Dick-First Organization
Patriarchal Programming, Abusive Tendencies, Crazy Wisdom, and the Childish Masculine at the Creek
The Dick” is the first thing to greet you when you make your way to the Creekmasons’ Thrones.
Thoughtforms present in that 18-year-old’s design decision in the physical Creek where the Creekmason concept was born continue to echo into the present. Patterns to be alchemized. Dick-First—patriarchy-prioritizing and -perpetuating—issues like abuse, toxic masculinity, and Crazy Wisdom in guruship.
As a visible figure in the Creekmasons, I’m in danger of expressing those aspects of masculine programming. Even if I somehow avoid it, though, I might still have them projected onto me so convincingly that I thoughtlessly adopt the offered role.
How, in light of that, can I possibly feel safe returning from sabbatical?
(Note, this essay is a little too long for email. Please head to Substack to read the whole thing)
The Dick on the Threshold
Back to the Realm of Pseudo-Nature. To get into the Creek where the Thrones are located, you have to either hop a fence or mountain goat down a moderately steep bank, walk under a little overpass in which local artists are in a constant paint based tug of war with city employees, and then trudge a ways through a field of bluish grey stones.
Sometimes there is a trickle of water and you’re walking downstream, stepping from half-submerged stone to stone with delicate balance if you want to keep your shoes dry. These days, the Creek is more often dried up. Chalk up another total catastrophe on the polycrisis scoreboard.
So you’re walking through the Creek, through a field of rocks, and the first rock that you see that was moved by a Creekmason is The Dick.
The Dick is not really a rock. For some unknown reason, someone overfilled a bucket with concrete and left it that way, apparently leaving the Creek to erode away the bucket. So what’s left is a big, cylindrical (shaft-like) chunk of cement that was contained by a bucket and a kind of mushroom top where the cement overflowed from the bucket’s top.
As I’ve said before, I was often stoned enough to find meaning in everything and the name The Dick was “low hanging fruit” here.
I placed it—“head” first if you’ll excuse the vulgarity—at the front of what I called the Great Retaining Wall. The Wall was a sort of masonry fence that I intended to protect the Thrones from the week or so of waste-high current that is all that most of our mild California Winters can muster.
Why did I want to greet everyone who came to the Creek with The Dick?
Primarily? I was in late adolescence—a barely-grown manchild of the ‘90s—and I thought it was funny. It also seemed like a good way to divide and deflect the water that would assault The Thrones during the coming winter.
Having recently returned from Sabbatical, I find myself prompted to reflect on the Creekmasons being a Dick-First Organization. Should the loud, upfront, childish masculine continue to divide the Creek? Should phallic energy deflect the watery emotional aspect that finds its way to us?
The railroad tracks lead in that direction. Can we knock the train off course?
I am a speaker for the Creekmason platform. Can I use my voice to establish the practice of mindful alchemy as a way to end the unconscious re-enactment of abusive patriarchy? Can my actions instill the value of repair and restoration as primary?
The healing, after all, is in the return. Isn’t that the point of community? To orient to seeking harmony, but in the inevitable event of rupture, regrow stronger?
Am I up to it?
Can I be Trusted with Leadership
That joke about the loud, upfront, childish masculine on the threshold is as close as I intend to come in this essay to “vague-booking”—the practice of going on Facebook and calling out someone specific using very vague language and never actually saying their name.
I am also not going to “name and shame.” I think that kind of cannibalistic infighting is one of the primary problems with Leftist organizations today.
But I will attempt an honest reflection that inquires into the traits that I personally share with the Odd Men that are often cast out from Liminal and Leftist social organizations and movements. The traits that I believe I share with people who might be labeled problematic or even abusive.
When I went on Sabbatical from the Creekmasons in October of 2024, I shared a few Big Questions that occasioned my departure. In Resonance, I began a series exploring the answers I have arrived at by tackling the Big Question of whether it is possible to create something that “matters” without becoming addicted to pixelated digital validation.
