09/29/2025
I remember when I was a teenager, my doctor recommended me to see a psychiatrist. I spoke to my concerns, worries, anxieties, and even desperations about the state of the world. I had a feeling like everything we held and knew was about to change, and like a train coming fast towards us, I felt disoriented and unsure what to do. The psychiatrist labelled me as having apocalyptic ideation, prescribing me anti-psychotic medications. She also sent me to a psychologist who had me "wear a watch," and every time I felt anxiety, "I would look at my watch to bring me back into the present moment," because I was too fixated on the future...
Needless to say, I didn't stay with either regimen or practitioner for very long. The medications dampened my lucidity and creativity, and with the psychologist, I felt unheard and unseen as though my concerns were being written off by these practitioner's sense of entitlement and authority. They couldn't or wouldn't hold me in my wrestling. They, in fact, wanted my wrestling to simply cease and with it all generative energy involved.
My parents helped me to try someone else. He was a white-haired old man. I don't remember his name. But I remember what he told me when we first met: "I don't think there's anything wrong with you. You're fine. You're going to be fine." This perspective gave...me...Pause.
We spent time exploring the world through my eyes and ears, and he helped me to accept myself, and my worldview, and hold it, carry it, so I could live in my world. He told me about his son who had travelled the world, exploring questions, meeting new people and cultures and communities, finding his own truths on what life is all about. He said, "Maybe someday you will do the same."
This white-haired old man taught me back then something I carry with me today. If you want to change, you first have to learn to accept and carry the experience you are having, no matter how big and grandiose it may seem.
And as far as grandiosity, another white haired old man later in my life would like to say:
"How do you eat an elephant?"..
"One spoonful at a time."
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