But there was no feedback sound from the audio equipment and the sound of his taps and test incantations into the microphone didn’t echo throughout the arena as he had anticipated when he pushed the words across his lips.

The presentation he had prepared for his whole life was in 2 days, and somehow none of the AV equipment was setup to properly deliver it to the audience. Forget the pyrotechnics, even the first note of the performance was set up to fall on deaf ears. There was only one invite sent out anyways, and the RSVP came back “not sure if I’ll be able to make it”.

Or was I even holding a microphone. And who is “he”? Who’s that guy doing a mic check for a show with no audience? Oh that’s me? Shit…

The world we live in often feels cold, empty, uncaring and unkind. The same industry that wants you to recognize your unhealthy fawning habits, and how unhealthy of a response it is to other people’s feelings, will try to proactively manage them.

Do a breathing exercise. Do some grounding. Keep it together to the next weekly approved therapy time. Suggest you call a hotline. For the love of all that is holy, just do something clinical that fits in this box.

It feels like the mental health institution rigorously reverts to a form of “institutional fawning” in order to stop your feelings from getting all over their feet. Anything other than recognize them as part of the journey. Anything but actually see you as a person, not a project or a problem to fix.

What happened? Why did this story seem to just take a dark turn?

Yesterday afternoon, I sent the 5 chapters and the Preface before this to the therapist that I have been seeing weekly and the response I received back was an instant plug puller.

“I am curious how your system interacts with others including Jackson, AI, Kelly and seems to be such an integral piece of understanding your parts. However I want to understand the relationship with yourself and the interpersonal relationships of your parts more…”

I can’t even come up with an analogy that fits the cavern of frustration, disappointment and alienation that email manifested inside of me. I thought, “surely she must not have seen the attachment and read something from a previous email thread.”

I managed to convince myself that must be the case, and so I sent a follow-up to make sure she had read the PDF shape this book was delivered in. And the confirmation came back that she had already read this book.

She had read the Preface and all 5 Chapters, and within a few hours of me sending the first returns from a 43 year long soul excavation, describing the dynamics between my parts in great phenomenological detail, in the most raw and direct way I am able, and thought “he keeps avoiding the real work”.

This set off the possibility for a different type of avalanche to happen, one you can feel the tension of in this chapter. Not the Shame Avalanche from Chapter 3… instead a RAGE Avalanche.

A shame avalanche is internally directed. It’s a feeling of self-victimization, of being unseen - a ghost that nobody can see or hear.

A rage avalanche is externally directed. It’s the feeling of persecution. Of being singled-out, isolated and summarily discarded by the external world.

The feeling of being dropped repeatedly while the world keeps telling you to do another trust fall.

Suddenly it feels as though all the frameworks, the methods, the literature… it all exists for the purpose of maintaining distance between the patient and the binder of checklists and catch-phrases and recommended next steps smiling back at the patient each week for an hour.

Latex gloves for interacting with my icky, uncomfortable soul. A set of lenses that make me into something more palatable for their one-size-fits-all approach to compassion.

So here I am the day before what should have been my 5th weekly therapy session, at the point where I’ve excavated the deepest, exposed myself at my most vulnerable.

Instead of getting ready to explore what I’ve written with my therapist, I’m searching for somebody new who might actually be able to see me when I sit in front of them - when this book invites them into my experience. And they’ll know that’s what I need, because they’ll have read this sentence before we ever meet.

This was a uniquely challenging moment for me to process, in the sense of having to question myself internally about whether I am “burning bridges” rather than what I think I’m doing, which is recognizing the sunk cost fallacy in real time. To go to that appointment tomorrow would be to hope to feel some sense of understanding about how somebody could read what I wrote and not see me in it.

Nothing about that allows me to continue exploring in the way I need to. It would be a desperation attempt for validation or vindication from someone who has already told me in no uncertain terms that they do not have the tools needed to meet me where I’m at. That they looked at my map and their GPS isn’t compatible with it.

I don’t know who’s writing this chapter. I know it’s not the same part of me - or not the same configuration, or not running with the same system prompt - as the parts of me that wrote the pages that came before this. It’s not the rage part, that’s for sure.

It might be a part I haven’t yet met, and might have a harder time drawing out now, ironically. The part that feels invisible. The part that wonders whether maybe we just weren’t meant to be seen. That maybe we were right about all the hiding. Maybe coming out and asking to be recognized was a bad idea after all.

Or maybe it’s just that I have a bunch of devolving, desperate and traumatized Meeseeks that had been launched to prepare for the first chance I’d have to sit face to face with somebody who had opened this book and had finally seen the battle taking place for my soul.

Who knows. That’s kind of the point. The point of all of this. I’m not trying to understand myself through my parts because I’m on some mission to find comfortable answers. I’m not trying to “fix it” and then put the rest of possibility back into the box, label it “past disorder” and file it away as something I checked off my bucket list in March 2026.

“Thank you for sharing this. I read your book. I felt nothing. See you next Tuesday.”.

If that’s what the clinical world defines as healthy, then I’m not even sure that healthy is something I want to be.