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Originally Posted by Cecily
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Thanks for your interest. Sincerely. A lot of the time it's like screaming into the void, but I think the reason most of us started sharing our experience was to help people understand us a little bit better. Usually doesn't work. It's hard to get people to relate when they can't relate. Also we're not completely reliable narrators of own stories. You can see persecution complexes on display and performative victimhood in pretty much any group of us, especially including this one.. take our struggles with a grain of salt. It definitely does suck in a lot of different ways, but a good bit of that is self-inflicted and liable to change with maturity. My view point has changed radically over time as I've taken more accountability for my life, coupled with actual experience. Society used to look a lot more scary when this was all hypothetical and I was running off existential dread 24/7. I give way less fucks now. Care way less about opinion / perception management.. Way happier for it and people mostly treat me the way I was going for once I stopped trying so hard. Also completely unsure how true any of that is. Maybe I really care about not seeming like I care.
Guess a big question is it really necessary for others to understand you? I think between any two people real understanding is an impossibility. So it's mostly my ego, which is super important to me, that cares about you caring about my life. It's narcissistic bullshit. Unimportant. People are different. It's ok. Be nice to people, treat them with respect, and that's enough.
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I’m not terribly sure. It’s a good question and to my eye anyways feels like one of this questions that seems to resolve itself somewhat with age. Getting older strips away that vanity and need for stroking until it’s finally all gone and we become caricatures of ourselves. Then we’re exaggerated versions of our worst traits unless we decide to hold onto the ugliness of caring what other people think and find balance managing our image while not getting hurt when someone doesn’t like you for whatever reason.
I’ve had many mushroom trips before but only one was a profound experience like the ones people talk about with lasting changes. For probably 30 minutes I sat around a fire and every relationship in my life or everything I thought I knew about the world was on the table. Like it was just a rule I had been following but for no other reason other than it was a rule. My marriage, my relationship with my kids etc... everything was deconstructed. It’s like when you’re driving and you imagine how easy it would be to swerve off the highway and into oncoming traffic, only this time I was completely indifferent to that idea. About everything.
It also laid bare my compulsions and bad habits, including the things I knew I was and wasn’t doing and why I wasn’t doing them. At least, there were no rules I was telling myself I was following or had habits I was engaging that kept me from doing them. They were just there.
Anyways, as I was coming back down from them, I remember concepts started taking shape again. Everything from my political beliefs, my preferences generally, my relationships etc... everything started to take shape again. But it had this physical quality to it where they were becoming more rigid as beliefs. It almost felt like as rules appeared they made things feel more 3D and like I had to move around them again, like it was before the trip. One big thing stuck out to me though; the vast majority of what was re-materializing for me was satisfactory and I was glad to have it back. I felt like in that moment , that’s how I knew I was comfortable in my own skin.
It’s a pretty spacey description I know but I guess my thought here is, I can’t relate to your experience or some of the other ones anyone else has had directly. I had the benefit of coming back to my life and being satisfied, which I know is a privilege. Yours and other posting in here felt cluttered with concepts and things that, to my eye, had actual properties and characteristics to them.
I hope you can be happy with your concepts one day or they start to melt away for you. There was a really big feeling of peace for me standing alone for a while and without rules. I imagine you could be profoundly happy with a long-term feeling like that.