Onward

For the past year things have been shifting under my surface, sometimes stressed and buckling as they squeeze past one another.  It's long felt it's too premature to comment, that even I must wait and see.  The cocoon's twitches are mere suggestions of the process it contains.  And then lately, a couple more long-held hangups have felt ready to relax.

With much hindsight, one of my great sophomorisms has been to mistake independence, or any single moment of shift, for growing up.  On the one hand, all the things we've been, including children, do not burn off to leave behind an adult in the ashes.  They are still with us, although their salience shifts.  And on the other, there really is no completely grown-up goal to reach.  We keep being faced with more instances of our naïveté.  Although independence, or rather responsibility, is an essential ingredient, there is much more to stewarding this process well.  That more holistic art might be called self-parenting or self-coaching—whatever role you prefer to give that voice in there.

It can be useful to peruse the collective wisdom of how to live, but only if what you learn gets embodied in your life.  Having missed this point, I searched exhaustively for the missing outside idea, tactic, or entity that might complete my adulthood.  But I am now convinced that there is no other way: self-parenting is an ongoing process; one must commit to it as a practice; adulthood is the emergent appearance.

The last few months have more and more revolved around constructing a practice of life: opening up to committing at all, building and adjusting a bit at a time, and, as the difficulties come, trusting the process and sticking with it.  In so many ways, it is a matter of taking my own damn advice and remembering how strong I am.  The single best self-advice for me has been:

The only sustainable, truly tenable relationship with oneself or the world is one of compassion.

So much loosens and shifts, all on its own, when held in this way. The pupa gets go do its work.

There is one definite change to report: my career.

Several things are in alignment. I need to focus on a single, regular, sustaining job for a while, and such a job happened to be on offer. It seems the time is due to get some space from the mode of coaching, and to grow in directions it did not make room for, so that I might eventually return to being/people work from an updated angle.

So I made a project this summer of winding down my clients in an orderly fashion. It's done. I'm no longer a coach.

To be clear, and perhaps oxymoronically given most of this post, I haven't stopped being myself. I'm still ready to nerd out around the art of living. It's just that I'm now doing it as any other civilian rather than in service.

This website was initiated alongside my taking up coaching, so it too is in flux, although I intend to continue keeping my web home here.

Onward...

The Deer Park

Here is a short talk I recently shared.

The reading today departs from Eliot Weinberger's book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which provides numerous translations, with critique, all of a single Chinese poem of just twenty characters.

Its poet, Wang Wei, is a revered Tang Era artist. They were known to be a student of Chan Buddhism and to express it in their work. They pioneered landscape scroll painting, and on one such scroll some hills are depicted with a fence to enclose the deer. The poem at hand accompanies this place.

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the translations in the book, so I tried to fashion my own, which may be foolhardy since I don't know any Chinese:

The Deer Park

Vacant hills, no one in sight,
yet sounds of people, conversation reverberate.
Returning, beams reach the forest deep;
again glimmers rise above green moss.

Pointers on what is going on here require some Buddhist terms.

The front half presents the view from emptiness: no separate witness, just motion within the medium. The back half presents the view from suchness: the permeating awareness interlocking with the spontaneously manifesting immanent variety. In the first half the contrasting words "no one" and "people" posit dissonance within unity, while in the second half the agreeing words "returning" and "again" reveal harmony within differentiation. This overall shape is the yin-yang.

The title, "The Deer Park", refers to the place of the story of the Buddha's enlightenment, but the poem and the landscape scroll link this idea with some more specific place.

Where is Wang Wei really showing us?
What are the deer, and what is the enclosure?

Leading from fool

This post is something of a coming out for me. I'm sure many people already know or think it, but going forward I'll now be embracing it, especially as a matter of professional identity. The statement is that

I am a fool, and I intend to lead as one.

Rather than some act of self-sabotage or paradoxical performance art, I think this is a pretty healthy and useful direction for me to head in. I'll try to explain what I mean by all of this.

First, the fool. I mean this as an archaetype, a dramatic role. This is the character whose social standing has completely collapsed, all the way through the trap door in the floor. All claims to respect, authority, gravitas, and power have been vacated, and all participants know this.

Because the fool is not dependent on maintaining any standing, they are free to behave without heed for it. Beacuse the question of any contingent value has been answered, rather than attempting to perfect their persona, they are free to manifest their intrinsic worth. They are free to affiliate with the high and the low, to speak their mind whether right or wrong, to just carry on doing their thing authentically.

Compare with the clown or the jester. The clown is a sacred character, empowered to do the dirty in the name of upholding the good, by publicly embodying and accentuating the faults of those in error. The jester holds the high and mighty to modesty by saying the unspeakable. The fool, however, is not mandated with any special corrective task. Their fumbling provides food for thought, as it is, without moral claim.

For much of my life I have kept the fool in my shadow, as Jung might call it. In my young adult years I took refuge in the cult of genius, seeking status in a career of gladiatorial academism. Following that I sought success in tech work, as well as belonging in alternative communities. There was a great pretense in my unique value.

These schemes all failed because they were never realistic to begin with. They had no destination, no cash-out point that would answer the memories of isolation from my youth, and dispel once and for all the interpretations of worthlessness and failure that I held. As I burned out and despaired, another great pretense became apparent, although it had been there since the beginning: that my painful memories also had unique value.

The last few years have been a slow process of uprooting the fool-avoidance mentality, in fits and starts, and allowing a wholesome picture of myself. It starts from opening up to the possibility that none of this, my story or who I am, none of it is particularly special. I'm not going to make a name for myself by solving the world's math problems; I'm not going to be a central figure in some social scene; I'm never going to be somebody.

On the other hand, no matter how much I let go of those false aspects of self, surely I'll never achieve vacuity of identity. There is still a person here with their own parts and peculiarities, who wants to invest themself in a healthy engagement with the world. What dreams do I take on instead? And how do I avoid reinfecting the project with my old mistake?

Case in point. For a few years I've been showing up in the world as coach-plus-whatever. I really love my daily work with clients, but I feel a pointed discomfort when it comes to any articulating and spreading what I offer. I have kept under the radar of critical judgement, lest I hear that: I've squandered my many privileges; I deal in meaningless fluff; I promise results when there is only process; I have some special insight to preach; I think I know everything about people. To be honest, this isn't my noble quest for the subtle sweet spot of unimpeachable work. It is my still fearfully resisting situations where others will call me a fool.

We speak out about such things to put them in front of us, and make it more difficult to avoid looking at them squarely. But the lessons must be integrated into one's life, or else the declaration is just a spiritual bypass. The real art is noticing when this aspect of oneself is in play, and then lovingly standing out of its way and handing it the reins to lead. It is already there so it need not be produced or fixed. Over time, one's trust in the basic okayness and basic goodness of the situation will heal.

Thus begins my lookout for ways to allow the fool lead. One powerful foolish behavior already stands out: stumbling and failure as a means of learning and growth. I'm constantly playing the naïf with my clients, asking ignorant or oversimplifying questions as a device to clarify their thinking. I could stand to grow more consistent with it towards myself, at times when perfectionistic judgment lingers. Already much I know in life was learned by mapping out all the ways to know it wrong. But then in my later expression of that knowledge I would only present the ex post facto perfectionistic version. (Consider how one approaches finding a mathematical proof versus how one typically writes it up.) I would probably be a better teacher if I allowed the inclusion of more wrong answers along with the right ones.

