A Sloughing Off of Old Identities

Oh, hey there. It’s me, the Sacredphrenia guy. You might’ve noticed I made some big project announcements at the beginning of 2023 and then largely vanished from the internet.

So, you might be wondering, what the hell happened?

I had spent the better part of two years drawing up a plan that would enable me to transition away from Sacredphrenia into something else entirely, a creative ecosystem that would help me pay the bills while doing the deep creative work I feel called towards.

I decided to announce that plan to the world to create some social pressure to force me to do it, which has worked for me in the past. It didn’t work this time. Days after making the announcement, major holes began to appear in my blueprint and within weeks, it was necessary to go back to the drawing board entirely.

As they say, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. And ironically, it’s in the going astray that we often find where we’re going.

A map can never predict the richness or the complexity of the territory one is about to enter, just as a conceptual model can never capture the true essence of worldly phenomena.

The territory I entered in 2023 was an unforgiving series of reality checks that slapped some additional sense into this sacredphrenic who was unable to admit that he’s still slightly sacredphrenic.

I feel honed by a difficult year. I have enjoyed numerous triumphs among a great number of personal failings. It’s clear to me that I’m healthier and more grounded than at any point in the last thirteen years. I would not have written that only two months ago.

Perhaps most of all, this has been a year of getting clear on what is and isn’t mine to do. There has been a natural sloughing off of old identities that had been projected onto me, little barnacles that were weighing me down. I find myself freshly compelled toward the original vision I had of my deep work before the project of Sacredphrenia took me on a fascinating detour.

If you take the project announcements I made earlier this year and you boil them all down, removing the impurities and concentrating the essences, you get a project that bears some resemblance to what I described in Sane Sapiens. This dream breathes life into me and acts as my continual north star.

I’ve recently begun a creative mentorship with one of my favorite podcasters to help me get clearer on what exactly this project is, who I am as a creator, and the steps I need to take to make this dream a reality.
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I will likely remain silent on social media until it’s time to start speaking again. My heart breaks over the atrocities in the world and my commitment to this vision of a saner species is renewed after every tragedy.
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Perhaps nothing has disturbed me more than the Stockholm Resilience Center’s recent report that six out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed, climate change being only one of them. If you have the stomach for it, I implore you to listen to Daniel Schmachtenberger’s clarion call in his recent talk, An Introduction to the Metacrisis, which can be found on the Norrsken Foundation YouTube channel, in which he has this to say, and I will leave you with these words:

“I want people to think about what it would take to turn the entire arc of humanity, factoring what is currently driving it, and that everything else that you could do doesn’t matter because the end of the possibility space of all meaningful human activities is imminent if we don’t do that.”