I have been spending a lot of time sitting with loneliness.
I formally finished a month-long dieta with Bobinsana last week, and concluded Monday night with an ayahuasca ceremony.
After all of this transformative upheaval, I found myself in an unexpected combination of wonder and what the fuck, no one told me this, that the dieta doesn’t exactly end. I knew this, logically. Of course I knew this. It feels like every spiritual tradition has some version of welcoming something into your heart and then discovering it lives there now.
Still, there was apparently a footnote I had missed.
She’s always with you.
I’m sorry, what now?
I had thought about the dieta as something I was entering into. A period of devotion. A relationship with this plant. A container with a beginning and an ending, followed by integration, where I would take whatever I had learned and return to my regularly scheduled programming with some new information.
Except I don’t think she gave me information. Instead, she permanently changed something.
In the days afterward, while I was hermiting at home, sleeping and writing and trying to let my body catch up to wherever the fuck I had been, something started becoming visible.
I have spent a lot of my life as an and.
Gianni and Rocky.
Rocky and Tessa.
Maven.
The Forgotten Cabins.
Partnerships and businesses and relationships that I deeply love and have actively chosen, all of them real expressions of my life and who I am.
And somewhere inside all of that, I started wondering: Does anybody know me?
The question stung when it first appeared.
I want people to think of Rocky and think of Rocky. I want someone to invite me to speak because they want to hear what I have to say. I want people to find me without first finding one of the people or businesses attached to me. I want connections that originate with me.
And then, almost immediately, another truth arrived.
Rocky, you haven’t given them the chance.
Oh. There it is.
For the last ten or fifteen years, I have become incredibly reliant on the people I love to connect me with the world. Which is also one of the great gifts of my life. I am surrounded by connectors. People who open doors and introduce me to extraordinary humans and invite me into rooms I might never have found on my own. I want that cross-pollination. I want a life intertwined with other people. I love partnership. I love community. I love what becomes possible when humans find one another and make something together.
I also want to experience myself as sovereign inside of it.
The strangest part is that I feel incredibly sovereign when I’m alone. I know who I am there. I fucking love being alone. I love wandering around my house with my dogs and my plants and my books and my weird little rituals. I love disappearing into the mountains. I love following whatever catches my attention. I love the person I meet when there is nobody around for me to explain myself to.
I know her; I just haven’t always shared her.
Instead, I introduce myself through what I’ve built. Through who I love. Through the partnerships I belong to. Through the roles that make me legible.
And I think the culmination of my dieta has been digging to find the answer to why I do this, a layer deeper than just simple loneliness.
I think some of it is humility, and I think humility can become a very convenient place to hide. There is safety behind a business. There is safety inside a partnership. There is safety in being one half of something people already understand. If something fails, we fail. If something succeeds, we succeed. The weight gets distributed.
Standing somewhere as simply Rocky feels different. There is nowhere for me to disappear.
I have been trying to understand why loneliness appears in my life when I am so deeply connected. I have a husband I love. Friendships that go straight into the deep end. A business built around community. People I can call. People who call me. People who know me intimately. I have also spent years keeping some part of myself behind the curtain.
Maybe loneliness isn’t always about the absence of other people. Maybe sometimes it is the distance between the person we know ourselves to be and the person we allow the world to meet.
The work may not be finding more people. It’s possibly that I need to allow myself to be found, and holy shit, I don’t want to.
Sigh. It’s once again incredibly useful information. As it always is.
I can feel the instinct to immediately turn this realization into a project. Build the personal brand. Grow the network. Make the connections. Tell people what I do. Ask for the invitations. Create some beautifully organized strategy for Sovereign Rocky™ and put that bitch on a content calendar.
I know how to do that, but this answer is quieter.
I need to allow myself to stop disappearing (in a new, more nuanced way). To tell the whole story when someone asks what I do. To say what I want. To tell people I want to speak. To share the work I have quietly been doing with people because it matters to me. To reach toward someone when my body pulls me toward them. To let myself be interesting without immediately redirecting the conversation toward someone or something else. To allow people to know me without handing them a business first.
Sovereignty is something I am learning to practice in relationship because I don’t want independence from the people I love. I want to know what it feels like to stand fully inside myself while loving them. To remain an I inside the we. To let partnership become connection between two whole people rather than a place where pieces of myself become easier to hide.
Bobinsans’s little signal underneath all the connection saying, You’re still in here.
I can feel myself rebirthing independently. I can feel some old safety beginning to loosen. I can feel the difference between being seen through what I create and allowing myself to actually be seen.
I don’t feel particularly panicked about needing to figure it out.
It’s more like—Oh. There you are, Peter.