I may have to pass through a temporary state of overcompensation, say, a little too much courgage in the conviction. It might be an important experience to invite people's judgment and grow a thicker skin. I'll definitely overuse the word for the next while. But eventually the process will complete as we all anneal towards not taking me seriously at all. I'm just doing my thing over here, a renegade with no rebellion.

P.S. My partner points out that Joan Didion has already covered some of this ground superbly.

Cleaning up

There's no fanfare required when the time finally comes. It's simply happening, and you are watching yourself doing it. Like getting around to scrubbing the stovetop.

There you are, taking the skeletons down from the closet, walking outside in broad daylight, and sticking the bones in the compost.

All that calcium is good for the soil anyway.

Love languages and beyond

The concept of "love languages" goes back to a book by Gary Chapman, and its popular understanding can be summarized as follows.

Each person communicates love via a preferred one of the so-called five love languages, which are: words of affirmation, quality time, gift-giving, acts of service, and physical touch.

I have grown opinionated on this idea and its use, and rather than bogging down any more casual conversations, I'd like to try expressing my response here.

The original claim is that each person has one primary and one secondary love language. In my experience, the more salient differentiation is not between primary/secondary/laters but between giving/receiving. For example, I often find myself giving though acts of service, but don't seem to expect them from others, whereas I tend to want words of affirmation more than I find it necessary to give them. This is a little too easy to fix to be a real criticism—we can just work with a version of love languages that distinguishes between giving and receiving, and acknowledges other context-dependence.

There are a couple more interesting pitfalls in the common use of the concept, however, as well as value in working through them.

Perhaps the most basic pitfall is to think that the point of the list is to diagnose oneself, and thereby know oneself. People seem fond to say "My love language is X", definitely, as a statement of identity. If this is fixed and determinative, then one is shielded by it from the responsibility to respond to circumstances: "I cannot, and therefore will not, give/receive love in language Y". Instead of the idea of love langauges serving our growth and agility, it is used to avoid these ends.

Yes, we have our sweet spots, but the point is less to know ourselves with certainty than to use that provisional knowing productively in the moment.

For example, there is already a powerful mechanism in the simple acknowledgement that people are communicating love in different ways. One person is giving love in one way, and another person is open to receiving love in their own other way. When these do not match, it is easy for the participants to assume that something is wrong, and to blame the other for not giving or receiving love as is desired. Naming the situation neutrally can disarm the scenario and enable either person to adapt how their love is given or expected.

Venturing into the abstract for a moment, this simplified drama is an illustration of a difficult lesson. When we view our situations through our personal and subjective perspective, the positions we take feel simply true. It is so easy to go through life with this perspective taken for granted, to then forget and eventually deny the aspects of reality that are obscured by it. Moreover, when our positions are in a clash with what is simply true to another person, it would seem that there is no common ground, no route to peace. When engaged in a contest of beliefs, the way out is something that seems utterly backwards: instead to recognize a bigger picture that includes the competing positions naturally, without judgment, as embodiments of the variety of the world. That bigger picture is then a space in which the participants are freed to productively work.

Another common pitfall, especially common in nerdy thinking, is to be concerned with the expressiveness or exhaustiveness of the list of languages itself, and to attempt to perfect it. For example, several people have suggested to me that the sixth love language ought to be play. This word would be broadly construed, including obvious games, as well as dance, flirting, and a general sense of invitation together into the yet-unknown. I happen to be rather sympathetic to this suggestion—it seems to me to cover a large amount of the situations that are missed by the original five.

But I still think that the "six love languages", or even the "thirty love languages", misses the point. There is no correct list. The list only provides suggestions to get you started in opening up to the multi-sensory variety of possibilities, in opening up to the actual circumstances. As I see it, the real lesson is to notice the meta–love language, which is the art of discovering and participating in the communication of love, however it might be expressed, in an ongoing process. When giving, this means to discover whatever makes another feel loved as the unique individual they are, to offer them exactly that, and to keep observing and adapting with the times. It is simply putting our full empathetic skills in the service of our compassion. When receiving, it means to learn a receptiveness to wherever love and support might be coming from. Doing so entails finding the source of love as a phenomenon within our own psychological experience, and connecting with it in the presence of diverse circumstances.

Venturing out once more, it might sound like hogwash in our modernist mindset to find that source of our experience of love, but means of doing so have been known forever, and can and should be named. You learn to visualize an entity that is fully seeing and loving you: your deity, your guru, your partner in intimacy, your dog, your parent, the parent you didn't have, your inner leader, or whatever is personally relevant to you. This is already you practicing loving yourself, albeit with a mask on to fool your defenses. As you study what it is like to feel that love directed towards you, you start to notice other ways you already love yourself, plus a growing openness to feeling love from everywhere else. At some point you've crossed the water and it's a big deal, but eventually you leave the raft behind and just go on with loving yourself, no big deal. Conversely, when we do not know how to feel for ourselves, our ability to receive love from others is compromised and insecure.

On the whole, the concept of love languages is a tool that I think I can put to use well, not only in immediately practical ways but also because the lessons around its pitfalls are valuable. The idea orients us towards appreciating our natural diversity as humans, and giving and receiving love exactly as it is.

A Simple Advertisement for Mindfulness

Mindfulness practices aim to help us be less blindly caught up in our stuff. By reminding us of the opportunity to intercede, they get our foot in the door to train our mental habits more intentionally.

Will they undo the fact that we are profane, mortal apes with error-prone meat-sack minds, emotions, and prejudices? No. They do not change facts on the ground. They only might allow us to relate to our situation more flexibly.

Different meditation traditions have been devised to address different aspects of how people can typically get caught up.

Some meditations (which I associate with vipassana) are more intellectual in nature, concerned with how we tend to fixate on concepts, constructs, and conclusions as essentially real. Because they are taken as "just true", we expend effort and emotion maintaining them, sometimes to the point of fighting to impose them on our world and ourselves. These techniques guide steady attention towards aspects of our first-hand experience that confront and subvert our own certainty.

Some other meditations (which I associate with samadhi) are more somatic in nature, concerned with how we often inhabit our bodies and our situation with unease, without knowing it. By reflex we go about trying to address the unease by applying our problem-solving minds to our situation, regardless of whether something is wrong. These techniques guide steady attention towards the willfulness of the unease, and invite us to relax out of it.

And so on. We are each caught up in diverse and unique ways; each meditation tradition arose from identifying and addressing common themes in this process. As one gets experience with it, one learns that the different ways of being caught up aren't even truly separate. The great meditation practices may have their sweet spots, but they often end up helping much more broadly.

They all have a commonality: the idea that our hangups persist so long as we are ignorant around their origins, and therefore they offer a means to direct our attention right to the place in our minds where, as a cognitive action, we can

just

stop.

That cessation can be among the most powerful of experiences we have in our lives, if our hangups have heavily burdened us. It can feel like a liberation from bondage, or like waking up from a dream; suddenly there is a lightness to things.

