2026: A Batshit Insane Year
Is it just me, or has 2026 been a really fucking weird year filled with crazy synchronicities? This year has been batshit insane for me and also extremely, violently transformative. The first half of this year I fell back into a deep depression, into isolation, into total despair, into utter hopelessness. Then I turned 30 years old and shortly after had a near-death experience and subsequent "awakening", a midlife crisis that forced me to take a long, hard look at my life up until that point and really ask myself "Who even am I? Am I happy? Am I living the life I want?". I realized that ever since I was a child I had basically been living a lie, I had constructed so many walls to protect myself that I forgot what the outside looked like, I forgot who I even was. And I realized that the constant masking, the constant fawning and the constant vigilance is what was killing me inside. The armor simply got too heavy for my body to carry. I decided to shed the armor entirely and embrace radical authenticity and vulnerability. I knew that by embracing authenticity and vulnerability that I was opening up myself to the potential of rejection, of harm, of pain. But nothing could be more painful than the weight of 20 years of toxic armor. I spent the next few months really rediscovering myself, rediscovering interests and all the stuff that used to give life magic when I was a child. The magic started to come back. I started to embrace my obscure, eccentric interests again. I started to want to make art again. I was no longer letting the fear of having my sandcastle kicked over stop me from building it. The more layers I had to peel back, the more afraid I was, but the more freedom I felt. I felt physically lighter. At the same time there were setbacks, sparks of old patterns of behavior that would cause me to regress a bit, fearing I had shown too much vulnerability, like a hermit crab snapping back into its shell. But also like a hermit crab, I slowly would come back out again. During this time is when the crazy fucking synchronicities were happening. I was being told by literally everyone I knew how this was such a weird year for them, a batshit insane year, a year of coincidences and comings of age. And with many of these people, their situations were eerily similar to mine. They were shedding old ways of thinking, having radical awakenings, becoming more authentic. Also in this timeframe, there was media coming out with themes that basically lined up perfectly with what I was going through. There was the Backrooms movie with all the themes of trauma, of toxic patterns of behavior, of the capacity for change, of building up walls and pushing others away. Then there was The Amazing Digital Circus finale which was literally basically the exact same themes, with regards to Jax's story at least. It almost felt like I was literally in purgatory, having all of my toxic traits and behaviors laid bare and naked in front of me, only to be violently and painfully purged. I have gone through more transformation in the past 6 months alone than I have in the past 12 years. I know I still have a long way to go, but as painful as this journey has been for me, I know deep down it has been necessary for healing and shedding old patterns. If I had to pick one word to encapsulate what the "theme" of this year has been, it would be "metamorphosis".
