#81: Sean Thor Conroe
"Lately, I’ve felt strongly that if you’re in your purpose, 'in your myth,' this gives you an intangible advantage in your spiritual and physical health."
Sean Thor Conroe (@seanthorconroe) is the author of Fuccboi (2022) and host of 1storypod, a literary podcast with past guests including Sheila Heti, Stephanie LaCava, and Tao Lin. He made a brief cameo in the audio recording of our Tea Party event last spring.
#81: Sean Thor Conroe
Aquarius/Aquarius/Leo
On a mountain, in the woods
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Being healthy, above all, for me, means cultivating your spiritual health. As in, the well-being or vigor of your spirit. This means a quiet knowing about what exactly you’re meant to be doing, locking in and doing it, not avoiding your destiny, not distracting yourself with the wrong things. Believing in your mission even or especially if no one else understands why you must.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Solitary and monastic, borderline anchoritic.
I start my days with water and coffee and loose, additive-free tobacco. I put on the eight-cup coffee maker and pour myself a large vessel of water, straight from the tap since where I live, on a mountain, we have clean, cold spring water. Then I roll a cig and sip my water, and once the coffee’s ready, I sit in my fold-out chair or pace on my covered porch and slowly drink my coffee and smoke my tobacco, trying to stay off my phone, though I often fail.
Most of all I like to be still and not respond to anything or anyone or look at social media. I try to pick up where I left off the day before, with what I’m reading or thinking about. I look at the things I wrote down by hand the day before while I drink my coffee and water, smoking on my porch. At some point, I move inside and switch to a nicotine pouch so I don’t have to get up to smoke. I work on what I’ve been working on, either at my desk in my office or at my kitchen counter or, lately, at this standing desk contraption I’ve set up in my office since I messed up my back sleeping on it weird traveling last month. It’s better now but I still like working standing at my stand-up desk contraption.
After about four hours, I make eggs on toast or oatmeal with grass-fed butter and maple syrup, or a smoothie in my Nutribullet with a banana, berries, peanut butter, spinach, celery, ginger if I have it, and water, and eat and drink that. Then I walk to the lake in the middle of the forest I live at the edge of, it’s about a five to ten minute walk. I walk there and sit on a little bench at the edge of the lake and listen for bears or deer for five to ten minutes, and then walk back to my house.