I’m a Creep

The inherent pain and social anxiety of putting the Liminal in Liminal Trickster Mystic

I’m a creep. And I’m a weirdo.

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here.

I don’t belong here…

Ironically, I’m finding myself feeling increasingly liminal to Liminal Trickster Mysticism. Why? In short, the community I started now feels too badass for me to belong in it. 

I keep thinking about flywheels lately. There’s a bunch of energy needed to get a flywheel started, but once you’ve cranked enough, it continues on its own. I barely even need to comment on the Creekmason Discord for the discussion to spin on with love, enthusiasm, and energy. It would probably continue without my input at all. 

Cognitively, I recognize this as the good thing it is: Liminal Trickster Mystics self-sufficiently helping each other feel a little less alone. Still, my knee-jerk reaction is to feel like I’m no longer part of the “inner circle.”

We did run the experiment of The Creekmasons with no Geoffe with my recent back to back to back Dark Night of the Soul, anniversary vacation, and family emergency. I didn’t put out an article here or a Nodes in the Net episode for a month, and the community continued to thrive.

It was a beautiful place in that time: compassionate, tender, heartwarming, and inspirational—and nerve-wracking. Let me speak this into the field: I simultaneously don’t want to be the star, the guru, the personality, the leader, and I’m also very scared that I will be abandoned if I don’t shine so brilliantly that I’m every Creekmason’s favorite. I guess it’s an all-or-nothing bit of binary thinking isn’t it?

But that’s the apparently inevitable nature of my anxiety. 

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I’ll be discarded if I don’t yield bliss. The world will reject me unless I’m its messiah. But that’s not “belonging” either.

Across countless contexts, the same pattern plays out: I develop a yearning to belong that’s eventually undercut by a persistent anxiety that rips me away from believing I can actually do so safely. 

Mostly I just feel scared of rejection and read into stupid things and feel dragged away from unity with the collective by my fears.

Historically, there have been few limits on what constitutes a collective I might attach to feeling alienated from. There’s been myriad groups and cliques. 

I always want to belong and always end up hanging out on the porch smoking cigarettes while people party inside. Listening to music and laughter. And yes, poisoning myself. The conversation there on the porch is better, I used to appreciate that. It’s why I started smoking. But the connections are wispy and insubstantial: if you’re like me, you’ll never see any of those other smokers again.

It’s not a community in quite the same way as the house-partiers dancing inside while the music blares, their bodies drawn together by rhythm, touch, the communion of “Shots!” and a very real need to be close to be heard. The tag-alongs and significant others taking refuge outside from the electrical storms of camera flash selfies will later realize there’s no evidence we were even at the party. Nothing to prove we were with who we were with. 

So, were we?

I always thought it was just because I was a grumpy hipster, but did I resent having my picture taken as a young adult during The Oughts because I didn’t actually feel like I belonged with the other people in any given group shot or Facebook album?

Both/And?

I remember reading a very autobiographical short story about this during a San Francisco State writers’ workshop. I remember one classmate pointed out I spelled “apart” wrong: I said something along the lines of “Why do I always feel so a part from that crowd.” And this writer I respected, he mocked me for the “Fruedian slip,” suggesting sarcastically I subconsciously believed I was a part of the crowd whose selfies I was scared to face.

That classmate picked up on, and took offense to, a dilemma that I still haven’t been able to reconcile. Did I think I was “not good enough?” Or did I think I was “too good for?”

Both/And?

Too good—and not good enough—for the “popular kids” I envied in high school. The writer friends I wanted to make in college. The parents at my kid’s school I continue to fantasize about connecting with. 

The scene kids, socialists, bar regulars, anarchists, subreddit communities, podcast cults, magick practitioners, meditators, Sanity Project participants, members of the Emergent Commons… and now, just a little bit, The Creekmasons. 

It turns out there’s only a touch more resistance to this ejection in the group I started.

It’s enough resistance that I’ve actually picked up on the early warning signs. Recognized the pattern.

I always find myself simultaneously drawn to these collectives, infatuated, and pulled away anxious. Or I push myself away intentionally: self-protectively, falsely superior. Elitist. 

Even as a self-proclaimed “hipster,” that subculture of valorized elitism, I consciously attempted inoculating myself from belonging by actively declaring I was a hipster. Some of you will be old enough to remember that a precondition of being a true hipster was denying you were one. Nothing was more hipster than standing apart from hipsters and making fun of them.

So I proudly proclaimed I belonged in the category, and at least according to my own mental gymnastics, the Catch 22 precluded my actual membership.

I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul.

I can never really let myself believe I belong anywhere, even if that “where” is someplace abstract or metaphysical. It’s not just with collectives of humans that I feel alienated; it’s also with Source. With Truth. 

Ah, to experience apparent prophetic unity with perennial truth. 

Have you ever felt it? That deep gnostic grokking of something that is beyond your rational mind but just so True that you feel it with every molecule of Soul that’s incarnated as you? 

This is the ability to tap into what magick practitioners call The Current.  To understand and express things that are fundamentally true. Always true. Deeply true, beyond relativism, perspective and appearance.

I am sometimes in that Current. I believe it inspired the meditation technique I call “Blissy.” It’s inspired insight into the Aquarian Ascension, current events, relational issues, work problems. 

It inspires me, at times, to feel safe.

It’s like a mood of confidence. A mood of assuredness. A felt, experiential understanding of the True Nature of Things. 

But it always fades. And when it does, and I’m reflecting on it from the place that Truth can’t touch, it’s obvious it is and always was pure delusion. It can’t have been real.

