Hey Fuckers.
I’ve gone back and forth on what to talk about this week.
The original plan was starting Dating in Dystopia. Lightening up, talking about my disasters, asking for your DMs to share your own stories. But other issues call and won’t be swept under the rug.
So we’ll get to that soon. We’ll do a hard show today. And a much, much, easier exercise episode is planned this weekend.
This is a nuanced episode. We’re going to back way up. We’re going to have a quite holistic conversation describing a problem and an emotional process. Inner work and the outcome of it.
First, a disclaimer:
We’re going to talk about the realities of being a mental health prof and podcaster while having a life that isn’t… mentally healthy. I’m your average American plus some complex trauma – all my work comes from keeping myself steady in highly unstable and hilariously unfortunate conditions.
I teach trauma recovery because I live through it, daily.
I often feel as though I’m not allowed to have this dichotomy. But I do. And I can speak insightfully about it without my words being indicative of any crises.
None of what I said or say here is meant to be complainy or calling for help. But to say, I’ve been silently struggling for years and now I’m doing better despite everything blowing.
I appreciate it, but I’m not asking for care - I hate when people feel like I’m asking them to sub to patron to emotionally hold me. I’m here to share what I’ve learned and relate. I’m getting back to doing it vulnerably and personally. That’s all I strive for.
Which is to say, please hold your pity and concern, it feels very bad and misunderstood. I’m fine with my life. It’s just not an easy one.
And because of all this…
These days I’m having a hard time describing the place I’ve been in. I’m genuinely feeling self-lovey (ay love-y) after years of being unable to.
But the means to get there are not good. Not shiny or bright. I’m guessing, not easy to hear about for most.
So this one isn’t for all.
What I’m going to say in this episode is going to go over poorly with a lot of people, I would imagine.
If you are in a high-alert state already, turn this one off, alright?
Going to share my thoughts anyways. When I don’t, I lose the ability to speak and feel like I’m an enigma that’s not allowed to exist.
So we’re going to acknowledge my dark side today. Where most of my progress comes from.
I think I made some people worried while also being ineffective in communicating that message recently. I’ve linked the pertinent episodes.
I gave more thought to what I was trying to describe after assuming we’d all just “get it” since I’ve talked about my love relationship with fear and leaning into catastrophizing before in the past.
That was a silly assumption. Humans, reasonably, don’t like to hear dark things when the subject is still, to some degree, in the dark things. Because that’s nothing but unfixable pain. People like the buttoned up story at the end, not the empathizing with suffering and uncertainty NOW.
So, apologies for being too forthcoming with the uncomfortable bits the other day, without warning.
I’ll back up and reapproach this more positively, with the results of the hardship….
Fact is… it’s probably easy to imagine that a life living in the woods, in an RV, has been a free-flowing, relaxing, easeful, self-luxuriating experience.
It has not been. And I’ve been upset that I haven’t had a better time. That I couldn’t appreciate all that I have (some degree of freedom in nature) and make the most of the experience. I’ve simply not been able to live the way I’ve wanted to, for years.
And now… rather suddenly, although all the pieces have been slowly gathering for the past year…
I’ve finally re-gotten into a flow of writing, drawing, painting, or reading every day. Maybe multiple – on a good day, all of them. Even yoga and meditating. Hanging out in nature, listening to the wind, appreciating the color of the sky.
At multiple points in the day. All beloved activities of mine, all these things I KNOW I WANT to do, but could not, for years… have easefully found their way into my daily cycle in recent times.
It has been so relieving, fulfilling, insightful…. It feels like being me again. It’s natural. And yet I wasn’t doing them for a painfully long time, when I couldn’t make myself calm down, feel okay, feel anything, or find enjoyment in any of my hobbies.
Living Death
Depression? Yes. It set in summer of 2022 and I can’t argue that it’s been unjust.
T word? Yes. The relationships, the world, the missing camper, the wildfire. 2025 was hot.
And sure, been busy. The 3-5 jobs depending on the week.
But there has been time. Too much of it when you’re not in a great inner place. Despite working every day this past year… I still found myself with hours of absolute nothingness, inconveniently.
So what was going wrong?
Well, the past few years have been characterized by the words “suffering, misery, and fear” for myself, truly. If you listen back to the episodes from 2024 to around now, I think you’ll catch it.
And that describes my relationship with time.
Any free time I had was not actually free time available for my creative hobbies. It was already filled. With ruminating and vigilance. From the suffering, misery, and fear. Which also seemed to be pointed AT time, itself.
Meaning, I continually centered around time, always aware, always trying to “get through it” as though I was being monitored by a micromanaging boss, staying busy.
Despite also feeling paralyzed, I never could settle down to do an activity. To have a quiet, peaceful, checking in with myself, moment. Because my head was screaming, constantly. My skin felt like eyes or flames were on it, at all times.
Continually aware of time. Continually feeling cut and sliced by the very existence of it.
“What time is it?”
No matter the answer? The result was evisceration. Stress. Panic. ABOUT the time. About ME IN the TIME? About what this time was preceding? What times were coming?
And, trust, this isn’t coming from an organizational place. I’m a very time-aware person. I manage it like my bitch. I do not get lost in it. I’m on-time down to the moment. I can almost always guess what time it is. I wake up before alarms if I bother to set them.
I’m saying. I’m not a person who waffles through time, unfortunately. I am not laid back or chill. I have a pacekeeping force in my chest. Time and I have a tight relationship.
Which had become punishing. So that I just wanted time to go away – or so that I would go away whenever I had it.
And it meant that I would disassociate and try to fade away into nothing whenever I could, instead of having a real life or doing anything I enjoyed for a few years there. Often disappearing from earth, uncomfortably, trying to sleep. Going to bed, early, exhausted, but having panic attacks instead of drifting off. WHILE drifting off, actually.
And I couldn’t figure out WHY.
WHAT is so painful?
And WHAT are you so scared of?
Emotional Blackout
I mean, had plenty of guesses. And that’s where things get complicated. Because they’re all related in a sticky net in my mind.
The state of the world. The family disaster – my dad dying, my mom revealing herself as a puppet master, the house renovation disaster and inheritance betrayal, the broken relationships and no contact order - of 2020 to today. Being alone almost all of the time, really struggling to find people and moving so often that even when I do… I’m gone. I know this is going to sound dramatic, but it’s the most simple way to summarize: the onslaught of almost everything going wrong for several years, on top of a lifetime of… more of that. Kinda feels like a practical joke that never ends.
You know, I had plenty of things to grumble, ache, and stress about. Even if some of them were losing their importance and being worked through.
But these were intellectual, mentalized, thoughts. “I must be sad because ____. I’m probably suffering because ____.”
I didn’t FEEL the answers from a bottom-up direction. I THOUGHT, assessed, hypothesized the answers top-down.
Because I couldn’t be in my body to feel anything. Because of the aforementioned suffering, misery, and fear. Stress, not sleeping, grief, physical pain, constant work, pushing massive stones up downward escalators…. you know the drill. It pushes you out of your meat jacket when being alive feels like being electrocuted.
So my body went into purgatory. Living, enough, but vacant. Only half cared for to keep it moving. And all I was left with was my stupid fucking brain to try to get by with – which is a very bad position for a person like myself to be in.
My brain is smart, but it is not wise. It’s lacking in insight a good deal of the time. It gets stuck. It can be very all or nothing. Moderation? No thank you. It jumps to conclusions and thinks it must be correct because the variables add up. And then runs the math over and over again. Checking EVERY equation.
And all of that nonsense work? Also keeps me further away from my feelings, so the real answer – from the wise emotional place - can’t come.
Which is what happened here.
It’s why I was stuck for so long.
Annnnd became a weird, 10% version of self.
Because my real, accumulated, emotions were under my fear.
