Felt like shit yesterday for a variety of reasons.  Of course, I’ve been feeling out of sorts for at least a month now, ever since I had a minor manic episode (according to psychiatry, anyway).  I got a lot of good internal processing done that was absolutely necessary, but I recognize that’s not a state of mind I can stay in.  I’m better now than a month ago (a lot better), and better than last week, and generally better day by day, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain or let it bother me.  Annoyingly, growth is not linear.

I’m trying to maintain non-habitual use of weed and only have it when I really need it.  I could no longer ignore the fact that it makes some aspects of my mental health worse when I use it all the time.  Sometimes this means refraining all day long until after dinnertime when I take my meds, a daily Herculean effort I sometimes fail at.  That’s okay, though.  I still consider cannabis an important part of my medication regime: it’s just one I need to utilize more responsibly.  I keep trying to remember I’m going after progress in harm reduction, not perfect abstinence.  Perfect doesn’t exist.  Perfect is a static lie, which makes it equivalent to a kind of death.

I’m watching How To Change Your Mind, a Netflix show based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name that gives an overview of how beneficial various psychedelics are for a wide variety of mental issues.  I felt validated and vindicated for my use of microdosed LSD five years ago, even if it appeared to outside eyes that I had lost my mind.  I hadn’t lost it, I found it.  Microdosing made me feel like my brain had been literally washed clean of mental cobwebs and then had broken connections repaired, and even a few new ones made.

I lost a lot of that a year or so later when I had to be hospitalized and was forced to take medication again, which makes me sad and resentful.  I wish we lived in a world that didn’t fear and pathologize people like me.  I know that if I lived with a native indigenous tribe somewhere that accepted and accounted for such experiences, I would not suffer from that projected fear and stigmatization.  I would be supported and very likely trained by elders to help me manage what would be seen as gifts, not burdens or a sickness.  I would be honored instead of feared, which in and of itself would make it a lot easier to exist.

I don’t need the ego-dissolving experience of LSD or psilocybin (been there, done that, wish there was a shirt to go with it), but I’m captivated by the work that’s being done with PTSD victims using MDMA.  As a person in the midst of an MDMA trip in a clinical setting said, it allowed him to examine his sadness without actually being sad.  Another woman with a level of trauma about as horrid as my own, but for different reasons, was able to calmly process previously suppressed memories to the extent that she was able to completely defuse them emotionally.  She’s living a much happier life now.  Something like 70% of PTSD sufferers who go through MDMA therapy aren’t just better afterwards, they’re cured.

I worry that no one will ever even entertain my doing this, though, because of my diagnosis and mental health history.  I notice with dismay that these cutting edge treatments are almost never recommended for people like me under the fearful aegis of not wanting to induce mania or psychosis.  I resent the fuck out of basically being told by just about everyone that I am permanently damaged and that nothing can be done to truly help except to make me take side-effect laden medication and threaten me with hospitalization if I don’t.

I also resent the fuck out of my spiritual beliefs being pathologized to the extent that there’s a large part of my psychological life that I just don’t talk about, especially not to psychiatrists.  It runs counter to my instinct to be honest and truthful: I find it extraordinarily difficult to have to filter my thoughts and words so that I’m not inappropriately pathologized.  It makes me feel like I have to hide and keep secret a great deal of who I really am, from everyone.  It’s incredibly isolating and lonely.  While I’m grateful for my spiritual experiences from the last few years, I feel more so than at any other time in my life that I do not fit in, anywhere.

Perhaps this is a perception problem on my part.  I keep feeling like there really are others at least somewhat like me, those who have awakened but get accused of insanity, but I don’t know where or how to find them, I imagine because they are also in hiding.  I know for a fact that there are a couple of people at the church we go to who fall into this category, and I wonder if I don’t need to get over both my social anxiety as well as my annoying egotism and try talking to these folks.

I just know I’m in desperate need of connection with other like-minded, or at least non-judgmental, human beings.  A friend who is a spiritual advisor told me last year I was going to a place where it would be possible to make the connections I’m seeking, but that I would have to work for it.  It wouldn’t be as simple as just going to an occasional public event, that the people and energies I’m seeking are in more private spaces.

I’m trying, I really am.  It’s hard for me to go to strange places and meet strange people.  I have so little trust in individuals and even less faith in humanity at large, and I wonder if that isn’t also a perception problem on my part.  Have I been so blinded by the onslaught of media negativity that I can no longer See or even imagine the goodness in the world that I know must still exist?  I frequently feel like Frodo at the end of The Two Towers when he has to ask Sam what the fuck they’re fighting for anyway, at which point I hear Sam’s little story in my head about how there’s good in the world and it’s worth fighting for.

*sigh*  Okay, Sam.  Onward through the fog.