The Real Independence
250 years of a country declaring freedom. 16 days in a jungle learning what freedom actually costs. And a house full of people who know that the best way to celebrate is to not perform a goddamn thing
My house is full today.
Rich Spalla is here with his family. We served together in Afghanistan. He’s one of the few people on this planet I don’t have to be “on” around. We don’t do the performance. We don’t do the reunion tour. We just exist in the same space, and we both know what the day means without saying it.
We’re not doing fireworks. We’re not doing the red, white, and blue Instagram backdrop. We’re not doing the grill-as-identity and the flag-as-personality that everyone else is running today.
Because the people who actually had to fight for this country don’t need a holiday to remind them what it is.
But I still woke up this morning thinking about independence. Not the country’s. Mine.
If you’ve been following this story, you know I just spent sixteen days in the Amazon with a plant and a silence so complete I could hear my own thoughts for the first time in years. You know I buried a version of myself down there. The guy who carried everything. Who answered every message. Who built a whole community around his own exhaustion and called the collapse “purpose.”
If you haven’t been following, the short version is this: I came home from the jungle, and the man who got off the plane was not the one who left.
Today is the first holiday I’ve spent with that man. And I keep noticing something weird.
I see this country with fresh eyes right now. Not because of the dieta. Because of the people who just got here.
A million World Cup tourists are driving across America seeing it for the first time. And they’re saying things that should embarrass us into paying attention again.
A British guy stood in Zion National Park and said: “I don’t think people realize how big, large, wild, full of wildlife, full of animals America is. There is nothing quite like American national parks and state parks. It’s just incredible.”
A Norwegian walked into a Bass Pro Shop and said: “Oh, gawd damn.” A Brit found Buc-ee’s and said: “This place is absolutely insane.” People are trying to smuggle ranch dressing home in their suitcases. A Scot cried as he ate his last Waffle House waffle before his flight because he didn’t want to leave.
Lawrence, Kansas - a town of 96,000 people - welcomed the Algerian national team so hard that locals learned Arabic to greet them.
These people have no propaganda. No politics. No inherited argument about what this country is or isn’t supposed to be. They just showed up. And they felt something real. Something big. Something that surprised them.
I know exactly how they feel.
Because I did the same thing.
Not to America. To myself.
When the noise finally stopped in that tambo, when there was no feed, no community to carry, no mission to perform, no one to save, I finally showed up to my own life with fresh eyes. And I felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Not pride. Not purpose. Just... clarity. The kind that comes from seeing something clearly for the first time, without the filter of what you’re supposed to think about it.
I looked at the life I’d built, and I saw what those tourists see when they look at this country: something huge and wild and ridiculous and generous. But I also saw that I’d been living in it like a renter. Never fully claiming it. Never fully claiming myself.
For years I told myself I was a veteran advocate who builds things. But that was backward. I was a builder who’d been shoved into the veteran advocate uniform because that was the only container I trusted. The only one that felt safe enough. The only one that let me feel needed.
The builder wasn’t the problem. The uniform was.
And the freedom I found down there - the real independence - wasn’t about leaving veterans behind. It was about finally giving the builder permission to exist without needing the uniform to justify him.
That’s what today actually means to me.
Not fireworks. Not flag-waving. Not the bullshit patriotic theater that lets people feel righteous without doing anything.
Independence is the courage to stop performing your worth.
To stop wearing the costume that fit ten years ago and trust that the person underneath it is enough.
To open Cursor at 6 am because you want to, not because someone needs you to.
To build something because you literally cannot stop, and to stop pretending that the building is only valid if it’s saving someone.
That’s the independence I declared in the jungle. The independence from who I was told to be. From the identity that was slowly crushing me while I called it purpose.
Rich and I fought for this country’s freedom in a desert on the other side of the world. But the freedom that actually matters - the one that changes your life - isn’t national. It’s personal. And it’s expensive. It costs you the version of yourself that everyone around you has gotten comfortable with. It costs you the applause. It costs you the identity.
250 years ago, a group of people looked at the system they’d inherited and said it no longer fit. We’re done performing our worth under someone else’s flag.
16 days ago I did the same thing. In a hut. With a plant. Alone.
And today, in a house full of people who actually know me, I’m not performing a goddamn thing.
I’m just here.
The builder. The veteran. The guy who flew home. All of it. None of it in costume.
This country is still the best experiment on the planet. And I’m still learning how to be a citizen of my own life.
Both are messy. Both are worth it.
Here’s the lesson if you need one:
The most dangerous prison is the one you build yourself and call it home.
The most important independence you’ll ever declare is the independence from who you were told to be.
If you’re reading this and feeling something clench in your chest - some version of yourself you’ve outgrown but are too afraid to bury - today is as good a day as any. You don’t need a jungle. You just need ten minutes of honesty and the willingness to stop performing.
Happy 4th.
Let go. It’s lighter over here than they told you it would be.