What No One Is Saying

Being true to ourselves is a “slower” process, sometimes feels tedious and is hardly without pain or hardship, but it yields better tasting fruit in the end.

It can take years to grow the kind of fruit that develops naturally from a life lived with self- honesty.

It’s like the difference between large scale corporate agriculture and growing food in your backyard or foraging berries and greens.

Big Agriculture yields fruit that is lacking in flavor and nutrients; it’s the same with Big Pharma. A life without psych drugs requires tending, self study, learning and practicing, growing your garden year after year after year and learning from your mistakes, and yields authentic delicious fruit that can’t be compared to a life on a maintenance drug for mood or personality.

Yes this is a controversial thing to say and may offend you. Yet, it hurt me so much that when I was nearly killed by psych drugs, no one wanted to “offend me” with the truth of what was going on, why I was losing my health and personality in bucketfuls.

I recently saw an example of this in my own life, as I think we all do cyclically. We work hard at a certain discipline and sometimes feel deprived of certain things in life while doing so. But then one day, those things return to us even better than ever before.

For the past couple of years I have had a lot of hardship in certain areas of life between constant moving, financial ups and downs, health problems, loneliness, living in undesirable places without security.

The answers to these problems came in living the questions themselves, as the poet Rilke noted, patiently, and taking the opportunities to grow my garden, wherever I was, however humble, however transient, knowing well I would have to tear it up in a few months so was any of this even worth it? Was life a cruel joke?

I wouldn’t say I’m out of the woods on any of these questions, but I do feel a sense that progress has been made by taking the slow and honest path. For me there is no other way.

It hasn’t been easy. I have had extreme mental states of every single kind. I could have been diagnosed with absolutely every single mental disorder without exception in the past few years, and given every single psych drug.

Well that’s pretty cool.

It’s joyful to know you could be diagnosed with a mental disorder but to opt out, to say yes to yourself instead, to have the patience and care to resist the label that never got you anywhere before, that was voted into existence as an illness, that simply isn’t helpful in looking at your life.

Nothing tastes sweeter than inching toward self mastery, self intimacy, the progress that comes slowly over a long period of taking good care of yourself, the very best way you know how to, and very imperfectly at that.

Nothing is more satisfying than meeting kindred spirits that are more aligned and connected than ever before after long periods of solitude and loneliness, even extreme isolation.

I know I should say something about everyone having their own unique path, some people benefiting from psych drugs and diagnoses yada yada yada. But everyone else is saying that, so it’s getting boring and overstated. It’s not even whether I agree with it or not, I just find it a boring line of thought, yet a diplomatic one that has value in some circumstances.

There are so many saying it though, and I’ve always wanted to say what no one is saying.