Transcending Wonderland

If you're anything like who I used to be, then you've got a whirlwind of trauma in the rearview mirror of your timeline and no idea how to properly deal with it all.

Because of all that pain, you're probably detached from your wellbeing, absorbed by your present starvation for safety and comfort, and desperate to put distance between your now and then.

You're likely emotionally white-knuckling it through each day, waking up to operate in robotic consistency whilst hungering for the release of deep sleep, shoving your feelings to the wayside with chaos and cookies, and wondering when the pain will finally cease.

You've probably tried a wide variety of healing modalities to offset the lingering sense of devastating losses, from traditional talk therapy with a professional, clinical medications, journal prompts, meditations, spiritual rabbit holes, the works.

And maybe some of those things helped for a time, but - if you're anything like who I used to be - not for very long.

You see, we're inundated with escapism protocols that guide us away from interacting with our existential reality in favor of injecting a short burst of satisfaction in the present. Because of that, it's both easy and ingrained to stifle our intuitive needs in pursuit of immediate emotional release.

Be that in the form of substance or non-substance abuse, binge consumption or avoidant detachment - and so many more I'd lose my mind trying to list them all! - most of us create a sort of Wonderland to escape to, a series of behavior patterns where we can disconnect from our chaotic reality momentarily by falling down familiar rabbit holes of satisfying illusion instead.

You know the drill:

Instead of having the difficult conversations we know we need to have, we ignore them and watch television.

Instead of pursuing healthy behaviors, we eat more bad food, avoid exercise, and blame our bad luck on genetics.

Instead of questioning our reality and our soul's perceived purpose on this planet, we shrug off our inevitable entropy and play nihilist.

Instead of switching careers to pursue our passions like we feel called to do, we avoid the opportunity and stick with the grind.

In short, instead of taking responsibility for addressing the emotional triggers in our life, we add onto our pile of disappointing choices with yet more disappointing behavior.

After a decade of being a reality escape artist, a regular Wonderland aficionado, I finally decided to do something about it.

I was doused in chronic depression, riddled with anxiety and panic attacks, white-knuckling it through CPTSD symptoms, and smothering all of it with a thick layer of substance and non-substance abuse patterns.

On this website, I share what worked for me, what didn't work for me, and what I do to this day to keep myself intentionally conscientious, self-aware, and on the path towards self-actualization.

I share all of this in the hopes that it might provide some help for anyone out there who finds themselves struggling to confront their reality instead of run away to Wonderland.