Faces of change: 2012 – 2022

This is the first part of a series about my lived experience of waking up after a 28-year identity break. I feel like I am finally home, and I am grateful for my experience, even if it seems like a hell. my life has been irrevocably changed for the better. Please read this with the understanding that I would not be able to put this together unless I had come through the keyhole to the other side and were no longer plagued by what I describe below.

Just to start it somewhere simple, I will say that At some point between the ages of 19 and 20 (1994 – 1996), I lost myself. It didn’t happen overnight, but was rather a gradual dissolution of identity that ultimately left me a shell of an entity with no actionable memory of who I wanted to be.

Losing myself created a schism in my reality that I am just now beginning to reconcile. I won’t try to cover the details here of what three decades of mental instability can do, but I will say that waking up from what I was under has felt like being at the bottom of a blast crater of my own making, everything and everyone I loved laying wounded and injured.

through ritualistic and scaffolded use of Cannabis, Ayahuasca and other PSYCHEDELICS, a lot of hard work, quite a few setbacks from shock, and with the tireless help of my partner, Asha (who was also a victim of my madness), I am in recovery and can say that I am again myself, though a little rusty at being so and with a lot of work ahead of me to try and make things right.

As I put my life back together, find new connections with people, and try to make friends again, I want to share a little of what my journey has looked like.

Some of that can be seen with these photos. In the ones before 2021, I seem absent, afraid, confused. Obfuscating my presence with ugly faces or goofy poses in others. In the later pictures, after a few months of psychedelic sessions and deep work, I seem more present, if a little taken aback at times.

While that may not be clear to everyone, what should be apparent is my physical change. I took up a very large amount of space (320 pounds worth!), and I believe that the weight was a reflection of my mental state more than anything. I was a shame-filled narcissist trapped in a nightmare world in which I had enfolded my family with me through persistent acts of othering, gaslighting, and isolation. While I was under the duress of a mental illness, I fully accept the responsibility of my actions.

2012 – 2019

I’m going back just a decade with photos, though the behaviors described have been present since 1996.

From the beginning of my mental break, I was unable to see myself or my place in the world, unable to remember anything about who I started out as, and I had completely lost touch with my soul. I didn’t remember that I was in love with music. I didn’t understand love. I was cruel and POSSESSIVE. I didn’t see or really know Asha, and didn’t think it mattered, she had become lost as well. My memories from inside this man’s head are shrouded in a tar-like mass of tendrils, and it’s an uncomfortable place to be.

I started smoking cannabis in 2018 once it became legal in Vermont. Through her own spiritual practice with it, Asha began to find a semblance of self and tried to distance herself from my cruelty and madness.

She tried to live more on her own in the campus apartments during her BFA program, but I ended up being there all the time, abandoning the responsibilities at our house (pets, my father, repairs and cleaning), completely oblivious to the very real need for her to find space away from me.

This was my Peter Pettigrew stage and the habits of thought, feelings, and deed I generated here would plague me for years. I WAS TERRIFIED OF HER LEAVING ME without knowing how badly I was treating her, WAS DISGUSTED WITH MYSELF, AND I ATE AND ATE AND ATE …

2020 – 2021

By 2020, Asha and I needed a profound change. I’m still not sure how I knew to do it, but after some early-hours research and what felt like a guiding hand, I ordered P. Viridis and B. Caapi just before my birthday, and I brewed Ayahuasca for us a week apart from each other. She went first,

Her experience was immediately life-changing, and i felt afraid and small in her presence. I could see how far away from her I was, and I could feel the distance between us, and I knew that she was in the right place and I wasn’t, and I was bitter about it. That hierarchical, competitive perspective would hold me back for a long time.

My own journey began a week later. In my first vision, I reached my hand up in pitch blackness and turned on a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. I was presented with the vision of a dingy office with no windows. cluttered with file cabinets, an old card catalog, books, shelves, cramped ceilings, pipes, and an old pot-belly stove, Dusty, bookkeeper green and sepia overtones. I recognized my own ideas, handwriting, drawings and detritus. I was looking at the inside of my mind, and it was a mess. I was given a word: “Curiosity”.

The next day, I no longer had the urge to punish myself by buying sugary, weight-inducing food. By October I had last over 80 pounds (I weighed ~175lbs by September, 2021), and I was beginning to create new perceptions of what life could be outside of my previous belief system. The pictures don’t show the struggle to stay on a healing path, however.

My visions with the medicine were not friendly for the most part, while always helpful. I had a lot of work to do. I spent many hours wandering in the woods and snow, sobbing or raging like a feral beast before I would come through.

I still had no comprehension of the depth and breadth of emotional and psychological destruction my madness had wrought — and continued to do so — on Asha. I was still living in a nightmare. I struggled with demons I couldn’t yet understand, but that were harming us.

During the summer and early fall of 2021, we prepared to attend an Ayahuasca retreat in the Peruvian Amazon with Shipibo Shamans. Neither of us had left the country as adults, let alone traveling and managing all the logistics for it in not-so-healthy mental states. However, by this time, we had worked with Ayahuasca a number of times and felt compelled to visit the source.