It is easy to assign significance to that depth and make it its own object of worship. But seeking this experience, and in so doing resisting hangups, is itself another hangup—let the buyer beware both the risk and the paradox.

But in any sober assessment, nothing is different about the world. These moments in fact pass; it is our nature as profane apes to then get hung up all over again. If anything at all has happened, we have been reminded to address our current situation with fresh eyes.

A larger scope of mindfulness posits not a destination that is ever achieved, but rather a practice, resembling the maintenance of a garden. It consists of noticing by whatever means how we are adding to our suffering by being caught up, and how we can let go, and then starting over.

Over time, by means of keeping a practice, we can find ourselves being mindful even when we were not intending to practice. The distinction between sitting and living slackens. The old hangups are still there, and they still get to us, but their power over us often unravels on its own, reducing them to a chatter. We find more opportunity to engage in life freshly, freely, spontaneously. We still get caught up again and again, and we grow more comfortable with starting over again and again. Thereby we learn compassion for our own process, and by extension for others'.

This is the real, deeper fruit of mindfulness: the garden's soil grows rich, and life manifests a comfortable space for joy to emerge, without the urgent need for release. The story has no definite end (or ends), being absorbed into the carrying on with life, same as it ever was, or not.

After a Falling Apart

Recording here a conversation I just had with an old friend, for I surely will need to rediscover this lesson.

I feel like there's a break in the clouds of the last few weeks.

excellent! im glad for it

Trying to reflect and process it with this moment of could-it-be clarity.

😀

I have these cycles where I put myself together, as it were, and function in a way. There is rhythm, purpose, ritual, accountability, and so on. However much it comes together varies from time to time. And eventually it falls apart.

mmmm

I've done a lot to arrange my life so that the falling apart doesn't hurt people much. But it still hits me a little differently every time, and I'm coming to see how I make it worse by struggling and fighting it rather than allowing it.

does it get easier each time?

No, it's better and worse, each different.

it helped me to see these kinds of things as inevitable cycles. And even when I fall apart, the other part of the cycle is coming out of that

The extent to which it hurts has a lot to do with how much it makes connection with my shame.

mmm that makes sense to me

Each time it somehow goes far enough, must go far enough, will not stop until it goes far enough, to break my resistance, forces me to surrender somehow.

If I wake up to surrender to it soon enough, it passes more easily.

If I struggle and fight, I crash harder.

It's oddly not about trying harder to sustain or eliminate or otherwise control. It's more like pretending there's something resembling a higher power, an allowing the flow of the universe to take charge.

I must regain the belief, and acceptance of it, that I don't truly control anything.

Which is very odd because soon after, I suddenly feel like I have agency again?

a paradox of existence I think

Somehow, after dropping the egoic control, there's room for the deeper-rooted, authentic direction to pick the reins back up.

"Egoic", including fear-based or insecure.

And the authentic part, that's more like the universe, or that thing people might label as higher consciousness, just doing its work through me.

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to relearn this.

probably a bunch, if i had to guess

I think one of the reasons I want the right community around me, is to have people who understand because they experience it to, and we can help recognize it in each other as we go.

On another note, now my partner has seen a representative cycle.

She has responded gracefully, has not piled on. It's so easy for people to amplify the shame.

I'm really grateful to her, as I was to you, for this grace.

It's really odd to have this dissonance where shame is a reality I'm holding and it's just not in the picture for your partner. And conversely they are holding more love for you than you are able to see because you simply don't comprehend how it's possible when you feel this way about yourself.

yeah

it's a way to learn it

An Exposure

I've been thinking a lot about my time spent living in California, trying to make sense of the various suspected factors in my not getting along well there. So many seem relevant that it's been hard to organize them into a story. Many just seem like poor match or bad luck taking place, but I've retained a bitter taste about some of them. Resentment is always a pointer towards work I have to do. So I've been asking myself questions around it. The questions led down a path like this:

What I'm so defensive of? Because I wasn't treated how I felt entitled.

Why do people owe you that? Because I need that treatment from people.

What would happen if you didn't get it? My fear would come true.

What are you really afraid of?

It was at this point that I recently finished rereading Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, in which I've felt echoes throughout my life. Especially:

Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.

Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.

[...]

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

About an hour later, a moment of sudden stillness came over me, and I found myself face to face with my own shadow. So I named it, moving my lips silently:

I've been owned by my fear of what other people think of me.

The instant the confession was complete, a compact but definite wave of sensation swept out through my nerves. Something felt different.

I looked back and already knew why I had been this way. I was so sensitive to others' needs. I was dependent on others for survival and connection. And, growing up I didn't learn well to provide connection for myself.

I looked back on so many more things, which now had a different light on them. It turns out that living your life at the behest of your deepest fears performs poorly as a substitute for addressing and healing them. I've been manipulated, leaving me drained and damaged. I've invested tremendous chess-game forethought into any actions having a possible outcome of my feeling shame. I've taken it so hard when I failed to control the world and people judged me, fairly or not. The thing that really brought me down was thinking that I could show up in a community and keep working harder until some fantastical hump was cleared and everything would become happily ever after.

Surely I've been circling around this knowledge in my journey, and some prior writings have brushed beside it. But this feels closer to the kernel of insight that is my goal, like another layer of the onion around it was sloughed off. Things feel lighter, simpler.

Insights can be fleeting, especially if we don't sieze the chance to integrate them. I'm intending to observe my ongoing experiences in terms of this knowledge so that I may notice and change, notice and change, and forge a new habitual self. The behavior will attempt to seep back in the long term, and the clearer sense I develop to name it, the better defended I will be. Writing this down and sharing it sets me up for that through accountability.

Sharing this is also intended as a kind of direct medicine: shame itself is the enemy, and its cure is to make a full commitment to standing by myself, a commitment which I first test by standing here naked in your gaze.

Avoiding Seeking Free Lunches

We've all heard this saying:

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Its meaning varies a little from domain to domain, and here I'm homing in on one facet common to some of these meanings.

In economics, a core observation is that arbitrage is undermined by the flow of information. By observing and modeling market conditions in novel ways, one may gain some temporary advantages, but as other parts of the market catch up in awareness, conditions revert to mean. Despite arbitrage having a reputation as a free money opportunity, staying ahead of the market would (theoretically) require its own form of ongoing and highly nontrivial work. In other words, there is no free lunch.

In computer science, abstractions in a programming language must be implemented in terms of an actual machine, and there might be separate implementations that honor the same abstraction but have different performance characteristics. Decades of research has produced, for many problems, multiple implementation strategies whose performances are incomparable: better in some cases, worse in others. Optimizations along one implementation choice can even conflict with optimizations related to entirely different abstractions. One gets a feeling no one true most efficient system of implementations is possible, that your programming environment can only grow more specialized at some tasks at the expense of others. In other words, there is no free lunch.

Recently I've been studying programming as a hobby, and this phenomenon in my work has found eery resonance with my own cognitive behavior.

Maybe it's the result of being cooped up indoors for a year, with only so many things to tend to. Maybe it's the culmination of psychopharmacological shift in the year I've been off SSRIs. Maybe it's been my hobby of studying programming language implementation, deeply folding my mind along efficiency-wringing shapes. But lately it's as if the Conscientiousness and Neroticism of my Big Five are having an affair: I've had this ongoing drive to do more work now with the intention of working less in the future, and spending any leftover time scrutinizing the details around me for opportunities to further perfect them.

Fortunately, this isn't my first lap around this track, and my past experience has taught me some things:

• What I'm describing is only (a caricature of) an urge. It is not the way things must be. My behavior may be different.
• Doing the urge's bidding would eventually hurt me.
• Doing the urge's bidding would make me less functional.
• Doing the urge's bidding would not even help the future very much.
  Before I continue this list, I'll point right here ^^^ to the thematic connection: While some planning and preparation is good, above some amount it exceeds its own benefit, and what you get is a failed attempt at a free lunch. Moreover, the activity usually continues unless consciously interrupted—planning and preparing for the future always, without space in the present to enjoy the fruits of past labor.
• I can train myself to notice the urge.
• I can train myself to notice, following the urge, the separate point of choice in my response to it.
• I can choose instead a response of, on the one hand, compassion towards the urge, and on the other hand, something more useful in my behavior.

In other words, there is a pull towards obsessive-compulsive mental functioning in my present life, and mindfulness is my first line of defense and is a tremendous help. In the heart of my keeping my mind healthy is regularly reminding myself that there is no free lunch.

Reading Report: The Secret Joy of Accountability

My wise friend Rachel pointed me to Shannon Perez-Darby's "The Secret Joy of Accountability: Self-accountability as a Building Block for Change", published in this volume.

The deepest claim is that healthy relating (with ourselves, with others, as a society) happens when we are each taking responsibility for our choices. Doing so is difficult: narratives around "abuser" and "abused" are useful in surviving, but they also interfere with our taking that responsibility, as does the very morally mixed context of surviving in a system that aims to take our agency from us. It is tempting to remedy the lack of responsibility by imposing responsibility on others. Not only does doing so usually miss the step of working on ourselves first, it fails to recognize the true nature of abuse: not as an act performed by only one type of person on another type of person, but as a system or performance that we all engage as roles in. True responsibility cannot be imposed, only stepped into voluntarily, as a new role, by any given participant. The best work seems to be in supporting people in making that choice for themselves, although we still have much to learn.

These lines spoke most clearly to me on some of those points.

"It's easier to tell you what he did and harder to tell you what I did. It's harder to tell you about the times I lied to him. It's harder to tell you about the panic attacks or moments when I just couldn't fight anymore. I'm afraid that if I tell you the whole story, the extent of the devastation will, paradoxically, get lost. I'm afraid I'll tell the wrong story. I'm afraid that I can never explain just what it was like; that if I do a bad job of sharing my whole truth, then it'll be like I'm lying and all of this healing work will have been for nothing. I'm afraid my story isn't the story you want to hear. I'm afraid to say that my healing means taking responsibility for the fucked-up things I did because then I'm not the survivor everyone wants me to be."

"The story of my horrible ex served me in so many ways: it helped me rally support, it helped me feel sorry for myself, it helped me break up with him, and it helped me move him out of my life bit by bit. But what that story never did was help me heal. The old story kept me stuck, trapped in old patterns that weren't serving me anymore. I had to change the story I told. Gradually, I took some distance from dramatic stories of the horrible things he did to me and started looking at ways I could take responsibility for my actions."

"In my process of healing, the question I keep coming back to is this: What would it look like to take responsibility for the complex choices I made in a grounded, centered, and accountable way? What are the places I can talk about choices in a manner that contextualizes them within systems of violence? It's not enough to tell me that I had no choice. Time after time, survivors are told you had no choice; you did what you needed to survive. Survival is resiliency, and it is necessary. But survival is not without cost. We make choices within a system that's meant to turn a powerful person who can act and make choices on their own behalf into someone who becomes an object and is acted upon. People are always resisting objectification. They are fighting, pushing, screaming to be people who can act for themselves. Sometimes we fight and we scream and we push against the edges of the things that are holding us, and sometimes int he course of trying to be who we are in the world, we do things we never thought we would."

"If we can't grasp that survivors are people who make choices, then we incorrectly name some of the things they do as battering. [...] There is no one behavior that can tell us who is surviving and who is battering in a particular relationship. To decide whether a relationship is abusive or not, we must look at the entire picture created by all those moments of intention and choice."

"To engage in a process of holding people who batter accountable, we must understand who batterers are. Something we often don't understand about batterers is that they're people. Most often they're hurt people who have almost no support in taking responsibility for their actions; they are also people often determined to avoid taking responsibility for their actions by nearly any means. People who batter are scared. People who batter often believe down to their very core that they are the ones being harmed. Many batterers believe that the world is out to get them and that no one could ever understand. People who batter are also very persuasive when it comes to convincing others that these beliefs are true. Batterers are people skilled at messaging with others and exploiting vulnerabilities."

"There should never be anything we do that's too shameful to talk about. Shame is our enemy, a ghost that keeps us trapped in all the ways we hurt ourselves and others."

"What survivors need is support in their own self-determination and safety. What batterers need is support in accountability."

"While doing this work I often hear people ask questions about how they can hold someone else accountable. So often, people jump to an external definition of accountability that is about other people assuming responsibility for their actions rather than imagining accountability as an internal process where each of us examines our own behaviors and choices so that we can better reconcile those choices with our own values. I define (self) accountability as a process of taking responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices. I deeply believe that the skill of self-accountability is one of the fundamental principles we've often overlooked in developing community accountability models. In a process of self-accountability, this reconciliation isn't dependent on another person's involvement, but instead engages with our own sense of values and what is important to us. In the work of self-accountability, we are constantly striving to align our actions and our values, knowing it's likely they will never be exactly the same. When there's a gap in that alignment we can reflect on what choices we would need to make in the future so our actions are more in line with who we want to be.

While I don't think it's possible to hold others accountable, I do think we can create environments that support people in their efforts toward self-accountability."

Seeking Peace

In order that I walk the earth, I must trample the grass. Eating requires the bodies of plants (at least), and breathing and drinking presuppose some share of air and water.

There was a time when I fell into my ideals so earnestly that I realized they implied I had no right to take up space in the universe. It was horrifying and crippling. After suffering, being debilitated even, at this logical conclusion, eventually I put up my hand and pushed back. I leaned into contradiction and yes a little hypocrisy, because my ideals are only models, and if they're telling me I have no right to take up space and exist then something is wrong in my application of logic.

If I'm to feel like I'm entitled to this life I've been given, I need to feel entitled to do so even if it requires leaving a mark or participating in destruction or imperfection. Life, the big capital-L phenomenon of Life, is only a fixed and preservable entity in the abstractions of our limited, centric, and temporal minds. In reality it is a churning cycle of growth, destruction, and renewal. Some conditions and actions destroy it with more certainty, while others tend to conserve it, yes, but if I am to survive I literally must allow some compromise.

I feel somewhat similarly about money. Yes, it is a Maslow's Hammer: we have reductionistically viewed our world and social organization through markets. When Capitalism is not checked by other ideals, it depletes resources and subordinates the human spirit. At the same time, value abstractions and markets are emergent behavior and I'm not sure I want the implications of any system that might completely eradicate them. So I must again allow myself to compromise.

