This is a bit personal as well as preemptive since the year isn’t even over yet, but I think that makes it more meaningful to me, as timely goals seem more likely to fail than those uncovered.
I just wanted to share my experience of the year in order to make another step towards feeling a bit more human again, and to be vulnerable with no regard for shame.
2021 was the hardest year of my life. I had lost who I was, what I wanted, and who I’d like to become. It comprised of a whole lot of pain, and as far as my recollection goes, I could count the number of days self-labeled as good ones on my fingers. Life had completely lost its luster; my inner confidence and my countenance took a massive hit.
It’s crazy, because I hardly have any memories of personal experiences that have happened in the last few years compared to life before around 2017. Besides the few trips I’ve been on with my buddies or family, or the concert I went to in October with my sister, there really just isn’t much that has stuck with me. Time snuck by, and seems to be doing so at an exponential rate.
Like many others, I disregarded the seemingly redundant and overplayed warnings surrounding working towards large and excessive amounts of money, and thought money would serve as a fix for a lot of my personal problems, and that it would build me up to portray this 'successful', 'smart', 'interesting', and 'likable' guy, but man, that couldn’t have been farther from the truth for me and what actually matters to me.
Back in April, my anxiety was through the roof, thoughts of suicide had been plaguing my mind, and I was trying to convince my family to just fucking let me go. Pushing forward wasn’t really in my playbook, and I began to brainstorm a final bucket list of things I’d be interested in trying, compromising with my family that I wouldn’t follow through with my plan until I had at least tried therapy for a while with a new therapist (she’s fantastic, btw).
One of the things that I wanted to try ended up being one of the gnarliest things I’ve ever done. On a two week notice, I flew down to Costa Rica to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca is a plant-based brew that breaks down into DMT, a hallucinogenic drug, which when used properly can have astonishing long term therapeutic effects. The ceremonies at the facility I visited last anywhere from six to twelve hours, and the nausea and constant battle to keep everything in your stomach is something else, especially while your perception of the world around you shifts. The rate of which thoughts are produced, transformed, expelled, or the way that your senses can start to blend together to experience forms of synesthesia, it’s easy to get lost or overwhelmed. Underneath all the chaos, though, lies you. You can see who you really are, indirectly and sometimes literally. You feel, hear, taste, even smell what drives your ability to exist. It sounds crazy if you’ve never had any experience with psychoactive drugs, especially regarding the nature of ayahuasca, and that’s because, well, it is crazy. It’s crazy when you experience an unbiased version of your own reality, and gain new perspectives on ideologies you once saw concrete.
I won’t say that it was all peaches and cream, though, and I don’t want to come off as trying to be some 'woke' bro, because three months after coming home from Costa Rica, and coming to the conclusion that I need to quit my job, and with my final day working as a software dev in sight, I had two vivid nightmares whilst wide awake and sober (I don’t use any substances, besides the occasional beer or glass of wine, but I also don’t judge anyone who uses other things). I started feeling and showing cognitive symptoms of psychosis. It felt like someone was inside my head and demolishing and tearing the place apart. My thoughts felt unauthentic, like someone else was creating them. In the moment, the terror I felt from these experiences was absolutely indescribable, it was the scariest thing I could ever imagine, because it was the ONLY thing I could imagine. I fully believed that that hell was my new benchmark for reality, and that I would never be the same again. To a certain degree, I was right. I am different now than I was before those two panic/psychotic episodes. I’m so much more grateful for a predictable physical and mental environment.
In June, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which led me to seek to understand what it actually is and judge the congruency between facts and my preconceived notions, which were ultimately erroneous. ADHD is kind of the missing puzzle piece to the generalization of my life as a whole. It’s been useful understanding how it’s amplified a lot of my negative behavioral traits, such as my tendency to isolate myself or ghost people even when I don’t want to, or to self-shame for minor missteps, or my spells of impulsivity, or restlessness. Just acknowledging these things, and receiving more positive affirmation that it’s all ok, and understanding and accepting myself rather than beating myself up is starting to break me out of limbo. It’s difficult and sometimes impossible to get myself to do something that I don’t want to do, even if the long term reward were something borderline fantastical, which is why I’m so damn good at dropping out of college, lol. On the other hand, I gain a driving force that completely consumes me when I’m lost in the things that I’m interested in. Even if they’re sometimes short-lived hobbies, I’m always seeking out those feelings of interest. That’s my drug of choice, so to speak. I’ve found that those intensely motivating emotions have come most frequently through romantic partnerships and personal expression, typically through creating and writing music. I’ve started putting in some work in both of those areas, mostly music for now, because HOLY SHIT I haven’t been on a date with a girl in FOUR years, like wtf. It took me too long to realize I was wasting my time and energy trying to 'improve' myself superficially, all because I took the dissatisfied projections of my ex’s dad to heart.
Defragmentation is the process of reorganizing the data on a hard drive so that it all flows contiguously, increasing the performance of any operations that utilize that drive. I like to think of neural defragmentation as the process involving the organization and reorganization of thoughts and where to place them for a more performant brain and healthy headspace.
My goal as of recently has been to try to be more true to myself, to not be afraid to express myself, to give love to others, and to just keep making music, since it’s the one thing that’s been consistently interesting throughout my entire life. I genuinely couldn’t care less about the money or clout anymore that I had dreamed about in high school. The feeling of creating and simply getting my emotions out means so much more to who I am, and neural defragmentation is a substantial subsequence of the creative process.