So I would try to do inner work, to sit with my discontentedness… hit the yikes barrier of lingering fear, tap that thing like a spring, get flooded, go “oh shit, nah, can’t handle that right now with everything else,” and bounce away from it. Distracting myself to avoid the scares.
Never getting down to the rest of the feelings.
Re-abandoning my body.
And then…
Sigh, small DnD crossover…
The relationship wall breaker
A boy got me.
Got me feeling. First, in a positive way. Then, in a very negative one. You can guess.
It took me a fair amount of pain and relational fear breaking through my emotional walls, to find my way back to feeling. Enough emotional hurt bundled together with panic cracked the door open.
Thanks returning to dating! You got me to hurt enough that I finally felt!
But, no, really, it’s a positive thing. Inner work around why I’m codependent came up, quickly. And busted the rest of the complex apart.
Because I didn’t only feel sad when the thing faded, I felt FEAR. And then got to explore “what the hell is this?”
I had been making up a story about this boy. And now (quote) “losing” the relationship meant that I lost hope. Lost things I imagined.
Warning: it’s about to get a little darker.
Lost some flimsy, idealistic, naïve, sense of safety that was connected to the budding relationship… because I thought maybe I wouldn’t be alone through the end of the world, afterall. I finally felt like I maybe had backup. Had any life support.
And then it was gone. And I was alone again.
Yeah! There’s the fear and devastation that was lurking. Talk about chest tightening. What a breakthrough!
So I took the opportunity.
I sat in my car, stared at trees, and flung that emotional door open with as many sad, unprocessed recollections as possible while I had the chance. Feeling through the last several years. Connecting subconscious whispers to explicit thoughts. Using the sensations in my gut and Brainspotting to guide the way.
(That shit does work. I’ve done an ep before but we moved on quickly. I like to find some tree scenery and then let myself stare at places, organically, while I’m doing emotional work. There are certain eye position “hot spots.” I recommend it. Brainspotting.)
In December, especially around the holidays, I spent a lot of time doing this. And feeling terrible while the world had happy family times. On purpose.
Because it felt awesome. In the actual definition of the word. Not in the radical version.
It was not “cool.” It was “humbling and overpowering.”
(Have I ever mentioned how many and how large my feelings are? No fucking wonder I block these things out when I’m busy. They are exhausting and demanding. The number of sensations that I feel is unaccountable and indescribable by mouth. I feel like a highly sensitive seismic sensor lives inside of me, reacting to “vibes” indetectable by other senses. OF COURSE I shut that out to function, it is a lot to hold.)
After the years of theoretical pain - experiencing it – actually feeling it all - was… well… like a return home.
But. There’s a caveat.
Unfortunately, hard feelings are the foundational lens to my experience.
Many of those things that I feel… are quite deep, low, aching, by default. As I’ve regularly said, life is a travesty! And also it’s wonderously beautiful. Both kindof hurt. Ah, yeah, there’s my outook - always been sad and moody… and then I sprinkle the joy on top, without losing sight of the devastating nature of being alive!
Like I said, a dichotomy that not everyone is able to understand.
Which was a lot to walk back into. But to come back to those feelings felt like waking up. To my own life. Still ongoing.
And, as we often describe after a prolonged trauma state, I “snapped back” into my life. Into myself. Bewildered about where I had been for so long.
Oh yeah, numbed out and scared, but ignoring all of it to keep functioning. Always keep functioning.
And through this experience of learning to feel so much again around 2019-2021… then having to shut it all down 2022-present… and refinding it once again…
I found…
The Fear Cap
It was actually less of the suffering and misery that I presumed were driving my already-dead-while-still-breathing life of numbness and existential-dread.
(I know I’ve used it before, that’s a description I’m going to keep coming back to)
It was primarily the fear that I wasn’t fully feeling that was torturing me.
Fear that acted as the “cap” and blocked out access to other feelings.
Fear that stopped me from sleeping at night.
