Tony Arce

Anxious, depressed, suicidal, victimized, angry, selfish, compulsive, explosive, self-righteous, insecure, and spiraling towards self-destruction. Hating his life, not for lack of success, money, family, resources, friendships, opportunities, or access to life’s indulgences; but because love was so foreign to him. He looked for it in all the wrong places, and every attempt to experience a shadow of it was cloaked in fear that wounded him and the people closest to him.

When success, ambition, relationships, adventure, recognition, pleasure, alcohol, drugs, and anything to numb the emptiness no longer satisfied, death became the only desirable experience to offer relief from the agony of a life without love. From childhood into adulthood I was brought up believing I was hated by the people I was told were supposed to love me. A child absorbs that and begins to believe something about them is fundamentally broken. When I was given another opportunity at life, the question that consumed me was simple: what is true?

What I realized, on the other side of seeking truth at any cost, is that something unexpected happens: love, peace, and joy become possible right now. What you see is a living witness of what happens when deception no longer has a gag over your mind. I was freed from a life of slavery to the thoughts, emotions, habits, addictions, compulsions, insecurities, and fears that consumed every waking moment of my life.

In a single moment of death and rebirth, I became a new person. Now, my guiding light is the objective truth that can be known, lived and experienced as manifestations of peace, love and joy. All the while knowing that the road to heaven looks like hell, and the road to hell looks like heaven. That pursuit is why I look for the people who are willing to seek truth too. Because even though the journey is worth going alone, two friends are better than one.