Stop to rest, friend.

A while back, I returned to my hometown of Chilliwack, BC, after a very stressful period. For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely happy—a better, more loving, and compassionate person than the one my old friends remembered.

But there was a problem. To them, I was still the old version of myself.

Growing up, I had been arrogant, difficult, and dealing with a lot of personal issues. In their minds, I was, for all intents and purposes, "Kevin v1.0"—a bit of an asshole. They had built their entire perception of me around that old version. So when "Kevin v2.0" showed up—happy, changed, and seeing the world differently—their systems couldn't process it. They saw the new data as a bug.

Instead of accepting the update, they kept trying to run the old program. "But Kevin, you always said you hated that," they'd say, pointing to old data. "Haven't you done all these things that go against what you are saying now?" It felt like I had to convince them that this new version of me was real, a feeling that was only amplified when their confusion led to four separate wellness checks in the months that followed.

The Wrong Bug Report

My friends' confusion wasn't entirely without cause. During a previous visit, when I really was going through a rough patch, I had shared my own debugging process with them. In trying to understand my emotional state—the cycles of depression followed by days of high energy—I had filed a bug report against the wrong system. I told them I thought I might have Bipolar disorder.

This was based on my own research, where I fell into a classic trap: affirmation bias. I was looking for an explanation and latched onto one that seemed to fit, not realizing that the symptoms of ADHD, Bipolar, and other disorders often overlap. This single, speculative "bug report" became the primary data point in a morbidly ironic game of telephone among my friends, overriding all the new, positive data I was presenting.

As humans, we often look for the easy explanation. It's a shortcut. But shortcuts can lead you down the wrong path. My psychologist, too, seemed to be looking for a quick patch. Instead of helping me analyze the full system—my diet, my physical health, my addictions, the immense stress of loneliness—her first suggestion was to prescribe medication.

Finding the Root Cause

Society often teaches us to treat symptoms instead of causes. When we get sick, we reach for a pill—a temporary patch—instead of taking the rest our bodies actually need. This is especially true when we feel we "cannot afford" to miss work, a pressure that only drives the sickness deeper. But a patch doesn't fix a fundamental flaw in the code. Depression is rarely a standalone bug; it's an error message pointing to a deeper issue.

My "manic-depressive" symptoms weren't the bug. They were the error messages. The real bug, the root cause I had been avoiding, was a pornography addiction that had been running in the background since I was a child. It was a piece of malicious code, a virus, that I was "infected" with on the school bus in grade two. It had spent decades consuming system resources, leading to the byproduct of loneliness, which in turn created a feedback loop that strengthened the addiction.

The moment I uninstalled that malicious code—by quitting masturbation entirely—a whole system's worth of resources was freed up. The weight was lifted. The constant error messages of depression and loneliness began to disappear. I had found the source of the Hydra.

A New Operating System

Overcoming that addiction wasn't just about removing a negative; it was about installing a positive. It was a fundamental rewrite of my body's operating system. There are sciences and spiritual traditions that speak of this, but I experienced it as code. Our life force, our semen, is often wasted. But when preserved, it follows the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros: the snake that eats its own tail. In death, we are reborn. The energy that is not expended is reabsorbed by the body, a self-sustaining loop that provides nutrients, energy, and clarity.

The most profound effect of this new system was a change in my perception. The constant "process" of lust, which had been consuming so many of my mental cycles, was terminated. For the first time, I could look at a woman and see her beauty without objectifying it, appreciating the person without being overcome by base-level desires. I had gained control over my own hardware.

With the noise of the addiction gone, my mind was finally clear enough to receive new data. We speak of messages from God as a voice, but I now understand it's more like a data stream. The signals are always being broadcast, but most of us have too much interference—too much static from our own unresolved bugs—to ever achieve a clear signal. By cleaning up my own code, I was finally able to parse the messages.

System Incompatibility

This new, profound clarity became the source of a massive conflict. My old friends, many of whom are atheist or pagan, were running on a different operating system. When I tried to share the data I was receiving, their systems threw a fatal error. They couldn't parse my new understanding of the world, which connected science and spirituality, because they didn't have the right API to receive it.

Worse, my new perspective acted as a threat to their own programming. When I spoke of God being provable through science, or the logical structures underlying our reality, it scared them. To even consider that I might be right, they would have to admit that their own lives—their own core code—might be built on a flaw. Their egos, the ultimate system administrators, put up a powerful firewall to protect the status quo. It was easier to label me as mentally ill than to consider a fundamental update to their own beliefs.

This led to the most painful corruption of data I have ever experienced. They took my metaphorical desire to "kill" suffering and parsed it as a literal command. When I said I wanted to "kill world hunger" by feeding people, or "kill addiction" by helping people heal, their systems, blinded by fear, interpreted it as a threat of physical violence. My closest friends thought I, a person who couldn't even harm an animal, was capable of murder. There is no greater pain than having your core programming so completely and maliciously misunderstood.

The Forced Reboot

The stress and fatigue from this conflict were immense. As I was driving back to Alberta, my mind racing with their accusations and the imminent dread of being institutionalized, I misread my fuel gauge. I ran out of diesel on the highway past Valemount.

At the time, it felt like the last straw. But several weeks later, a pastor I was listening to said that sometimes, God wants you to stop and take a rest. The signal, which had been getting through clearly before, was now crystal clear. Running out of gas wasn't an accident; it was a forced reboot. It was a higher-level process telling my system: "Stop. Rest. You are doing too much."

Separating myself from those old "friends" was the final step in that reboot. It has given me peace and the freedom to run my own operating system without interference. I no longer worry about their perceptions, because I am no longer trying to connect to an incompatible, legacy system.