This last one might be the hardest yet to hear. I must love, trust, and coexist with people who do terrible things. Things I point to and know in my bones are wrong: exploitation, oppression, wanton destruction or violence. Even if my state were to split off the country, we would have to make trade and even agree to not invade each other. We are too interconnected not to have a relationship. I must compromise, and I choose a compromise that views every human, even ones my gut labels as terrible, as fully worthy of love and compassion, and walk the walk of my hope for peaceful and cooperative existence.

I still stand with courage for what I think is right, and hold with honesty the highest of standards in front of us. But that standard is an ideal, and it will always lie properly beyond us. I commit to continuous progress towards my anti-isms, though I will never be perfect. Just like I must trample the grass to walk, I must forgive myself as I go. If I do this, I must forgive others too, and the proof of this is in working with them as partners despite everything.

The underlying hard work is in returning, time and again, to treating others as fully capable, in fact innately willing, of setting down their defensive postures, of seeing beyond their fears and egos and separateness, and of experiencing understanding of our common humanity. Trust is an act of faith, and I believe that those who do not bring themselves to practice it condemn themselves to fight.

There is a feature of how we are wired, a byproduct of our empathy, in which one person experiences fear, anger, or some other distrust, and another person perceives it, and reacts with their own form of sense of unsafety. When they view their fates as separate, they end up pitted against one another. This is the root of sides-ism, that sense of "you're on my side or not", or "with me or against me", in-groups and out-groups, and tribal behavior. To address the violence requires addressing its root, which is how we respond to our feelings.

Another feature of how we are wired is that our minds attach, and become attached to, meanings with our feelings. We identify with these meanings and understand attacks upon them to be attacks upon ourselves. In turn, the cognitive act of holding meanings interferes with our bodies' ability to cease experiencing the underlying feelings. For example, a grudge amplifies and prolongs a feeling of anger. And in order to experience the cessation of fear, we must work against everything our evolved defenses are telling us and step back from our interpretations of distrust in others.

I feel that cultivating trust is a calling for me, and I will borrow, practice, and share any tool that works in service if it. Unwinding one's distrust is an art. There are many traditions, as old as humanity. Ones I've heard of include meditation, yoga, therapies, conflict resolution, reconciliation, and the experience of something ineffable and uniting, and I look forward to learning more.

The real work begins within myself and I acknowledge humbly, and with forgiveness, that I have a long road ahead of me with my own surrender to trust. I also acknowledge humbly that my path does not distinguish me from others, that I have no special or dignified position. For I believe that there is no monopoly on spiritual wisdom, and we are all in this together, all fully sacred as fellow humans.

Facing outwards, I acknowledge that I cannot change anyone else, and my words are not intended with the tone of telling you what should be right for you. As I learn time and again, I cannot even force myself to change, no matter how much I tell myself these truths; I can only set up the conditions in which change naturally happens within me. Rather, my words are intended as an offering of a space, and if you find that your space overlaps with mine, then I will gladly meet you in the space in between, where a healthy, enriching relationship lies.

And that is how I'll try to move forward: cultivating peace in myself, and working to model it outwardly. When you are tired of fighting, you are always welcome to stand with me.

Make Life Worth Living

Some people have confronted the question of why they ought to continue living. This great confrontation can significantly divide our lives between before and after it into different experiences; it is a Pandora's Box.

I've found the existential view to be convincing: because existence precedes essence, reasons for living are fictions. I immediately clarify and stress that this is okay. The lack of true reason does not seem to prevent other forms of life from living, and we are odd because we demand such of ourselves. In Viktor Frankl's variant, it comes down to a meta-reason: we go on because we find meaning in doing so. That meaning is entirely relative to the one who lives. The point isn't that the reason be true; in order to be good enough, it must resonate within us, stir us to choose to go on.

With Frankl there is a pivot from philosophical reason to psychological outcome. When we face the great confrontation, it is resolved by the making of a choice. Our psyches define the parameters within which we make this choice. If the goal is to find the will to live then we can help ourselves by actively shaping our minds to promote that. What I'm saying is, we can teach ourselves to enjoy life.

This answer is simple, but simple ≠ easy. Speak only from my experience with depression: First I denied the answer, being glued to my prior views for my very good reasons. Then beliving in its possibility, for a long time its visceral truth was drowned out by pain and pessimism. I did not know how to hear my inner voice, and the lesson didn't take. Or I would find it for a period and then lose it.

The remaining ingredient, the answer to the difficulty, is practice. Continually, perhaps continuously, sustain the knowledge through ongoing effort. Make finding your meaning, holding your meaning, and amplifying your meaning into your way of life. Make the living of your life an act and art of self-expression. Like all habits, eventually it will stick and not be an effort, and like all learnings, eventually it will work its way into your system and bear fruit.

I mean all these things with this motto, which is my personal answer to depression:

Make life worth living.

The "making" is an active verb. It is a choice to find meaning, and to create its truth for ourselves through our curation of our minds by habitual practice of self-expression.

A final comment. It may be hard to distinguish what I'm saying from "Just make yourself happy and keep trying." Maybe there is no true distinction, only the meaning you find in the directive. I'm aware and I don't callously expect to have changed your mind. Rather, I'm laying my cards on the table and inviting you to see for yourself.

Comment on Pacifism

Lately I've been thinking a lot about pacifism. Writing about it has been blocked because it brings up deep pain and it's a sprawling topic to wade through. But here are some points of view I must briefly share.

I believe the option for setting down our oppositional posture, instead seeking reconciliation and cooperation, should always be under active consideration.

I intend to avoid getting bogged down in debates. Peace isn't actually possible because of the bad apples? It's closer to reality when more people continuously renew provisional trust in it. The philosophical limits are ill-defined? This is a mindset, not a refutable logic game. End of discussions.

I am confused that the attitude has such scant mention in our society. Have people simply forgotten about it? Is Endless War, into which the younger half of us have grown, a given? I feel lonely in my allegiance to the idea.

I am distrustful of notions of justice. I think it is a slippery slope to, or morally coded dressing up of, a power grab by those who perceive affliction. This alienates me from you, my dear liberal friends.

Not the Essay I Intend to Write

I regularly come out of conversations with essay proposals for myself. Things that have been simmering in my background come together in the medium of interaction. Then I turn to the page and, without a live foil, the thoughts redissolve. What were all those things again? How were they connected? Were they just some obvious observations weakly strung together?

Clearly I'm relying on my partner as a tool for my expression. One part is that maintaining a concept of my partner's mental state, especially of their growing understanding of what I'm saying as I explain, helps wrangle thoughts into a structured list of words. Annother is that my empathy for their feeling the oomph of my ideas is part of my experiencing their significance surely and having the motivation to write them. It points to how I still have difficulty fully feeling my own self as strongly as I feel (my projection of) others.

On the one hand, I can't blame myself. My mindfulness practice and lifestyle changes have allowed my mind to relax into a state where I have vanishing inclination to hold any one thought as tightly or as long as is needed to make it to the page. It's a symptom of a greater change that has been for my good.

On the other hand, I do experience some attachment to these essay ideas and wish that they would experience a greater life than the ephemeral existence they had in that one conversation. It feels like a waste.

I write this having come out of exactly such a conversation. Maybe the ideas will yet find their expression. At least it got me back to the page, and so I decided to write about what I was instead presently experiencing.

