February 8 2024

The waves of depression I go through are unrelenting and I’m really at a breaking point but I don’t see how it will improve that much given the state of the world and my sensitivity to what’s going on around me. At the same time, I feel a big push to overcome some of the more petty things in my life that have been dragging me down for a really long time. And in order to do that, I'm having to be really real about what’s going on inside of me and how my life has played out thus far.

What I’m realizing as I come out of my most recent portal of darkness is that most of the the thoughts and feelings that come up for me when I'm depressed are actually very relevant and kind of spot on, but I'm not able to be honest with others about my perceptions because they wouldn’t be able to handle me expressing myself truthfully (I’ve tried this many times in the past and it never goes over well). My way of coping with having to concede to the egos and personalities around me has been to dissociate form my deeper intuitions and create a false persona in order to get by. Perhaps this is what nearly everyone is doing on the planet instinctively; and I often wonder if what people call autism/aspergers is just who humans really are underneath all of the bullshit. The difference is that people like myself are hyper aware of the false masks we have to wear, and are not able to engage socially on the level that most people do because we’re sunken deeper into ourselves and deeper into the collective psyche of humanity – which is dark as fuck if you wanna peel yourself away from your video games and trash TV for a second and see what’s really going on and how power systems are playing out globally.

So how to navigate all of that? I don't fucking know.. but I know that I wasn’t trusting myself enough for a long time and I was allowing myself to get manipulated by others. And I betrayed myself by donning a persona that isn’t even who I am and feels gross. But that persona is part of me now, and some of the person who I pretend to be when I’m out in public is true to who I am, and I feel like I need somewhat of a persona to survive because the awkward, deeply sensitive, and deeply vulnerable person underneath the mask gets eaten alive by the world. I have to protect my heart and my soul, or I will not survive.

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I’m laying low for the last two days of the rabbit year. I think the dragon vibes are going to be pretty intense once they hit; I can already feel the energy building.

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I’m seeing seals and hummingbirds a lot lately, and some soft sunrises and discordant sunsets.

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I had a surreally good tarot reading for the new year, but there was one stark warning in there that could mess everything up: 7 of cups (Thoth deck). I’ve been meditating on that card a lot. I know I’m bogged down with the past and wound up in delusions about the future. I have a hard time facing reality, and I keep reaching for the shiny thing that’s just around the corner. I let my emotions get stuck inside for too long and then they come out all gnarly.

A lot of how I end up trapped in the energy of the 7 of Cups is from spinning inside of my mind for too long and living out false realities cause I’m not happy with the one I’m in. I create these idealized visions of how I’d like things to be and nothing can ever live up to them. I’ll always be disappointed. In breaking out of this I’m not obsessing too much over my dream world right now: I wake up and go back into the dream, acknowledge it, and then let it go. No dream journalling or analysis.

Another big thing I do is that I jump to conclusions, like having one interaction with a person and making a whole story around it, or meeting someone who I like and then over-fantasizing about what it means rather than letting the friendship or relationship develop naturally.

Something I’m doing to break out of all of this is: going through all of the stuff I own and getting rid of a lot of it and organizing it and letting go of shit. Burning old journal pages, finishing off projects and writing about key experiences I’ve had and gaining more perspective on them. It’s really helping me because I think that a lot of why I can’t be present is because I’m holding on to so much garbage from hurtful past experiences. And in reading my old journals I’m realizing that I know myself quite well and I can see all of the patterns in my life with great clarity, yet I’ve failed to act on my intuitions. Part of my inability to do that is because I haven't had stable housing for so long..

I’m also doing a lot of yoga, but not too much, and that’s helping me get into my body and stay grounded.

I’m spending a lot of time alone and distancing myself from people who drain my energy. I’m figuring out who I am and what’s important to me.

I’m staying involved politically and reminding myself how fortunate I am in so many ways, and I’m taking the time to appreciate simple things like a cup of hot cocoa and hanging out breathing in fresh air by the sea.