We attended a 12-day retreat in late September, 2021. The shamans took something out of me in the Amazon that I’m glad to be rid of. While in the jungle, I was presented with a deep truth about A life-long personal cosmology that I didn’t fully come to terms with or understand until very recently, and now that I have, my life has turned around. At the time, it created a belligerence and ego-based denial in me that led to the darkest time in my life so far.

2022

January – August

I faltered and lost myself over the course ofthe next year. AFter we returned from the Amazon, I tried to live a better life, but I began to be subsumed by old habits of thought and the darker meanderings of my mind trying to understand what I had been shown.

I hadn’t yet become aware of my dissociative episodes, and began to feel like I was looking at the world through a kaleidoscope.

Daily life became very heavy. I changed jobs due to an unnecessary financial panic. I needed to take time off to heal, to find myself and hold on, but I didn’t know it.

Asha continued to rise and pull herself beautifully out of the nightmare I had created for her, despite my confusion and jealousies. We took a trip to Florida for a couple of weeks, and She asked me to free her from my covetous, POSSESSIVE, and jealous thoughts. She asked for freedom to explore her life, reminding me of what we had intended in the beginning, and I had to confront that I had taken our relationship from us, had robbed us of our youth. I didn’t take it well at all.

August – December

Caveat: This time period is still hazy in its nearness, and my documentation of it remains flavored by emotion rather than memories of.

By the time Asha began her Ghost Karaoke project, I had succumbed to an all-consuming patriarchal confusion, pain, and anger. I believed that she had abandoned me, betrayed me, and was going to leave me behind, despite her saying and showing otherwise. I sobbed, yelled, and drank to try and kill myself, I was an absolute child lost in a tantrum. I was writing music, but it was from a dark place with no magic, and I was lost.

By early October, my degradation had continued. I couldn’t keep up with the simplest of tasks. I was unstable and histrionic, and I believed that I should be left behind. I wasn’t safe to be around, and I acted it. Because of me, Asha had to escape and was forced to live in a women’s shelter for a month.

I had lost my identity again, and my world became very confusing as I tried to understand what was happening. I felt abandoned because I couldn’t imagine why Asha would want me in her life after being trapped with me for 26 years. I hadn’t begun to understand the power of love or forgiveness that can come with true reciprocity and reconciliation.

Asha was trying to find a new path for herself in Sedona, Arizona. We bought her a plane ticket. I had written the two of us off, “knowing” I wasn’t able to be strong enough for her. It was in that state of weakness and wrong-mindedness I cheated on her, a repetition of the action in 1996 that is what mostly contributed to my madness in the first place.

The next day, She texted me to ask me why i wasn’t taking her to Arizona. Something inside me snapped back into place. I remembered who I was, and I saw her for who she was. What she was trying to do, and why. It was a first moment of finally, after 26 years, seeing my partner as a person, but at a terrible cost.

We met up in the early morning after she texted, and I told her everything. In her grace, She forgave me. Over the next day, we packed for a move to Arizona.

While we weren’t able to move there as we had hoped, We did spend a couple of weeks touring, seeking, and enjoying the high desert. On our way back, we stopped in Santa Fe to visit Meow Wolf and then drove back East. On the way down from the high desert, I saw my future and the meaning I want for my life. This is the first step there. Asha and I are friends again like we were in 1993 and building our lives together.

Epilogue

When I lost my identity in the 1990s, My early love for Asha was transmuted into a covetous, jealous desire for ownership rooted in the kind of patriarchal logic I had been raised in and exposed to. With my identity went my connection to music, my desire to perform, my need to find friends. I lost everything that separated me from the Leviathan’s interpretation of me, and I slotted into the role expected of me by my understanding of this place, filtered through the cognitive dissonance of childhood trauma. I transformed into a grotesque personification of squalor: squalor of mind, of deed, and of temperament.

Worse, I transferred that squalor on to the life of another person, a person I purported to love. Instead of a life together, in my madness, I possessed her and created a life of isolation and trauma.

I became a tacit inheritor of the patriarchy when I gave up on myself, and doing so broke my mind to the extent that I ensnared others into my nightmare. I am now waking up and making amends as best I can wherever necessary.

There is so much more to say, but I’m going to have to weave it in later. Suffice to say that both the trauma I’ve caused and our reconciliation are real. We are friends now as we were in the early 1990s, and both of us have found directions for ourselves that feel right, that keep us in each others’ lives, and that we believe will be helpful to others in the long run.

I am grateful that our lives are running in parallel for the time-being. And I deeply value being able to spend time in her presence while I can.

please enjoy her performances on her YouTube channel. She is exploring some powerful themes through her work that deserve to be witnessed and discussed.

Thanks again for reading, and do reach out with comments, questions, etc. I endeavor to be an open book, as ultimately we are seeking Kin and Friends with whom we can share the rest of our journeys. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that isolation is anathema to life.