Zero Day

For the better part of a year, I've been tapering down my SSRI dosage. Today is my first day at zero.

After each downward step I gave my body plenty of time and space to adjust—a full two months. Especially the first couple times, it took work. I feel grateful that I can now identify primal fear and the subtle ways it pervades and influences my cognitive system. With effort I can compartmentalize it and take care of myself through it. Eventually my body recalibrated and the condition subsided. Sometimes new feelings came up, ones I hadn't experienced in a long time. (I'm especially noting a bout of righteous anger.) Repeat, and repeat.

The overall lesson that feelings will course through me and I will survive and even heal is a powerful one. Indeed, to have faith in my ability to heal, in my plasticity even at this age, is one of the aces in my pocket as I go about the rest of my life.

If shit happens in the future, I can always go back on the meds. I respect them as a tool and I consider them as scaffolding or a cast around me while I heal. Sometimes some people will heal on their own with just that structure, but some problems will not go away so easily. For too long in my life I simply continued using them for support without knowing how to address the underlying problems. I think that there is a problem in society's treating them as a cure rather than as a tool with its scope of effect.

Another possibility is that I find in a few months that my biology inexplicably shifts again into a state where I need them. Maybe I'll need them on-and-off throughout my life? TBD. I'm open to it.

In any case, this morning, deleting the daily reminder from my phone to take my fucking pill was the quietest great victory I can remember celebrating. Here's to progress.

Psilocybe Mushrooms Have Changed My Life

If anyone would like to have a one-on-one conversation about this, please feel free to contact me securely on Signal via my phone number. Please do not use email, SMS, FB Messenger, etc. for this purpose.

I have been consuming psilocybe mushrooms ("shrooms") semi-regularly for the last several months. Doing this has profoundly changed my life for the better. I believe that normalizing their occasional, safe use as part of healthy emotional regulation would improve many other people's lives, too. So much so, that I believe that the potential legal consequences for me would amount to less harm to the world than my withholding my learnings would. Therefore I am coming out of this closet and advocating for their normalization and legalization.

What do they do to people?

Shrooms alter one's experience for about six hours, say. There is some hallucination. But more important here is the cognitive/emotional effect on one's ego process. A quick background digression:

Our personalities are compound. The chunks of personality, the various thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that arise from our experiences, jockey for attention and control. Those to which we have stronger attachments tend to win out and occupy the cockpit. These cockpit occupants and their world view are the means by which we come to have the Freudian ego. One of the behaviors of the ego is to curate our experience: attend to some sensations and thoughts, and ignore others.

A key effect of shrooms is they shift one's perspective out from this cockpit. By sidestepping the curation, one has access to a fuller range of sensations and thoughts that are naturally a part of oneself. One sees themself and the world more clearly and honestly.

What have they done to me?

I personally don't get strong hallucinations from psychedelic drugs. Shrooms give me visual effects that are mostly of the closed-eye variety and there are amusing auditory phenomena. I'm going to focus on the cognitive/emotional effect.

Some background on how I'm built. As my mind guesses or projects emotional state onto those around me, it conveys those guesses by making me feel those feelings viscerally. These sensations of others' feelings are far louder than the sensations of my own. In other words, I have much stronger empathy for others than I do for myself. My ego contains significant components that are absorbed from other people.

When shrooms disrupt this situation, I gain access to the things that were crowded out, to the rich life that arises from within me rather than being inherited from my environment. If my true self were a kindling flame, shrooms breathe oxygen upon it so that it grows brightly and expresses itself. Parts of myself that I have denied, imbalances that have yearned for resolution, proud appreciation for the good in me—these things become visible, wrapped in a blanket of compassion and peace. I have faced and felt healing in many areas that I have struggled to fully conjure in my traditional therapy. It has felt like a joyous return from exile. The improvement is immediate and visceral. I liken the experience to times when my body has been low on some nutrient, say salt, and when I finally eat something that replenishes it my body gives me a great HALLELUJAH! of relief.

My skeptical education has trained me to perform many feats of logic, rhetoric, and criticism. Living in this mindset has suppressed—repressed—my access to religious experience. I personally don't doubt the world to be a material one, and religious sensations to be mere aspects of my ordinary mind's function. But having them is a normal human fact, and, I'm starting to believe, an important component of my having a healthy ecosystem of emotions. Shrooms, by setting aside my mindset, have helped me feel powerful mystical connection. Knowing this feeling has touched me with a deeper and truer joy and hope than I had ever known. Life and peace have become so much more worth fighting for.

Separating my feelings from other people's is changing how I structure my life. As Rilke might say, I stand guard over my solitude. I seek a large buffer of space around my inner world, so that other signals do not drown it out. This means avoiding the city life and most of my extroverted tendencies. It means accepting being "lazy", "avoidant", or "unproductive". It means keeping better boundaries in my relationships, and choosing to share company only with those who connect with me while maintaining a sense of presence and sacredness of the act. I've also started being more conscious about when and how I eat. Overall there is a great sense of purification in my life. My values have shifted and my stress has largely subsided.

My senses feel much richer. In the week after a shroom ceremony, I perceive details of color and sound much more vividly, and I am tickled by more reasons to be curious about the world. I also access my intuition about things more clearly, and I feel agency to act from this place rather than having logically precomputed everything. Finally, I feel like my meditation abilities have improved because I know more about what the destination looks like.

What do my shroom ceremonies look like?

Since roughly April, I've been holding ceremonies for myself with frequency varying from weekly to every few weeks. When I notice that it's been long enough (as above, "Do I feel low on salt?"), I set aside most of a day. That day I stay home, get cozy, and limit activities and distractions. The main intention I set is to be present with myself.

I weigh out the dried fruits and then make a tea with them. Since I'm a big nerd, to maximize yield I add some citric acid, and to prevent stomach discomfort I add a ginger-turmeric teabag. After maybe 10 minutes I consume both the liquid and rehydrated solids. The flavor doesn't bother me, and I've generally had good digestive luck with this setup.

And then I generally start getting myself in gear for me-time. How long I have to wait for effects depends on how empty my stomach is. I can tell it's starting when my tinnitus changes character, connected with a sort of buzziness in my everything. The effects keep ramping up for a couple hours, hold steady for another four, then ramp back down.

Recently I combined it with an intermittent fast. It felt like good synergy, purifying my mind and spirit in tandem with my body. I'll probably continue combining the two, and experimenting with ways of adding to the sense of ritual about it.

How might you know if it is right for you?

I can't emphasize enough that everyone is different. Only you can know. Ultimately you'd just have to see for yourself, or not. I'm sorry that there isn't a better answer.

There are some great reasons to say "no". You could be worried about nausea. Heed any degree of paranoia about a panic in the altered state. If you are taking any psychiatric medications, consult your doctor first.

Do I have any tips?

Sure do.

• Do due diligence. There is plenty of info out there to be read. It's not my intention to create a reference list here, so just Google it and ask your hippie friends.

• Consider your dose. Don't be a hero—smaller doses are better for therapeutic value (for most people). Unfortunately, being a biological product, there is natural variability. The best response to this fact is to seek a batch that has been "calibrated" by an experienced user, and note their advice. Most people on an SSRI will have to take a larger dose, sometimes much larger.

