Something is brewing

The Path

My path in life has been an interesting one thus far.

Like most, my childhood was both sufficient and deficient.

My parents gave me and my siblings a tremendous effort, and have eclipsed both their own parents’ effort and outcomes. For this, they are by definition - successful.

Like most however, this isn't enough. They only can get us so far.

They get us to self-sufficiency - we get ourselves to enlightenment.

That is the most direct way of speaking about my life thus far - rounding off self-sufficiency and pursing enlightenment.

Like many I was joined at the hip to the group when I left the secondary education system. Like others in my cohort, I believed university to be a necessary pre-requisite to achieving even the most basic of life outcomes, and so I did.

It took me two years of chaos, social anxiety, failure, misandry, and uncertainty to realise that while Science and IT were definitely interests, they weren't my formal career path - but maybe just a part.

This series of setbacks (devastating but necessary) was the ignition for the most serious of searches for meaning and better living - whatever that meant at the time.

A quote from Einstein has always stuck with me:

You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.

With this in mind, I knew I needed new information, peers, habits, beliefs.

I began reading, trying to learn about myself, the world, the universe, humans, men, women, children, society, religion, basically anything I could use to improve and learn.

On the journey of learning more about yourself, one inevitably ends up at personality. The first stone of my path was the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test. I had encountered the MBTI before in school but got a personality type that didn't quite match at the time, and so I dismissed it. It wasn't until I reperformed the MBTI test (maybe it was because I was alone), I was retyped. From ESFJ to INFJ.

Reading the default pages assigned to the INFJ type, on Strengths and weaknesses, romantic relationships, friendships, parenthood, career paths, workplace habits etc... I found myself reading, to this day, the single most intimate description of me as a person I'd ever encountered in life - in totality. It changed my life.

As a somewhat disconnected or aloof young man, still yet to unfurl my social skills and qualities, I'd never had something, or someone, understand me so deeply.

Reading everything I could about the INFJ and the MBTI I encountered the commercial ceiling of its potential in my journey. The MBTI however, is based on a theory of psychological types developed by Carl Jung, there was another level - The Big Five. I asked Grok (Twitter/X's AI) to best summarise the difference between MBTI and the Big Five model:

The MBTI and Big Five are distinct personality frameworks. MBTI uses four binary dichotomies—Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving—to sort people into one of 16 types, like INTP or ESFJ. It’s intuitive, type-based, and popular for self-discovery or team-building but lacks strong scientific support and assumes fixed preferences.

In contrast, the Big Five measures five continuous traits—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—on a spectrum, offering nuanced, individualized profiles. It’s widely validated, used in research and hiring, and better predicts behavior, but it’s less narrative-driven.

Essentially, MBTI puts you in a box; Big Five maps you on a graph.

I’d hit the edges of my box, so I went to the raw theory that ensconces the practice - The Big Five Model. Also known as the Five-Factor model of personality, or OCEAN, the Big Five are a series of five scales that we can measure individuals personalities on. They are scales, so you can be anywhere on each of the five dimensions, they are not positive or negative, every trait is a double-edged sword - they just are.

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Upon completing the Big Five questionnaire I was greeted with my results, and some things stuck out. I was 96th percentile in Openness and I was 86th percentile in Agreeableness.

After much learning on these traits, I have come to some conclusions about them, and how they will affect my life going forward. The biggest revelation came from a series of quotes from Jordan Peterson about Openness:

People who are open, it's creativity, essentially. Creativity and verbal fluency together make up openness.

Artists are contending with the unknown, and they’re possessed by it. They have a personality trait of openness that makes them do that, and they can’t even help it. They’re cursed with the necessity of putting a foot out into the unknown and making sense of it.

Open people need novelty, or else they just wither on the vine.

I had more of my mother’s creativity in me than I previously considered — more creativity than 96% of the population, actually, and it wasn't something I could avoid and still be happy. Creativity was the path.

Closing one, opening another

With new material and information, I made the lateral move to film at the same university and began my next journey.

I got 4 weeks into my new course before the world erupted and everything got locked down - COVID-19. I returned to the world broken, addicted, broke, purposeless, I was a very different person, as was the world. This is the low point where my formal Therapy process started.

The process of unravelling the parts of yourself you refuse to acknowledge. The Shadow.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Heraclitus

One day while just looking for cool things to watch I found a YouTube channel, called Galahad Eridanus and his Substack. The first video I watched was an intelligent, abstract, cinematic, skitzo mess and I was all for it (the video). Meant with the highest regard, its the type of content you need to spend years studying (or living) to even begin to approach.

I had found a channel making not only exactly the content I wanted to make, but also the very things in life I was searching for. What are the chances? After finishing the first video with mild comprehension I went to his channel and watched the next video. In this video he explains (like I am right now) how he came to make the video, and how it started with a period of insomnia starting around late 2020, he also mentions a symbol that he says would be the most important one I'd see in my life. It was a Z or an N (depending on rotation), although it didn't matter what orientation because the symbol represents the beginning and the end. Start and finish. The hinge.

Something in me said 'fuck it, check.' I went to my 2020 diary and flipped to early November and on the 6th of November written right there was the symbol he'd mentioned. There was another symbol there above it, although I didn't consider that important, until recently, when another synchronicity occurred.

I had just start a new job, and met a guy there that was similar to myself, had similar esoteric knowledge and naturally we clicked quickly. On one of our first couple shifts together we were talking about odd words, and I mentioned the word Sonder to him.

Sonder

Noun

the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles

Not long after, we had another shift together where he mentioned going out with his girlfriend and a colleague for food and drinks, they had visited a few places, at the last place he looks up at the business signage, and it read Sonder Desserts.

It was this second synchronicity that gave me pause, and I went back to reconsider the forgotten second symbol written in the diary.

After some research, I found it was a Norse glyph called Dagaz

The rune represents dawn, enlightenment, and the awakening of one's true self. It's associated with sudden change, profound transformation, and the dispelling of ignorance. The dawn or change to day. It can only be interpreted positively because light has no negative, thats just an absence of light.

With the added contextualisation of the Nordic glyph Dagaz, the first symbol, the Z, came to represent a signal, from the universe itself, that I'm on the right track. Its like everything in my life up to this point has been in preparation for what's to come.

Stick around,

More to come,

Obviously...