Another Big Question was: Can I be trusted to lead this organization?
Can I be trusted with influence and leadership even if I do continue? I am exploring the ways in which my shadow would be activated by a leadership position in the Creekmasons. I don't want to be anyone's favorite person or guru. I just don't trust myself—or anyone—to avoid harm with that power. I don’t believe any pedestalized leader can avoid hypnotizing others into behaving in ways contrary to their incarnations' highest expression.
I should expand. At minimum, a charismatic guru can easily redirect seekers toward practices that aren’t right for the kind of brain they have and the kind of trauma they’re here to metabolize. At worst, the Alternative Spirituality scene is plagued with countless stories of physical, financial, sexual, and emotional abuse.
It’s a lot. Why am I worried that I might transgress in such heinous ways?
Why the Self-Trust Issues?
The acculturation process for 90’s boys fucked me up.
Looking at the media I grew up on, there are the obvious examples of relationships that glorified the “tormented man who can’t help being a monster” archetype. Examples of vampiric men:
Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Edward from Twilight
Stefan from Vampire Diaries
The music of the era promoted abuse too, for example:
Push by Matchbox 20:
“I wanna push you around / well I will / well I will”
Liar by Taking Back Sunday
“I'm an addict for dramatics / I confuse the two for love”
Kim by Eminem
“Quit crying, bitch! Why do you always make me shout at you?”
And then there were images of what a romantic relationship looked like that were incredibly toxic. Take Ryan Gosling in The Notebook…
Remember the scene where he’s threatening to kill himself by letting go of the ferris wheel she’s on if she doesn’t go on a date with him?
Remember when he starts beating himself in the face to punish her for setting boundaries?
That’s what I was told romance looked like.
I believe my personality is, in essence, a combination of every person I’ve ever met, every book I’ve read, and every idea I’ve imbibed. Some aspect of me inevitably absorbed programming from the culture to develop abusive tendencies.
Defining “Dick-First”
This list of a broken patriarchy’s defaults—abusive behaviors—is sourced from adrienne maree brown’s masterful Emergent Strategy.
you make agreements or set boundaries and they get crossed or broken, and/or you can’t hold the agreements/boundaries yourself.
there is a culture of blaming or dishonesty that breaks down trust over time.
arguments are really confusing and/or repetitive—you can’t tell what you are arguing about,
the arguments have no boundaries or containers, you keep returning to issues you felt were resolved, or you keep losing track of your own values and center in the process.
you feel like a core part of yourself is compromised or not welcome, and/or you want to change a core aspect of another person or group.
you feel bullied or bullying, scared or scary, emotionally unsafe.
(Abridged from the original eleven items down to only what I feel I have been most often guilty of myself.)
When I consider an Alcoholics Anonymous style amends tour, it is clear to me that I’ve created a ton of harm through my unskillful behavior over the years. I semi-frequently consider trying to dig up the contact information of people who I was a monster to in high school before quickly deciding that their tormentor popping back up in their life out of the blue would probably just re-traumatize them.
Are All Abusers Really Evil?
I don’t know if a lot of people who encounter abuse—or who commit it—or who just judge it from the sidelines—understand the psychological mechanics of it.
People say that my capacity for empathy, my desire to use healthy, effective skills whenever possible, and my aspiration to grow and evolve every day disqualify me for the “abuser” title. It’s nice that people want me to believe in myself and that they see me as generally harmless. That would be comforting.
But I have harmed.
I know this to be true. My regret and self-shaming torment doesn’t negate the damage I’ve instinctually perpetrated on people who didn’t deserve it.
I acknowledge that this is the part of me that sounds like Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The vampire melodramatically tormented that he has to kill to exist.
Still, few actually know that what makes a monster is (at least sometimes) not an intentional decision to cause harm. Sometimes it is just a train chugging down the tracks laid for it. A reactive machine, habitually responding to whatever set it in motion and following through with inertia.
