Salt for the Eclipse: Autumn Q&A

Hello. It's the third Tuesday of October. As I've hoped for a while, I am now finally launching my seasonal Q&A series. The answers are available for all to read, while the questions come from paying subscribers. I've meant to offer this as a counterpoint to the longer-form, intentionally focused, self-selected topics I write about once a week; for people who subscribed in hope of reading my thoughts on something, anything, including matters that don't necessarily fall within the normal scope of Salt for the Eclipse, this is an opportunity to hear them.

Even if you follow me through either of the two social media platforms where I actually maintain a presence, or if you have the ability to reach me by other digital or physical means, the answers I give here are more deliberately considered and involving than I could promise to give in those other contexts. That does not mean every answer will be an essay unto itself, but it will still be nuanced, meditative, and respectful of your own time and energy spent asking me. Also, of course, it's a way for me to be in better dialogue with readers who only know me in this space.

For the autumn Q&A, I've received two questions. Note that in drumming up awareness of this posting series I haven't mentioned whether people will be credited by name for their answers or not. Given this neglect on my part, I will err on the side of privacy and not attach names to questions today, particularly since I wouldn't be certain of what to use. However, in the future I will say that subscribers who e-mail questions should feel free to note what name (if any) to use when attributing them. Also, for today's instance, feel free to e-mail me again and request an edit with your name if so desired; I will update the version of this post on the main website.

Let us now proceed.

Q: How do you think having a child will change you (or your values/life/lifestyle)?

I know the answer to this that I've heard in advance from dozens of people is I will never be able to anticipate what an enormous change having a child would instigate, only to know it would be immense and irrevocable. However, while I routinely consider the ineffability or the mystery of this matter, regarding it as one of the very reasons I wish to undertake such a journey, I am nothing if not someone who feels driven to set my gaze further than whatever the conventional wisdom around me appears to be. Therefore I'll try to answer this question with what I genuinely think...

... and the caveat that I still do not regard my having a child as inevitable. It's interesting to read the definite future tense — "will change you" — when I have been forcing myself for years to think purely in the conditional tense. So many things have interfered and I am now trying at an age, 37 years, when there are far less guarantees. No matter how much my desire to have a child is virtually an absolute, I have yet to learn whether this desire is linked with my fate or exists despite it.

This uncertainty makes it harder to weigh what is really going to happen even if pregnancy and childbirth come to pass (or if I adopt, which I feel less positively about trying but will not discuss today). It feels easier, despite my yearnings, to not anticipate any major disruptions to my life as I know it. Often it feels as if every time I think on reproduction and its implications, I am only experiencing waking dreams about things that happen to other people, not to me.

Nonetheless, you've given some concrete examples of things that might change supposing my dream comes true, and I like having something to dig my teeth into here, so here we go.

Changing "me":

Identity is both what we make of it and also an illusion created through our relations with other beings. I think that if I managed to have a child, it would be up to me what language I used to describe myself as a parent, and even up to me whether I chose to remain a parent; that status could be surrendered even on an ontological level, whether or not it were morally right to do so. However, that status could also be removed by the child in turn. And regardless, after bringing this child into my life and the world, I would never again be able to describe myself as someone who had never been a parent. The rest of my conscious existence would be modulated on some level by this detail. All of this may sound fairly abstract, but I don't see it that way. I mean that (much like my psilocybin experience that's addressed in the next question) this is a cosmic event that cannot be undone, and my identity would change as a literal death of my old self and the creation of a new one.

Indeed, even my body chemistry and anatomy would be altered forever, maybe only in subtle ways but maybe in grander ones; it isn't puberty or physical gender transition, but it's comparable. This physiological change is itself something I actively want to go through, welcoming it. I want a body that has created another body and nurtured it. I wish to become such a being.

Changing my values:

In this regard I'm less sure of what to predict. I would like to forecast no change at all. What I regard as my values can be described with phrases like integrity, good faith, good relation, compassion, generosity, reliability, consent, empathy, obedience to the land and sky and my god, balance between opposing energies, and choosing regeneration over entropy. It seems hard to imagine why having a child would change any of this unless the stress of caring for a child in this age eroded my ability to meaningfully abide by those values at all. The one distinction I can really imagine is just that I would feel obliged to follow those values more closely as a direct role model to someone very young who depended on me. Of course a child's ethics are up for them to determine, not me, but I would like them to see my own ethics in action and I'd try to avoid hurting their chances at prioritizing anything I found truly unconscionable. But all of this is still about how and why I would choose to express my values, not what the values really were.

Perhaps it's worth noting that I have only known so many people close to me who have had children themselves, and very few live physically close, so I do not have insights into their own parenting and I could not tell you if their own values seem to have changed. When I think of parenthood changing values I largely imagine bourgeois families whose children become school-age and suddenly the parents start to have bizarre opinions about progressive curricula. Personally I find most schools not progressive enough and would prefer to homeschool among fellow leftists, but even if that weren't what happened I still imagine I would show up at school board meetings less than meetings of environmental concern. My hypothetical child deserves a good education, but even more than that they deserve safe water, air, and soil.

Changing my life(style):

This would assuredly happen and feed into other ways that my identity would change. I have tried to anticipate this the most, if I anticipate anything. I currently spend a good deal of time doing things that would inherently be impeded by needing to care for a baby, young child, adolescent. I can only multitask writing with other activities that take place where I'm sitting to write. Engaging in sex and kink with my owner, and potentially other people, is a major source of fulfillment that also could not happen as often, nor could we attend kink-related events without a completely separate childcare plan. I do not see non-sexual ritual activity being impacted so much, comparatively, but it would also become important to conduct such activities with an awareness that a young person was a potential witness and that I would need to consider how much to deliberately involve them, or allow them to involve themselves, or leave them out and let them decide their (spi)ritual beliefs and practices without me. Lastly, supporting a child costs so much that even if I found a better paying job in the near future, I could not expect that salary and my owner's to carry all of us as far as the same number would carry just we two; so that would affect everything from what sort of food I could eat to how easily my home could be maintained, never mind vanilla vacation options.

