Remembering How To Seem

On identity as branding, commenting versus creating, finding your tribe, and feeding The Weird Wolf

There’s very little in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that references binge watching streaming services directly.

There’s very little to suggest that Arjuna was trying to escape his duty on the field of Kurukshetra that fateful day to go home and binge RuPaul’s Drag Race— though judging by most depictions, Krishna looks like he’d be well into it.

Similarly, I’m in no rush to escape my dharma, living at Govinda Valley, an ashram and yoga retreat south of Sydney. I start my day with sadhana first thing in the morning. The sunrise lurks through the gum trees and peeks through the curtains of the yoga room, where I practice my asanas (yoga poses) with the fluid grace of an early 20^th century animation. Class is usually next (theory and philosophy of yoga, ayurveda, astrology – you know typical STEM subjects), followed by four hours of seva, or devotional service, which for me looks like housekeeping or groundskeeping (as I’m dead butch, I’m usually working the hospital corners rather than mowing the lawns). Then a yummy vegan lunch, and from there I choose my own adventure. I live in an RPG, where I can explore the Royal National Park at my fingertips, hit the beaches, or hang at the ashram for some cute hangouts with my yoga buddies.

One of the downsides of living in an intentional community, is that if one person comes down with a jibby tummy, eventually everyone comes down with a jibby tummy. I find it very easy to live the actively engaged, mindful and meaningful life when everything is going my way effortlessly, but the moment I’m slightly inconvenienced or a little under the weather, I go to my default – inhaling a bag of liquorice and a wheel of blue cheese, while binge-watching TV series and old favourites. What can I say? Without a few foibles I may fail to manifest in this realm!

I was rewatching one of my favourite period films, The Madness of King George, and had forgotten how it resonates with me. Take this final quote:

Thurlow: Your Majesty seems more yourself.

George III: Do I? Yes, I do. I’ve always been myself, even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. And that’s the important thing. I have remembered how to seem.

I have, actually, always been myself. And most of the time, I do a pretty good job of seeming like myself too.

If you want to get by in this sick-sad world, all you need to do is seem like yourself. Consistent. Predictable. Pattern personified. The specifics of your motivations, history, preferences and peculiarities are not so important as their structural integrity. I for one have garishly commodified my history, traumas, diagnoses, sexuality, body and mind to present myself as something easily understood, categorised, and sold as a self-contained ecosystem with a coherent narrative.

We are all incentivised to present a consistent narrative of self. Look at your own personal narrative, your subjectivity, your way of being in the world, and read it as you would a CV. Does it read well? Does it match the tone and suggested style guide of what is expected of you? Is it organised into easily definable categories, populated with your experience, broken down into relevant dot points? Do you have any gaps in your employment history? Why? And how much of it is a lie?

I have a CV that would give Gretchin from HR a migraine – It’s a mess, frankly. I have two degrees, have worked in media, the arts, government, entertainment, health and sometimes not worked at all. I like men, women, trans folk too, I have had open relationships, closed relationships. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort on my mental health, spending over 2 years of my life in one institution or another – as patient and as a clinician in training. I have been a Thelemite, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Kaos Majickian, Theosophist and Ocean Whisperer. Owner of so many labels: Broken. Survivor. Slut. Kind. Self-absorbed. Creative. Difficult. Crazy. Insightful. Oblivious. Drunk. Wise. Fun. Depressing. I strain to keep up with the chorus line of my past selves, marching on and by this current iteration, in a Bosch-like precession from past and future selves to present.

And yet, I’ve made it work, I’ve been seeming very convincingly for a while now. What’s next? A full hero’s journey come full circle, with the mandatory traumas that called the protagonist to adventure, leading to revelation and transformation for the protagonist and audience:

A recovery arc crescendos, as JACOB finishes his Bachelor of Occupational Therapy, returning to the to the wards, no longer as a patient but as wounded healer, fulfilling the promise to pay forward the kind treatment and wise words once offered to him. The first chapter of this franchise draws to a close, with some flaccid corporate rap commonly used over the end credits in popular films between early 1988 and mid 1995.

I do the choreography of recovery well, so I usually play that angle. Who doesn’t like being told how brave, accomplished and resilient they are? More accolades for simply still being alive? Don’t mind if I do! Yes Sir-ree-Bob, sanity and well-adjustedness is as performative as a tea ceremony for me, full of precise nano-movements, subtle emotions, interlaced with a flurry of activity and stillness, suggestive of meaning whilst ultimately empty.

Still, 2025 was a little rocky, and that tea spilt all over my lovely sanity socks, you know the ones I mean, the red grippy socks they only hand out to the most sane of people, to congratulate them on their perpetual and ever-lasting sanity.

2026 is my year to take a break from the performance and ask, who am I, and what am I doing here?