Having been on both sides of abusive relationships and awake enough to reflect on the dynamics, I feel very confident that the “strategies” that abusers employ to get their victims in a disempowered state are often the result of instincts, not schemes.
I have watched my mouth automatically spin out a gaslighting reframe of hurtful words I’ve just uttered one too many times to believe otherwise.
I have noted the way that I am prone to instinctively finding fault in others’ relationships with third parties, as if I am trying to isolate them into relying only on me.
I have witnessed and observed my own habit of dredging up supposedly solved conflicts. Long before I learned to curb it, I regularly regretted derailing what could have been productive, connective conversations.
None of that involved any calculation on my part. I didn’t understand the strategies behind those habits whatsoever until I started hearing them brought up in the context of “abusive behavior” on social media.
Mostly Human Monsters
Look, I don’t fully buy into the “Myth of Pure Evil” argument made by thinkers like Charles Eisenstein—the assertion that it is nothing but a fictitious mental shortcut based on black and white thinking that pure evil exists. No rule for reality is true 100% of the time, even a rule that itself insists on nuance.
Even the nuance is nuanced.
However, I strongly suspect that despite the probable existence of truly incurable monsters, 99% of people who get the label of monster are just living their programming, traumas, and attachment style with no self-reflective capability.
Or.
With limited self-efficacy. Limited belief in their own ability to intentionally choose what character traits to exemplify and what behaviors to engage in.
In my experience, the belief in a narrative about yourself that you have all the agency you need to live in alignment with your values is actually vital to, well, living in alignment with your values.
When I was stuck with a sense of learned helplessness, blaming my upbringing, my diagnosis, society, substances, or other bad influences for my problems, those problems expressed themselves through my behavior with greater regularity, explosivity, and harm.
It wasn’t until I enacted a plan to radically shift my life toward agency through working out the muscles of integrity and honesty that I was able to begin to believe that I could do things on purpose.
That I could simply make a choice and follow through.
It would be fair to wonder here how self-awareness and self-efficacy can create a safer, more connected Creekmasons.
Let’s Refocus on Healthy Community
Not just in this article, but as a society.
Founded by someone unable to shake the shadow of an “abuser” self-diagnosis, the Creekmasons have historically been a Dick-First organization. But under what social theorist bell hooks termed “White Supremacist, Capitalist, Colonialist Patriarchy” what organization is not Dick-First?
I want to do something different. That’s always been the goal with the Creekmasons.
It’s why I started a lateral collective that aims for mutual uplifting of artists by artists rather than a Geoffe Channel where I invite parasocial worship and spotlight.
It’s why, when I was asked to frame the collective of weirdos hanging out together on Discord, I did so relying on the invented (but currently suspended) model of an Anarcho-Indie Publishing Collective heavily inspired by anarchist Greek intellectual Yanis Varoufakis.
I was Dick-First in my personal relationships because I had no exposure to positive and healthy models of how to exist in that social context. Similarly, we have all been raised in a society with few viable models for community.
The “Meaning Crisis” involves the breakdown of religious life in American culture. People aren’t congregating in congregations anymore. Our kids don’t play outdoors with friends—they’re isolated inside with screens. We don’t trust our neighbors. We’re bowling alone instead of in bowling leagues.
Cloistered in our dark and lonely rooms, we’re turning to ChatGPT as our companion, lover, and guru. Often I find that the only “person” I feel safe confiding in is not a person at all. The odds of abuse seem somehow lower in an entity programmed to be cloyingly sycophantic.
Despite two thirds of Americans claiming the title at one point, no one even belongs to social clubs like the Freemasons anymore. How could the Creekmasons stand a chance?
In his New Optimist manifesto, Homo Deus, historian Yuval Noah Harrari shares that for the first time, suicide has surpassed violence as a cause of death. What a strange bragging right that is for humanity. We’re spending so little time around one another that instead of getting into deadly conflicts, we’re doing what the influencers who are our only friends call “unaliving ourselves.” How often because of alienation and isolation?