Those are some major examples. I know one thing that would not change much is how I would have to work at home. I already need that at this point. I also know that although there are many hobbies I would like to pursue more deliberately, I have long since resigned myself to the fact that there are only twenty-four hours in a day. I'm unlikely to ever finally start a band even if I remain childless; though perhaps I would try a bit harder in those circumstances, it's more likely I would commit myself more deeply to the few things I'm already focused on doing. I know what most of my callings are and I know most of the things that probably don't qualify.

Circling back to the lifestyle changes that I know would happen, I also am not convinced they would have to change quite as much as some people warn me about. That is, there would still be significant alterations, but I do not accept arguments that I could never ___ again. My owner and I have discussed the potential impact to our social lives, and he is someone who's already much less inclined to venture out to socialize than to stay home and just receive guests. I crave in-person socialization more often than him overall. So a potential arrangement we've already had in mind is that for at least keeping up my presence in the local kink scene (and generally seeing friends who may or may not want to interact with a child) he would happily do parenting duties alone for a few hours while I visited other people and groups. Likewise, we're lucky to live only an hour from my sibling and sister-in-law, to whom I've long wanted to extend the following offer: if you would sometimes take our child for a long weekend, we would gladly do the same for your own children. Between that and even closer-to-home fatherly and stepmotherly support, I know my owner and I do not have to go this completely alone, even if it would be nice to have more friends with children around us too. I think this should make it less likely that I have to give up some activities as completely as I would otherwise fear.

This was an even longer answer than I anticipated, but I hope it's engaging and enlightening.

Q: Do you think the psilocybin, having unlocked certain rooms of the mind, left them unlocked when it departed? In other words, do you think it’s possible to access those places without the help of mushrooms, now that you’ve seen how to get there?

I will have a much simpler time answering this: yes.

But to elaborate at least a little and to extend the analogy, I think some rooms are fully unlocked and then others are unlocked but there isn't enough space to just open those particular doors all the time. In the latter case I mostly mean the hallucinatory factor. My visions on mushrooms were extraordinarily vivid — impossible to confuse with normal reality and yet impossible to compare with something I deliberately told myself to picture. I should mention that I did experience "flashback" hallucinations for a couple of weeks after my trip, lasting only about thirty seconds or less and largely only visible in dark rooms or behind my closed eyes, when I was just waking up or falling asleep; these were not waking-dreams so much as direct impositions of unreal things into my conscious awareness; I could tell the difference. Nevertheless, I could make the hallucinations go away by breathing deeply and focusing on something else, and now I haven't had any such flashbacks in months. I doubt I will have such experiences again unless I eat more mushrooms or try a different drug.

(Other people do not necessarily get this reprieve, for a genuine risk of taking any psychedelic drug is that although you will not develop a genuine psychotic mental illness unless you already had a high potential to do so, you can continue to have flashbacks so routinely that you may have to develop coping mechanisms around the experience and you may imagine you are becoming psychotic. This happens to more people than is usually discussed. But it also does not happen to the majority of people.)

What feels truly, permanently unlocked are a series of emotional doors. I have not cured my anxiety — I've still very much needed to continue with therapy, with taking my buspirone, and with practicing non-ironic mindfulness — but I have finally learned what it feels like to, crudely put, stop giving a shit. On a very profound and beautiful level. I have found reserves of patience, resilience, and openness to change that I did not have before. The hippies were onto something with the quest to "loosen up." I feel as if the strengths of my autism are now able to operate better with less of the downsides.

And even when I still experience fear, I think I now experience it differently. It can be visceral, primeval, fight-or-flight business, but I can more often tell myself to question whether I need to be as afraid as I am, or stop myself from thinking overly far ahead and assuming the worst-case scenario. I accept the emotion when it arises but I am less likely to let it own me. I think a lot of Dune, more than I already used to. The Water of Life, which a woman of the Bene Gesserit must consume to become a Reverend Mother, is a hallucinatory (and in this case toxic) drug that unlocks her ancestral memories and makes her unspeakably powerful. The liquid is blue, much like the liquid made from steeping Psilocybe species in water, and Frank Herbert was open about this inspiration from his own psychedelic use. I have written of the litany against fear featured in those stories — I must not fear, fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration, I will face my fear, I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone I will turn the inner eye to see its path, where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain — but now not only do I bear that in mind, I think also of what makes a Reverend Mother, and of how Paul undergoes the same ritual to become the Kwisatz Haderach, an even more powerful being whose name translates more or less as "the Shortener of the Way," seeing all linear time and existing beyond it.

The series has its problems, but I feel as if I've endured something similar and become a more powerful version of myself in the long run. And I don't know why I would need to take psilocybin more than once for that purpose. It seems to have served that already. Simply remembering the experience is enough for me to draw on new reserves of strength. If/when I have another trip, it will either be because I sense the mushrooms have some new lesson for me or because I feel outright shaken from the foundations I'm on at the moment. I do not think I will wind up routinely microdosing or anything like that. There's no need.

This concludes the seasonal Q&A. Immeasurable thanks go to you who helped this start, and for providing such interesting material to begin with. Questions for the next one will be due by noon EST on January 21st, to thehunterskiss@gmail.com; I will verify whether your own e-mail address matches with the Supporter tier or higher in my subscription list. Upcoming deadline reminders will be sent to people in advance as well. In the meantime, I'll return on my normal newsletter schedule this Friday.