“That was just mania. No one really likes you, the world is disintegrating, and your work is shit.”

Then there’s unity with Source that I feel in times like these where I’m a little high and buzzy and I have temporary gnosis that all is consciousness, that all is in The All. That God is everything so, by definition, nothing can be outside of the divine.

And yet, even that feeling of being an aspect of God always fades. The atheism sets in and it brings with it a judgmental recrimination for my goofy belief that the universe could ever be purposive, meaningful and profoundly interconnected within a metaphysical field of all-pervading conscious, loving awareness.

* Coming back later to edit, the above sentence is cringey to me. Writing while in hypomania and editing in alienated depression makes for some difficult demons to face. 

Having my sense of belonging ripped away from me, whether it is with people, Truth or Source, is identical—no really identical—with my bipolar cycles. 

This is my bipolar disorder. (Or seems to be. I’d be very curious to hear whether this whole phenomenon is relatable to people who don’t process their entire experience through the lens of a diagnosis.) 

It seems to me, truly, that the moods that drive this flirtation with belonging preceding being yanked away from it are the spiraling sin curve of mania and depression. 

Anxiety, paranoia, and a persecution complex are the tools of the anthroposophical “Dweller on the Threshold” that kicks me out of belonging anywhere: in collective, in knowing, with God. They’re what my mania has always become when I linger in it or purposefully attempt to prolong it. 

The metaphor I always use is that hypomania—and therefore, I’m realizing now, also the moods of belonging in groups, abiding in Truth, or connecting with Source—is like milk. It can be nourishing. Refreshing. Soothing. 

But if you leave it out on the counter too long, it goes sour.

Sour hypomania is anxiety. It’s the same high energy and heightened awareness—the physical sensations, when you direct your mindfulness at them unflinchingly, are essentially identical. The only difference is that your mental context is just more pessimistic. It disrupts your whole narrative faculty. 

Soured belonging is a persecution complex, social anxiety, and not feeling Kennough. 

For me, the “Liminal” in Liminal Trickster Mystic doesn’t mean “centrist.”

It doesn’t mean sitting on the fence or existing exclusively in an intangible purgatory. It means being drawn into things deeply, and then feeling myself dragged out. Almost against my will. 

Sometimes palpably against my will.

But lately, I’ve been lauding that as an immunity to becoming wrapped up in a cult. The fact that credulity “gives me the ick” prevents me from being overly radicalized and losing my sense of identity.

That’s what’s on offer when joining a group: dissolve into the community. Become a bee and abandon your “you-ness.”

I take things to extremes. That self-proclaimed hipster in college was a proud loner. An elitist. And lately I’ve been dabbling in various culty message boards and chatrooms. A joiner.

But I don’t actually want to be either. I don’t want to be an utterly self-reliant American individual, nor a mystic merged with the universal Us. I want to simultaneously exist as Atman and Brahmin. Somehow, I want to figure out what it feels like to, at once, know myself as a jewel in Indra’s Net and as the net in sum.

Maybe that’s an essay for another time.

What might it mean to “reify the liminal?”

That’s kinda what the Creekmasons are doing, in our little Liminal Trickster Mystic subculture. 

Can you really build in the liminal? When it really comes down to it, is it a place or a purgatory? Like me, do you instantly become liminal to whatever is instantiated? And what happens if I keep cutting the distance to belonging in half? Will I eventually approach infinity like a mathematical limit?

That actually sounds groovy.

But what does it mean to build in the liminal? It sounds like what happens when you construct a bridge. But are The Creekmasons a bridge? Or a destination? 

Both/And?

I’ve sometimes compared my leadership to Doula-hood. I’ve compared my mission to being a water stand on the marathon course, increasingly, one staffed by a whole group of people who are supporting each other and throwing a text-based rave.

But I also want to complete the marathon, if I’m honest with myself. I want to see what it’s like across the finish line, sprayed by the celebratory champagne of messy but triumphant belonging.

Completing the marathon looks like belonging to me. Belonging with People, with Source, and with Truth.

Can I find that at the water stand? Can we belong, together, as a support entity? A coven of doulas? An organization of hermits?

Or does the hermit—the mystic that swims in the waters the psychotic drowns in—necessarily have to be a loner?

In his Meaning Crisis series, John Vervaeke posits shamans have traditionally inhabited a liminal zone. Again, this doesn’t mean “the middle.” It means consensus reality and the transcendental are like the left and right feet of a person in walking meditation. Traveling into the transcendental with the help of plant medicine, ritual, or other forms of ecstasis, shamans bring back nuggets of insight that the rest of society uses to make pragmatic decisions that assist in survival. 

The mystic necessarily inhabits the outskirts of the community. He’s a little too weird. He wanders through the desert or meditates in a cave. Maybe the mystic is even a little scary. Maybe she’s a swamp witch with wind chimes crafted from tiny bones, secluded but available for spellwork, telling fortunes, and reading palms. 

It’s a solitary life, though, certainly. The insights they bring back from Other Worlds may help inspire the holy books of the community still locked in the societal Matrix—they may inspire the very construction of matrices—but archetypically the mystic doesn’t even get to plug in once their ideas are accepted. 

So again, the question: can I belong anywhere?

No really: help me figure this out.

What does a community of Liminal Trickster Mystics look like?

Can you have one? Or must we be lonesome hermits? The shift of civilization toward the online realm seems to have brought many more of us together than was ever possible previously, but now that we’re here and our communities are solidifying…Is anyone else familiar with this itch? This gradually deepening alienation? 

I’m a creep. What the hell am I doing here? Do I belong here?