• Plan your logistics soberly. Obtain from a source you trust. Consider getting and using a scale, accurate to sub-gram. Make a safe environment for the session. Consider having a sitter unless, and even if, you are experienced with psychedelics. Consider having a benzodiazepine on hand, just in case.

• Plan your headspace. The more specific your intentions, the more likely you will be disappointed. Rather, prepare to be open to the experience. Consider familiarizing yourself with mindfulness, Focusing, somatic awareness, or some other art of non-narrative introspection. This will make you most receptive to what shrooms bring. Try to have a sense of what baggage you're bringing in with you, and be ready to sit compassionately with any anxious response.

• Make it a ritual. Find what choices and symbolisms make it seem sacred for you.

What should you know about the drug?

Psilocybes grow naturally in many parts of the globe and have been consumed for thousands of years. Like most things considered edible, they are perfectly safe in reasonable amounts under most conditions.

The dominant psychoactive ingredient is psilocybin. It is a member of the family of tryptamine molecules. This family also includes some of your body's neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, as well as some other chemicals that are psychoactive drugs because they mimic those neurotransmitters in your body.

It turns out pure psilocybin has a slightly less useful therapeutic effect than shrooms—it makes people more anxious, for instance. The reason shrooms work better seems connected to what's called the "entourage effect". Psilocybes include small amounts of other psychoactive compounds. These include a couple other tryptamines. They also include some monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). The latter weaken your brain's defenses against things that mimic neurotransmitters, hence increase their efficacy; they also have antidepressant effects, and are sometimes prescribed for this very purpose. The combination of a tryptamine with an MAOI is also, and perhaps more famously, what takes place in ayahuasca.

The fruit bodies are often uncomfortable on people's digestive systems. Nausea or diarrhea is common. The most common other side effect is anxiety.

One might ask how shrooms compare to other psychedelic drugs. I emphasize that everyone is different and this answer is only mine. I have tried a good number of substances over the years. I have found mild therapeutic effect from several of them, especially LSD in microdoses. About two years ago I had my first real encounter with a tryptamine, namely 5-MeO-DMT, and it temporarily gave me great reprieve from my depression. Then I had ayahuasca and it felt not just like a relief but like it was healing something. When I finally found shrooms they were far more convenient, comparably healing, and for amorphous reasons slightly better suited to my personality. It was the first time I fell in love with a drug, and thankfully it felt like a healthy relationship. The bottom line is that, for me, microdosing LSD is somewhat helpful, and tryptamines and especially shrooms are profoundly so.

What is the legal status?

On the federal level, psilocybin is illegal, and therefore so are the mushroom fruit bodies that contain them. The FDA is currently alllowing controlled testing the of substance for therapy, but for most people this does not yet change anything.

A curious feature of the law is that the spores, which do not contain the substance, are federally completely legal. The spores remain legal at the state level everywhere except for CA, ID, and GA. You can buy them on the internet to ship to the remaining states, and there are plenty of instructions on the Internet for growing them into fruits.

Unless you grow your own, though, buying them usually means needing a dealer. The drug trade has risks, and I can't help you with that. Some localities have decriminalized mushrooms, and since most interactions with law enforcement are local, this dramatically decreases the risks in those places.

Conditions of Healing

As one learns about various schools of psychological healing, especially the healing of trauma, it's pretty natural to grope for an intuition for what they hold in common. Hence the question,

What are the conditions under which healing takes place?

My current best understanding takes the general form,

Healing is facilitated by re-experiencing things in a special way.

Wounding past events should first be recalled, even indirectly, and it is then that our response to their presence in our psyche can be reprogrammed. (I'm summoning the recent-ish discovery in psychology that recalling memories rewrites them, and therein lies the opportunity.)

Schools of therapy tend to have their preferred modalities, aspects of experience that serve as focal areas of re-experiencing. For example, somatic styles use bodily sensation, IFS uses theory of mind (perhaps narrative of personality), and CBT uses literal re-enactment. The diversity of possible modalities seems, to me, to be a corollary of how our memories connect holistic pictures of our experiences, rather than recording isolated sensations.

We often have processes of homeostasis that resist simple habituation, and, moreover, unassisted re-experiencing things can lead instead to triggering and retraumatization. So the fact of re-experiencing on its own is not enough: there must be something about how we do it.

As far as I can tell, the various healing methods all have something to do with how we use our attention while we re-experience.

Usually the key is to attending to an intuitive sense: compare IFS's notion of Self, Focusing's felt sense, and Buddhism's sati. Accessing the intuitive sense effectively is usually requires a state of presence or mindfulness, wherein other processes no longer obscure the way. Our active search for the sense must be done with curiosity, an eager receptiveness to accepting it whatever form it takes. A modality uses its avenue of re-experiencing as a language or a model for describing this form of the sense. Effectiveness seems to vary with the person, the issue, and the language or model, so our process should benefit from a "the more, the merrier" approach to modalities.

Aside, I can't honestly say why the intuitive sense ought to be a magic ingredient. Here are two hand-wavy narratives I've heard along these lines. In IFS they call the process Self-leadership, so, the Self consoles the hurting parts within you; this to me evokes an evolved response as infants to turn to an adult for safety, providing resolution. And in Somatic Experiencing, there is the goal of preventing our human-cognitive process from disrupting our lower-cognitive processes represented by the felt sense, allowing their completion. What is a common aspect of theories of mind that they might both be getting at?

There are outliers, notably EMDR, which involves a kind of disrupted attention.

I also want to comment that the set and setting of the re-experiencing must offer us sufficient safety, at least partly because fear often elicits homeostatic responses. A posture of compassion seems to support this.

The conditions above are not a guarantee on their own. They just provide a fertile setting in which the seeker can eventually learn the true underlying process of self-change; they point in the right direction. In all cases, one should cultivate a practice, and keep groping for the thing to be learned until it clicks natively.

Vacation/Vocation Update

My walkabout served me well. Friends, the city, society... they are all louder sensations than my own feelings. Focusing past them is very difficult without arranging some kind of sensory deprivation. So I spent about half the trip alone, and it was very rewarding.

The experience by myself, juxtaposed with my reintegration upon return, confirmed that I'll be happier when my work allows me to leave the Bay, to work flexible hours, and to live slowly and simply. I'm doubtful that taking a tech job, even a more people/management role instead of engineering, would suit me for very long. Maybe I should stick to short gigs, contracting. But actually, coaching will suit me much better; more on this in a subsequent post.

Giving myself my due attention also stirred up a desire for expression that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. Express I did, by taking risks, making messes, being imperfect, playing, and exploring. Why is it still so hard to access these parts of myself normally?

I spent a lot of time processing grief. I've made it no secret that a breakup this year has been extremely painful. Why did this one hurt so much, while the prior felt more like a reasonable adjustment? The unsatisfactory nature of its ending didn't explain it for me. What feels more right is that in the context of this relationship some deeply hidden parts of myself felt seen for perhaps the first time, and losing access to that mechanism left me feeling stranded, abandoned. Shortly before I left on the trip, it occurred to me that if this is correct, then there is something I can do about it: each time something reminded me and I felt that stab in the gut, to stop and look for that part of myself and try to provide it with love and expression on my own. The pain would point the way toward its own healing.