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I’m doing a course with the Friendship Centre here and I’m learning a lot about my ancestry and how I can be a support person in the local Indigenous community. This is bringing up a lot of heavy emotions and is reminding me of the broken connection to land and culture that I have. Disconnecting from the realities of colonization is part of the collective self-delusions that we share as non-Indigenous people on these lands, yet with the pain of facing these uncomfortable truths about how we came to inhabit these lands also comes the clarity and wisdom of becoming more rooted in the present.

It turns out I have a distant ancestor who’s Innu. I suspected that I might have some Indigenous ancestry, as my family on my paternal grandfather’s side has been on these lands for so long. It turns out even longer than I thought, as they were some of the first colonizers who came in the late 1600’s / early 1700’s; and one of those ancestors married an Innu woman. I felt chills up my spine when I found the information and a deep sadness washed over me. Maybe because I carry in my genes the first wounds of broken culture, spirit, and land? I only have information about my Innu ancestor’s daughter who I was glad to see that she was in her 20’s when she had children, and not a child like many of the Metis and Indigenous women who married French men back then. I wonder who her mother was? I sense that there’s some deep pain there and I plan to talk to one of the Cree spirit guides I know to get in touch with this part of my family in the spirit realm and see how I can offer healing and support.

I think it’s notable because my beloved yet racist grandfather insisted that we were pure White and had no Indigenous blood. And looking at how many other ancestors I have from the Chicoutimi region in the 17th -19th centuries it seems likely that I have other ancestors who were also Innu / Algonkian speaking.

I won’t be telling many people about this because there are too many White people latching on to information like this and then thinking it legitimizes their presence on these lands. I am 98% European and look European and receive all the benefits of a blonde (now silvering) haired blue-eyed sinewy White chick, like sailing through airport security and having cops let me go when I’m driving shit faced and high as fuck. And I have zero lived experiences as an Indigenous person. But on a deeper spiritual level, I feel that this connection gives me a greater sense of responsibility to honour the lands I now live on (and the First Peoples of these lands)

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AI

I have a tendency to hide my head under the covers when it comes to what’s going on out in the world, well in a broader sense anyway. I focus on the few topics that I’m passionate about and actively trying to dismantle / heal and leave everything else out. I’ve recognized that it’s just how my brain and energetic system work. Learning more about autism/aspergers has helped me be more sensitive to myself and not put pressure on myself to assimilate more than I can. Because each issue that I’m exposed to is going to have a huge impact on me, and I’m just not able to take it all in at once. I often think about the Robert Anton Wilson quote: “the universe cannot be simultaneously apprehended”.

Times when I've been tripping really hard on acid or going through bouts of psychosis I was opened up to too much universal consciousness all at once and I wasn’t able to absorb it all and I shut down and became fucked up inside. I was being opened up to energy gridlocks, parallels dimensions and the breadth of the cosmos, but it came through me all scrambled because I wasn’t grounded in myself, and I didn’t have the support and care that I needed to anchor the insights. In the same way that I don’t think we should be setting up a colony on mars before learning how to live sustainably on our own planet, I feel that as individuals we need to take care of our own basic needs before reaching out too far into community or into cosmic universal energy. Back to Robert Anton Wilson, he talks a lot about this and how people will often explore occultism and spirituality and open up their higher energy centres without having their hearts open, and they end up messed up. He’s who I learned about Sufism through, and they have some techniques for opening up the heart that are really beautiful. Oh ya, and he calls new age flakes “bliss ninnys” haha.

But ya the whole AI thing: I could only ignore it for so long, so finally I looked in to all what’s been going down in the tech world and it’s so insane - the electric sheep have arrived and a lot of people are having nightmares about machine takeovers. I don't know what to think of it all but it's kinda fucking scary. Having the film T2: Judgment Day permanently burned into my retina doesn't help.


p.s. I talked to my Cree friend about my Innu ancestry and she reminded me of one of so-called Canada’s most famous Indigenous rock band’s called Kashtin. I hadn’t heard their hit song Tshinanu since I was a kid.. I listened to it on my own when I came back home after going to the MMIW march and was crying a lot.