5 | 11 | 23
I’ve been having a rather interesting time these last few weeks. I had the opportunity to travel to another town for work and found it a stunning experience, between loneliness and insecurity of not knowing anyone in the new place and some stunning clarity experiences and PCEs under the influence of weed edibles.
This has set in motion a pattern I’m pretty familiar with: having PCEs via drugs and then slipping into semi-dissociation on the comedown.
This dissociation seems to be something that I can inhabit for weeks or months, as my brain was perhaps overwhelmed by the drug use and synaptic signalling is reduced.
I think the intuitive enjoying/appreciating vs. disliking is a different issue, but the ‘depressed’ brain does lend itself to the depressed ‘me’ as the sensate experiencing is lowered commensurate with the increase experienced during the high.
There’s also a kind of mourning that happens, where I had such a great time during the drug use and then that enjoyment feels inaccessible from the lower-energy place. This I think is a belief I hold, I frequently find myself ‘down’ whenever I’m tired.
Additionally, there’s the fact that once I decide to be ‘down,’ it depresses my energy levels further, which becomes a self-defining cycle that could continue ad infinitum. I’d prefer not to do that if possible.
In the middle of this is the recent memory of clarity, reminding me of what’s possible. With each experience what I’m looking for becomes clearer, and less performative as it exists more and more as a material fact and a possibility for me to live that way.
I’m partly writing this entry to kick-start my determination, remind myself of that possibility, and set myself further on my way.
It’s interesting how the physical and the intuitive influence eachother despite existing on different planes. For example, when I’m anxious, my body and mind ‘tighten up’ in a way that suppresses clear experiencing, clear seeing to the degree that when I do relax, as in the PCE, there is a psychedelic clarity. The way I was taught in school that the eyes work was basically that they collect the light and send a signal to the brain and Bob’s your uncle, but there’s a lot more going on than that, and the emotional ‘Being’ does a lot to change how things are experienced.
–
I’ve entered into an investigation of ‘awkwardness,’ as a kind of low-level social fear I’m discovering it’s kind of everywhere.
I’ve been working in a new clinic as my job situation has been changing around a lot lately, and so I’ve been seeing it a lot lately. Awkwardness seems to especially come out when people don’t know eachother and aren’t sure what to expect, as if this new person is going to somehow attack.
It’s related to carefulness around intimacy as well, it’s considered unsafe to be intimate with someone so part of awkwardness is wanting to hold someone far away while simultaneously performing the politeness requisite in society. This is an inherently tense situation because the politeness doesn’t allow immediate retreat. There are also crossed aims, perhaps wanting to simultaneously run away and impress someone.
I looked up antonyms for ‘awkward’ and came up with ‘relaxed’ and ‘at-ease,’ so that’s what I’m aiming for now when I’m starting to feel awkward. So far so good, and paying attention to those situations is really revealing how often it comes up for me.
It’s kind of no wonder why people get so miserable when I see how often I’m tensing up in these social situations. Just getting hammered by that signal that something bad is happening, that there’s danger, over and over throughout the day. No wonder I’ve had difficulty feeling good! It’s good to have something specific to watch for.
That more than anything has been what those clarity experiences have been good for, they cast into clear relief the gap between the actual and all this difficulty. It doesn’t have to be so hard!
An interplay I’ve been noticing in myself has been how I set these ‘tasks’ for myself, like Hercules.
I feel bad about something, and immediately start looking for some way to ‘fix it’ some quest to go on to assuage the feeling. Maybe that’s some practical chore I invent, or often I wander into a fantasy of some girl coming along and making me feel better. Then I start feeling bad if the quest doesn’t seem to be going well! So I end up feeling even worse than I did initially.
It would probably be more efficient to just examine that initial feeling 
It seems strange to just be able to kick back & relax. A lot of that is socially mediated, I imagine having to explain that to someone. No, I’m not going to school for my PhD, I’m sitting on my deck relaxing and looking at the trees. To them that might look like a big loser! But I only set out to impress them in the first place because I wasn’t relaxed, and previously imagined that if only I had some other people around me that were impressed by me, that I’d feel better.
Why not just feel good to begin with?
I have this huge long shopping list of things I have to do all because at some past moment I felt bad, and fantasized that I had to do something, and now I feel bad if one of those things is threatened. But the list is so long now, and there are so many loose ends, that now I feel this anxiety basically at all times that I’m not staying ahead of my list.
I caught onto it somewhat last weekend, I had been really busy and decided to spend Saturday relaxing and watching some sports. But then the entire day I couldn’t relax and felt that I was somehow doing something wrong… basically, my belief was that watching sports wasn’t an impressive enough endeavor. So I was essentially telling myself that I am never allowed to relax, or if I do relax it has to be in specific ways. Which is a pretty strange definition of relaxing.
So this week I’ve been going really crazy, watching TV shows, looking at social media, generally loafing and doing all the things that my brain (and often, the media) tell me are ‘bad and wrong.’ And it’s been fun!
Where I still have some investigating to do is around other people, I still believe that I have to sell them on some version of myself. Watching TV and looking at social media is just not impressive enough.
I had a glimpse of purity last night where I remembered that my goal has been genuine intimacy with others. It’s funny because that goal felt so lofty and bold, I was scared of sharing it with others.
So I’m not allowed to talk about being on social media or watching shows (if you moan about it you’re allowed to share these things), but I’m also not allowed to share that I’m interested in genuine intimacy, freedom, and clarity because that’s ‘too bold.’ That’s kind of funny, I’m supposed to stay in these narrow bounds to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
The whole thing is starting to seem pretty silly
