My soul went missing a year after my college graduation. I was relaxing in my room after my mom had just been sticking her nose into my life, or “helping me look for a job” like she calls it, when my soul went for a DMT trip and never came back.

I know what you’re probably thinking, and you’re wrong, this wasn’t the spiritual version of “going out for a pack of cigarettes” — my soul is upper-class white. Ha-ha jokes. At least my soul didn’t take my funny bone with it. But seriously, I know how privileged my soul felt to be mine, so I’m confident it wouldn’t just abandon me right on the verge of my long-awaited independence and leave me soulless and employable only as an airline customer service agent.

5 years of soul-searching and over 1000 DMT trips later, I still haven’t lost hope, and neither have my parents who pray every day that I find my soul and move in with it in a rental apartment somewhere. In fact, I believe this is all a test I need to pass to win my soul back after all the neglect I put it through during 8 long, grueling college years. I became a Ph.D. in “Philosophy of the History of Liberal Arts in Ancient Egypt,” and I paid for it with my soul. My tone-deaf mom bringing up me getting a job must have been the last straw.

But I’ll do whatever it takes to win my soul back. After all, like I always say, “nothing good ever comes easy,” and “good things come to those who wait,” and my soul once gave $20 to a homeless busker on Christmas and waited patiently until there was enough change to break $19.50, so I could stretch my strip club dollar. 

Over the years, I’ve caught glimpses of my soul several times, but it’d be gone before I knew it, always a step ahead of me in our spiritual game of cat and mouse. It’s like I’m chasing a myth, an urban legend boy scouts narrate around the campfire to restore their faith in humanity before bedtime. Even the term “soul-searching” itself doesn’t do it justice, like saying Bear Grylls does hill-hiking for a living. 

So, after a decade of soul-tracing, tracking, trailing, soul-hunting-down, I must admit I need help, and not just from anyone, but from a soul detective gone rogue, a bad-ass shaman who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty, the child of Dalai Lama and Steven Seagal’s every character. So basically real-life Steven Seagal.

Description my soul answers:

– Male
– White
– Millennial
– Old (it enjoys 80s music even though I’m a 90s kid)
– Exceptionally beautiful

Since I’ve watched every single detective show on Netflix for research purposes, I know every investigation starts with the realization that “In order to find [my soul], you have to think like [my soul],” and the question, “If I was [my soul], where would I be?”

My soul thinks I’m God’s gift to the world, and I know you can’t just force yourself to think like that, so come see my stand-up open-mic act this Saturday to kickstart the investigation.

As for the “If I was my soul, where would I be?” million-dollar question, here’s a list of its last-known whereabouts. Keep in mind my soul is extremely elusive and never stays in one place for long. 

– The limits of my parents’ credit cards
– The heart of the Mumbai slums
– The Hilton hotel right next to the Mumbai slums
– The milestone of 1,000 Instagram followers
– The end credits of every single-player PS4 game
– 1,573 Starbucks throughout the country
– The mid-way points of half marathons for causes that hot chicks support
– Twitter and YouTube comment war zones
– Barber shops that charge $50 for beard grooming
– Facebook groups for inspirational quotes about going with the flow and everything happening for a reason
– The beds of all the women from my soul-searching support group, or “yoga class” as they call it, whom I managed to convince to embark on a joint soul-searching journey with me

Since soul-searching has been a full-time job for me, I hope you’ll consider the experience my soul has accumulated along its incredible journey as payment — it will happily share it with you because that’s just the kind of soul it is.