ABOUT THIS BOOK
Hello in there, and thank you for being here. Let me welcome you to this book, which is as much yours to interpret as it was mine to write. I greet you as a friend, though we may never meet. We need not be in perfect alignment to be on the same team, working in different times and spaces in a very big collective job. Everyone wants to know the meaning of life. One way to find it is to go against the grain and make the world better instead of letting it eat you alive. To do that, you have to know, grow, and show yourself, and to do that, you have to know your wounds and heal.
In my day-to-day career, I work in a therapeutic capacity to help people find their strengths and work around their setbacks to do the best at the things that matter to them. My aim with this book is much the same. I have lived with anxiety and depression for over 25 years. Sometimes I didn’t have the will to seek help, sometimes I had the will but no access, and sometimes I had access and will but no success. Sometimes I was too jacked up to reach out and sometimes I was ready to do the work but too broke to get started. I’m sure you can relate. This society happens to treat people who don’t take the shapes it prefers like lepers and there are many social and financial barriers to better mental health. The first of these is shame because we’re conditioned to believe that only a flawed person doesn’t thrive in this system. Let me fix that for you now: it’s bullshit.
Smarter folks than I have said that adjusting to a sick world doesn’t make you healthy. I demand better, for you and for all of us. I know what it’s like to endure and explore what’s referred to as mental illness (we need a better term for this and so many things) and I have done so with and without help, with and without medication, with and without cash even. I’ve tried many roads and many tools. The only way I can help people wherever and whenever they are is to write, so I wrote with you and everyone who might read this in mind, and now we’re in it together.
I am in no position to judge anyone based on politics, faith, or shoe size and it’s exhausting so I don’t much bother to do it anymore. I just want folks to be their best selves so more of us can help make the world a less ominous place in this strange time. A great churning has brought currents from the depths up to the surface. “As it was in the beginning,” the saying goes, “so it shall be in the end.” Space doesn’t matter because the work that needs doing is distributed worldwide, and time doesn’t matter because the work will go on beyond the apparent and immediate transformations of this year of shifts and rifts. People worldwide are deeply divided and just about conquered, and I know you want better for yourself and those you love, so let’s get to higher ground.
I’ve often wished there were an approachable manual on the subject of these barriers to vitality and their solutions, written not for the white-coated priests of the pill or for the kids of the .001 percent who can be raised in rehab, but for the rest of us. If people both with and without these burdens understood them better, it would be easier for us to stop tuning out those in need of compassion and start connecting with each other again. I’ve looked around and found several books that were helpful, but not quite what I was after. I was bemoaning the lack of such a book one night and it hit me that maybe I ought to just write it myself, and here we are.
This book is a field guide to surviving mental health challenges in an alienating world, but there are layers. I got as sick of bland, blinders-on self help books as you did. It’s ridiculous to dispense or receive shame for not fitting in to a world like this. The plain truth is there are valid reasons you and I and so many of us feel this dis-ease. It isn’t just brain chemistry or family dynamics or whatever horror is dominating the news cycle, it’s the whole enchilada! As the digital regret-a-verse is being sold to us as an escape from a planet that could be returned to balance, people are slowly beginning to understand that we were already in a simulation of a sort, built not of pixels and code but of language, rules and pain games. We won’t get out of the big black box by thinking inside it.
If we lived in more authentic societies, you’d know that you are anything but an anomaly, it’s just that most of us were wearing masks long before COVID-19 made it literal, and we’re so used to it that we don’t remember our faces in any sense of the word. The “normal person” costume you were jammed into as a child doesn’t fit anymore, and it’s cutting off your circulation. The good news is that it’s not going to be like this forever, because the situation literally can’t sustain itself. The old world is splitting open, and a new world is beginning to take shape. In this, the Great Between, there is a lot of death to process and a lot of birth to prepare for.
There is a huge movement happening in many places and individuals that in the overview feels like a collective shifting. Now, that many not be apparent because there are still a lot of knuckleheads grasping onto the old world, but good tends to be less obvious. I reckon one reason so many people don’t fit in this world is because they’re ready to work on the upgrades that are so vital. We are the doctors and doulas, the revolution will not be televised, and the involution may not be publicized. What matters is not your resemblance to the templates offered on mass and social media (because all of them are traps) but your authentic growth and empowerment and how it can ripple outward to assist those who have been artificially held down. It’s not some passive New Age love-in and tune-out party, it’s a challenging, vital game that demands people show up and play through.
