chapter three: integration
by late 2021, my life was perfect. I had a beautiful, loving partner, supportive friends, a house, community, a men’s group, movement practices, a permaculture garden.
And, on a cold evening in december, I contemplated taking my life for the first time.
And then I met annika
i remember the early days. Days spent shut down, me dragging Annika into the shadow memories of my childhood, all subconsciously and without any possibility of care or impact. And Annika, desperate to be seen in her pain, the wounds she carried, but any trauma she showed being exploited, used as fodder for manipulation.
It was hell. We told no one about what we were doing, what was going on. They wouldn’t understand, we thought.
nd then we started to share about who we were, what we were doing. It was (and is) messy, with us posturing and collapsing, not yet able to hold both the enormity of the growth we had been experiencing and the extent of thow absolutely broken the Breaking had left each of us. ONE OF OUR VIDEOS.
My process of sanctification (A term I like to borrow from the Christian wisdom tradition which means the process of being made holy in the act of following God/Aliveness/Reality) has forced me off the edge of the map, and I come back, burnt and broken, bearing the fruits of a new reality yet to come.
I am half-finished.
I don’t yet know who I am, what my new identity is, and how all of this comes together. I do know that I have been given the gift of wisdom, and I now need to come back to the land of the living to learn to share what I have been given. More to come…
“It's my third day or fourth in hell, the food tastes like shit, and I don't remember what it feels like to have sunshine on my face. Since I entered, I haven't seen anything living besides humans, and I've slept on two chairs pushed together to resemble a bed. I've been sneezed on, had someone piss their pants next to me, and watched a man be restained and drugged.
‘This is for my mental health’ they said. ‘It's just a psych evaluation’ they said.”
FROM MY SuBSTACK READ THE REST here
“The movie ended. I got myself more soup. I tried and failed to start another movie.
And somewhere in the space of sitting on the couch, fire quietly snickering in the wood stove to my left, something shifted.
And I remembered that I wanted to kill myself.”
YOU CAN READ MORE HERE>
For months after the Breaking I wandered, desperate, wild, and aimless. I tried everything I had tried in the past, only harder. More therapy, more men’s work, more self-care, more time in nature. But nothing helped. My mind had shattered, the parts I had tried to repress my entire life had come bursting to the surface. I wasn’t sure what to do, where to go…
When I met Annika in May of 2022, we had both reached the end of our ropes. I had become suicidal and was struggling with persistent thoughts of self harm, suicide, and murderous intentions towards others. Annika was living a life of solitude after years of searching for and failing to find peers in the new paradigm into which she had been birthed.
She had a belief, and I was desperate enough to try it:
What if the only way through was through? What if the only way to reconnect to all of the parts of ourselves was by intentionally entering into an enmeshed, dysfunctional, co-dependent, abusive, narcissistic/enabler relationship? And what if the only way to integrate that relationship was through getting closer, rather than further apart?
And meanwhile, my music began to grow, like a pine cone exploding into growth after a forest fire. The forest, my old identities and capacities had been reduced to so much charred wood and ash, but there was something emerging from the ashes… here is a clip of me singing for the first time in almost a year from 2022
I started to be the artist I had always dreamed of being. As I toured the underworld with Annika, healing both the internal abuse that was present and the abuse showing up between us, my own voice started to mend in a way it never had before. Here is me improvising a song in German and English with a Medieval band Annika and I ran into while we were in Germany last:
