How to walk the tightrope between social burnout and agonising isolation?

I've been planning to write a post about solitude, loneliness and isolation for a while. Is solitude good or bad? Everyone thinks it's bad. And I'm crazy I got myself into it. Then why the heck did I get myself into it? Is hiding yourself away in the country for months without having a face-to-face …

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On hyper-empathy in the age of cities, strangers, mass and social media

Despite my attempts at basic witchcraft training in that regard, when attempting to leave my hermit’s cocoon and participate further in (some semblance of a) social life, I see the same old problem up-surging, the same ones that brought me into hermitage in the first place. There are people who are unbelievably wounded and whose …

Shadow work in depression hacks

As part of a certification course I've recently forced myself to read "Owning your own shadow" by Robert A. Johnson. This was on the way, literally on the train to a lengthy and intense extended family visit back in Poland. The book initially irritated the logic-and-facts oriented part of my mind with its vague metaphysical …

The new strategy with grief, sadness and depression

Inspired by almost a year of working through Karla McLaren's Dynamic Emotional Integration model, and more recently specifically by Jessica Moore's articulate video on situational depression (the one that comes closest to my felt truth on the matter so far), I have recently on a long train ride taken up the resolution to try out …

The queer book of body and emotions

I have been trying now for some time to formulate the overarching theme of the personal research I've been doing over the last years, seemingly jumping across areas, taking up new topics and dropping them, migrating across topics. It would be nice to write a book – actually that's what I'd already set my mind …

Guitar messing about making up chords (sound journal)

So it seems like I can mostly only write when I'm down; or very solitary. Seems like that's when I have the drive to. https://soundcloud.com/sasha_tramp/morning-guitar-improv-april-10 It seems though that there is still the possibility of talking through music, typically the more direct form of expression. This morning I decided to play around with modifying chord …

One year of hyper-empathy

This blog is about a year old now. Since my life has shifted quite a bit since I've started writing it, I keep thinking about re-branding or re-conceptualising what this is about. Actually the subject I might have the most things to say on recently is "survival in Berlin". Perhaps it's also relationships. Yes, I …

Getting half a handle on some basic trauma-digestion processes

I usually don't write about the good times on here because writing is mostly my tool for getting through the tougher times. When I'm well, I stay off screens; I stay outdoors, or around people without distracting myself with electronic devices. Some thoughts have been circulating lately around the topic of trauma healing (in this …

More ropes for traversing despair and depression; perhaps on perinatal trauma

In a "better", by most measures, life situation, still waves of this "post-war" type of apocalyptic depression return at critical moments. I guess I call it post-war because the inner image my eye sees is perhaps akin to how Warsaw after the uprising gets pictured (below an artist's rendering, I believe). The inner image is …

How Berlin converted me to Marxism-Leninism

Well, not precisely. But in one of the cuddling sessions, N. said, matter shapes consciousness – rather than the reverse (or perhaps, much more than the reverse). I have not invested the time into researching whether this line of pop-marxism from the lips of my punk-dyed psychedelic-ingesting Berlin queer friend represents the theoretical plot accurately …