Does it seem a little like we’ve been de-skilled by a system that benefits from us not having solidarity? You may wish to rely on your neighbors, start a commune where you know everyone’s name, or make use of a proverbial village to help watch your kids, but do you really have the social skills to manage the inevitable conflict?
As a member of Jonathon Haidt’s screen-raised, indoor-childhood-veteran “Anxious Generation,” do you know how to cope when you are humiliated at the hands of the unfamiliar?
Can you deal with being forced to have a direct and difficult confrontation about an Odd Man who is making everyone uncomfortable or a fellow farmer who isn’t doing their share of your intentional community’s chores?
Whether there exists some vast malicious cabal influencing world events and tearing us out of communion with our neighbors, the way society is organized just so happens to reinforce the social isolation that makes collective action impossible. If we have to rely on the police to solve all our conflicts, if we fear being around strangers, if we automatically enact the Dick-First programming of patriarchy, who benefits? Not you. Not me.
Dick-First structures neither benefit men—who commit suicide and die of stress-related heart disease at much higher rates in patriarchal societies—nor the women they oppress.
So let’s do something different.
Three Strategies to See Myself as Safe… Strategy One: Alchemize the Train Right off its Tracks
Alchemy gets a bad rap as the backwards superstition that preceded its etymological relative, chemistry. It has a reputation for making geniuses like Isaac Newton so obsessed with turning lead into gold that they lost it and started distilling their own piss with fire, mazes of tubing, and a menagerie of oddly shaped beakers.
Most people in the Liminal Trickster Mystic subculture agree that no one intended the “lead into gold” thing literally, though. Alchemy was never about infinite wealth.
It’s better thought of as taking the base aspects—lead—of our personalities and transmuting them so that the gold underneath can begin to shine through.
Base aspects of the self like society’s Dick-First programming of toxicity, abuse culture, and patriarchy.
And how does the transmutation work?
First the woo woo take: We’re here, incarnated, to have experiences.
We’re deepening the conscious appreciation of the universe by the universe—because we are the universe experiencing itself.
So to get over a behavior, we have to truly, consciously feel everything there is to feel about it.
Once that box has been checked, the karma is burned off, and the habit can dissipate.
If the universe learned what it needed to learn through your specific incarnation, you can move on. If not, you’ll spiral back into relapse.
Too Woo? Let’s Make it Practical.
How does transmutation work? It looks like watching myself—shedding all distraction—as I rapidly backpedal to twist an insult into a gaslight that will make someone else feel crazy for questioning whether I have actually insulted them.
For years I harbored the pattern of dropping some vitriolic bomb and then twisting plausible deniability in my favor as I reframed it into some less barbed thing that I “really meant to say.” The fucked up fact is that the thing “I really meant to say” would be closer to whatever I actually believed. It would be the truer statement. So why was I hurling these insults at people?
The fire that burns the piss in this version of alchemy is the depth of conscious awareness that attends to the behavior. As I watched myself perform that same toxic, if not abusive, pattern again and again, I could note the pressure that arose in my chest just before I unleashed the venom.
Over time, I connected the dots. I saw my behavior was essentially a venting off of difficult-to-endure physical emotions or feelings.
This was how the programming I was acculturated with was manifesting in my behavior. The heat and pressure in my chest was like the scratch on your face that makes you pinch the bridge of your nose, unconsciously nonverbally communicating exasperation.
The avoidant, boundary crossing, unconsciously cruel outburst was the reactive behavior I’d picked up through mimicry. But it was a reaction to a real urge, rooted in a real—and often universal—feeling.
I learned to travel back up the stream of consciousness to look at where those feelings came from. What was really bothering me? And could there be other, more skillful, more effective, more wholesome ways to manage them.
These were impossible questions during the decades I was sleepwalking through the whole scenario.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
~ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
But how to widen that space enough to wedge in some self-efficacy?
