Digging into my Demons

Digging digging digging into any forms of static or disharmony inside of my experience, trying to find the little things that felt like nothing at the time but snowballed out and led to all kinds of unhealthy thought patterns and habits of which I've been fixing or healing from for the past however many years.

Today I made a fantastic discovery.

DALL·E 2023-04-14 23.26.14 - a shadow figure exploding into a many colors. he is floating in the sky and there are fish swimming in the sky while the ground is covered. in the s.png

I lost something. Something really precious. Something that I always loved about myself but something which others didn't understand.

I used to be SO FULL OF ENERGY. I was so energized that people could hardly keep up with me, and it expressed itself in two very different ways.

When I was contemplative, my mind moved a mile a minute, processing things at lightning speed (I still do this). When I was happy and feeling social though, I was just an explosion of energy. I'd get into all kinds of trouble, jumping out of the bushes to surprise a stranger, singing in the movie theater parking lot, sometimes staring at people just to get their reactions, doing all kinds of social experiments.

I was an agent of chaos....and an agent of FUN.

I annoyed a lot of people, that much is true, but I also made a shit ton of friends and I had a kind of magic about me which you don't see often. I could get away with shit that no one else could get away with and somehow or another I managed to break almost every single rule and never get in trouble for it. I rarely made enemies either with the exception of two bullies in junior high school who both grew to respect me (CAUSE I HAD BALLS!!!) in high school.

People thought i wanted attention and that might have been a tiny part of it but it was much more about enjoying life and laughing. I wanted to make everyone smile and laugh, except for the people who made life difficult for others. I wanted to break the monotony of the boring every day we were all used to.

This earned me a diagnosis, ADHD, which I firmly rejected and still reject as a disorder. It certainly points to a real part of myself but I never saw it as a disorder or "neuro-divergent" or anything like that. It was part of my makeup. If it's normal to be able to sit at a school desk all day (when we all know this is not something that matches kids temperament), why is it not normal to NOT be able to sit still doing things that other people tell you to do?

I had too much energy to sit still, and unlike the other kids, I did not let school stop me from killing this part of myself.

It lasted far into my adulthood where I partied like crazy in university and beyond, sometimes recklessly, but not nearly as drunk or high as the people around me. I never liked alcohol because I thought life was fun enough without it.

Slowly over the years I started to suppress the urge to make people smile and laugh, and to create happy chaos. I never suppressed it completely but I started to feel more anger and frustration towards people.

As I got older and had to start working, I felt frustrated at how easily people gave up on their desires and passions, and not often for noble causes like "helping others" or "changing the world". Usually it was just to buy a house and spread their DNA out of a fear of not imprinting their DNA onto the planet. No hate for these things, but I say have your cake and eat it to, don't sacrifice yourself in order to have a good life....

But the difficulty of making people smile and laugh, and get out of their robotic state became heavier and heavier for me, and I started to avoid people more, mostly because I didn't want to feel depressed about how lame everyone was.

And so I toned down my own personality in order to stop dealing with the depressing reality that most people weren't interested in having fun at a random intersection with a guy who decided it was a good time to wobble like a penguin while his friends rolled their eyes. I conformed, not out of a fear of judgment, but out of a fear of my own judgement towards other people.

Then I developed some chronic health issues that made it more difficult to generate that kind of fun, and it became a struggle to hold on to this part of myself at all.

I want to go more into this whole story but I think this is enough for today.

I've decided that it's time to revive this part of myself at all costs, and I'll talk more about that next time.

If you are curious about what my ridiculous antics looked like, check out this video by Wednesday Campanella (when KOM_I was the singer), it is a spitting image of me before I hit 30 (although I’ve never been a Japanese woman😜):

I’ll pick up this topic again in a few days and try to go a bit deeper but I just put up a podcast episode with @drrune about Shadow Work, which is essentially something you could say I’m doing here, although what I’ve shared is pretty tame compared so some of the other stuff I’ve done to try and integrate my shadow. You can hear it here: