I haven’t been saying a thing lately about the reels of each Father. Mother. God. episode that head up each of these posts. On the one hand, it hasn’t felt necessary. Back when I was still creating Father. Mother. God., I had the notion that I’d do a lot of writing about it, once it was done. Talk about the process, elaborate on the stories, unpack the embedded symbols and scriptural references. Even make source sheets for each episode, for Jewish textual study. But then somebody pointed out to me, you know, you don’t have to do all that. Trust your work. Let it speak for itself. Don’t undermine it with explanations. So I gave it space, and I still do.
But at the same time, this particular episode is remarkably relevant to the present moment. So I have some things to say. Better Off Dead was written in October of 2024, as I was attempting to come off my meds. Put simply, that attempt didn’t work. I’d set the bar for success, shrewdly I thought, in a place that allowed for my continued creative output. I told myself that so long as I was still writing the comic and launching each remaining episode in time (there were three more to come), that the experiment was doing fine. But getting the comic produced quickly became the only real marker of success in my life, and everything else started to slide. The moment I published the last episode, the next February, I knew I wasn’t fine.
There were earlier signs. I was heading into my beit din that December, the culmination of my entire year-plus of Jewish studies, and my affirmation and assumption of my place amongst the people Israel1. That date, December 12, stands out to me because it was one of the only happy days I can recall in that whole period of time. A day being a highlight is fine, but being in such a horrid haze of depressed energy and diffuse focus and rampant self-doubt all the rest of the time is not. My stubbornness kept me going. I had a beautiful December holiday trip planned, and my partner and I were at a place that should have felt divinely ecstatic, but even in the healing waters of the hot springs, I couldn’t dodge the funk. Nonetheless, I persisted in my logic. The comic was fine, so I was fine. And in recovery, F.I.N.E. stands for exactly one thing. Fucked up. Insecure. Neurotic. Emotional. Yup, I was “fine.”
This particular episode was written in a state where I was already very much not fine. I was intimidated. I was scared. I don’t even remember what, exactly, motivated me in this attempt, besides the idea that I shouldn’t have to rely on these drugs. And that I knew I couldn’t do any deeper healing if the real traumas and patterns and limiting beliefs were sealed over with a level of pharmaceutical cement. And, maybe, just a little bit, I thought I owed it to this journey and this story in Father. Mother. God., to give it another shot. I needed more tools and more healing than I had available to me. I don’t even think I had an active therapist at the time. But it still boiled down to this. I had to try again. To push back against the pathologizing medicalization of my inner life. And so I did.
When I finished the comic successfully, on time, with an episode that visually and thematically tied all twelve episodes together in ways that I am still heartwarmingly proud of, I expected some sense of accomplishment. Completion. Celebration. But I was hard-pressed to celebrate. Instead, I felt unmoored. This is not uncommon for me (or others, I believe) at the completion of a large undertaking. But instead of my energy eventually feeling freed up and available for redirection, I kept sinking. Even after I got a therapist. Even after I got back on the meds. Even as I told myself that, creatively speaking, taking the meds again was the most powerful thing that I could do.
I recall an email exchange with a friend and former coach of mine around this time. Her response to this particular episode, Better Off Dead, was to say, “I salute you for how you have held yourself in the darkest places, your courage to come off your meds and your willingness to go back into the breach.” And in turn, I had to admit that, “as it happens, this round of the no-meds experiment ended rather poorly. It appears, at least for now, to be a gravity problem.”2
But this didn’t set well with me, and I found myself pushed internally, trying to articulate just how taking the meds could actually be a powerful choice. This is what I came up with:
For me it’s a matter of where the more powerful place is to put my focus - when I leave certain chemical tools off the table because “I should be powerful enough not to need these,” then “what I love” is no longer even a relevant consideration - very quickly, the only focus becomes ‘just don’t kill yourself today.’ A really dismal and not very powerful way to live.
On the other hand, when I allow myself the benefit of lithium (a naturally occurring element, as it happens) something happens where dying doesn’t seem like the most powerful thing I can do anymore. Instead, for whatever biochemical reason, my brain actually allows for the possibilities of love and desire to even exist, and for me to look up towards the horizon and pursue them.
So what’s more powerful - risking my life to prove I don’t need a pill, or taking the damn pill and letting my genius actually take the wheel? I think the latter (though that conclusion was NOT easily arrived at, that is for sure).
Looking at this now, I can immediately spot it. The pitfall in my logic. I was reacting to my own addictive tendency to “should all over myself.” And ‘I should be powerful enough not to need this’ is very far away from experiencing myself as powerful. But that’s where I was, and that’s what I committed to. And I did my damnedest, that whole spring and summer, to tune into my next evolution and find my next steps, all while adding back each of the three medications that I’d been taking before, one by one by one.
And I found that while I did even out somewhat, the heavy, nihilistic funk and sense of spiritual castration and existential disconnection never left me. I busied myself preparing for a trip to South Africa. A once-in-a-lifetime journey to practice and apply the powerful alchemical tools of intuition and self-mastery that I’d been studying for years, all while on safari. I knew it was important to go. I hadn’t planned on it, I hadn’t budgeted for it, but I was tuned in enough to follow my intuition when the opportunity came.3 To make it happen despite having no clue where any income was coming from, the coming year.
I didn’t know how important that trip was until I was there. No - I didn’t know how important it was until after I was there. No - I’m still finding out how important that trip was, now.
Gearing up for the safari gave me a creative focus, and a structure, in the form of monthly calls and homework and a new set of choices to work with. But the rest of my time, my energy was mostly consumed with coasting. I was recovering myself, I said, but without feeling like much recovery was happening. I re-landscaped the front yard of the house I no longer live at. Ripped out the gigantic, weedy, no-longer-flowering lilacs, dug out all their gnarled rootballs, and set about building a small set of terraced garden beds with lovely stone walls. It was a good distraction, it was a perfect example of satisfying myself by being of service, but service in a lesser form than what I’m really here to do. I’m fine, as an amateur landscaper. But not at the expense of my life’s work. Whatever that was…
I was disappointed, after the safari, that my life hadn’t changed more dramatically. That nothing profoundly unexpected had opened up. Taking the piss out of myself, I even wrote a song afterwards, with the tongue in cheek chorus, “when’s the magic gonna start?.” And I was defensive, silently, that I still clung to this notion that the most powerful creative choice I could make was to take my meds. They enabled me to function “enough” to participate in the world. They got me to South Africa, didn’t they? And yet, there I was, still honestly not that functional. New doors and new opportunities still. Just. Not. Opening.
At the same time - while it FELT that way, it’s not completely true. Feelings aren’t facts. I took on several new clients, really started building out my coaching practice. I did a couple of scribing jobs, even whilst moving in large part away from that work. I did a ton of soul scribing,4 had work in two art shows for the first time in my adult life - there were highlights. But mostly, it felt like I was treading water. Putting myself back together but never gaining momentum or traction or a foothold in anything that felt like a positive direction.
Somewhere in the late summer, a conversation with my partner began around getting off the meds again. This time it started because she was eagerly inviting me into a ceremonial space and medicine community she’d found. She wanted to share the love and magic of that world with me. Now in such ceremony spaces, medications like mine are wholly contraindicated, so let me be clear. Coming back to plant medicine work is NOT the reason I decided to come off the meds. It merely gave me a time stamp, a target to shoot for. Unbeknownst to me, it was to be more of an event horizon. Because beginning my taper off the meds is the clearest change I can point to, that precipitated the separation that she and I are in now. But I still had to do it. Because my definition - of what the most powerful action I could take was - had changed.