Fear that kept me running through every task, every day.
You know when you have an insanely overbooked day of grave importance? You wake up, keyed up, aware of what has to be done although you want to do exactly none of it, with a pervading sense of dread and urgency. Are you ready for it? No. But you must go. Now.
How can I say in a way that anyone will believe – “that’s how I felt every second of every day.”
Amped up. Not with anxiety. With FEAR.
Fear of what?
Again, plenty of guesses. And I had been wagering them all this time.
“Fear of being alone, in this society.” Was the top contender.
I understand how I got distracted focusing on that.
But, as I stated in the last episodes (linked here), which I think concerned some people because I stated it very poorly…
The REAL fear … the thing driving my trauma reacting was… living a life that isn’t reflective of the reality we’re in. And wasting time living in devotion to the false idol sold to us by capitalism that I don’t even believe in.
That’s what I ultimately had to confront.
That’s what I was trying to soothe with a rapid relationship.
That’s what was blocking out the rest of my life experience.
And I had to dive into it to come back out.
Okay. So this is where we transition to the harder talk. Confronting catastrophic thoughts by going INTO them. Stop listening now if you’re not into dark venturing today.
Five second pause to give you a chance to find your phone.
…
The catastrophic process
The REAL fear is… living like I have 60 more years to grind through. When, in reality, I might have very few.
This will sound dramatic and horrible. Fearmongering if you’re not ready for it. But we’re working in “worst case scenario playthroughts / leanings into catastrophic predications.”
If fear wants to be heard, I say “let’s hear it, mold it to a realistic form, and adapt thoughts to match the reasonable fearful potential so we can move on mentally.” Rather than “push it away and keep secretly living under its influence.”
Always have. Just couldn’t for a few years because the rest of my life was too unstable to be safe enough. It’s the “go through and then ask ‘so what now’” procedure.
SO let’s go. Let’s take this to the worst.
Let’s say the government is about to wage a new world war. And develop a full police state inside the nation. With some flavor of abusing, abolishing, and enslaving the population. I don’t know, get imaginative. Civil war. Nuclear war. Health crises. Food shortages. Dream up your version of dystopia. Mine looks something like Handmaid’s Tale x The Road.
If these things happen… Then what?
If semi youthful death is imminent, I want to be throwing a parade, not toiling in the name of a life that I was never going to be able to live anyways.
And if these things happen, a semi youthful death, most likely, is imminent, FOR ME, because I’m not one to sit back and slowly suffer when the problem is identifiable – I’m a bit too fiery for fading out. Will probably get into trouble, don’t have kids to worry about. If this turned the “camp” route, I won’t let myself survive imprisonment. And also, my body is so dumb that if there are ever food chain disruptions, I’m probably fucked. And also also, if I get sick I have no one to help me.
So, just being logical… it’s precarious. In the worst-case scenarios, I don’t think I’m going to be stuck as one of the lone survivors of a nuclear fallout or an enslaved population or mass sickness event.
I won’t be starring in that movie. I am not Will Smith.
Which cuts out a lot of the fear for me.
When I sat with these potential events… and the thoughts and feelings of “youngish, soonish, death”… and what it all means about life, NOW… in the day to day…
I found relief.
In the simplicity of it all.
The clarity that, as I stated, it brought.
Because, nah, it’s not ideal. I don’t DESIRE mass suffering or personally to be snuffed out.
But at least, to me, as far as personal outcomes, it’s not the scariest thing: staying alive in a hybrid of this world and the assumed pending one, is.
Which is what I was really thinking. And suffering. And misering. And fearing about. But not seeing fully, to dispel, because it was too frightening to confront. The fear cap kept me out.
Here’s what I mean.
Rather than FULLY confronting “man, it’ll suck if we really are headed for some apocalyptic society in which I’m dead like… week or year 2,” I was half acknowledging the potential reality but then translating it into today’s terms.