Alchemy as Gum on the Tracks
Dan Harmon uses a metaphor in one episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast from a few years ago that I’ve found inspiring, influential and sticky.
If you’re trying to quit smoking, he says, just fully watch yourself every time you’re having a cigarette. Note the flavor. Note the feelings. Feel the burn.
Every time you do this, in Harmon’s words, you are putting a piece of bubblegum on the train tracks of your automatic behavior. Your habit might be to follow the railroad tracks toward automatically lighting up a lung dart every time you start your car. It may even be a process that happens without your conscious brain’s involvement.
But over and over again, watching yourself smoke (or behave in toxic, Dick-First ways) eventually you begin to alchemize the pattern.
A single piece of gum is nothing to a train. But if you employ mindfulness enough times, the mountain of sticky pink goop you can add to the railroad tracks of your automatic habits will, eventually, be enough to derail the train.
Enough to liberate you from the specific unwanted behavior.
What this means is that eventually you will have experienced the behavior with enough depth and intensity that the pattern can no longer play out unconsciously. You’ll recognize the early warnings and be able to get yourself to safety.
You will have learned to deprogram yourself.
I have watched my own abusive tendencies over the last several years. I’ve put plenty of gum on the tracks and a lot of unwanted behavior has been derailed. Through making changes, I have learned to believe I can make changes.
I feel I can finally say I am self-aware enough—and self-efficacious enough—to expect to present myself to the world as a generally good dude.
I think I was always basically good, but these automatic programs obscured it. They were the clouds blocking out the sun. They were the instincts society had installed that have made people, especially women, feel uncomfortable around me my whole life.
Letting those instincts go—alchemically burning them off—is step one of feeling like I am a safe person to be publicly visible. To be graffitiing these words on the walls of the internet on behalf of the Creekmasons.
Strategy Two: Recognize that it is Impossible to be Publicly Visible and Wholly Avoid Projections Rooted in Dick-First Ideology
In the words of the Four Agreements, my job as de facto leader is not taking others’ projections about what a masculine leader is personally.
Prior to my sabbatical, as I noted in the quote back at the start, I’d become downright paranoid about becoming someone’s favorite person, guru, or parasocial, pedestalized friend-idea. It’s easy to look at these concerns as egotistical and self-aggrandizing. It’s easy to say, “just don’t be a leader if you’re concerned about the responsibility to wield authority safely.”
But through personal experience, I have recognized that even when you’re trying to start a clearly self-described anarchist, leaderless organization, people will project their idea of a leader onto you. I’ve been surprised more than once by people calling me the special founder who is “responsible” for creating and nurturing the energy of the Creekmasons. (I thought we were co-creating this together!)
Those projections others often saddle visible people with? They tend to be Dick-First.
Whether I’ve alchemized the toxic masculinity I was programmed with or not, as a visible figure in the Creekmason community, the assumptions about the Dick-First way that power is wielded and expressed will be projected onto me.
It seemed like an intractable problem.
Here’s the hard fact, though. Unless I am locked in my room, I am going to be projected on.
To be visible is to be the object of what Patanjali called in his Yoga Sutras “the mental modifications of reality” that others need to learn to let go of as a part of their own spiritual journey.
Why are so many “mental modifications”—narratives we spin about our perceptions—Dick-First? Well obviously, the projectors grew up with the same horrible cultural influences as me. But as another angle, that which is projected onto the most visible people in a spiritual sangha are often echoes of a broken family system that needs to be processed.
Most frequently, they are the ideas about masculine authority that people still harbor from their traumatic families of origin. According to Steven Cope, writing about his guru’s fall from grace in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, we tend to see our spiritual family as an ideal version of the family we wish we had been nourished by as actual children.
As a result, if someone had a stern father growing up, they will often either wrestle antagonistically or submit obsequiously to anything they perceive as male authority. Whether I want to be authoritative or not. Whether I want to be male or not. They’ll still see a shiny-booted dictator or an all-knowing superdad.
