00176 - Discovery Log
AI Summary: Insightful log on validation, authentic connection, daily writing, and balancing mystic life with real‑world routines—cats, community, and creative momentum.
Last night I was having a lot of fun on Substack, while having some back and forth conversations with some intriguing characters. It was also experimentation at the same time. In some ways this last week has felt like going to school for the first time. A mix of nervousness and excitement: the perfecting breeding ground for anxiety.
So when I woke up this morning, my mind tried to fall back into old patterns again. Which made me wonder why. It led me to an old conundrum that I’ve been trying to address deeply lately: validation.
When I’m truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I deeply and vibrantly love people. I love to hear their perspectives, I love to go deep within their inner realms and poke and prod at every construct they made. Not because I doubt it to be stable, but rather because I marvel at the mental structures that people have developed. Here I am, interacting with a being that has never existed and will never exist again. It’s the most unique experience I can encounter, an expression of nature that I can communicate with, which requires minimal translation on my part.
Yet at the same time, the social anxiety that I fermented for nearly two decades reared its head as well. My trusty defense advisor started sharing with me the variety of ways that these people could be interpreting my language and tone. Especially because I was called out again for being ‘a hopeless romantic’ which hadn’t experienced the ‘shadows’ of the world. When I first read those words, my reaction was that I was being ridiculed. But when I took a breath and shifted my perspective to be more inclusive, I realized that the words were actually indicating something else: love. It was a compliment, intentional or not; it was a reflection on my progress. I was finally showing the side of me that was being ridiculed when I was a kid: my excitement for life, my joy for being around people.
It’s strange though, because it feels foreign to me, while equally holding a deep familiarity. It’s the core of my being, but also a side of me that’s been abandoned and neglected by myself for the majority of my life. I had to laugh when realizing that I was being perceived as naive, when in the past decade I’ve been focussed on defending against people that try to scam, circumvent, and harm the organizations that I worked for. I didn’t excel in those jobs without reason; my interaction with people in my personal life was built on massive and complex systems of security layers, triggers, tests, traps, and other methods. All of which were intended to manage how deeply unsafe I felt in this world. In other words: I already lived every day what I did in my job – I just extended it for the benefit of an organization.
But I’m trying to hold true to my authentic expression now, which means that I will have conversations where I no longer adapt my responses to the situation to manage how people perceive me. I no longer assume that I can read their mind, even though my hyper vigilance and clairsentience still give me signals. I’m in command now of how and when I interpret these signals and it’s a breath of fresh air, but still somewhat uncomfortable; which is ok.
In a way it reminds me of the forest cat I sometimes encounter; I named him ‘Charles’ as a joke, given that he’s a wild Portuguese cat.
Image: ‘Charles’ (blurry due to the distance, but let’s call it art)
He originally came around here because I have food for my own two cats that’s freely accessible to him. He’s clearly used to living by himself and dealing with wild animals and untrustworthy humans though. There are rules that he follows when it comes to the distance that he allows me to approach him. I see when he gets triggered in his suspicion as to my motives and his sense of safety in this interaction. We’ve been going at this for a couple of months and by now, he chills out in my vicinity, keeping a minimum 5 meter DMZ between us. Which is a lot better than the scurrying away the moment that I would get up from my camping chair. I’m slowly moving my way towards acquiring a third cat… he’s already accepting treats that I leave for him. Soon my evil plan of making him love being a lap cat will be completed…
Anyway, I mention some of this because I want to start sharing a bit more about my actual practical life. The subjects of mysticism and spirituality are so ethereal that it’s easy to get lost in the abstract realm, making us forget that we chose to live a life on this planet. And as someone who has had the privilege of living in a magickal oak forest for 3 years now, I feel obligated to honor the role it played in my life. Nature has been one of the most spiritual and mystical experiences to interact with this past year. Once I understand those roots, then all other experiences in the material realm became evident in their ethereal value as well.
I’ve tried capturing this balance a bit now as well in my new About page, which I started writing yesterday. It’s almost complete, but the crucial element of community still needs to be addressed. My goal for today is to get that page completed and see if I can then finally continue with writing my essays, because by now I’m starting to get the itch to do some deeper exploration. Discovery logs and poems have their place, but they cover what I already know. Meanwhile the essays illuminate the realms of my subconscious and beyond.
That said, writing and publishing daily has been a blast. It’s really helping me build up my confidence to share more of my work and spread out my web of content. In fact, it’s getting me to the point of seeing how I’ll promote myself on TikTok now. Especially since I’ve released the idea of making selfie style videos. Which apparently has something to do with the Pisces eclipse that we’re in or were in; I don’t keep up with astrology as much as I would like. But that’s mostly because I’ve got so much to write about already!
Which finally brings me to an organic conclusion to this log entry. Daily writing is really helping me settle my energy enough to start seeing what drives me to write the more complex and deeper topics. This ‘superficial’ approach of sharing myself, has helped me ground into what this enterprise that I’m building will actually look like in the material realm. Which is extremely helpful, because my desires and visions have been hogging a lot of my mental bandwidth.
I ‘just’ need to manage my impatience now about the speed in which I’m accomplishing my goals. I imagine this process as that of starting a flywheel, the initial energy required is immense for minimal results. But once things get going, I’ll just be flowing throughout with minimal effort. Or at least… that’s the hope; and the messages I’ve received from my mystic team of how my future will unfold.
Anyway, tomorrow is a ‘big’ day for me, as I will be publishing my first newsletter. Time to play!
(and as a former cynic, yes… I get how that naive that sounds; I just don’t care!)