Faces of change: 2012–2022
This is the first part of a series about my lived experience of waking up after a 28-year identity break. I feel like I am finally home, and I am grateful for my experience, even if it seems like a hell. my life has been irrevocably changed for the better. Please read this with the understanding that I would not be able to put this together unless I had come through the keyhole to the other side and were no longer plagued by what I describe below.
Just to start it somewhere simple, I will say that at some point between the ages of 19 and 20 (1994–1996), I lost myself. It didn’t happen overnight, but was rather a gradual dissolution of identity that ultimately left me a shell of an entity with no actionable memory of who I wanted to be.
Losing myself created a schism in my reality that I am just now beginning to reconcile. I won’t try to cover the details here of what three decades of mental instability can do, but I will say that waking up from what I was under has felt like being at the bottom of a blast crater of my own making, everything and everyone I loved laying wounded and injured.
through ritualistic and scaffolded use of Cannabis, Ayahuasca and other psychedelics, a lot of hard work, quite a few setbacks from shock, and with the tireless help of my partner, Asha (who was also a victim of my madness), I am in recovery and can say that I…