This same capitalistic hellscape that I – make no mistake – also hate. But then, more outwardly violent and tainted by shortages, infrastructure crumbling, the gov taking all our resources, etc.
So that the future appeared to be me, alone, forever, continually poorer, continually working, but in such immense pain and suffering enacted by government mandated labor, hunger, and collective grief.
Without confronting my fear, my mind was creating a story of me, in a more extreme cage, ramped up by society falling, into old age, and probably living to be 100 years old.
The confines of today, with some doomsday sci-fi stank on them. Was the nightmare my brain was secretly playing in the back of my skull.
…
When, again, that won’t happen. I’m a spitfire. I won’t stay quiet to make it that long and I’m not important enough to keep. That long life of containment and abuse is not a valid fear or outlook on the future.
And that. Is. Freeing.
For me.
Because for me, time is scary.
But that’s because I was assessing it as “perpetual, constant, unending, isolation, anxiety, and effort.” Those descriptors and time are analogous. Time is the experience of unending anxiety, pain, suffering, and ultimately pointless effort.
Or it was, for me.
When actually that’s just how I was seeing 2025.
And then my brain extrapolated and extremized that experience ten thousandfold and added a crumbling scenic background for the next 70 years, instead of confronting what was scaring me most.
And meanwhile, the thing that I really COULD most predictably fear doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Here comes more darkness.
- Because I’m not afraid of death. I like sitting with thoughts of it. I do it a lot. I’m kindof macabre. It’s comforting to know it’s a sure thing. And also, man, I can’t wait to sleep so hard before the next life turn.
- Because I’ve also always assumed I would die young. In my 30s I started to get nervous about being stuck on this ride too long – the threat of needing to retire really has bummed me out for a while. Weird to say but living a long time hangs over my head.
- Because it reframes what time there IS NOW.
And that’s the most important point.
Hey, if this is happening – if my WORST REALISTIC FEAR is early demise due to our governments exploding the world, socially or literally - I don’t need to keep trying to save for retirement.
Working 60 hours a week isn’t going to help me, now or in the long run. I don’t need to be punished for my time being unproductive. There’s nothing I’m NOT doing right now, tomorrow, or next Tuesday that is holding me back from the life I want to live.
Maybe I’m just not going to get the chance to live that life all the way. The path isn’t available. Because the world has changed. My dreams were built on a future that none of us would see, maybe.
Again, dark, sorry, and of course this is all hypothetical. Lean into the worst case scenario to get through the fear.
But. That’s okay.
Because…
Perspective Flip
Those dreams… weren’t really dreams. They were semi mandatory plans built on what I had to do to survive capitalism. They’re not what I ever really wanted. It’s what was possible and required.
And secondly…
If I’m just not going to get the chance to live that life all the way. Because the world has changed. My framed-by-the-past dreams were built on a future that none of us would see, maybe….
That means… I need to reassess what I want to do or expect from myself.
I DON’T have to turn off my feelings to maintain this pace of life that makes me sick.
And
I DO get to do the things that I like, despite their uselessness in capitalism.
I’m not in danger if I do. I’m not being irresponsible. I’m not wasting my energy. I’m not dooming myself. Like I said, if anyone is setting my life up for failure, it’s an international cohort of evil billionaires.
Guess that means I’m allowed to do things like… you guessed it… paint, draw, and read. Stretch and meditate. Stare at trees. Listen to rivers. Brainspot.
Fucking… feel.
And, yes, relate, write long podcast episodes that are deeply personal, and try to date.
I don’t have to be afraid to do these things because they cut into the time to achieve in the “old world” way. Engaging in them won’t make me a destitute failure with a tragic end.
That was a false, assumed but misinterpreted, theoretical feeling - created by avoiding the REAL, LOGICAL FEAR….
That society will do that, for me. It already has been, my whole life.
That’s why this is a talk about fear, not an anxiety.