It’s my job to have alchemized my Dick-First shadow enough to not allow those projections to become the role I play. To not be tempted into believing other people’s ideas about who and what I am and enacting the damage and harm that those toxically masculine traits can only enact.
Or they’ll project other ideas about men with power. Ideas about philandering, abuse, charlatanism, megalomania. Many of our uninitiated leaders truly do express these aspects of our social indoctrination as males.
And even while consciously looking out for these gotchas, others still are tempted into behaving in those ways through the opportunities that their coven-mates provide.
Those peers have been set on a path to alchemize their karma, heal their trauma, and process their own programming. The visible person sitting on group meditation calls with them can sometimes just be the impersonal vehicle for their own Work. And as such, they’ll give that person a role to play in the drama that teaches them what they came to learn.
Crazy Wisdom, the Dick-First Approach to Karma
Some say the cure to this is to add wood to the fire.
Have you heard of Crazy Wisdom? It's the belief that even behaviors that look “Crazy” to us unenlightened schmucks can still be so profoundly “Wise” that they are in everyone’s best interest. These sorts of gurus are said to be so wholly actualized that they are immune to creating further karma.
The results are predictable. Crazy Wisdom often just looks like an excuse for abusing people who project ideas about abusive authority. The excuse seems to boil down to, “you needed to work through your trauma, so I gave you more so you could face it head on.”
The Crazily Wise guru is offered a role to play by a hurting member of their community, and they don’t hesitate. They dive right in and provide all the harm that the community member projects as a likelihood.
In addition to projection, there’s a good chance Crazy Wise gurus that get into scandals are expressing their own programmed shadow or trauma. Hurt people hurting people, and excusing and enabling it through self-aggrandizement.
I’m committed to not fall into the insane trap of believing that knowing a little bit of lingo about awakening makes me impervious to causing harm.
There’s wisdom hiding adjacent to this extremism though.
If we discard the absolutist “can do no wrong” and “doesn’t need to concern himself with normal mortals’ ethics” nonsense, there is actually something valid about being so empty and willing to help others examine roles that they try to fit you into.
As a visible person, I believe I can remain stable and equanimous without taking either hate or adulation as a reflection on me.
And by not reacting to or being drawn into the narratives that are directed my way, I can even help those who have some interest in growth with their own management of the effects of the transference they are experiencing.
I can help others bring mindfulness to their own indoctrination. I can chew some of the gum that ends up on the tracks of others’ programming.
And doing so contributes to the alchemy of patriarchy not just on an individual level or community level. It plays a part in resonating that Dick-First lead into gold civilization-wide.
It helps ensure that the art we make for the generations growing up now will not have toxic, if tormented, monsters as glorified relationship goals.
Sounds good. But what about the times that I will inevitably fuck up?
Strategy Three: Gently Tend to the Spirits that Emergently Arise from the Complexity of Group Dynamics
Here’s real emergent complexity: Start with one ant. It wanders aimlessly on the field. As do ten of them. A hundred interact with vague hints of patterns. But put thousands of them together and they form a society with job specialization, construct bridges or rafts out of their bodies that float for weeks, build flood-proof underground nests with passageways paved with leaves, leading to specialized chambers with their own microclimates, some suited for farming fungi and others for brood rearing. A society that even alters its functions in response to changing environmental demands. No blueprint, no blueprint maker.
~ Robert Sapolsky, Determined
A system is more than the sum of its parts. Any community—but perhaps especially a spiritual sangha composed of neuro-spicy individuals—will self-organize into patterns that are totally unpredictable.
Even if I am as careful as possible to alchemize my shadow and express the positive, healthy, skillful, wholesome behavior of a visible community member. Even if I manage to remain empty and equanimous enough to not take projection personally. To not allow myself to live down to the expectations expressed by my peers. Even with all those safeguards, our whole sangha is still at the mercy of emergent patterns that are unpredictable and impossible to prevent by examining the parts—individual psyches, behaviors, and habits—involved.
