For better or for worse, personal development is the primary theme of my life. I might not still recommend each turn in my path, but what follows is a basic outline of how I’ve survived to the ripe old age of 45 as a queer neurospiced meatmech maneuvering late stage capitalism while battling lifelong suicidal ideation (keeping in mind my social status as a privileged white person).
Throughout my teens and early 20’s, presuming I would not live any longer than that, I actively damaged and neglected myself while incessantly performing public psychic surgery with very little self compassion or guidance. I began reading “self help” in roughly 2003, when introduced to “Control Theory” by William Glasser. Soon followed work by Daniel Rutley, John M Gottman, and “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, and my ‘content’ as it’s referred to now followed suit.
In 2005, suffering the death of a childhood friend, I decided to see a psychiatrist, beginning a long multi-decade journey through multiple practitioners and modalities, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Process Therapy, Parts Work, and EMDR, in tandem with Somatics, peer support, Systemic Family Constellations, The Landmark Forum (NOT recommended), silent Vipassana retreat, and The Grief Recovery Method which I facilitated in my practice.
Over time my reading focus shifted from how to fix the failing cishet relationship escalators in my life to things like Michon Neal’s 5 ways Amatonormativity sets harmful relationship norms for us all and many more community members and bloggers lost to the sands of time, as well as writers like bell hooks, Audra Lorde, and Ijeoma Oulu, sparking the beginning of fierce rejection of the assumed superiority of the scholarship of whiteness I had animated as violently and offensively as possible.
At my best, I was in three support groups, seeing a therapist weekly, medicated, had a peer counselor, a vibrant social life, a vocation I enjoyed in which my therapeutic enthusiasm was helping (other privileged and mostly white) people, the freedom to choose my own schedule, a few close friends, an art studio side hustle, and swam with my able body a few times a week. I still managed periodic ideation, generally linked to my period cycles, but the consistency and relatively short lived nature, as well as my existing support network, anchored me through them effectively.
Cue, COVID-19.
I made some personal development strides in the early stages of the Pandemic in relative isolation, particularly Ringmaster Rex and the two years of system mapping integrations that followed. However, anything misapplied can become toxic, and a frog in slowly heating water with no other frogs to talk with about it doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.
Though I’ve maintained NOVID status, can know with relative certainty I haven’t caused the murder of anyone’s fucking grandma, and have not had so much as a cold in these five long years, those victories cost me virtually everything else. The life I had pre-pandemic is a distant memory with very little having arrived to take its place.
As my isolation and general despair deepened with the depravity of the “civilized” western imperialist world displayed in 4k on my phone every day, I devolved into an intense and despondent addiction. I am currently recovering with the return of full substance sobriety supported by multiple recovery fellowships, discovering just how much effort I spent in service to staying as embedded in fantasy as possible, and how disorienting it was to leave that behind over these last few years, including my recent ten year period of relational isolation that felt, at the time, like solid boundaries.
Viewing my struggles with socialization and disordered attachment from the lens of addiction has helped rekindle my faith in my ability to return to the levity I’ve experienced previously, whereas identifying my struggles as me badly managing a collection of DSM-5 diagnoses I should have all the tools to handle already did not.
My dissolution as the pandemic has persisted in many respects directly mirrored the abject horror of my teens that, thankfully, fewer and fewer know the chilling details about. It was quite severe, and deeply unsettling even as I rationalized my concerns away while inside it. Returning to this familiar curve in my spiral was necessary, written in the stars, in the eyes of the people who passed through my life during this time, and in the creeping lines on my face. And, I took the longtime perceived stability of individualism as part of a life built in an ablest system that is actively collapsing, as well as the perceived ruggedness of my mental health, for granted.
The life I had was a life worth losing to make way for whatever is to come, perhaps my repentant communal redemption or maybe finally the disgraced solitary downfall my enemies and victims hope for if they ever think about me at all. Either way or somewhere in between, what existed had to be unraveled, as is my task in this life, again and again.
If one were to take away anything from this writing, I hope it is this: Even hard won established progress is non-linear and, in the absence of consistent nurturance, can and will fall away at any time. It’s important to embrace all parts of ourselves and our legacies including the dark, shitty stuff, and to keep dualities fortified, ready to leverage either when their wisdoms are required. But overfeeding any one at the expense of another produces problems that can take precious time to acknowledge and a lifetime to recover from once being lost becomes clear in the first place.
While returning to levity is always possible as long as one stays alive to meet that challege, I continue to pay dearly for feeding into my hubris, and into the fantasy that I could grow and thrive relationally with what amounted to having no food or water. Looking back, I can see how I was ahead of a devastating societal curve growing up in a social media bubble in the 90’s, and I see a similar pattern here; a Micro grief experience for the world that no longer exists after COVID in my small life, akin to the Macro grief experience I suspect this country as a whole will be experiencing very, very soon.