Another Perspective Shift
Society has always been promising me one life outcome, while delivering another. Demanding more than is possible. Putting an ocean between me and my emotions. I’ve never been my own enemy. I’ve never been fucking up my own future. I’ve never been something to fear, micromanage, dismantle and rebuild.
Society has been.
I was never going to achieve my goals within this system. A lower class brat from a violently (sorry) emotionally and relationally retarded family was probably not going to have the life I started dreaming of back in college. The one sold to us BY colleges (that I’m deeply in debt to).
It just used to be hidden better.
The downward escalators. They used to move more slowly, I think, back when food cost less than the minimum wage, so at least you had a chance.
When insurance actually pretended to help and covered some healthcare.
When rights weren’t being openly stripped.
And women shot. And people disappeared.
So… seeing all this now, again. The way that I was never going to climb some golden ladder as a poor woman, not without selling my soul and my health….
If the only thing that can really happen for me is at-best, even if we don’t go the fascist route, a life of struggling for societal stagnancy… and at worst, imprisonment before early death….
Then I guess the REAL fear is living a dissatisfying life, built on lies, that I was never REALLY going to have control or direction over. Living in illusions. Finding out, soon, that I was wrong and worked my life away.
So.
I might as well start to have a good time while I plug away at the things I can, and do things I enjoy, with a reasonable pace, huh?
Why the fuck NOT live the way that I’ve wanted to?
Why not… actually live?
The adaptive response to the most likely reality of what I’m fearing.
The outcome
And with that trip through fear – and I mean, this was a very brief reaccounting of days of work… weeks? Months? Still ongoing?
And it wasn’t a casual chat like this, going through it.
I really sat, felt this terror in my body, struggled to breathe, held myself as my heart raced, cried. And keep doing less dramatic versions of that to today.
The fear has become unimaginably easier to sit with. The emotions, more available and easier to discern. Energy, much simpler to rebalance. Thoughts, directable and much “cleaner.”
I don’t know how to say, except to say:
I feel great.
Not, like, happy.
Or hopeful.
But relieved.
And full.
Because I am full of feelings.
Post-terrortripping, I can be in my time, in my body, in my surroundings. And do whatever I want from there. From conscious choice - not automatic, bone-deep, painfully uncomfortable all the time, fleeing.
And I hope that highly dichotomous journey makes sense.
In conclusion.
Don’t worry about me.
My dark thoughts and morose experience of life have always been with me. They’ve always been the backbone of this project. They started this project.
In a backwards way, they’re how I make progress. Sitting back into them somehow launches me forward.
But I learned not to speak of these dark trips that reconnect my brain and body in a comforting blanket of horrors (including a lot of the art I visualize and create) a while ago for this reason.
It rightfully makes people uncomfortable and concerned.
Well too bad! And sorry..
Blocking out the darkness? The fear and corresponding – sorry, one more dark note – appreciation for death… blocks out my connection to being alive. Feelings. And joy, that dances across the foundation of travesty.
It blocks out my genuine positivity, in the face of negative circumstance. Which is probably my genuine strength as a mental health podder.
You can be ok, even when things aren’t.
But you have to go through the fear – the darkness of potential realities – for it to be sincere.
Attempting to skip negative affect or high activation levels and be centered, anyways, is toxic positivity.
Something I’m not willing to do anymore, because… see above conversation.
No point in avoiding the fear that’s reflecting reality. It keeps you living in ways that are inappropriate when compared to the environment. Living in ways that are closer to nonexistence.
Instead, go through the fear, get to the bottom of the well, then ask “now what?”
And find the positive possibility and freedom of choice that exists within. The destruction of old cages. The potential in their wake.
And as far as I’m concerned…
If we’re stuck on this ship it’s sinking, we might as well have a parade.
We might as well live.
We might as well feel.
So we’re just gonna have to journey into the hard shit, to get to the other side.
Cheers, Fuckers.
I worked really hard on this episode. And I hope it helps.
Check out the exercise episode for a much, much, easier round of inner work.