Then I spent time with other people, and it was also fruitful. I shared some of my arts: curating experiences, creating safety and comfort, gently leading by example. I felt fully seen and appreciated in these regards.

I seeing myself, others seeing me: more than healing the disconnects that underlied my grief, I think they might be bringing about more changes, as if I'm becoming due for a molt. Especially, I suspect that there may be parts of me that I've kept well-hidden even from myself and are seeking to come out of the closet. It is just a vague sense at this point—if it doesn't get drowned out by all the stimulation now that I'm back.

There is one piece of this emerging aspect of identity that has become clear in recent days, which is what kind of coaching I would like to do. Again, more on this soon.

Archive: Advice to a Friend

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 14 May 2018.]

Some advice to a friend

A couple days ago, a friend contacted me for support. They were in a very disoriented state. They were not happy and having thoughts about ending it. The brick walls in their room were distorted, or underwater. Their chest was heavy. I reached into my memories of being overwhelmed, and gave some advice that had been relevant to my experience. Yesterday, another friend contacted me for support with their situation, similar enough to the first, and I found myself giving the same advice. Something is telling me to just go ahead and share it. Pasted below (with permission) is only my half of the conversation (so there's a little discontinuity and some background will will have to be inferred).

First, this experience you are having.
I imagine it's scary.
This strange feeling in your body, like a panic attack, and your view of the walls all fritzing.
So here's a strange point of view that I adopted last summer. I used it like a mantra. I still do sometimes.
It was in the context of some crushing existential angst. Hopelessness, and my having no way to fit in.
I told myself,
Existential angst is just a bodily sensation. You may think it's an idea or even an emotion. But it's more like a type of pain.
It's a very strange one in that it seems to affect your idea of reality and how you fit into the universe.
But if you sit with it and watch it closely, it behaves much more similarly to a pain. It rolls over you like a wave and then tapers off.
If you learn to watch the waves from the side, rather than splashing to fight in them, you can simply wait as they pass.
There is a Buddhist expression, suffering is pain plus rejection.
Pain is a sensation, but suffering is like a state of existence. What elevates pain to become suffering? The fact that we reject it, that we fight it.
Having something like a panic attack or a traumatic flashback reminds us that the "we" that we think of as ourselves, is only a participant in our experience.
And all these other parts of us that we clearly in this moment don't control, they can make us feel unwelcome or even unsafe to be in our own bodes.
Sounds like something in your brain is, and I say this without judgment, really dysregulated right now.
Your brain knows how to re-tune itself. I imagine sleeping will help a lot.
In the meantime, there are two sort-of concrete things I can suggest.
First, try to turn the rejection or fear into curiosity.
Slow down, tune into this extremely weird situation.
Try to learn as much about what it's like to be you right now as you can.
Do so gently, patiently.
I'm not saying don't Xanax at all, but spend some time definitely not avoiding this first.
Even if it amounts to you lying in bed, eyes shut, unable to sleep. Spend that time, quiet, listening, feeling, and acknowledging.
If you ever find yourself in this state again, you'll know your way around, and it won't be so scary.
The second suggestion is, actively go easy on yourself. Treat yourself. Get comfortable. Remind yourself of what makes you feel calm and spacious and resourced.
Look for these features in sensations. Look at something pretty. Play gentle music you like. Smell a fragrance you like. Unfurl your softest blanket. Etc.
It is not artificial that you're doing it for yourself. You can comfort yourself.
Show yourself that it's safe to be with you. That you're capable of holding your hand.
As for the suicidal ideations. Acknowledge it. Don't fight it, per se. It's there for a reason. What is that reason? (Again, curiosity.) And as long as you remember that your decisions are made from some other place, some other part of you, then you won't harm yourself, and you won't be unsafe.

Archive: Finding a Rhythm Again

[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 17 January 2018.]

It's been about a month back in SF. Things have gone well.

It's hard to give myself slack for how long it takes, how slowly I've made concrete steps. I still feel the requirement to excuse myself for how much I depend on my friends, not least for housing right now. And I'm still extremely skeptical of my of progress.

Given all those disclaimers, the sense that things are going well seems real.

Upon my return to SF, I was determined to get off to a good start. I braced myself for an onslaught, of my body revolting to the place where it knew such pain. That surge did come, as per my last entry, but it plateaued, and I found that my coping skills were sufficient. Mindfulness kept me aware of primal fear as a bare sensation, and kept it at an arm's length with breathing room in between. I repeat that I was skeptical, but indeed the triggers have grown infrequent and with mindfulness I can arrest them before they take me over.

I distinctly wanted to hit the ground running, to set myself up for success. To take everything slowly, pay close attention to the trauma and the coping, and to take care of myself first and do everything else second. Even if I accomplished nothing future-oriented, I wanted to have my short-term affairs be healthy and sustainable. I started with two important practices. Number one was to go grocery shopping frequently, roughly twice per week, and cook for myself more often than not. A close second was near-daily physical activity: climbing weekly, and transit via foot or bike as much as possible.

As things unexpectedly started to feel under control, and as these habits started to gel, I added more. I kept the initial goal of each habit modest, and aimed for practice and patience over perfection. So, next came following up with some job/career leads. As a reward I allowed myself to socialize, reconnecting one-on-one with only a couple people per week. There's been some spare emotional endurance to offer support to friends who are hurting. After that came weekly meditation.

Looking forward, I feel an urgency to deepen my awareness of the signals from my body. My guts are still middling, and now that my triggers are reduced it's unclear what will be most helpful for them next. Several times I've noticed that I experience certain stresses or fears from my legs up through my gut, and stopping at my diaphragm. I am usually tense in my diaphragm and have weird issues about controlling my breathing. There is clearly some mental connection to unlock there. There's also a special fear I get when I'm put on the spot and feel in opposition to my body, say, when trying to dance or flirt. So I'm considering as my next project to take a dance class. And I have much more to do in terms of finding employment, both short-term and medium-term.

Speaking of flirting, though, all of these things have happened in parallel with a big transition in my relationship situation. Only vaguely due to others' privacy, I'll say here that it's a loving and supportive acknowledgement of diverging paths. I've tried to welcome it as a healthy learning experience in independence, seeing as I've hardly been single since mid-college. And yet I feel that itch to get my needs met somehow. Even though I feel confident and empowered to be intimate with people platonically, and in fact feel no shortage of emotional intimacy in my life, I'm terrible at breaking ice with people in beyond-platonic directions. I welcome suggestions here.

Anyhow, a couple references spring to mind these days. One is that scene in City Slickers where they say "Your life is a do-over." And there is of the notion of email bankruptcy. I've cleaned my slate of expectations, and am trying again with more intention and better awareness. Although I wasn't necessarily aiming to get the whole system up and running again, it feels like that's likely to happen anyway—there's an emerging feeling is that I am living a life again, that I'm a character in a story that I belong in. And I'm regaining access to old feelings of abundance that I want to share with the world around me. I am re-experiencing the components of happiness slowly and individually with great appreciation.

How to summarize? My life feels pregnant with challenge and possibility, and I feel resilience and momentum to do the slow, patient, unglamorous work to keep meeting that challenge and realizing that possibility.