Right now? The most powerful thing I can do as a creator is NOT take the meds. It’s to FEEL everything, while giving it space. It’s to be somatically attuned, present to all my disparate parts, while I keep shifting my focus back to my goals. Choosing where I place my attention, time and time again. This is a luxury that isn’t always afforded me. I can’t speak precisely to why it didn’t work last time, and why it’s working now. There’s a Tibetan word, tendrel, which means dependent connection or interdependent origination. One of the heart practices of my Buddhist sangha5 is Tendrel Nyesel, a terma (treasure) revelation of Tertön Sogyal Lerab Lingpa, the previous incarnation of my root teacher. It’s a practice of eliminating the flaws in interdependent circumstances. The best I can do here, honestly, to explain why this round of un-medicating is going so much better than the last, is to acknowledge that for whatever reasons, there’s better tendrel this time around.
Hold on. Better? Losing my relationship? Moving out of my house? That’s good? Well yes. In a way. I’m not ever going to take medication just to keep a relationship, that’s for sure. I’m not giving myself away. And I’m handling all this change and tumult, mostly, with aplomb. Which is a lot more than I can say for how I was handling standard issue domestic life a year ago, on the meds.
Something happened in South Africa that is still unfolding. I didn’t connect the dots right away. It wasn’t obvious. But in hindsight, it wasn’t that long after safari - a matter of months - that I had the willingness to try tapering off the meds again. I had the sense, in Africa, that I was restarting my life. Starting over at 45 (my birthday was my first day there). And I was frustrated and impatient, coming back, to discover that starting over again meant being in an infancy of sorts. A creative infancy. I wanted to see change, I wanted to see progress, and I didn’t see it yet.
This past weekend I made a vision board. It was a microcosm of the whole process of holding creative tension. The last time I made a vision board was decades ago. Particularly in this moment of transition and dwelling in the wilderness, the stakes felt high. It felt like a lot was riding on this simply act of ripping pictures out of magazines and gluing them to a little paper board.
I was nauseous with discomfort and anxiety. Current reality? It kind of sucked. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to complete the collage, and that even if I did, I wasn’t going to keep it. It was just a purge, I told myself, not a vision board. Just a process of clearing out. Meanwhile, the story I was listening to in my head just looped: “you’re gonna do this wrong.” As if there’s a wrong way to make a collage. Familiar with holding creative tension, though, I soldiered through the waves of nausea, continuing to tune into my desired end result - a vision board that I could not yet see - again and again. I found the spot in the house where the kindergarteners sit in their dayschool, the miniature tipi in the living room, and I crawled inside on the sheepskin rug to calm down. I sat in the door of the tipi for hours, crafting there on the floor. I talked to myself, I self-soothed, humming, singing, getting up to solicit hugs, getting snacks, talking my inner kid down, getting water, getting air. I breathed. I gave myself permission not to finish in the time allotted (it was not enough time! The whole day wouldn’t be enough time!) but agreed to keep going, anyway. I noticed the self-doubt and self-defeating voices and welcomed them and let them be. I tore out the pictures they wanted too, and the text lines - “All existence is suffering,” and “the pharaohs must fall,” even though I didn’t know if I’d use them. And I just kept going. At a certain point, the process opened up for me. What started with gluing things down and then angrily peeling them back up, rejecting and rearranging and re-applying myself, gradually turned into an intuitive and focused flow. A knowing, a confidence, emerged. And I did, indeed, finish in time.
Ultimately what came through was prophetic and powerful. It’s hanging on the wall in my new room. More than a little bit of Africa snuck in, too. NOW I’m starting to see how much was catalyzed last summer, and is still unfolding now.
Current reality keeps changing. My end results keep getting clearer. And so it goes.
To be clear, I don’t mean the country. I mean the God-wrestlers. I’m not touching the question of the modern nation-state here, ok?
It also wreaked havoc on my relationship. Setting the stage, more than likely, for the fresh resentments around my most recent attempt to try un-medicating again.
And thanks to Mom, I had the savings to make it happen. Mom had been to Africa once. This felt like a trip to go see her, in a way. In fact, the whole time, I kept expecting to run into her there.
My application of the discpline of graphic facilitation to scribing my own emotional guts, generatively, in order to see what’s in there and get a handle on it. Topic for another time.
(which I am still, after all these years, loosely connected to, though I feel a little bit like I lost them in my divorce)