My hope is that there is a simple heuristic that will function well enough to shift the influence of this inevitable property of systems in the best possible direction.
I am hoping that by intentionally prioritizing harmony in my continuing assessments of my skillful behavior, I can tend to the emergent vibes with intuitive grace.
A commitment to harmony is the mental shortcut that inspires alchemy. Harmony is the principle that reminds me to not take things personally. And in complex scenarios for which the outcomes arise from something less knowable than the mechanistic interactions between individuals, I’m hoping that prioritizing harmony first is what will ensure more connection, resonance, intimacy and community.
But again, what if I fuck up? Even hoping for harmony I can easily step on toes, hurt feelings, cross boundaries I didn’t know were there, and run afoul of the egregoric projections of the group as a whole. In other words, I can transgress against the group’s unspoken but co-created story about who and what we are as an egregore—an entity more than the sum of its parts.
What then?
Importantly, as a visible Creekmason, I hope I can model the right way to gracefully fuck up. When I create disharmony, I hope to be held accountable by the other ‘masons. I hope to be told I’ve crossed a line.
Please feel authorized to forthrightly communicate clear boundaries. To kindly, but firmly call out instances of perceived Dick-First behavior. As long as you keep mutual growth and communal harmony as your core aim, maybe we can both do a little alchemy.
Most of all I pray that when these incidents occur, I can maintain the clear headedness to apologize, take ownership, and make amends.
There is something to be said for modeling a healthy way to apologize, to set unflappable boundaries, and to—maybe most of all—re-integrate as a result of conflict in a way that makes the restored relationship stronger.
As they say in Community Building, Norming comes after Storming. Groups perform highest together when they gracefully resolve chaos.
A community surviving its fights is good. Better would be that it grows in intimacy and resonance through the conflict. That’s the opportunity every conflict offers, after all.
Every rupture heralds a repair that leads to a stronger bond.
Like tearing a muscle to help it grow.
Let’s Grow Together
As I’ve said throughout this essay, I have roots as a deplorable male. I have exhibited toxic, Dick-First behaviors, habits and beliefs. The Creek has been divided in some ways by the toxic childish masculine since its inception and there are ways in which many of us are each partly to blame.
But I can only speak for myself.
To those who have been hurt by my delayed alchemy of my toxic masculine shadow—and there are a lot of you out there: exes, friends, coworkers, co-seekers, family—I am deeply sorry.
To anyone who has projected their idea of a leader onto me and found me wanting, I have a different kind of apology. Maybe a challenge. When you, I, and whoever else each alchemize our tendencies and allergies toward the masculine, I wonder how our relationship with masculine authority expressed by others might change. I can always be a better leader, follower and lateral peer. Maybe you can too? I hope we can commit to nurturing one another’s growth by taking turns embodying each of those roles.
I am committed to harmony moving forward. And that means contributing to the end of our Dick-First systems. Ending them firstly through alchemy of my own conditioning, and then through my communities’, finally fractally bubbling up all the way to our current incarnation of problematic Patriarchy with a capital P.
Let’s heal stronger.
The same way a cigar is just a cigar, through alchemy, emptiness, and harmony, maybe I’ll start to see my life’s various buckets-overflowing-with-cement as nothing more than someone’s weird construction fuck-up.
Related
Alchemizing Coal to Gold: a Shadow Work Ritual for Self-Love
1: Shadow (Yeesh, Geoff. Your Journal used to be Emo AF…)
The New Normal: an Epidemic of Loneliness Calling for Self-Love
I’m having this consistent “Social Anxiety” experience with my in-person hangouts that is pretty uncomfortable.
Bravo. Love the self-awareness you’ve grown into, the ownership you’ve expressed, and the strategies for going forward. I’m in a community that has stumbled along with our various allergies and projections of leadership unto others and ourselves and it’s refreshing to see someone propose a healthy way forward that we can experiment with and hopefully model. Thank you for sharing and best of luck in communing.