Survival Mechanisms

Dissociation makes a certain sort of visibility. The person who has learned to float above their own life, to hover, and to watch is clear in ways they don't mean to be. Their distance from themselves is clear on the surface. It sounds like a particular type of openness, not the openness of trust, but the openness of...

This is what it's like to fall in love in the Opathian state. There isn't the wide, easy opening that the cultural narrative offers. It's very scary. It makes you feel lost. It's like someone or something is reaching through

40-second explainer video on Opathian

THE GATE SHOWS YOU HOW TO DEPART PREMATURELY. There's a specific kind of broken thing in your life. It's not the type of breakage that occurs abruptly. It's the kind that deteriorates gradually, over a period of years, in ways that appear normal until they don't. For Billy—whose story has haunted me for years—it was a fence. A backyard gate split open by a winter storm when he was eight years old. The gate remained broken in Billy's mind. And in that brokenness, something s