I am writing this book in the 2020s, which is, so far, the very strangest time I have seen in what has felt like a pretty strange life. Things were always pretty weird on this planet, but now things are weird squared and cubed, with a tendency to double that every couple of days if the news cycle is to be believed (can’t recommend that). Millions are just coming out of quarantine as constant crises provide excellent opportunities for re-making the world in the image of whoever gets there first. The old carnival is over, and more people than ever know it. Every day feels like being up for a week, every month feels like a year in itself. Huge parts of personal identity and global structure are withering and collapsing. “The way it always was” won’t be how it goes from now on, and we can take a new kind of comfort in that. The old kind of comfort came at a very high price, and the bill came due with considerable interest. What has gone on in shadow cannot persist in anonymity forever. We’re getting new eyes after lockdowns and letdowns. One nice thing about living in “the end of the world” is that while people’s behavior is generally worse, the amount of time it remains secret or tolerated is steadily shrinking. More and more, everything is proving to distorted or outright false except for lived experience and the way we treat one another and ourselves.
Where does that leave you, friend? Feeling seasick or shipwrecked? Do you have “apocalypse fatigue” as veil after veil is torn off and the future you were sold as a child becomes the vanishing past? Do you feel alien, or just alienated? Even if you revel in this time of revelations, you may be feeling hollowed out by a life survived inside a parasitic regime. It’s hard to persist within a system that demands endless time and labor in exchange for synthetic comforts and precarious futures. “Be not afraid,” as the angels say. You are not as alone as you feel.
Consider the possibility that you feel out of place because your inner space is much closer to the world to come than the one you were born into. Until you find your place in the world that is emerging, I hope you’ll find the coming pages to be of service to you as you learn to wrestle free of the paranoia, depression, anxiety and restlessness that so plague the human spirit in our day. As we learn to dismiss the programming of our youth, may we all be liberated from the forces we used to call “the powers that be,” both out in the world and inside our minds.
It wouldn’t be a book if I wasn’t giving you a message, but this is not about me perching on a rock like some wizard lizard telling you what to think. There is a great deal of suggestion inside, based on lived experience navigating anxiety, depression, isolation, paranoia, and the process of continually deprogramming and reprogramming myself. It’s a travel and laboratory log of what seems to work in the way of changing the settings on the game of life lived intentionally, a little at a time. As I have learned in my professional life, that is how it’s done. The push to always fix things right now and forever is a dangerous lie. Incremental change accomplishes what quick cure schemes can’t, and things will fall apart now and then. It’s the price of admission here. Repair is part of ownership, and you need tools to do it over and over for your whole life.
What I offer is a bit of insight and some metaphorical scaffolding for you to build your own adventure onto rather than the commands or spiritual bypass you may have seen in other books. You may feel completely free to take or leave any sequence of words in this book. I know you don’t owe me your time, but I hope you’ll give yourself the chance to road test the material here. Whoever you are now or aspire to be, I appreciate your being here, reading these words. I wish you only the best in your quest to take these ideas into your life, discover what they mean to and for you, and remember who you are outside the pain that you may have hung your identity on. What we’re going to do together in this book is re-frame reality until we find handles that let us steer. You’ve been a stowaway in your own lifeboat too long. Now it’s time to call mutiny!
Toxic positivity and spiritual bypass are dead ends. You can’t understand and integrate your dark side if you pretend there isn’t one. The method and narrative in these pages are thick with metaphor and a fair amount of spooky “us vs. them” type frameworks for the purpose of adding theater to game play, because we’re looking at life as something we do, not something we have. Parables work by speaking to the imagination rather than the logic box. A lot of the real work here gets done in the subconscious, so there’s some dream-speak to help the medicine go down. It’s easier to examine collective neurosis and social conditioning if we frame them like separate entities, or game opponents. Don’t take it too seriously. People who take metaphors literally wind up doing stupid and horrible things much too often for my tastes.
Life isn’t always funny, but there are jokes, and if you don’t learn to recognize them, you’re going to be the brunt of them. So rest easy, this is a system but not a new religion to swindle you in the name of self-help. Jumping between cults is for suckers. You’re smarter than that. You know in your core it’s just a game. The more fun you have with it, and the more humor you allow yourself, the better a time you will have with the work of reintegration, re-dedication, regeneration, reanimation, and radiance. If that sounds better than what you’ve been doing, you are in the right place. Come on in, rest your brain-bones, and get ready to break some spells.