it all away from me. Silence, spending my days in my parent’s basement, wondering how the hell I could ever get back to normalcy.
In the months ahead, I underestimated just how much my entire life would become wrapped around the need for professional survival. I was knocked back down to the first rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Creativity, inspiration, fulfillment, self-actualization all fell away. I needed safety, security, stability, and they felt further from me than they’d ever had. And I will never forget how, during all this, so many of you offered refuge for me when I needed it most.
It was an exercise in learning to find freedom within grieving. In forgetting who I was. How far had I been flung from those magical nights in Brooklyn, the world opening to me in all its magic and possibilities? Who had I become, and what would I make of the dreams that had once carried me here?
The dark night of the soul is a stage of final and complete purification, and is marked by confusion, helplessness, stagnation of the will, and a sense of the withdrawal of [a God or spiritual force]. (Peter Chong-Beng Gan)
I’d known the phrase Dark Night of the Soul from Catholic Prep School (lol), but I underestimated the gravity of it. How could I know then on that sweltering morning, as I watched the fog rise off Wissahickon Creek, that every belief and notion I’d held about myself would come into question?
I’ve turned over a leaf so many times in these past two years. I had to question every fundamental belief I had about myself and the world. I faced so much rejection. Instant gratification and easy resolutions evaded me at everything I tried. I lost dear friends; I got broken up with many times before things even began; communities I had invested time into in Philly turned toxic and at times that toxicity turned towards me; I worked more 12 hours days than I could count, trying to overcome scarcity; most times, I feared reaching out to my professional network, processing the scars and feeling ostracized and vulnerable.
But most of all, I lost a sense of who I was, what my name stood for, what I was supposed to become, who I wanted to be.
To forge a new self, a new path, I had to learn how to surrender to a quiet I had never known. I had to learn, for the first time, how to truly breathe.
I’m writing today from a new place of my own in Philly, moved here quietly eight weeks ago, after long stretches of picking myself up from what felt like my life falling apart. In these last 18 months, I shed so many things and I learned—in the cocoon of this freefall—how much spaciousness loss creates, what we can make room for. It brings me to tears so often when I feel the power of the communities of care that have filled my life up with such unfathomable meaning amid many days colored by aimlessness and despair. Throughout this time, the spaces I poured my heart into on my way back to a new self also held space for me, with such generosity of spirit and freedom.
I’m writing you on a joyful month, full of pride and accomplishment. From the other side of this, I can take stock of how I’ve grieved deeply: many eras of my life, dear friends that have fallen away, imaginations and dreams I had to let go for new ones to come forth. I can also take stock of how many beautiful seeds are sprouting. I work full time as a consultant now—and the people who I collaborate with hold me in a way that makes me feel more like myself, helps me see my potential every day. My mentors and colleagues and dear friends teach me every day with their compassion and precision, their willingness to imagine and fashion something restorative, unprecedented, and powerful. Although I am a skeptic about impact and if we truly influence people, with you all I wake up every day with trust that we are making a dent in the tsunami of all the toxicity that enshrouds us.
Amid a time of genocide and white supremacy and authoritarianism in a deeply fragmented society and world, a time where we are called to rise forth into our deepest calling—to envision, to activate, to build, to resist—I have learned so much from you all. I admire the ways we move together, rooted in our deepest callings, on this path to dismantling the systems we live within. I have so much love for everyone’s deep commitment to the transformational communities and practices we need to build in order to co-create this new reality.
I wanted to take a moment to trace back what I’ve found—and what has found me—these past few years of piecing my life back together. There is so much to celebrate. I’m humbled: Most of my days now are organized around building communities of healing. Days of making room to experiment with new selves, narratives, behaviors, and creative practices to transform our systems, our surroundings, ourselves. Here’s to you all—and everything you’ve shown me about myself, about perseverance, about manifestation, about love, about community, about duality, about multiple truths, about resisting oblivion and erasure, about the power of imagination, about resilience, and, most of all, about healing.
Magnum Foundation x Aperture x Counter Histories
Since early 2022, I’ve had the honor of co-leading a fellowship at Magnum Foundation called Counter Histories, part of an ongoing initiative that explores the creative possibilities offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in historical records. For our first year, I led a plethora of group workshops focused on project development, self-exploration, knowledge-sharing, and community-weaving between our cohort. For our second year, we’ve been supporting the cohort of 20 as they distribute their projects in their local communities and around the world.
