The phrase "The Great Empty" characterizes my entire life from adolescence until now. My most recent Substack post is a includes a confessional about coming to terms with this. Honestly, I have to admit that I feel with hopeless and pathetic that I'm only fully coming to grips with it at 30.
It also seems to fit with the comment I left on one of your earlier posts about narcissism being much more of a relational strategy than an inherent temperament (something that I think a lot of research shows, and that I've come to notice personally; though my choice of cope was compulsive people pleasing).
I'm like you in that psychedelics were a huge assist in getting me to this point. I did two "big journeys" – MDMA and ketamine respectively – and have very occasionally micro-dosed on psilocybin since then. Trying integrate into a sense of authenticity post-trip has been a lifetime's worth of work, and I've still only dug myself out of the ditch by a foot-and-a-half.
I've had four people now (including a healthy male mentor who I deeply trust and my very skilled Ayurvedic practitioner) recommend that I do an Iboga journey in the next couple years, and that I'm 'ready' for it – clearing out a bunch of stuff lodged in my nervous memory and/or my larger metabolic engine.
One of the reasons that true love (in the agape sense, not purely eros) is such a good medicine is that it sets up the container for the medicine to be administered at the right time, in the right way, in the right order. This is something I've come to realize, through both coaching work and other relationships, is essential to bridging the gap back to a sense of self that feels more natural, even if it remains largely fragmented and fluid.
What is really interesting to me is that I'm a prime candidate for wokeness in a lot of ways, and yet, I never got pulled into it in a full-throttled way. I still don't really understand why. I credit it to my inherent allergy for social bullshit past a certain threshold, which is kind of an unexpected trait to possess for someone as squishy as I am.
The phrase "The Great Empty" characterizes my entire life from adolescence until now. My most recent Substack post is a includes a confessional about coming to terms with this. Honestly, I have to admit that I feel with hopeless and pathetic that I'm only fully coming to grips with it at 30.
It also seems to fit with the comment I left on one of your earlier posts about narcissism being much more of a relational strategy than an inherent temperament (something that I think a lot of research shows, and that I've come to notice personally; though my choice of cope was compulsive people pleasing).
I'm like you in that psychedelics were a huge assist in getting me to this point. I did two "big journeys" – MDMA and ketamine respectively – and have very occasionally micro-dosed on psilocybin since then. Trying integrate into a sense of authenticity post-trip has been a lifetime's worth of work, and I've still only dug myself out of the ditch by a foot-and-a-half.
I've had four people now (including a healthy male mentor who I deeply trust and my very skilled Ayurvedic practitioner) recommend that I do an Iboga journey in the next couple years, and that I'm 'ready' for it – clearing out a bunch of stuff lodged in my nervous memory and/or my larger metabolic engine.
One of the reasons that true love (in the agape sense, not purely eros) is such a good medicine is that it sets up the container for the medicine to be administered at the right time, in the right way, in the right order. This is something I've come to realize, through both coaching work and other relationships, is essential to bridging the gap back to a sense of self that feels more natural, even if it remains largely fragmented and fluid.
What is really interesting to me is that I'm a prime candidate for wokeness in a lot of ways, and yet, I never got pulled into it in a full-throttled way. I still don't really understand why. I credit it to my inherent allergy for social bullshit past a certain threshold, which is kind of an unexpected trait to possess for someone as squishy as I am.
#TeamWerewolf 🐺
Hey :-) thanks for sharing this. #TeamWerewolf all the way <3
I haven't tried Iboga but I've heard it's very intense! I have done ayahuasca three times though, which was ... well, there are no words.
Love the title, and “under title”.
THIS, I can tell, is going to be a great read.
This post was a trip. So much one can comment on. I can see the links you're building.
For the record, Lucas is not NPD. Come on. That guy was lying. Hilarious.
I mean, it was definitely one of the weirdest dates I've been on, but why lie about that?!