I’m approaching the half-time show, and getting all reflective about myself and the state of nations. Nothing special, just basic male midlife crisis stuff. I feel men tend to go one of two ways, a fork in the path of mature masculinities – Get weirder, more joyful, more at home in themselves and the world, more loving and open to love, embracing the mad monk or errant knight inside, contemplative and contented, if a little bemused. Or – They get weirder, more contentious and cantankerous, deeply and personally offended by broad social trends, threatened and threatening, tight and thin-lipped, thin-skinned and tight-hearted, greedy, fearful and hateful – poltergeists in waiting.

I want to feed the weird wolf, rather than the rabid hyena.

I still feel it could go either way, and I’m doing myself no favours. The spiteful revenge fantasies of earlier times that fired my passion for change and motivated me to want more, do more – They’re too dangerous now. These become carcinogenic with age, and turn into bitter ruminations, imagined or real slights revisited without resolution. I have never in my life been in a fight, not really, but every day I wake up with “TODAY IS THE FUCKING DAY, CUNTS!” prepared for conflict at every turn and in every interaction – It’s exhausting. So much clutching and squeezing and trying to hold on to myself, to my mind snares, preferences and schemas. Hate is a luxury of the twinks.

Social media is a thing. I still can’t say for sure if it’s a good or bad thing, but a thing nevertheless. I’ve seen how the way I use it is changing. Playful banter has become vicious, personal and surgical attacks on random people on the internet, who in all likelihood are either bots or just as miserable, hungry and lost as I am. I used to pride myself for taking the news and politics seriously – lot of good it’s done me or the world. The news is never good, and always outrageous – which is the norm. News is supposed to be news because it is an aberration of the norm; what we get is merely The Norms retweeted to us hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. We are force-fed via algorithms an endless gavage of horrors and outrage and fears and all of it points to society cannibalising itself, if not today, certainly tomorrow. And yet… things usually work out alright. The world continues spinning, which points to the possibility that the news leaves me uninformed, and unhappy.

I used to find some solace in writing, video art, and other creative pursuits. It was my way of staking my claim on my own patch of shaky ground in the default world. Even social media posts felt like a creative endeavour once upon a time. But drip by drip, I have become a passive consumer of content, taking in all this negativity, from every conceivable angle, endlessly all the time. All my tabs in my mind are open, I can’t read more than a paragraph of a book without being distracted, let alone create something meaningful, the most I can do is wail into the endless void of the comment section, or at best, post another thirsty.

I feel disconnected from people. I mean we all do, right? That’s probably the one thing that unites us all, this lack of connection, whether that’s to those in our immediate circle, our community or the imagined nation. For me, I just feel, it’s something a little more. I have this protective elemental homunculus inside of me, a bemused cynic, a curmudgeon though more a trickster than ill intended, and he’s oh so happy being alone and right up there on his throne of shit. The Shit King has draped a film, a layer or almost imperceivable cling wrap between me and you. It doesn’t matter how in love or how much we detest each other, a shared history, shared battles, long time or short – I feel like there’s this… something in the way. Stuff gets through now and then, but the little shit king shoots it down eventually, covers it so deep in shit that I wonder if it was ever really there. I want to bring down this layer, overthrow the Shit King and really connect with people, in the moment, to feel love and to feel loved. To feel part of. To find my tribe.

At the time of writing, May 2026 – I’m going a ways in addressing these existential niggles and identity quagmires. For over three months, I’ve been living at an ashram called Govinda Valley, just south of Sydney. I’ve been keeping away from the news mostly, but what I can intuit from memes, it appears I have chosen an indeed auspicious time to have secluded myself away from the world.

I’m building daily habits, developing sensory and emotional regulation and self-awareness through a holistic lens. I’m practicing yoga, meditation and breathwork while studying habit formation, motivation and goal-setting, alongside Ayurveda lifestyle principles and Vedic astrology as tools for self-reflection and life direction.

Govinda Valley is an intentional community of seekers, ponderers of reality and itinerant spiritual philanderers, coalescing via many different paths, with many different hopes, expectations and reasons for being here, but ultimately looking for expansion – Expansion of capacity, expansion of understanding, of loving awareness, of devotion, of self knowledge or knowledge of the ultimate realities. The corporeality of intention feels palpable in such a place, at such a time, surrounded by a community with such intentions. And aside from all that – They’re a solid crew. Fun to be around, loving, silly, endlessly and suspiciously patient and kind, feels like connection is cutting through in spite of The Shit King’s protestations.

Let’s see if I can keep the Weird Wolf well fed.

Let’s see if I can create rather than comment.

Let’s see if we can keep The Shit King at bay.

Let’s see if I can work out how to be, and how to seem.

Let’s see.

First published on SubStack https://jacobjharrison.substack.com/p/remembering-how-to-seem