Get ready for something scattered but that will maybe come together in the end.
Where we left off was me in and out of the emergency room with all of the symptoms of a heart attack, but everything was fine. Since then, my symptoms not only didn’t improve, they got much worse. I saw many doctors and had many, many tests, that showed every organ system in my body was fucking up in ways that no one had an answer for. Then it occurred to me that this exact thing happened to me in 2016, with similar symptoms, but no one knew what to do then either.
At the time, I was basically bedridden, as I’ve been lately, but I had to do my own research because it became clear that no doctor would ever have the genuine intellectual curiosity needed to figure out what was wrong with me. I ultimately determined I had stage 4 Epstein-Barr virus reactivation, something that many medical professionals do not recognize as being real and do not have any understanding of. Because of this, I started treating myself through a cycled protocol of pharmaceutical-grade antiviral herbs and by coercing uneducated doctors into writing me prescriptions for low-dose naltrexone, an off-label, experimental treatment for modulating the immune system. And it worked. I got better over the course of a few months and was symptom-free for several years.
No one told me what was happening to me. I had to figure it out on my own. And this time, by the time I figured it out, stage 4 Epstein-Barr reactivation has wrecked my heart, liver, thyroid, parathyroid, endocrine, and nervous system. Now I have to fix it by myself all over again. Because as far as I can tell, there are only like two people in the entire world who truly understands the complexity and severity of EBV and I can’t afford to wait for any medical professional to give me to the go-ahead to treat myself.
This has been a theme in my life that ayahuasca has brought up many times. When I was a kid, I gave all my power away to my mother and to the cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses. My entire happiness and mood was based on whether my mom was OK, and if she wasn’t, my entire existence would be in shambles. Every move I made in my life was based on whether the cult approved, and if they didn’t, I risked being shunned by my entire family and community.
I was wired to never look inward to figure out how I felt about things but to only look to external sources of authority to tell me what to do, think, say, and how to feel and live. This led to a life of pure misery that I never realized could be different. I developed a strong belief that the world was not a safe place and my only hope of survival was to find authority figures (people and groups) that I could trust to make me feel safe.
In college, I decided the best use of my energy was to study law and political science, zones where I felt like safety could be found. I worked on several local government campaigns and then, the dream of dreams, Obama’s first presidential campaign. He felt like the ultimate authority figure who would change everything and keep us all safe but that didn’t really end up being the case.
For years, I diligently followed every move of the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, and felt every political twist of the knife, allowing it to completely alter my mood and feeling of safety in the world. For years, I put my health and feeling of safety into the hands of doctors who seemingly never had answers or solutions to any of my problems, and who would frequently make me worse. For years, I stayed in jobs that I hated so I could have health insurance to go to doctors who never helped me. And for years, I believed that I was inherently broken and that it was everyone else’s job to put me back together because I was too weak and fragile and stupid to do it myself.
Then ayahuasca blew off the doors of reality and I woke the fuck up.
When I realized I was playing out the same “powerless” storyline I’d experienced as a child with the government, the medical system, my employer, and in my relationships, I knew this was a very deep program that only I could dismantle. I saw that the idea that any government, doctor, job, or person could ever fully take care of me or keep me completely safe was a delusional belief. The idea that we would ever get to some utopic, stable place where “the other side” finally gets it and we all enjoy unlimited amenities that keep us safe and that never overreach, for the rest of our lives, is also an illusion. One that I’d likely spend the rest of my life hoping for but never get.
As much as I would love to believe that we are in an advanced, evolved time where we 100% know the ideal mode of governing, living, emotional processing, and treating illness, all I’ve ever been exposed to is evidence that we are still in the dark ages. If you want safety, you have to create it. If you want health, you have to take it into your own hands. If you want anything, you are the only person who can give it to yourself. Because if your safety and “rights” are coming from anywhere outside of you, the odds of them eventually being violently ripped from your arms are more likely than not.
I’ve spent as many years as I’m willing to waste of my life hoping for more unity and idyllic conditions and now I’m done. I think the left and right are both cannibalizing themselves into an oblivion from which neither can be saved. I’ve accepted that the world is frequently cruel and unfair, that even the most educated are often idiots, that we are little more than fancy animals, and that if there’s anything that you want, you have to find a way to do it yourself. I don’t say this from some lofty, privileged, well-resourced position, but as someone whose entire life has been consumed by cruelness, unfairness, idiocy, and struggling alone in pure darkness. I say this as someone who has begged and cried for help from others and never once found anyone who could help me in the same way that I could help myself.
I am concerned about what is happening in the United States on many levels but that’s nothing new. I often remember things some of my old political science and law professors would say regarding signs that a country’s about to collapse and I shudder. I fear that what we’re experiencing right now is not as bad as it gets, but just the beginning of a series of things that are incomprehensibly more devastating. I don’t say this to ignite fear, but rather to give you a reality adjustment.
Maybe this is just the long line of career criminals in my ancestry talking, but perhaps it’s time to get a lot more comfortable doing illegal shit? Like, maybe stop waiting for daddy government to tell you what you can do and go find the fucking renegades who do whatever they want without asking for permission. Because they exist.
I’m done pretending like this country that has done nothing but rape, pillage, poison, destroy, lie, cheat, steal, and rewrite its way through history is going to suddenly turn a corner and become some sort of dependable socialist Shangri-La. Even if that were somehow achieved, how long do you really think it would last? We could pour billions upon trillions more into this system and it wouldn’t save a thing because it’s corrupt and rotten to its fucking core.
If things do continue to disintegrate in the way that I fear, my only advice is to find a community of like-minds with those who are skilled at things you can’t, whether they’re legal or not. Fuck the government. Fuck the medical system. Fuck the laws. Fuck all external sources of authority. Trust yourself. Find people you trust. Do what you want.
And if you don’t agree with anything I’ve said, good for you. I hope I’m wrong, too.