On Wednesday, March 6, Aperture released Issue #254, “Counter Histories,” dedicated to highlighting the thematic and featuring some artists from the cohort. (I screamed so many times!) With a deep commitment to face head-on those who would seek to erase history through toxic forces of oppression and authoritarianism, these artists’ worldviews feel so vital in a time where we see history being hijacked and erased in front of our very eyes. My dearest gratitude to the whole team, with my biggest love to Tif and Emma for welcoming me in to this journey so thoughtfully. See our cohort’s presentations from 2023 here.
Our Salon
I never would have been able to feel confident in leading our Counter Histories fellowship meetings if not for Our Salon. Pola and I hosted an artist support group for three months during the Omicron wave of the pandemic in 2022, bringing together our network of emerging queer, BIPOC, and women-identified documentarians, futurists, producers, and cultural workers. We gathered weekly, doing self-care assessments, collaging, brainstorming, ideating, and breakouts with the goal of rest and rejuvenation. This inquiry led our gathering: In our fractured society—where the pressures for survival rob so much of our energy—what would it mean for me to follow my north star as an artist?
Our Salon is more than a call to gather—it’s a manifestation of our ethos of bringing people along with us as we navigate growing up in the art world, leveling up side-by-side, and lifting one another up. It’s about building something authentic, with intention and in no rush. It’s about having a moment to be real outside of the sharing of thesis statements, the facades, and the smoke and mirrors. Our network is growing, over fifty now. We’ve tried to gather in the park in NYC a few times, but then it rained every time (gratitude to Magnum Foundation for lending us some room to stay dry). I have faith we’ll get outside this spring! My dream is to get a group residency fully paid for everyone just to rest, rejuvenate, meditate, play board games, and vibe. Let’s build y’all, slowly and with intention. Big shout out to Irynka, for all you did to push us along.
Blue Cliff Monastery x Plum Village Sangha
Before the pandemic, Michelle and Taylor both had both encouraged me to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Mud, No Lotus; I finally opened it up somewhere amid the Delta wave. Immediately I fell so deeply and intensely into mindfulness, reading Thay and Pema Chodrön. I learned meditation and breathwork and would come to meditate in silence nearly every day in 2021. This practice eventually lead me to book my first retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery.
Some of y’all know this story—mere minutes before I arrived, I got the call I was being laid off. I sat in the Walmart parking lot in Middletown on the phone with Tony, laughing and in shock. Was there a better place in the world to process such a seismic shift than a Buddhist monastery? After a life-changing retreat weekend, Brother Dại Lục handed me Thay’s book Good Citizens, smiling at me before offering an invitation. Why don’t you just stay here longer, Evan? He laughed, elbowing me: What’s keeping you from giving yourself more time here? What could they possibly do now…fire you?
I took him up on that. These last two years since, I’ve spent nearly three months total at Blue Cliff. I’ve transformed myself through connection, laughter, tears. I’ve confronted my fears. I watched shooting stars for hours and unearthed myself to complete strangers only to have them see something in me I can’t even see. Thay’s sangha has fundamentally re-ordered my entire life, my relationship with my body, my relationship with my past, my understanding of how I move through the world. I’ve turned over my deepest traumas, finding where in my breath and my body they’d been blocked. My emotions are no longer intellectual; they are sensations in my gut, my chest, my arms. I read myself in reverse now—scan the body first, no more creating stories in my mind; no need for everything to have an explanation.
There are some weekends when I come back so raw, having unlocked something so heavy it leaves me shaking with tremors. There were times after retreat that I had to hide away. I’m not so good at noise anymore. I can’t walk into gay bars anymore without feeling the anxiety welling up in me. I’ve had to change so much of how I spend my time, after truly seeing the way my body responds to so many of the spaces I used to move through. But I’ve learned to really see the colors on the trees again. I’ve learned to listen to the wind. I’ve learned to slow my steps to return to reality again. I’ve learned to stop inventing so many oversimplifications in my head to make the world make sense.
I’ve had to redefine my relationship with almost everyone and everything. It has been finding refuge and turning myself inside out all in one, alongside the most warm people who are there to dive deep together. I’ve met so many dear fellow travelers, organizers, and artists looking for new meaning and purpose in our groundless and detached society.
GPFFL: Football is Family
Some of y’all keep ragging on me about Athlete Era, lol. The first day after I moved to the city in September 2022, I joined a queer flag football league here in Philly and met some of my best friends in the city that first day. GPFFL (Greater Philadelphia Flag Football League) quickly became my home in Philly. I served on the board for a year, and as a captain for our competitive travel team, the Revolution. If you told me two years ago when I didn’t know anything about sports that two football seasons later that I would have captained a team to win a championship trophy, I would have laughed so hard.
It’s not lost on me how moving, blessed, and essential it is for all of us to have this community, to feel safe in this abundant queer family—especially considering the basic dignity we are denied, the cultural rites we are not afforded and that are so deeply under attack. In times like these, it’s important to hold onto our queer joy, our little victories, our beautiful queer football crew. This piece I coordinated with CBS Philly features some of my photos and highlights the magical feeling I get whenever I’m with my football family:
Dot Connector Studio
In the beginning of 2023, I became Associate Director of Dot Connector Studio (DCS) after being brought on by my dearest Jessica Clark (we’d been brought closer when we ran the New/s Initiative together at GoFA). At DCS, I manage business development, HR, operations, and client management and recruitment for our consulting firm based here in Philly. DCS has supported the Salon and many creative endeavors, and is a refuge for our fellow social innovators trying to make their way and break out of the churn of burnout from full-time jobs. I have so much pride for the way everyone at DCS is trying to break the mold in so many ways and that we strive to embody that in how we are intentionally growing our team and network.
I worked with Jess and our team to pivot our firm from a focus on media, journalism, social impact to a new direction centering strategic foresight. We employ futurist methodologies to build long-term strategy, research, and learning journeys for our clients in philanthropy, media, and the arts. Along the way, we help to increase organizations’ ability to thrive amid uncertainty while building alignment with deeper values. We’re pivoting towards “future-making” as a north star:
Future-making: (noun) the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating, and giving form to preferred ones.
Along the way, we’ve incubated some magical projects, and here are two of my recent favorites:
DCS x Pop Culture Collaborative x Digital Waves
Working with Tracy Van Slyke at Pop Culture Collaborative, I served as the producer and managing editor of Digital Waves, a Substack newsletter and time-bound learning journey designed to help pop culture narrative change field leaders and philanthropic partners navigate the currents of news and information about digital communities and culture. During this time, we identified trends, spotlighted emerging strategies, and asked burning questions, all to build a shared understanding, and urgency about this emerging field of work. We followed topics such as fandom formation and mobilization; building resilience against alt-right organizing; the rapid decay of digital platforms; brand-fandoms; and so much more. Along with the Pop Culture Collaborative’s simultaneous exploratory grantmaking and research, Digital Waves helped us to assert this big idea:
The pop culture narrative change field must create, nurture and strengthen expansive, resilient, pluralist digital communities and pop culture fandoms where tens of millions of people imagine, create, organize, and make meaning every day.
Highlight: I finally got to put my nerd researcher hat on, and wrote a magnum opus on how we can mobilize video game communities for social change.
DCS x Emergent Expression(s)
With the leadership of my dear friend Bristol Baughan, and the ride-along beautiful chaos of our brother-in-futuring, Robert Sinclair, we launched Emergent Expression(s), a community container for personal transformation and creative expression. With a mix of worldbuilding, botany, and somatics, we work with artists to heal their wounded relationship with their creativity—and more importantly, to reconnect with the early experiences that drove them to become artists in the first place. We’re offering workshops over the next three months—please check it out here!
& Is Evan Making Art?
For my personal writing practice: I got 30,000 words deep into writing a novel before getting laid off, but that’s for another newsletter. Maybe this is my call to act to pick it back up.
On the photo projects front: I’ve been working on an archival project of my own. When I was younger, I took nearly 60,000 photos of high school friends, and wrote over 200,000 words in my journal around that time. I’m just starting to piece it all together as I’ve been looking through it all. The project—its first chapter entitled Please Make Me Real—documents growing up gay at my all-boys Catholic prep school and the ways I anxiously spied on everyone from the margins. The project is helping me to make sense of the years of interpersonal violence, loss, and trauma I endured, while also investigating mythologies that the men around me clung to and invented in order to survive. I’m trying to remind myself to be proud—damn, I took some of these images when I was 14, 15, 16! A big thank you to Irynka, who’s been helping me make sense of it all and has shown me so much love and care.
Sometimes we meet here
in a place only we can remember.
We never arrive at the same time,
but always, I can feel you’ve been here again—
I ask your ghost: Do you walk the shores
where we saw last you?
Sometimes when my bare hands touch that lake,
I run the cold water over my face, as if
it might cleanse me
of everything.
Sometimes I forget
all of it. In one of those stupors, some August,
the sun shines down on the water.
It’s up to my chest; the summer sunlight is dancing
on the little waves. I feel a spirit
in its blinding,
telling me to stop time,
telling me,
I’m already absolved.Four years worth of updates. If you made it this far, I applaud you and I’m grateful. Let’s build together this year.
With my deepest love and gratitude…
