Having done away with dissociation, I’m experiencing a lot more surges of big feelings. I think these feelings have been there underneath the whole time, but I was running from them.
I really got stuck. On one hand, I wanted to succeed, be a great actualist, become actually free etc. On the other hand, the strategies I was employing were anything but about openly feeling.
I was trying to override what I was feeling, to push past it and ignore it (on the way to success, I thought), I was distracting myself and running.
Sometimes I was trying to solve the feelings with real world solutions (ie “I need more friends”, “I’m not occupying myself enough”, “I need to do X to feel happy”).
Other times I was distracting and running. Escapism and pleasure seeming so as to not have to deal with negative emotions.
Another one was to blame myself. “I’m a terrible person”, “I don’t care about anyone”, “my neurotransmitters are messed up”.
I really put myself in a difficult situation, caught between the real world and the actual world and not flourishing in either.
Now I can feel what’s underneath without it being mediated by, anything really - even social identity. The feelings are very strong, at times. Very strong fear, for example. At other times, strong sorrow.
Weirdly, even though these feelings are by no means pleasant or easy to feel, it seems it’s a step in the right direction to be feeling in such an unfiltered way. At the same time, when these feelings come up my intent is to get back to feeling good - I do not purposely wallow in feelings of anxiety or whatever. Sometimes I think of Geoffrey saying to himself as a feeling being, “just chill dude”.
That being said, some of these feelings are very sticky. When fear takes over, those feelings push for some kind of action. But other than further anxiety, there isn’t actually much to do but to sit it out (and aim to “tap dance” on top of it - not taking it too seriously lest it ends up in a panic attack).
Fear is powerful - it can easily make me feel like everything I am doing must be wrong. When this happens I am careful not to catastrophise further by going down the route of feeling it’s my fault or worrying about if I never find the actual world etc. It can help to remind myself at these times that the actual world does exist, that I can trust Vineeto and the other actually free people who have done it, and that I am finding my way through the psychic maze and will come out the other side at some point.
I suspect that some of the strong feelings have something to do with control - I’m fighting for my life at times haha. The quotes from Vineeto in Kuba’s diary about naïveté are inspiring. I’ve already proved that a strategic or sudorific or controlled or anxious approach doesn’t work, so I’m interested to see if I can let go…