Victor's Oddyssey

Cycle 12 Day 26. Thursday, April 30th. 13:30 in the afternoon.Fam, I’m properly fuming right now.A System That Doesn’t BendYet again, the healthcare system has shown its indescribable rigidity and utter lack of logical procedure and common sense.As you might know by now, I’ve delayed my treatment currently.You might hear it already by the fact that it’s Cycle 12 Day 26. Normally, my cycle length should be 21 days.And this is due to me having agreed with the hospital system that after the third re-treatment, I am to have a follow-up PET-CT scan.And when that PET-CT scan was to be scheduled, there was no available time slot within the time frame to allow me to maintain such a 21-day cycle length.However, I was very clear that I did not want to proceed with the fourth treatment before getting the PET-CT scan and getting the results of that.Because I want to reassess our treatment strategy going forward after having gotten back the outcome of that scan.The Missed Detail That Cost TimeWhat then happened was that two to three weeks ago, when I had gotten my PET-CT scan scheduling, I asked them to book my next treatment right after that.And they came back to me shortly thereafter and said that the week after the PET-CT scan was fully booked.So there were no time slots for me to get.However, they missed a very crucial detail.There is a queue for anyone who doesn’t have a booked time slot.What they instead did two to three weeks ago was they booked me for a time slot the week after the one I wanted a slot for. Which means I’m locked in to have my treatment delayed more than a week further than might have been the case.Because if I had not had that time slot booked further ahead, I would have been very early in the queue.And there will always be slots that are rebooked and rescheduled.And then I would be at the top of the queue and I would be getting a time slot next week.But because they, without informing me of the consequences, decided to book a treatment time two weeks from now, that was locked in.And I had no visibility, no information about the fact that that lock-in made it impossible for me to get a treatment next week.The Cost of Centralized SystemsSo once again, the hospital system surprises me with its incompetence and its lack of transparency.And it’s just part and parcel of such a centralized system.Where through paternalism and standard procedure, autonomy and agency is not given to the individuals within that system.Including the patients.Including the caretakers.And this just properly sucks.I’m in a very critical situation.So I should be able to have at least some transparency into how these processes work.But it seems incompetence has overshadowed even bringing that to the table.And this is not the first time this happens.And I’m f*****g sick of it.Forced to Play the GameThe problem is, this system is as it is.And no matter how much I push my agenda in terms of asking for increased transparency, it will not come overnight.It’s a shitty system.And I need to play by the system’s rules.And I hate that.But yeah, it is what it is.My next treatment will then be, as it was locked in without my knowledge, on Wednesday, the 13th of May.So I’ll just have to make do and bide my time until then.Additional notes: It should have been clear already when agreeing to initiate retreatment with systemic therapy 3 months ago that the PET/CT scan should be scheduled after my third retreatment round. Despite this, my fourth retreatment start date was initially scheduled to be the day before my scheduled PET/CT(!!)- which makes absolute zero sense and wouldn't even be at all feasible… This mistake further delayed the treatment scheduling process…I’ve now at least fired my contact nurse from ever contacting me again. Let’s hope the next one has at least a bone of ambition and cognitive ability in her body…ClosingYeah, end of rant.But yeah—if you can stay away from these rigid systems, please do, to the largest extent possible.Because they’re definitely not being mindful of your life force, fam… Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 25. Wednesday, April 29th, 09:09 in the morning.So, waking up to today, I realize that these coming two days are days of examinations.The First Exam: Applied Tree CareTomorrow I have an examination in applied tree care.The second part of that course that I’ve been having over the last four to five weeks.And I will be examined on my knowledge of subjects including:* different solutions for planting trees and shrubs* assessing the soil and improving the soil around trees* supporting both young and old trees with tree supports or tree crown stabilizations* different tree pruning techniques* nature preservation* protection of trees when undergoing construction work* tree inventory* tree risk assessment* tree plans* tree care plansEtc.So that is for tomorrow.And I haven’t had too much energy and time to study, but I accelerated my studies yesterday and I will keep preparing for the exam today.The Second Exam: PET-CT ScanHowever, that’s for Thursday.For Wednesday, we have the big exam.And the big exam is namely the PET-CT scan.The examination of my whole body by first having me fasted so that my blood glucose levels are lowered a bit, and then injecting me intravenously with radioactive glucose.So that’s the 18-FDG fluorodeoxyglucose.And what happens is that when glucose is taken up by any tissue in my body, also radioactive glucose will be taken up.And the PET-CT scan will detect the radioactivity that is emitted from those parts of my body where the radioactive glucose has been taken up.According to the Warburg effect, most tumor cells are very prone to glucose metabolism. This means that, apart from a few other organs in the body such as the thyroid, the bladder, the heart, maybe some others, any tissue that shows a high differential uptake of this radioactive glucose might be a suspected tumor tissue.And I’ve done quite a number of these scans already.The first one was in July 2024, and then three months later, and then another three months later, and then another three months later, and then another three months later…So that’s like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.Yeah, this is my eighth PET-CT scan.And then apart from PET, you have the CT, which is computer tomography, where you’re also able to decipher somewhat the density of the tissue.So you can see morphological changes to tissues through the CT scan as a layering.So there are two layers to the scan:* one is tissue density* the other one is uptake of radioactive glucoseStrategy at StakeAnd this exam is of course much more important than the one on Thursday.And we’ll see.It’s basically examining my performance, you could say, in terms of everything that my body is being exposed to:* my own protocols* the treatment* everything combinedSo let’s hope I’ve done enough to tempt fate here, and that I can move the needle in the right direction.If it turns out that the needle hasn’t really moved much, or that it’s moved in the wrong direction, I will really need to quickly reassess my strategy here.Possible AdjustmentsThat might entail adjusting the chemo protocol in one or multiple ways.One potential option, which I don’t think I would go down, is to intensify treatment frequency.Another one is to increase dosage.But if anything, in terms of changing the chemo protocol, I would probably first look at changing the chemo substances or the chemo cocktail.From FOLFOX to FOLFIRIThe second-line recommendation would be to switch from what I currently have, which is FOLFOX:* Oxaliplatin (neurotoxic, affecting DNA repair mechanisms)* 5-FU (a broken DNA/RNA base analog)And switch that to FOLFIRI.FOLFIRI still involves the two-day infusion of 5-FU, but replaces oxaliplatin with irinotecan.Concerns About SwitchingAnd my concern there, apart from the general concern that I have a proven track record with FOLFOX—so why change horses mid-race— well, maybe if my horse is losing, I would have to…But the other concern is that irinotecan seems to have a higher toxicity to the gut lining.And I really need my gut lining to stay strong and resilient enough to recover between each treatment round.Because I’m fasting so aggressively, and then upon initiating my recovery arc, I need to refeed very aggressively.So if my gut lining would be even more sensitive, it might impact my ability to refeed successfully.And that could impact my overall recovery heavily.And in the worst case, that could lead to a downward spiral where I’m not able to recover well enough to get iterative rounds of treatment over and over again.Immunotherapy: A Double-Edged SwordAnother avenue to explore would be the immunotherapy realm.Currently, I have been avoiding retreating myself with PD-1 inhibitor antibodies, such as:* Nivolumab* PembrolizumabThese antibodies, if successful, would attach to tumor cells and dysfunctional immune cells and instruct my own immune system to eliminate malignant tissue more effectively.But if unsuccessful, they could trigger autoimmune adverse effects.And I am very much convinced that this is what happened to me over a year ago, when my adverse effects in terms of:* autoimmune dysregulation* autonomic nervous system dysregulationheld very strongly for over eight months.And it impacted my quality of life even more heavily than going through aggressive systemic therapy.So introducing this antibody again—I’m quite split on it.But if push comes to shove, I might have to.Because there is a track record of me succeeding in systemic therapy when these antibodies were part of the protocol.Whereas this time around, they haven’t been included.Adjusting My Lifestyle: Tree WorkAnother thing I’ve been very actively doing is that I’ve abstained from operational tree care work.Unfortunately.During the winter, I had my first internship.And the way you do tree care work is that it’s medium to high intensity physical exertion throughout the whole day.And then you come home, rest a bit, sleep, wake up early, and repeat that for five days straight.And then you have a weekend.And it seems that that doesn’t necessarily help my body recover.What I need is:* days of full recovery* short bursts of intense resistance training* ...followed by day(s) of full recoveryThat seems to be the most efficient way for me to rebuild and repair my systems.So for now, I am not an operational tree care worker.Instead, I’m focusing more on:* inspections* inventory workWhich I don’t mind.But it would be nice to climb trees again, to be up in the canopy.A Difficult BalanceThis adjustment is also influenced by the fact that my winter internship coincided with a worsening PET scan result.It’s just one data point, but I don’t want to take that risk again.And intuitively, it feels like too much stress for my body right now.Especially since back then I wasn’t even doing systemic therapy.Now I am.So this challenge—combining treatment with education—will intensify.Especially going into the summer, where I’m expected to do a nine-week internship.If I’m continuously undergoing treatment, I won’t be able to do full weeks consistently.So I need to solve a puzzle:* syncing with different people* finding single days to join as internship days* adapting to my energy levelsFinal PreparationMost importantly now, I will use these last two hours before the scan to wind down.There will also be time to rest at the hospital, because after receiving the radioactive glucose:* I need to rest* I receive a beta blocker to reduce brown fat uptakeSo I’ll start winding down now to improve scan accuracy.And then we’ll take it from there.There’s no use getting ahead of ourselves.Once the results come back—hopefully within a few days—I’ll reassess everything.And we’ll just keep calm and carry on.ClosingAnd oh yeah—tomorrow I might be celebrating finalizing these two exams by going to Tak on the rooftop of Gallerian by Brunkebergstorg in Stockholm.So if any one of you wants to dance in celebration of the sun arriving in Stockholm, do join me there.Write me a message.I’ll be there with others who want to celebrate.And if you don’t want to celebrate, or don’t have the time, you can still write me.We can talk.Be mindful of your life force, fam.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 20. April 24th, 08:51 in the morning.So yesterday I had a classmate of mine send me a sound system song about gangsters and hoodlums in the street, and how they want to live their life one way, but then reality turns it into another one.And I got inspiration to write him these lyrics.Here it goes.Gangstas In Da StreetsGangstas in da streets, they want to live out their dreams,But as wid every dream, it's never quite as it seems,Our social fabric, best we scrutinise at its seams,Coz life has never been bout drivin high wid gold reems,When gangsta king burns rubber, bad gyal line up on scene,The pimp ride draws attention, bad gyal whine up and scream, But soon as tires tire, gyal gon pack up and leave,The gangsta king's turned pauper, just got wrapped up in sheen,But as the saying goes, It ain't gold just coz it gleams. But as the saying goes, It ain't gold just coz it gleams.Word up.Be mindful of your life force, fam.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 20. April 24th, 08:25 in the morning.So I just woke up, and was looking in the chat with a couple of close friends of ours. They had to move house or apartment temporarily because their permanent apartment has gotten water leakage.So for the coming five, six months, they’re going to stay in this other apartment that the insurance firm has found for them.And they’re not fully satisfied with the standards of that place.It doesn’t really measure up to their normal apartment.So I got inspiration for this poem/rap lyric, which starts off with taking the bitter with the sweet.Here it goes.Take the Bitter With the SweetTake the bitter with the sweet,Life’s a curse but still a treat.Gotta stand on your two feet,Don’t just sit down, bow and tweet.Now’s the time for re-erection,Of yourself, no re-election, Of their hell now you’re expecting,No more smell of dereliction.Raise the bar,Go raise the castle of the Tsar.Raise the car,Your chase leads back to where you are.Bite your tail,You are just here where you belong.Sit up straight,Breathe in, feel the power of the gong.Peace out, fam. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 14. Saturday, April 18th. It’s 05:47 in the morning.And I just woke up to a dream.So here’s another one of my dreamscape diaries.However, this dream I had in Swedish.And I’m pondering whether I therefore should speak Swedish now, but I think it doesn’t really matter.I’ll stick to English, because I don’t remember any exact quotes from the “movie”, I was about to say—it’s kind of like a movie, right, the dream.So I’ll stick to English for now.The SettingSo I’m in the dream.And I’m in this big kind of salon.It’s like a big manor house, estate, castle almost.Big rooms.Not epically tall ceilings, but yeah, kind of epically tall to the ceiling.And I’m in some kind of sitting area.I think there’s a buffet going on.So I have a plate of food, mixed types of foods that I brought.And I bring myself down to sit in this seating area.I might be on a couch or a chair with my food.Yeah, it’s probably in a kind of lounge group—like couches or armchairs or whatever.And I bring myself down to sit there.There are some people in the vicinity, which I don’t remember if I interacted with or not.But quite soon thereafter, a person comes along and he sits down further away to my left.If I look straight ahead, to the left side of me, there’s another armchair or something similar where he takes a seat.A Familiar FaceAnd I know this guy from before.It’s Gerard, an old friend of mine from high school that I haven’t stayed in touch with since.And I remember him as a funny guy.A really likable, personable guy.And the weird thing here is that in the dream, me and him were referring to the fact that we met a few months before.And now that I wake up, I’m pretty confident that this is not just something that I imagined inside of this one dream.I’m pretty confident that I’ve had a previous dream, which was around a few months before, where he featured.And we kind of talked about what I was experiencing in that previous dream.This is a thing I haven’t, at least consciously, experienced before.Or one could say you’re not conscious when dreaming.But yeah, you are conscious when you’re dreaming.It’s just that you’re fabulating.You’re fabricating these weaved patterns that don’t necessarily correspond very well to the reality you experience and act within once awake.But I’m pretty sure that what we were referring to in the talks we had in this dream I just woke up from actually referred to dream content that I had a few months back.And in the dream, we discussed it as if the last time we met was a few months back.A Loop Across DreamsI don’t remember all the details of our discussions.But I do remember that it centered around me having to face my own mortality, which he had seen.And we were discussing that.But then also, we discussed the mortality of his mother.Because in that prior dream a few months back, he had been opening up about the health of his mother.And I even met his mother in that other setting that was going on in that dream.This is crazy.I didn’t think this was even possible—to have these reconnecting loops.But seemingly, the previous dream must have consolidated in my memory, even though I don’t remember it actively.And now it was reactivated.So kind of like a subconscious memory—something that I cannot actively recall—but now it was recalled to me within this second dream.So I did, in the previous dream, meet his mother at a separate location.And she seemed quite frail.And we were talking about health.And it seemed clear that she was relating to my situation and I could relate to hers.I don’t remember if we talked about it word for word.And similarly, in this interaction in the dream I just had, we were kind of talking in riddles.I don’t know if it was because of the custom in this place, or just Gerard wanting to be polite or not too intrusive in what he was asking.But yeah, it was clear he wanted to reach out, and relate to me.And then I was asking about his mother, because I remembered meeting her.And I asked something like: okay, how is your mother?How is your mother holding on?And I looked to him and I saw him gradually break into tears.And his face was all red.And I was thinking to myself: should I go over and console him?Or should I say something?Yeah, I should go over and console him.And then I woke up.Trigger and ReflectionSo I do know that quite close before I was going to bed, I saw a Facebook story with Gerard in it.Because I have him added on Facebook, so I sometimes see his content.He was taking part in a march somewhere in southern Europe for game and wildlife preservation.Which I think is an interesting topic.It would be interesting to discuss with him as well, because it has many aspects to it.So that’s probably why he featured in the dream.But the craziest thing, though, is this loop.This re-referencing to a previous dream that I’m quite sure I had a few months ago, or a few weeks ago.And now this referencing showed up in this dream.But why not?I mean, it’s similar to when I, as seldom as I am nowadays, find myself in a situation with a Chinese-speaking person.I start speaking.And because I got fluent in Chinese at a relatively early age, and I went very deep into it when I was between 19 and 21 years old, it’s still with me.But it’s not necessarily something that I can just actively recall word for word.My active vocabulary is a bit of an unknown, because it comes jumping to me while speaking.If you would ask me: name as many nouns as you actively know in Chinese, I wouldn’t be able to pick out nearly as many as I would if I’m just using them in an active conversation.So there is such a thing as tacit knowledge.Tacit memory that is stored.And you don’t know if you can actively retrieve it until the time comes when you have to.ClosingYeah, those were my reflections around that dream.It’s six o’clock in the morning.So if I stop this recording now, I can probably get one or two hours more sleep, hopefully, which will be very much needed.I’m not going to open the Oura Ring app now, because then it’s going to think I woke up prematurely, even though I’m going back to sleep.So you’ll hear about my sleep quality some other time.But case in point: I’m going to stop the recording now and accumulate more hours of sleep, because I’m definitely in a sleep-debt situation since many days.Be mindful of your life force, fam.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 13. Friday, April 17th. It’s 03:47 in the morning.And we’re in for another dreamscape diary.This one touches on a few topics and themes that are very dear to my heart.So let’s jump into it.The DreamIn the dream, I find myself standing up.At the base of my feet, there is someone close to me, close to my body, who’s laying on his back with his legs kind of in a battle to entangle my legs and my hip.So I’m in a setting that I’ve been used to for quite a while, which is my favorite sport.The one sport I found at around 30 years of age that has stuck with me since.But it’s come and gone, which I’ll probably get to.And I can also identify who is there, on the floor, trying to wrestle with me.And it’s my dear friend and colleague Alex, from when I was working and living in London.Yeah. Working and living. In that order.It’s a Freudian slip.Which kind of tells half the story.Not living and working, but working and living.Such a Northern Hemisphere, Northern Europe kind of thing: working and living.Or as someone pointed out the other day, when I talked to another new acquaintance of mine, he had heard from his Argentinian Spanish friend that “Yeah, I’ve been in Sweden for a while now, and it’s clear: here people live to work, whereas in Argentina people work to live.”But anyway, we’ll probably get to that side note later.In the dream, I’m now wrestling Alex, my colleague from London, in our home gym, in Grapple Collective.And I don’t remember in the dream how the environment looked and felt exactly, but anyway, we were in the home gym in the dream.And then, for some reason, I come up with this new move where I put my knuckle kind of to the ground, like I have a closed fist.And I take my right arm and I cross it over to the other side downwards, and I put my fist with the knuckles pushing down into the mat on the right side of Alex’s neck (or the left side from my perspective), in the crevice that’s formed between his shoulder and his neck.And then I’m taking my left arm and crossing it over my right arm, and I’m finding a way to push down my other closed fist on the left side of Alex’s neck, right where it starts to curve out into his shoulder.And in some weird, miraculous anatomical way, biomechanical way, I’m able to use the leverage that I get from this to apply pressure to his neck.And I can also push down on him.So whether he tries to worm his way out of it or not, I’m successfully strangling him.But bear in mind, I’m just pushing my fists into the mat, into the ground beneath us.I don’t have anything to grab onto in terms of fabric around his neck.So it’s not the type of Brazilian jiu-jitsu wrestling where I make use of the fact that I get an anchor point, that I get my hooks in, so to speak, by grabbing the fabric of his neck collar.No.I miraculously am able to get leverage here and restrict his movement enough and tighten the noose around his neck enough, even though I just have my fists to the floor.So it’s completely unrealistic.But sure, I’ll take it.Because I usually don’t win out in these scraps with Alex. 😅 So in the dream, I’m a happy camper.I just tag along and I’m able to choke him out.And then I’m also a bit confused about how I actually got that to work.But so is Alex.So we try it again.But now he just lets me get that position.And it works again.And then something else happens in the dream, but I don’t remember what.And then I wake up.So yeah, that was the dream.Missing the MatsIt’s exciting for me to very viscerally, in a dream, experience performing and doing my favorite sport.Because it’s been crazy long since I did it last time now.It’s like two years ago already… All because of me having to switch to this new, very unwanted physical discipline of fighting cancer.Already at the onset, when I got the diagnosis, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be wrestling anytime soon, because I was immediately thinking of the risks involved in terms of getting an infection if I was to start treatment.My immune defense would definitely be affected by the treatment, and any infection might become more serious.There are a lot of skin infections you can get in grappling every now and then that might get more serious.But also, because you’re so intimate when you’re wrestling, or what we call “rolling”, with your partners, the people in your gym, but also when you’re doing competitions - though most of your time spent on the mat wrestling will be with your training partners in the gym - you will also be exposed to a lot of other germs just by people breathing down your neck, people breathing straight into your nose and mouth, basically.And you’re just bathing around in this pool of everyone’s sweat, basically.So it’s been two years since I grappled.And therefore I’m very happy that I got to experience it in a dream, at least, however unrealistic that actual move in the dream was. 😅 And I’m also happy to have shared a moment, despite only in the dream, with Alex, my friend.I miss him.Would have been such a blast to hang out more often.We have many more things in common than we’ve actively built on, that we just touched on in terms of our friendship.For one, he’s very poetic.He writes poetry and spoken word, which I’ve once joined him at a spoken word evening and witnessed, which was very valuable for me.It’s probably influenced me a bit in my own poetic journey.So thanks for that, Alex.And then just the fact that we share this sport whilst we worked in the same company, that’s been very valuable.And he’s been a key part in me joining that gym.He was the catalyst.The Neck InjuriesWe came onto the topic of this sport that he’d also fallen for in adult age.And what had happened for me was that I had been away from the sport, unable to feel safe enough to train physically, because I’d suffered two different neck injuries that were both caused by training accidents in the gym.And every time I tried to get back on the mats, I’d have, the same day or one or two days after, this sensitivity and stiffness and pain in the neck, around the spine, around the discs in the spine where I had contacted my previous injuries.And before that, I’d had a lot of issues with repercussions from those two injuries.They were each a bit different in nature.The first one was a “stinger” injury. Getting a “stinger” injury normally happens when, for some reason, end up with your neck twisted and with a lot of pressure on that neck.So in my case, I ended up in such a position, through a very explosive motion by my training partner that I didn’t expect, partly due to a very drastic change in tempo during a round of technical sparring/drilling. The tempo wasn’t very energetic up until that point—but then the tempo just switched very suddenly by my opponent, who had very strong legs.Me being on the side of his back and latching onto his back with a kind of seatbelt arrangement, I didn’t have the time to react by folding in my neck.So my neck just got pressured from the side, and from all of his body weight, and the explosiveness of him trying to push himself with his legs out of this position.And I ended up with the pressure on my neck that causes a stinger.And a stinger is caused when the sideways pressure on your neck puts so much pressure on one of the discs in your neck that the disc itself, or some of the spinal solid tissue, is pushing on a nerve to the extent that that nerve gets pinched very acutely and the stinger occurs.And the stinger is then an electric impulse that’s acutely sent from that neck area, from between those two discs, or between that exact space in the spine, and it’s firing like a lightning bolt all the way from your neck down through your shoulder, through your armpit, and all the way down to your forearm and into your hand and your fingertips.So it feels like a lightning bolt striking down your neck and reaching all the way down to your fingertips.And for me, this happened by my neck being twisted to the left and the impingement and the lightning bolt streaming down my right arm.Or it might have been twisted to the right.But anyway, the actual lightning bolt streamed down on my right side.And this caused such repercussions in terms of nerve damage, and that led to muscle atrophy.So still to this day, and forever, for my whole life, some muscles have atrophied, because they don’t have the same solid nerve connections as before. They’ve had to reshape and reconfigure themselves. I don’t have chronic pain from third anymore apart from when I do certain types of movements, or definitely overexert myself.So for the set of active muscles on my right side in the arm, but especially in the lower back, under the armpit, and the kind of transversal muscles there - there are some of those muscles that are no longer activated by the nerves in the spine as efficiently, or some of them have basically completely atrophied.So I need to make use of other muscles, which have thus overdeveloped and reconfigured themselves to try and compensate for that atrophy.But in certain types of movements, such as L-sit or static movements where I really need to push down with my arms and activate all my lower back, there’s a point of exertion past which I get weird nerve spasms and I’m not able to complete the movement anymore.And then, in terms of right around that neck area, it’s not something I’m suffering from daily in terms of stiffness and pain, because I’ve been doing so much rehab to this stuff so that I’ve strengthened my neck. So there’s a now reserve built up there to take from in terms of muscle and connective tissue that’s probably buffering me a lot against that stiffness and pain coming back. Hours upon hours of daily morning neck training sessions have made that tissue more resilient and less sensitive to having had this injury. And the injury itself has hopefully, and probably also, healed up a bit.And then the second injury was an even more annoying event where, during just a training drill, we were just training to be in a dominant position or not, and we were going at a medium tempo, medium intensity, but nothing more.I was probably going at a lower one.My training partner wanted to get back at me because of his ego, so he wanted to score points on me.But then it was even worse than that, because I kind of let him get me in a position where I end up in turtle, the turtle position, with my back towards the sky.And then he’s in front of me, and he’s laying on top of my head with his chest, and then he grabs my neck and he squeezes for dear life.And this is, imagine, a Central Asian dude who’s grown up doing greco-roman wrestling, so he’s super strong, and he’s just squeezing.For some reason he decides to start squeezing my neck from up there.So it’s like he’s crushing a melon between his chest and his arms. And there’s not enough time for me to react, to tap to this… So in the blink of an eye, I feel like—and I can probably even hear—a crackling sound in my neck.And then it’s too late.He’s popped one of my discs in the neck.So something is bulging out.It’s like a disc has been displaced in some way, or one of the vertebrae has been displaced in some way.And that caused me to have to go back to the drawing board in terms of rehab and trying to get back to the sport.And that one is very sensitive.If I don’t get enough sleep for a set period of time, or if I have a long-standing flu, then that can definitely light up again.Finding My Way BackBut back to how I got back to the sport.So I tried for these five, six years when I was off to try and get back, but every time my neck just flamed up.These old injuries kept making themselves remembered.And then, in conversation with Alex—sometimes it’s interesting, because you meet someone in the streets or you meet someone in a social event or, in this case, at my company, and the way you talk about things, and I think the way you move and you take up space, sometimes there’s this instinct of thinking: okay, that person might be doing this sport that I’m doing: grappling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or in our case submission wrestling.And I think I asked him straight away in a conversation, and he said yes.And he had a group that he was training with, but that group didn’t have their own gym yet, because it was a break-off from a previous place, and the coach was trying to find a new permanent place to rent where they could train.So they were kind of a vagabond gym for now, where at that very moment they were training in the sports hall of a school in northern London, or central northern London, or central east, around—let me look it up in Google Maps.It was around—I mean, it was in East End.But let me see where exactly.Yeah, wasn’t it around Spitalfields?Let me see.I have a feeling it was around Arnold Circus, around the Shoreditch area.Spitalfields, Brick Lane, somewhere there.Arnold Circus.Anyway, we were in that sports hall, and I was training.We set up the training mats ourselves, because we just had these mats that—I don’t know if they were there from before in the sports hall or if Max, the coach, had purchased them and placed them there.But I think they were part of that sports hall.And then we put out all of those mats so we had the training area.And then we trained.After a bit of warmup, we had some initial more technical drills. I think it was a bit of stand-up where we were doing hand fighting and maybe trying to grab each other’s necks, and I did that with a few people.And then we were doing some things on the ground, and then we were rolling, standing and rolling.And it felt good.It was a good environment and a good atmosphere between the people in the gym.And the best thing was when I left and the days after, I didn’t have any strong persistent neck pain.It was a bit sore, but I felt like: this is something we could try again and see how it goes.But then I had so much work.So we’ll get to that theme later.But I think a week passed, maybe even less.And I don’t remember if I came back to that place or not, where they were renting in the school.But what happened anyway, what Alex told me, that this coach, Max, had just found a place.And it was a place that he would be renting for himself.And he would be renovating it from scratch.So it was an old kind of warehouse facility in one of these most lovely railway arches that you can see around London.In many places where the railway goes in London, they built these arches so that the trains can go above the traffic and above the cityscape.And in those arches, originally there were just arches.But through the city being more and more densified, I think what’s happened more and more is that vendors and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes have started to move their businesses into these railway arches.So they have their company workshop or their creative studio or their restaurant or, in this case, their grappling gym in the cavity under one of these arches.Which is architecturally beautiful - to make use of that space and kind of full in the blanks of the city.And inside, if you haven’t reconstructed the ceiling, you actually have the ceiling vault-shaped just like that arch.So it’s a beautiful thing, albeit quite industrial-looking.And so he was to build this new gym of his for us, for our sake.And I was on the train now. I was jumping back into this.I was just hoping that my neck would be able to bear with the training.And soon enough, he had done the renovations to be able to open up the gym.And I joined as one of the first members.And I was so happy to have found this place.And with every training, I was happy to see that my neck could withstand and gradually adapt to the training.And I kept coming there.And what Max named Grapple Collective became my definite third place in London.What a Third Place MeansIt’s very important to have at least one third place.There’s a social theory about the third place where they postulate that the first place, that’s your family, that’s your home, which is important for most of us.The second place, it’s your work, or where you spend your days doing what you’re dedicated to do, or what you at least need to do materialistically to get on - or what you at least tell yourself you need to do to materialistically get on.And then the third place, it’s something entirely different.It’s this other space that covers what the other two spaces, the first and the second space, are kind of lacking.It’s the space in between.And in the social-theoretical sense, it’s defined as a space where you have quite a large number of people that gather often in one physical place—but it could be a virtual place—and they share something.They have something in common.But there are also many things they don’t have in common.So they come from different backgrounds.They have different baggage coming into this space.And the space itself is centered around this one setting, this one common denominator.So in this case, it’s the sport.It’s the love of the sport.It’s the love of all of the benefits you feel and you can share by being in this space and doing the sport.But in another third place, it might be a place where you can relax and disconnect, which is definitely the case here in the grappling gym as well.But I’m thinking more like a pub, maybe.Another component to the third place is that it should be a place that you can come and go as you like.So it’s not a place that is bound by duty, per se, although you might feel a duty to the place.But it’s an open space, or a semi-open space.And here, in terms of a grappling gym, you even have this kind of institutionalized because many gyms have what’s called an “open mat”.So even if you’re not a member of the gym, even if you haven’t committed to paying for a class, many, and most, gyms have an “open mat”, which is once a week, often on weekends, where you’re invited as a non-member from anywhere in the world, if you’re just a respectable person and you kind of know what you’re doing coming to a grappling gym, you’re most invited to come and join and train with us.And this day, this session, this open-mat session, is often one where you focus on sparring.So you’re doing more freestyle drilling, or you’re doing more freestyle, free-form rounds of sparring, where you’re doing that with a training partner.And there are probably other facets to the definition of a third place that I’ve missed.But the main point I want to drive home is that I think people are in big need of such third places.And sometimes, in our contemporary society, that can be somewhat lacking if you end up being too wrapped up in the first and the second place.Because in parts of our modern society, we can be pulled into a direction where we need to isolate ourselves as a small family because of the outside world being so overstimulating and so intense.And then there’s this other component where the second place can definitely grab a hold of us.And I’ve been most suffering from this, where I’ve allowed the second place to drain me.And if you want to get conspiratorial—or not conspiratorial, but for me, just if you want to speak the truth—it’s what we’ve been raised to do in our part of the world: to overexert ourselves in the name of being valuable in the marketplace, being valuable to someone else.But not just in the marketplace.Being valuable to society at large, being valuable to “The People”, to “Humanity”, this most abstract collective...There's this definite tendency in many of us to push ourselves into a specific mind state, into a psychological frame, that we grow up building around ourselves and that is built around us through all the institutions that we’re exposed to, including our own parents, but stretching into schooling and how government agencies push information on us, going into the workplace. This mind state has us defining ourselves overly by our job, by our occupation, by our daily toil.This is sometimes referred to as a Lutheran work ethic.There’s Max Weber, the German philosopher, who’s talked a lot about this kind of overly obsessive defining of our own sense of self-worth and our own self-image based on our daily toil, on our work. The idea that our work defines how ethical we are, and how much of a worthy person we are.We self-define, and we define this in others.And there’s this mass psychosis we play around with between ourselves, and we create for ourselves, in terms of that we define ourselves by our work.But it’s not based on how much you value it, genuinely, when you look in your heart of hearts and you really get to know yourself and listen to yourself and pursue such more basic emotions towards what you feel like you want to do, what drives you, what would be your life’s creative force pushing you onwards.No.It’s defined by these collective ideas about what type of occupation, what type of daily toil, is worthy of a person of your stature in society.And that can be shaped by your exact socioeconomic upbringing, how the social fabric has wrapped itself around you and the people most close to you that you grow up around. And it’s tough to break out of that mold.I’ve definitely been stuck in that mold for most of my adult life, which has had me overemphasize—even if it’s not at the core of what I in my mind thought of as my self-image and sense of self-worth—it still propelled me in the wrong way.It’s had me emphasize my work and how I deliver in my work, and it’s pushed me to stay and bear with occupational roles that are maybe not exactly where I want and should be in life, if I ask in my heart of hearts.And this is what happened in London.So I sacrificed so much of my life energy just at the altar of my working role, to the detriment of everything else in my life:my quality of sleep, my mental health, my amount of free time and energy I had overall at all, my will to collaborate with other people.Because it was this huge enterprise project that was so unwieldy and so filled with political twists and turns.And I was there as a subject matter expert, for one, wanting to solve the actual process problems and the automation problems and the logistical problems and the supply chain setup configurations that I was convinced we needed to do in certain ways.And to do that in terms of planning the design of those, but then also being in this weird straitjacket role where I was also expected to manage and oversee the work of a small team or a medium-sized team, but then also neighboring teams of developers and then testers, and then liaise with a super-user from the customer side.And there were other layers to this in a big enterprise IT project where there was a lot of change management and stakeholder management in order to be able to stay on course and keep focusing on the development items in the pipeline that we had already started working on and planning in increments for three months at a time, on what big design changes we should implement in terms of process automation and the automatic calculations and such in the supply chain space for this customer.And having to work in a scaled agile environment, with a scrum master, and everything having to be predefined and effort-estimated and then annoyingly looked at and reviewed in detail, and sometimes having effort that I was forced to change last minute or to scrap already-spent effort just sometimes arbitrarily because someone else said so.So a very frustrating situation where I was working day and night.I was working very long hours.My overtime stacked up to where I basically worked 16-hour days for some stretches of time.And annoyingly, it wasn’t even overtime that I was allowed by my company to get compensated for, whether in money or in compensatory leave, to any large extent.So I’d sacrificed myself on the altar of this daily toil to the detriment of me fully enjoying grappling.Although I was still able to get my grappling hours in. I prioritized it above anything else basically outside of my work, because I needed it as well.It was a lifeline in this scenario for me.Because if I wouldn’t have been doing grappling, or such similar exercise—but it’s not just exercise, it’s a stress reliever and it’s something that can reset your brain, your body, and mind, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand that whole year of indescribably gruesome toil at work.Even if you’ve had a shitty day at work, when you come to the gym and you put on your spandex, your rash guard, so to speak, and you get on the mats and you start training, soon you’ll find that you’re not thinking about what you just did at work anymore.You’re just thinking about what’s happening on the mat.You’re there.And it’s just then and there - it's the “here and now” of then, in each and every moment.You’re so wrapped up in this practice and being present in order to react, in order to feel exactly what’s happening in that place at that time.Of course, it’s a physical stress to your body, but that is so much more natural a stressor that we’ve been evolutionarily adapted to over the eons, as opposed to the abstract mental stress that you feel if you sit all day, long day, in front of a computer screen, staring and being stressed and tapping away at a keyboard while speaking into a microphone with people all around the world in a virtual meeting or in a chat forum, in a chat thread, in order to try and affect your environment and to relieve yourself of that stress in a setting where that stress might never be relieved....and where what you guys are working towards, it’s this never-ending story that’s going to carry on for months and years.You might not be there to see the end of it.So the grappling was still, in this life situation of mine, a very important resetter.And I was so lucky that I was able to keep training.And I kept training and I kept going to the gym, despite not as frequently as I should have prioritized for myself.But then again, it was a crucial choice for me to choose to do grappling as opposed to something else to relieve myself after work.Competing AgainAnd after a while, I felt that I’d gotten warm enough in being back that I should actually go and compete again, which I’d done a bit prior to getting these injuries.So I signed up for a competition in London.And as anyone who’s competed in grappling and in submission wrestling knows, when you haven’t been to a competition for a long time—or whether it was when you did your first competition—you get such an adrenaline dump if you don’t warm up intensely beforehand.And I did that same mistake here.So I got such an adrenaline dump after my first match because the intensity had to jump from basically zero to a hundred.And then I had to do my best recover quickly because in these tournaments you have a pool of people, and there’s often not too much time between matches because the number of participants in your brackets, in your weight class, for your belt level, is usually not that big.So I had to be able to get back to the second match and then the third and the fourth match.And it went well.Much better than I’d expected.Though you never feel like you show your true form in a competition, especially if you’ve been off it for a long time.I was commended by Coach Max for my defense and how good I was at retaining guard.And I was able to get to the final match, where I lost to the same person that I won against initially.So I got a silver, second spot, second place, which was my second grappling medal, I think, in a competition.And then a few more months passed, and there was a competition to be had in Brighton where my coach had been urging all of us to think about joining.So we were a big group of people going to Brighton.And I competed in two classes:one which was white belt normal bracket, where you could win on points but you could also win on submission,and then the second bracket was submission only.So as opposed to IBJJF, in the submission-only one—but in both brackets, leg locks were allowed, for example.And I was able to win a third place in the first class that I was competing in.And then in the second class, the submission-only, I won my two matches and I got the gold.Many more of the other members in my gym also won their matches and got medals and everything.So we were such a big group of people.And yeah, maybe in retrospect I’ll put up a few lovely pictures from this here where you see a big landscape-oriented image of all of us when we’re smiling to the camera, celebrating.And then came the most beautiful moment.Because when we were there, the whole group, in front of everyone, Max asked for everyone’s attention and then he handed me my blue belt.Saying a few words about my journey.And yeah, I don’t cry normally, and I didn’t cry then, but I was close to tears and I was really happy.I had a smile on my face which was broader than most people have seen me smile.Just thinking about it now makes me smile widely.So I’m very much thankful for Max believing in me, and me being able to deliver on that belief, and joining the gym, and being that consistent with my training, despite all of the daily toil I was doing at work.And this competition was actually held already when I’d moved from London.So I was specifically traveling back to London from Helsinki, where I’d been re-stationed, to join this competition with the other girls and boys from the gym.So it was a very valuable moment for me personally in my life’s journey.And of course, I wanted to keep grappling, so I joined a gym in Helsinki, which was great as well.But I got a bit of an knee injury there after a few months, which forced me off the mats for a couple of months.Previously, back when I was initially training in Stockholm, I had already suffered a tear—not a full tear, but quite a major tear—to the LCL, the inner ligament on my right knee, inner-side ligament, which is still a littlebit weaker than my left knee. But as long as nothing’s flared up, I’m still very functional in the right knee.And then in Helsinki, I kept training at Art of Ground Games, run by Van Nikken, a very good guy, and Juri - two good coaches.And then I moved back to Stockholm, Sweden.And I joined Stark, which means strong in Swedish.But the problem was then I ended up with my cancer diagnosis.So since then I haven’t trained.So I haven’t been able to be back on the competition mats.Because I was thinking of competing in Finland, but then I got injured.And then once I recovered from that injury, I’d moved to Sweden. And soon thereafter I got my cancer diagnosis.Why This Dream Came NowSo to wrap things up: a really cool dream.Thankful to have had that dream.And I think part of why that theme came to me was that during this past weekend Max and Greg Souders are having a training camp. Greg, a prominent figure in the grappling space, him and Max, they’re at the forefront of—especially Greg Souders, but also Max—they’re at the forefront of this other approach, non-traditional approach, to learning grappling, but also learning basically any type of movement, training movement, based on our core psychology around learning and movement. As opposed to doing strict technical drills and repeating those drills and describing very much in detail how you should apply a certain technique and what steps you need to take in order to get there, this approach is much more organic.It’s much more based on actual human physiology and behavior, where you indirectly stimulate learning to achieve the goals.So the specific goals that are set in your sport—or that are indirectly created in your sport based on the objective of the sport—in grappling, that would be to have the opponent submit to you.But if you extend that, okay, how are they able to submit to you?Or what are the avenues you can go down in order to have your opponent submit to you?It’s through strangulation, or through compression and injury, like the applied pressure and leverage to a joint, for example, and that reaching a level where your partner needs to tap and give up or faint.So what are the avenues to go down in order to affect that?It’s more about reaching an objective rather than prescribing any exact method to reach that objective.The way you train for that is to have more organic drills where you have a starting condition and you have an end point that you aim toward, and then you iterate on that, you cycle through that on different levels of detail, to build up a library of instincts basically, as opposed to a library of techniques.And those instincts, they can more naturally turn into free-form movement, which is much more resilient and anti-fragile than strictly contained, constrained technical drills in controlled settings.Because those controlled settings will never reappear in a real wild scenario.And what’s happening is this weekend, or for four days, Max and Greg and some other coaches, they are holding their shared four-day seminar in Málaga where people will be grappling and sharing their knowledge and getting such good coaching on site in Málaga.And it would have been a bliss to be there.But I don’t want to risk that still now with my life journey and me being back on treatment.But it’s almost worth the risk, because now, just having dreamt of the feeling of being on the mat grappling, it’s such a unique experience that I cherish so much.And I’m just hoping I can be back there someday.But there are other fish to fry, right?So we keep frying the fish in front of us.We’re not going to go across the lake for water, as the Swedish saying goes.We need to dig where we stand, to mix metaphors.And we could go on at length about my one year in London and how it turned out so opposed to my what expectations I had before arriving there.But let’s do that another time.Now I need to get back to sleep.So yeah, hang loose, fam.Be mindful of that life force of yours.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 9. Wednesday, April 15th. 03:39 in the morning.So, a poem—an idea for a poem—came to me upon waking.And I will now read it to you:The Night TrainThe night train is burning the midnight oil,Racing down the tracks, in hot pursuit of facts,lost to the fact that it is dark along these tracks.It’s dark in these depths, The darkness is whispering: lay still and just rest, But the darkness then channels a scream of unrest.The conductor is pressed. Hard-pressed for thoughts,Streaming and steaming,Where once there was naught,In deep sleep so soothing, which inner peace brought.But peace is hard bought, and peace is hard fought.The night train keeps burning the midnight oil,Thoughts and fancies stack to the ceiling in a pile, like nuggets of coal,I shovel them into the furnace, and they turn to nuggets of gold,Nuggets of my soul.Nuggets for the bold.The bold and bright,Who keep the light,Shinin’ oh so bright,And have their sights set to delight,And maintain that most jolly sprite, Even when wandering through the night,When faced with odds that aren’t so bright,When fate, at odds, strikes down with might—a lightning rod… [Still work in progress here…] ... The night brain is burning the midnight oil.Despite being drained from its daily toil, at night it rests in the most fertile soil.Fertile, but sometimes so dense with nutrients that it would have most names on these plains refrain - recoil, From going any deeper.These cells are filled with sleeper cells,Revelling in rebellion whilst reining in their inner stallions,Dormant, not yet valiant,But soon to wake at the wake of dawn,And rub their eyes in early dawn,Then grab their shields and grab their spears,And stand up tall, though gripped with fears,Prepared for the battalion. As the night train rages on over the sleepers.The night brain keeps burning the midnight oil.Dendrites stretching out their limbs, Connecting chains - so long, yet so thin, The one with most connections wins.Like a freight train, this chain stretches on and begins, Its journey from Vladivostok to Berlin, A network of interconnected bins,Urban jungles, cans of tin,Nodes in an empire of the darkness within. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 8. 05:25 in the morning, Tuesday, April 14th.So just a quick addendum to my previous episode on The Corporation.I think the title of the comic is most aptly going to be The Corporation.Because corporation, etymologically, is from corporatio in Latin: to combine in one body, corporare.So we have many bodies, many individuals, many bodies, many individual bodies combined into one body.And that’s basically at the tenet of this: that we’re sacrificing our own body, our own mind and being, our own individuality, to build up this new, bigger body.But it grows to a scale where that bigger body is so unwieldy that there is no connection between it and the individuals going into it.And it’s to the loss of all bodies inside of the corporation, but also to all bodies outside of the corporation that are intertwined with and in relation with this bigger body, this composite body.So the word corporation I think is the most apt word to use for aggregate human organizations that have grown to this scale.And I would actually suggest that we find another common term in English, or in our own language, which more closely reminds us of this fact, because not many of us are speaking Latin in our day to day.So maybe if you’re a French person, because you still use the word corps for body, even living bodies.In English, you just use it for dead bodies.But that’s also telling.There’s a corpse in the corporation.So the corporation is a corpse.We have our bodies, our corpus, and we put them inside of the corporation, but they turn into corpses.And the corporation itself turns into a corpse.And through that, through the gradual incorporation of our bodies, our corpus, our individual corpuses, the corporation, the organizational body, is growing.And to the extent that it’s growing, with every incremental step of the growth, it’s turning into a corpse.More and more into a corpse.And then you could make a twist in Swedish by having a korp, a raven, scavenging away at this corpse.But that would just be a word pun in Swedish mixed with English, so it doesn’t make any sense.In Swedish we would call that Göteborgshumor, as the city of Gothenburg is known infamously for being especially fond of making these word-pun jokes, these dad jokes as they’re called in American English.Yeah, that was the addendum.But I think the title is for sure The Corporation.And then you could go into, inside of the comic book, you could go into this, at the end maybe, of the comic book, of the comic strip, you could get into this etymology of the word corporation.Because that’s basically summing up the whole crux of this issue that we have with scaling human endeavors, that I’ve seen for such a long time.And I’m not the one to come up with these ideas, obviously.Many other people must have iterated on them before.But actually, I haven’t read that much literature on the unwieldiness of the scale of things.So maybe it’s something I could write a book about, actually, not just a comic book.So maybe that’s for a later creative spark episode, about the formulation of the ideas at the core, the core tenets, for a book on human scale and how it f***s us up.But that’s for a later date.Yeah.Then, in closing: stay blessed, fam.Ciao. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 8. Tuesday, April 14th. It’s 04:22 in the morning.So.Fam.Everyone listening.The few loyal followers listening to this:You are about to hear the first of my nighttime reflection episodes here that will feature, and mainly wrap around, a new creative idea that I have that I will brainstorm with myself in this recording, and you will follow my thought process.And it’s interesting, because the reason I have this idea is that I got it straight away as I woke up.That happens a lot to me.And it happens a lot in these transition periods in my current cyclical situation, where I’m going down into this underworld with the most of suffering, and then I’m crawling back up, I’m slowly rising to the surface, and then mentally you could say I’m starting to soar toward the skies already.And it reminds me of what a good friend of mine yesterday wrote to me. He said: the lower the lows, the higher the highs.And that definitely holds true from my experience, both in my awakened state, but also in terms of my dreaming and my creative life, my creative spark.This most valuable creative spark that I’ve always cherished.It’s always been there with me, but when I haven’t had these lowest of lows, it’s like the highest of highs haven’t really started to pick up speed.And you all know it, at least from consuming other people’s creative endeavors that have been triggered by other people’s creative sparks, that if you take the world of music, for example, the lowest of the lows, the most oppressive periods in people’s lives, very often concerning life and death or love and hate, they’ve generated some of the most magnificent musical creations.And those creations are timeless.They’re like a star in the starscape.To the memory of man, they’re very hard to erase.Now that we have recorded sound, and I’m certain before we were able to record music, there were thousands of these creations that were surviving throughout the generations.They were being retold.They existed through tradition.Which, at least in Swedish, means spoken word.Most probably it should mean the same in any Germanic language.That tradition, this oral tradition, the oral retelling, the oral re-singing, and the physical replaying—yeah, we’re known to have heard of the replay button, but originally it had to be the replay of a human being in order to keep the tradition alive of retelling the story that was told through sound, through rhythm, through lyrics, through singing, through melody.And they made that happen as well.And let’s say back then, one of the strongest songs might have been caused by a vengeful twist of fate where half the tribe had to suffer an annihilating death because of some natural disaster.Well, that turned into tradition to retell that in order to caution the people not to have the tribe go through that again.And that story, very often accompanied by music, must definitely have been around for years.And over time, I’m convinced, it’s what created our religions.Religion means to be bound. It’s to be bound to religio in Latin, if I remember correctly. It’s to be bound to a conviction that something holds true based on history, based on human experience.And I’m sure these original stories have, over time, formed and shaped these more world religions that have become organized and grown out of their suits, in my opinion.Where religion originally was something tied down to the small tribe and the few individuals living in it.As anything human, we’ve scaled it up.We’re talking about society here, but the original society, in an evolutionary sense, was originally just a small tribe.Your family, your neighboring family, some other neighboring families.And often you guys decided who was to be chieftain for the time being.And there was a division of labor within this extended family.But that was it.So we’re already on a side quest here, but bear with me.I’ll get to the main creative idea that I was waking up to.And it’s definitely connected, in a sense, to what I’m now free-balling on.So we were talking about the highs and the lows, and then we went into how they are enmeshed into any cultural product, any creative product that you get from human beings that sustains itself over time, that creates a narrative that people find captivating.It often has the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.Or maybe the other way around: it has the lowest of lows and then the highest of highs.Or there’s a roller coaster, somewhat like my conundrum here, where there’s steady fluctuation, where I’m just flipping like a light switch between highs and lows.High, low, high, low, high, low, high, low.Okay.Yeah, it’s getting repetitive, but there’s a lot of nuance there as well.And that’s definitely something to clarify.Just because I’m going through these cycles that from the outsider’s perspective might look homogenous and monotonous and draining and grueling and gruesome and just pitch black, it’s definitely the case that every low, every valley, every downfall, every twist and turn where I’m heading down into the abyss, has been radically different from the one before.And the same is to be said with every high.There are layers to this onion that I would never have even dreamt of experiencing in terms of my visceral experience in this.But my body is one.My body’s one integral system.So my mind is following all of these twists and turns.And similarly, it’s also peeling off layers of its onion and discovering new dimensions to itself and to its relation to the material world as a whole, as we experience it.And as it’s peeling away, it’s discovering its untapped potential.And I’m not meaning untapped in terms of what you see on the internet, that the brain is only using 1% of its capacity.It’s on a different plane.I mean, I could be saying I’m using 1% of my capacity, but I think the brain’s capacity to see through things in different ways and from different perspectives is infinite.Or it’s only limited by the laws of the universe.And those laws are malleable.Any law is malleable.I mean, we’re not legalists here, right?We don’t think what is right or what is possible is only the things that are within the framework of the law.No, we’re not those guys.Because if you were, you would be history-less.You would be someone who’s completely inept at projecting into the future.Because what’s legal, what’s allowed, what’s taboo or not taboo at this very point in time, it changes.It’s changed before. It’s going to change in the future.So what’s your measuring stick?And why do you limit the realm of possibilities to only being in the here and only being in the now?And then what’s deemed legal was deemed possible, was deemed taboo or not taboo, was deemed appropriate, was deemed moral in this place.If you move to another place, if you put your body and you wake up or you grow up from being a child to an adult in another place, well, that measuring stick will have changed.So why do you want to limit your realm of possibilities to only have an idea of what’s just and right and what’s appropriate and what’s legal or whatever moral to this here?So in combination, the time and place, it’s all flexible.The here and now is just one point in the XY plane of the infinite-dimensional plane, which doesn’t only encompass time and space.It encompasses so many more parameters that humanity can peer through and peel away at.So that was a side note, or a side route to the side route, which means it’s easier to get lost in the woods.But I need to keep my eye on the woods, despite cherishing each tree in it.Speaking of metaphors with trees, yeah, I love them, because now I’m getting closer to the region of one of the things I’m putting a lot of time into since September last year, namely arboriculture and dendrology and tree studies.But that was a side note to the side note to the side note.So now let’s go back.We’ve talked about the highs and the lows, which was already a side note.So now we’re fourth removed from the original topic, or more.But before that I said I was going to—oh yeah, it’s actually fifth removed, because the highs and the lows came from me talking about waking up, and in the same way as when you wake up you can remember what you dreamt sometimes, and you can remember it quite vividly and hopefully in some detail, at least at the point when you were waking up—what seems to happen to me a lot, especially now that I’m getting to enjoy the taste of some of these highs creatively, is that I’m waking up to the idea, the creative idea, generated in my mind.And this one time, just now when I woke up, I had one such creative idea.And what’s lovely with these creative ideas is they tend to make use of the things that I’ve done during my daytime existence.But they synthesize them in the most unique ways.I mean, you’ve probably heard of this before.People claim creativity is often when one or several minds—but I think it’s almost always generated inside just one mind, and then it can be retold by one mind, and it can get rings on the water, and you can get that idea to spread or to be revamped, remixed by someone else, which is a new creative spark coming from that person.Which is what’s driving this wonderful creative edge that humanity has.It’s not just that one individual can do this. It is that we can accumulate this over millennia, over generations, and spread it geographically.But what happens is that I get the idea, and as I said, it’s synthesized in the most unique way.Sometimes in the most unique way, it seems to have synthesized different experiences from different realms, different disciplines, into a new created product.And this happened tonight.So now the pre-word, the prologue, is over, and I’ll start to get into the actual idea.And throughout that idea, afterwards or a bit during, I will also bring in other aspects to why I think this idea came about.And hopefully we can conclude before my mouth gets too overworked here, and the muscles in your ears get overworked as well, and our calendars are clogged up because I’m sitting here just telling this reflection and it’s already time for my next treatment, and you’re sitting there listening or reading and you missed four days of work.So let’s not get there.Marching on.The CorporationSo we have the stage.I’m waking up.And in my mind’s view—let me see, how did it start?Yes.In my mind’s view, I get the stereotypical experience that I’ve been having: working in a big company.But it’s a bit warped.Or in the first frame that I’m seeing, it’s like a comic book.Maybe the comic-book feature of it comes a bit later.But what I’m seeing is: we’re in a big company, a corporation, a conglomerate.Oh, conglomerate makes me think of the labeled conglomerates inside my body.But yeah, let’s not get into that.So imagine you’re in a big company, this colossal enterprise.And inside this enterprise, you have workers.And there’s a very young, industrious, motivated, energetic, almost frenetically willing, energetic young individual, young professional, as they label it nowadays.But a young aspiring professional who’s aspiring inside this existing hierarchy of the big corporation, who’s willing to push himself in the daily grind.The daily grind.Remember the word grind here.The daily grind.And he’s grinding it out.And together with him, there are a lot of colleagues coming into the corporation.They join through a rigorous application process which is only selecting a few out of the applicants to join this big corporation.And it’s an honor for them.They feel it’s an honor to have not only applied to join the company as apprentices, but that they’re then accepted as one of the few, and that they get to apply themselves inside of the corporation.So they start their apprenticeships or their internships.And throughout the internship they need to grind it out.They need to do a lot of menial work.They need to do a lot of work that other people in the company don’t want to do.And over time, they accumulate all of these tools, all of this understanding of the company and the corporation, and they can provide so much value to the company by grinding it out and by helping the corporation as a whole.And they keep being very industrious until they’ve collected so many tools that they become these more experienced, and therefore more and more senior experts inside of the company.Subject matter experts.Process experts.Process specialists.Senior consultants, senior engineers, senior lawyers, senior administrators, etc., etc.And being these subject matter experts, they’re really keen on refining their work.And they start to care about the details of their work.They start to tutor other people in this.And they keep grinding.They keep grinding.They get home to their private life, to their life outside of work, and they don’t have much time for anything else.But they’re so dedicated to work.They’re so dedicated to the firm, to the corporation, to the conglomerate, to the institution in their lives.And suddenly there’s a stroke of luck.There’s just something happening in the world, and there’s a miracle coming down to them.They get kids.So the subject matter expert, the Nestor, the one who’s at the pinnacle of his contributions to the firm, the spider in the web, the one who makes the work of other minor workers, the younger, more energetic applicants and junior colleagues, so much more valuable by infusing it with process improvements, with increased knowledge for everyone to share, now has a new goal in life: to take care of their kids.But they’re getting a split-personality syndrome.They have put so much into the firm.But gradually, over time, family life starts to matter more.And they start to deviate from their holy path of the firm.Where they were to sacrifice themselves for the firm, now they have a new idol.The child.The holy child.And they gradually sacrifice themselves more for the family.The crux is that they’ve come to a position of power inside the corporation.And that power is only increasing by the day because they’ve reached past a certain threshold point where they’ve accumulated a lot of privileges, a lot of rewards for their past work.And some people have even gamed the system by not having been in this valuable-contributor bucket, in essence, by being the subject matter expert who’s coordinating everyone’s efforts, or being the leader, being the coach who’s helping everyone else to grow and blossom and seeding innovation.Rather, some have gamed the system so they’re able to get closer to the laurels of the company prematurely.But whether they’re in that bucket of people, in that swim lane, or whether they were in the original swim lane of the greatest contributors and the martyrs for the company, essentially—and remember that word martyr as well, because it will reflect in what’s to come—so you have the grinders, you have the martyrs, but now you get to the stage where these people that have continued this trajectory in the firm, they have a new god in town: the child, the juvenile.And they keep spending their energy and their dedication into the family, to the suffering of the firm and their contribution to the firm.And since they are at a very high position in the firm’s hierarchy, their decisions, their way of acting, will trickle down to form the culture of the company as a whole.And these people who originally were very valuable advisors to their juniors, they become less and less valuable.The idol, the family and the child, they lose sight of their original aims for the company and they’re not as flexible in their thinking.This will over time have the firm stagnate in its goals and aims and its malleability, its adaptability to the surroundings and to its own strengths and weaknesses and what’s happening in the world.And this will trickle down throughout the firm.The firm will get more and more rigid as it goes on.And this will create bitterness over time, which will accumulate because of arbitrariness inside the firm, because of people taking things for granted inside the firm to the extent that sooner or later they will just start not at all corresponding to the reality outside of the firm.Or the reality inside of the firm, for that matter.So the map is not changing at the speed that it needs to change to stay at least as close to reality as it once was.And as I woke up and started having this idea, I was looking at it from my own personal point of view, where I feel that since I haven’t formed a family yet, I’ve been in this subject matter expert bucket for a long time.And I’ve been a very good company man.I’ve contributed a lot to the company.And I’ve looked at my colleagues who have gotten kids, and I haven’t understood why they got so lax.But obviously, if I go into their perspective, they have a new idol in town.But they also have a limited energy budget.When they come home from every day of work, or nowadays when they can work from home, still they need to be connected to their laptops, and they just feel that they’re this split personality syndrome and they have to make a choice.You cannot be fully engaged in two things at once.That’s not how humanity works.You see these hustlers online saying that you can start your side business and it will become your passion, but I’m convinced it’s not how that works.What they do is they have a job, they have their day job, but they find a way to be able to do that day job without much passion and engagement.And then even though they’re spending hours on that job, it’s basically just hours where they do things on autopilot, and a big part of their brain, and even their hands and eyes, might still be focusing during their working hours on this new passion.So similarly, it’s what’s happening to the family father or the mother who used to be the company man, but now they’re less and less engaged in forming the company to the best of their abilities because there’s a new god in town.And I see that now.I fully see it more than ever, that this change has to happen, because I’ve never been able to combine two passions at once if one is draining me to that extent.And I mean, to be fair, most people don’t feel that what they do in their company is their actual passion.What tends to happen, though, is they sublimate their want for having a passion in life by identifying themselves as this company person, the company man, the company woman.And they build a cultural identity around that.And they build their self-worth around that.And that starts even earlier with our education system, and even earlier than that with parenting and how our social spheres are just burnishing us, they’re branding us.Original etymology for branding is this heated iron to mark the flesh of the cattle.And we’re being branded from birth with these expectations on ourselves to conform.And that carries on through into our definition of self-worth through being a company man, basically.Following in the patterns of our ancestors.Joining the army just like your dad did, or his dad before him.Standing up for the nation, for the people, for the kingdom, for the king, for the tribe.And there you have it.Originally it was very crucial to stand up for the tribe, but now as we’re a mass society, it no longer is, in the sense of having to act in a very specific way, following very specific customs.No, you can create your own customs.But back to the story.So I personally reflected on my own path here, and I started to empathize more and more with the family parent who gets into this crux.And as you’ve heard, it’s a common theme that over time the firm starts to stagnate.So it grows bigger and bigger, larger and larger, more and more unmanageable, more and more distancing itself in terms of its philosophy, its methods, its madness.There’s a method to the madness, and it’s growing out of shape.It’s growing to a scale that humanity cannot handle.Which brings us back to this original side topic of the tribe.Because the original scale of things was the tribe.There’s this anthropologist who came up with a number, the Dunbar number.Yeah, an anthropologist, Dunbar, I think he identified how big tribes in aboriginal societies or indigenous societies got to, and it’s in the hundreds, maybe one or two hundred people maximum.And then it starts to scale to an extent where humanity is not very good at coordinating its efforts, or at least there will be a lot of aberrations in how well it coordinates its efforts in relation to what’s best for it, what’s closest to its natural tendencies, etc.And definitely to what’s functional in terms of harmonizing with its external environment, the flora and fauna of its surroundings, and the natural resources of its surroundings.So that’s the story of humanity as well: that it’s scaled out of itself, out of its social fabric, its suit.It’s grown out of its suit socially, but it’s also grown out of its suit ecologically.And that’s the tendency you’ll see in this.But carry on the story of the firm.You see me retelling all of the stereotypical stages in the firm.And I already got quickly into education and upbringing as well, so we can have those as well.So you have the cyclical parenting and birth and parenting and birth, where you have the birth initiating this journey for one individual joining the company.And the child is then brought up.It’s being shaped by its surroundings, by its parenting, and the society at hand.And then it goes into a formative phase where it has to become an individual in the flock.And then it’s herded into the company.And then it becomes the company man that grows to be the subject matter expert company man, that then becomes the senior person with this new god, the family, the new child, and the new children in the family.And then that person keeps having to split their attention and split their lives between the company and the family, so it’s never fully satisfied with either.And the company isn’t fully satisfied.Those other people still in the company, they’re not fully satisfied either, because the company gets warped and holds less and less meaning for its members because it’s grown out of its suit.Same as humanity has grown out of its suit socially and ecologically, it’s now grown out of its suit in terms of endeavors and goals and how they line up.But the person needs to be in the company because they need the material security of staying in the company in order to provide for their family, because they’ve left the wilderness.This is the new wilderness, to be able to extract resources by being a member of not the tribe, but the corporation.That’s the new tribe in town.And what they do is they keep being a member of the corporation until the day they die.So they keep being drained of energy until the day they die.They keep being in the split-personality situation until the day they die.And what’s happening throughout all of this is they are dedicating their life energy, their currency, their flesh, their blood, sweat, and tears to the corporation.And in my mind’s view, what I saw was that the corporation—I envisioned it as like a tall factory building rising from the soil.And with every increment of sacrifice and dedication and energy and blood, sweat, and tears spent by each member of the company, there was a trickle of flesh, metaphorically speaking, being churned by the company.And you already remember I was referring to the word grind and to have it in mind.Well, what I’m seeing happening here in this comic book that I envision this is to be—it is to be a comic book, I’m to publish this comic book, I’m to generate this comic-book version of this story—the people had their daily grind, their dedication going into grinding it out here.And that makes me visualize a big grindstone, a big millstone, at the center, at the heart of the factory building, that is grinding away all of these workers.They turn more and more into drones that are just mechanically grinding away.It’s less about the output from the company.The output of a huge company, it can water down over time.You see it with social media, that now that they’ve grown so huge and added so many layers to the cake in order for that company to sustain itself just economically, and because of the stagnation inside the firm and the stagnation of the goals of the firm, it starts to gradually just turn into a drain of energy for the people inside the firm, but also for the ones who are using the product.So inside the heart of the factory you have a millstone, a grindstone.And what’s being ground is the passions, the energy, the time that these company workers, the drones of the corporation, us, are putting in day in, day out, into the corporation’s soul, from their own soul.And that’s a big grindstone.It’s grinding away, grinding away.And people are actually martyrs.But they’re martyrs for something that turns into something else.The startup, the noble idea, it has turned into something else.It’s morphed into this colossal giant that is no longer steered by the will of the individuals.And it’s no longer steered by the will of the most powerful individuals either, because they cannot steer it either, even if their will by now will have been very corrupted from the idealistic dreams that they might have had at the onset of this.And this is the corporation, but you have this in any type of human structure.You have it in the bureaucracy.You have it in the political party where people get into it being idealists and then they come out of it just being drained.They might be materially powerful or whatever, but they’re drained because they sacrifice so much of their uniqueness into this generic whole.So I’m fully convinced, and this came to me gradually during the second half of high school and stayed with me ever since, that the best interactions in life, they’re the ones that are most localized.If I want to get to know another person, it’s always the best to do it just me and that person.If we bring in a third person into the conversation, into the room, it’s never as unique.It’s never as intimate.It’s never as multifaceted.The quality of the interaction goes down.Now we’re talking about human endeavors on a scale where every individual that is included in the process, they need to dedicate so much of their lives and so much of their time and space on this planet, which is limited.It’s all limited.So viscerally experienced by me, how limited it is for each one of us.And we expect ourselves to dedicate so much of that into one single mass endeavor.The firm. The corporation. Humanity. The church. The state.No, f**k that.Those things will come out of their own.They will be created by all of our interactions.But what if we could focus on the more local-level interactions?The way I’m doing now, talking to you guys.If we could focus more on the local-level interactions and improve the quality of those and honor those and curate those, I’m convinced we would have so much less of these grindstones that we put ourselves in.And you can say, yeah, it’s impossible because we’re so many people on this planet now, and our strength is to aggregate knowledge and traditions over time, so there’s no way we can go back to that localized mentality.But I say b******t.I’m living in a very global world, but I’m still feeling this.It’s at the core of my bodily existence that I feel how much I cherish quality in direction, quality in perceived life quality in waking up and knowing that for the coming moments, before I get to bed tonight, if I get to bed tonight, if I’m lucky to get to bed tonight, I would get so much more out of genuine interactions, genuine collaboration with individuals, rather than sacrificing my blood, sweat, and tears into an abstract, monstrous, amorphous, metamorphosed monster of an aggregate entity such as a corporation or a political party or a government or a bureaucracy or a military or a sect.If I could cherish those individual interactions, those spark-of-the-moment type of synergies, when I go to bed at night my life will have felt so much more full, so much more in tune with my natural instincts.Because there is no thing else than individuals.These aggregate bodies that we’re talking about—the firm, the party, society, humanity—it’s all an illusion.It’s such an illusion.And our minds play tricks on us, and we inherit these tricks from our parents.So much of our cultural heritage is just wordplay on riffing on these themes.So there are more alleyways here in this reasoning, of course, that I could go down.But the main point was that I got this lovely creative idea of making a comic book on the topic of the corporation.But it could just as well be called The Church, or The Party, or The Bureaucracy, because any organization that human beings scale to that scale, it’s out of proportion and it’s unwieldy.It’s unwieldy in itself, for itself, but especially for the individual.And the individual, if you listen to the word individual, it’s something that is indivisible.You cannot divide it.Of course you can divide it.You can chop up an individual into all of the constituents, animal cells inside that individual, etc., etc.But we’re all just energy in the end, or whatever you would call it.We’re all just flux.But no, I really lost the thread.So I want to create this comic book.And I’m not a subscriber to the belief in the law of attraction, this popular-science idea that if you manifest something in terms of speaking it out loud to yourself or to other people, it will be created.No, I don’t think that’s the case.I don’t think fate will magnetically attract me to writing this comic.Same way that I don’t think me shouting from the top of my lungs to myself or to others that I will cure my “incurable” cancer will make that happen.What I do firmly believe, though, is that the more I can talk about my ideas, the more nuance I will bring to those ideas, but also the more top-of-mind they will be in a sense where I will keep working at them consciously, but also subconsciously within my dream states, for example.So I’m very happy that this idea came to me.And I don’t think it would have come to me if I would have been stuck in the corporation day to day, which I no longer am.And I’m grateful for that.And maybe I can retain not being stuck in such a corporate day-to-day for quite some time now.Let’s see.So there you have it, my idea.I’ve shared it with you.And obviously this is not something I’m going to realize tomorrow, but it’s a new idea in my creative library, which is endless.And so many of those ideas have not been written down, so they may be lost forever.But this one at least will be recorded, for me or for someone else to pick up the baton and run with.Yeah, that’s it.Now I need to get back to sleep.Though I’m hearing the dove cooing outside, and that’s sometimes the sign, now when it’s starting to get into the summer half of the year and it’s so light outside, that I might not be able to fall back asleep.But that would all have been worth it for recording this idea, for you guys and for myself.So to conclude:Thanks for hanging in here.Thanks for sharing this moment with me.Be mindful of your life force.Be mindful of your own creative spark and think of how that could be life-affirming for you in your context.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 8. Sunday, April 12th. It’s 05:10 in the evening.There’s one added part of the story—just a minor detail, but still quite funny and interesting from a physiological point of view—that I wanted to add to the previous S**t Hit the Fan episode.And it’s that when I woke up and immediately felt this weird sticky fluid all around my boxer briefs, obviously it was quite immediately after I had shat myself.And the reason I had shat myself was because I was so relaxed that I didn’t have any control of the ring muscle, the one that releases at the end of your gut.The sphincter muscle.And because of that, I had shat myself.When I woke up, I was panicking, and I directly stood up.There was directly a lot of blood circulating down to this area—my upper thighs and the glute area.But I still had this latent numbness from this area not having been under my voluntary control, being so relaxed nervous-system-wise.So a lot of blood was flowing there, and I think there was some physiological reaction to the fact that I realized that I had shat myself, which made me want to contract those muscles between the butt cheeks.So there was this mixed weird feeling for maybe 10 to 15 seconds of my butt trying to tense itself, but also having this weird feeling of numbness to it.There was an interesting freakish detail that I forgot to mention to you when relaying this story earlier.And I think one of the reasons I forgot to bring up this detail was because I had willfully, deliberately thought about how I should present this topic beforehand.So my mind had gone into a space where I wanted to relay it by first tucking it in, first having a disclaimer, and then slowly going through the background until I ended up in this state.And because of that, my concentration and my focus were not as much on the details of what happened when s**t hit the fan.And my learning from that is that I will try to peel away even more of the self-censorship and the pre-structuring of any content that I do in this format.Because the whole point of this format, the whole value proposition of this format, is that it is to be instantaneous.It is to be unfiltered, raw, and the full “director’s cut”—but without the director even there.There shouldn’t be any cut.It should just be the raw, pure reflections, as much as possible, from me basically trying to dissociate mentally, when I’m speaking to the microphone here, from the fact that there will be an audience on the other side.As much as I can discount the fact that you guys are listening, the better this content will be for it.So I vow to keep moving in that direction.Even if it means I’m going to make even more of a fool of myself, I think that is the whole point with this content.And apart from my conviction that me relaying my own personal experience in this very traumatizing, challenging situation in the fullest way possible could hopefully help some of you pick out some things from it to bring into your own lives when you suffer from some challenge—...it is also just the fact that one of the main tools for me to get through this is to be this uncensored, to be this unfiltered, because that’s how I can find value in anything.It is basically building me into the most anti-fragile version of myself possible.And also, I enjoy it.I think it is core to my personality, something I have been deflecting somewhat in order to fit in.But I don’t care anymore.You take me or leave me.I’m just going to be as unfiltered as possible.And sure, sometimes I might need to wear a mask in order to remain in a certain context.But to the best of my abilities, I’m going to try and push onwards with this - consistently peeling away at my inner self-censor.And let’s see where it leads us…So anyway, be mindful of your life force, fam.I’ll talk to you soon.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 7. Sunday, April 12th, 9:58 in the morning.So as I’m lying here in bed, I’m looking back on another weird night.This episode is going to be quite self-revealing, unfortunately. But in the name of transparency, in the name of raw originality, in the name of exposing my full self and the full spectrum of my emotions and experiences going through this odyssey, it needs to be revisited.Whether you want to keep listening or not, that’s up to you.Whether you want to judge me for exposing this physical flaw that I’ve been forced to have, that’s on you.Because I don’t care.So here we go.Refeeding Into InstabilityWhat happened tonight needs a bit of background first.As you should know by now, I’ve just gone through my third reretreatment round, and my twelfth treatment round in total.And on the sixth day after everything I’m doing, which importantly includes a 6-day long water-fast, it is time to refeed.As described yesterday, I initiated refeeding, and that is always a shaky process because the body has been in a dormant but also toxified state.One of the cell types with the greatest sensitivity to chemotherapy is the gut lining.The cells in your gut lining, all throughout the gut, renew themselves very rapidly. I’ve read scientific papers concluding that they renew every three to seven days in any person. So within a week, your gut lining will basically be completely replaced.And the way chemotherapy acts is that it does something to healthy cells that interferes with their machinery. It may incorporate flawed DNA, such as in the 5-FU that I’m receiving. It may tamper with DNA repair and replication mechanisms, as in the oxaliplatin that I’m receiving. It may have other effects as well.But almost all of those effects will cause more cell damage and cell death in those cell populations that are fast-dividing and more metabolically active.And the cells of the gut lining are very much in the main league there.So they will be heavily impacted in anyone going through chemotherapy, including me, even though I’m water-fasting in order to have my healthy cells go into as much of a dormant, protective state as possible.So my gut lining is heavily damaged.Through not eating, and through the burst of chemotherapy, all of the gut flora must also most certainly be heavily modified.And in summary, my gut—and of course all the other bodily systems—are not what they should be in order to start re-ingesting food.Another such subsystem is the organ machinery required to produce digestive acids, such as bile.And then comes the problem: I need to refeed.There is no perfect strategy, but there are better and worse strategies. My current basic logic is to get liquid nutrients, and the highest-value macronutrients possible for rebuilding, into my body as early as possible.That means having a broth filled with protein.The easiest such broth to make, that can be heated and stay on the stove overnight, is chicken broth.So I take in a lot of liquid nutrients in the form of chicken broth, as well as solid protein in the form of chicken meat and beef mince.That is my only nutrient intake—for the whole first day of refeeding.What then tends to happen is that my gut becomes very distended from what it was before, because it was completely empty. During 6 days with no caloric intake it will have shrunk up a lot, and now it needs to reexpand to be able to take up all this nutrient volume—but even more so all this liquid volume.I still think it is a good idea to take in nutrients in liquid form.However, the way I do it, it is quite a lot of liquid. Quite a big quantity.And it still might be the best idea, because there is going to be a lot of turbidity, a lot of motion of these liquids inside the gut.So if I have a nutrient-dense broth—but not too nutrient-dense, because that might agitate the gut too much, too much of a shock—then I reason that this liquid will move around all the nooks and crannies of the gut lining.Because the gut is not an even flat tube. It has all these folds and fibrils. There is so much surface area to cover.And my reasoning, which is purely heuristic and based on common sense rather than on some highly specific scientific model, is that gradually exposing as much of the gut lining surface area as possible to valuable nutrients through a liquid filled with protein might be one of the better ways to go.But what then happens during the first day of refeeding is that my gut is filled with all this liquid.And not all of that liquid can be absorbed by the gut.So it needs to come out one way or the other.It doesn’t come out through the mouth, because I’m no longer nauseous. I’m not going to puke.So it needs to come out the other way.And if the gut is not able to absorb it into the blood and the interstitial tissue, then it will come out from behind.What Happened in the NightWhat happened tonight was that, after having had my gut activate during the afternoon and evening, and having to go to the toilet quite often and produce very loose stool, there was still enough liquid in my body when I went to sleep that it needed to come out sooner or later.So I fell asleep around half past eleven, quite late. I think this was due to my body still being so metabolically active from having started to ingest food. So my bedtime got relatively late because of that, despite me not having slept much at all the night before.The night before had been the one night in this cycle where I had the most intense near-psychedelic-state sensations—my gut rumbling and undulating and feeling hypersensitive, my whole body in that strange intermediate state where it is most intensely trying to recompose and reconstitute itself.But the problem now was that I still had all of this fluid in my gut.And I woke up around 2 a.m. with this sensation of sticky wetness.What had happened was that I’d shat myself.There was a big wet, liquid stain all around my boxer briefs.So I had to get up. I had to clean that off.A bit had spilled onto the bed. Fortunately, not much had come out of the boxer briefs and onto the bed, but it was still enough liquid on the bed that I had to pull apart some of the blankets, bring a towel, bring hot water, bring a cleaning cloth, and clean things up.I then had to clean my underwear.I then had to figure out a way to still be able to sleep on our double bed without the dirty part being exposed to the clean part of the bed. So I had to fold the bed linen in a way that let me sleep on half the bed while the dirtied part was rolled away, which was a mess.And in this state, I’m already very weak.This is never anyone’s favorite activity to do in the middle of the night, and it definitely was not mine tonight either.And then of course there was still more liquid to come out.So I had to sit on the toilet for another thirty minutes or so to gradually let all that liquid come out, because I didn’t want to go back to sleep only to have this happen again immediately.I did that. I cleaned myself.And what’s also happening is that because I have so much liquid in the gut, it is kind of diluting the stomach acid in a way. So I think the nutrients and the liquid are moving through the gut quite quickly.And that means it is acidic.So in my groin I’m feeling this acid coming out as well, which is very unpleasant.So I had to keep wiping myself.Then I got to a stage where I thought my stomach was maybe not as active anymore, and I went back to bed.But I’m not sleeping much at this stage.I got back to bed around 2:50, and then maybe lay there for half an hour before there was more liquid to come out, so I went back to the bathroom for another half hour or more.Then I went back to bed again, maybe got a little bit of sleep, or maybe just lay there before my stomach once again wanted to rid itself of fluid.Then I went back to the bathroom for another fifteen to twenty minutes.Then back to bed again.And now I’ve woken up, so I think I got a bit of sleep toward the end of it, because it’s quarter past ten in real time now.The Numbers of the NightI checked what my smart ring says about the night.It is currently giving me a sleep score of 66.So over the night I was at least able to accumulate 6 hours 34 minutes of sleep, which is definitely better than yesterday, when I only had 3 hours 54 minutes.So: 6.5 hours of total sleep, 1 hour 40 minutes REM, 1 hour 5 minutes deep sleep.I was “in bed” for ten hours…So yes: roughly three and a half hours of wake time.Those waking slots were between around 1:45 and 3:00, and then another large waking bout between 7:00 and 8:15.My resting heart rate is not too bad.HRV is really crap: 46 ms. So I did manage to make it through the night.There were some casualties, though.So we need to clean the bed once more.After having cleaned the bed linen yesterday—Jonna was diligently doing the cleaning yesterday to rid our bedroom and apartment of everything I had been wearing or sleeping in during the intense chemo infusion period—now this happened once more.And yes, we need to clean it up.Sleep Is Always Under SiegeMy sleep is always disrupted by new things.There is always something, wherever I am in the cycle, that might be disrupting it.Whether it is chemo, or HBOT, or the fact that I have fasted for so long, or my gut being unstable, or my nervous system being unstable……or my body overreacting to strength training, or sauna and therefore being overly inflamed……or the fact that I have started eating again, or that I have eaten a bit too close to bedtime, or that I have eaten a little too much because I need to overeat, basically, to regain body weight and strength and reboot my systems.There are so many different ways my sleep can be destabilized.The neighbors might be doing something.Something might happen in the morning and cause noise.You name it.So that is one common theme here: we will keep having these disruptions.Another common theme is the cyclicity of things.The cyclicity of my challenges and my struggle.SisyphusIn recent days I’ve already, twice in the past two or three days, been exposed to the myth of Sisyphus.I don’t remember every detail, but in some way Sisyphus committed some unforgivable act against Hades or another Greek god.And the punishment that was devised for him was this:He would be placed in the underworld at the bottom of a cliff.The incline of the cliff was such that he could walk up it and push a boulder up it—but not enough to ever actually get the boulder over the top.At the bottom there was a massive rock.And Sisyphus’ task was to push that boulder up to the top of the cliff.But the devious crux was that every time he neared the shoulder of the cliff, every time he got close to the top, the boulder would roll back down.There was nothing he could do about it.No determination, resilience, or strength in his repertoire could stop it.And then he would have the task forced upon him again: push the boulder back up.This is me, basically.This is my life, and it has been my life for almost two years.And I can never really mentally leave that state of just pushing.Because if I did, then given the state of my being, given where I am in this disease process, the boulder would just get heavier and heavier, and harder and harder to keep pushing.I’ve been trying to find ways to normalize this, but the process itself keeps barraging me.It keeps hitting me.It is like a hailstorm with new obstacles coming along.And I just need to find relief and consolation and strength in anything I can grab onto along the way, on this journey, just to accept that this is now my journey.I am just pushing this rock.And I think we all are, in some sense.Sooner or later, we all have to come to the conclusion that we are pushing this rock.Every one of us can find small examples in day-to-day life.For example, cleaning your bedsheets.It is something you have to do all the time.You need to do it from when you become responsible for cleaning your bedsheets until you die—unless you pay someone to do it, or you are still living with your mother and she does it.The reason I experience this so intensely is that there is such a clear cyclicity to my suffering, and that the suffering has such a high intensity compressed into very short recurring blocks of time.There is this recurring stage where I feel I have pushed the boulder up to a certain point, and then it falls back down again.There is such a clear seasonality for me.Nowadays every three weeks I crash and burn, and then from the embers, from the ashes, I slowly recompose myself to the best of my abilities, trying to rise like a phoenix.That too is a most useful symbol… Because the phoenix, in the tale, is decomposed and recomposed so many times.So it becomes this image of constant regeneration.And that is life.That is what life is all about anyway.You might mentally think that you are a stable, concrete entity that has been living on this planet from the day you were born until today.But that is very far removed from the truth.You are in constant flux.All the molecules in your body, all the cells in what you interpret as your body, are constantly being replaced and renewed and repaired and destroyed.So there is no stability in this life.It is all just a process of regeneration, decay, decomposition, recomposition, reformulation, reformation, revolution, evolution… I could go on.Why I Keep PushingThere are ways I can find consolation in this conundrum.One, of course, is that this intense crisis situation instinctively puts my body in a state where it is acutely aware of its frailty and acutely aware of its capacities.So it develops a very strong self-interest in exploring every avenue of how what I perceive, moment to moment, can be used to improve my life situation.That is true both in the sense of ensuring survival from one moment to the next, and in terms of life quality.Because if I do not experience life quality, if I do not experience a joie de vivre, a joy in being alive, then what is the point of all this?If I’m just pushing a big boulder up a mountain and it is going to roll down anyway, then if I cannot enjoy the ride in any respect whatsoever, I might as well be done with it.So it becomes intensely clear that in order for me to have the tenacity, the psychological energy, the resilience to keep doing this, I need to find ways to enjoy the process.One such way is to accept the downsides and see them as something thrilling, something that piques my curiosity.And here I think I’m fortunate in being endowed with such a high degree of novelty seeking.I’ve had it since I was a young boy. There are video recordings of me talking endlessly about dinosaurs and how different dinosaur species relate to each other.And it has just carried on from there.It is such a thankful way to be driven—curiosity-driven— in the situation I'm facing, because I get so much real-world information that I can spin my web around.It is like I’m a spider spinning a web of knowledge, and there is such a variety of flies ending up in my net.Such a variety of prey needs to be caught.So I need to spin the net wisely, and I need to be very much on my toes to perceive the minute differences in the vibrations in the net, or the shifting weather patterns, and try to make conclusions about how those relate to what type of prey is falling in, and how I need to adapt my strategy.And this is not just knowledge-building in the abstract.It is embodied knowledge.It is built through real-world embodied information that I receive from the physical world in near real time.And if that knowledge-building helps me foresee things and proactively adjust my strategy in a correct way, then I will also be rewarded in the most embodied way: higher perceived quality of life, higher chance of sustaining my health, repairing my systems, hopefully even strengthening my systems while going through these bouts of having the huge boulder pushed up to then roll back down on me.So curiosity is maybe number two after survival.Then number three would be to share this with other people—to share this with the world, and through that build stronger bridges and more multifaceted bridges with my fellow humans, whether I know them already from before or they are completely new to me. This is also very valuable and worthwhile.I have so many examples of old and newfound friends where our interactions have been strengthened, developed, or deepened drastically through me being in this harsh situation.Then, number four would be to enjoy what comes out of the widening of my spectrum of perceived experiences. The widening of the spectrum between bad and good experiences.Over time I’m widening that spectrum ever more—between how bad I have felt at my worst and how I can feel when I am on the other side of that spectrum.I’m becoming more acutely sensitive to anything remotely positive in relation to those worst experiences....and this continuous widening naturally gives me a heightened perception of sensory pleasure, gratitude and appreciation whenever I get to experience something positive and life-affirming. One obvious example is with food.Fasting and being poisoned leaves my gut like a quarry—crushed up and toxic, rubble everywhere.Compare that to when I start refeeding and my system stabilizes enough that I can appreciate a small piece of food.It barely matters what that food is....or going from not having any energy to be social—not even with my partner—to having enough energy for an engaging, deep conversation with someone....or going from being at the precipice of my body just laying down all its weapons, almost wanting to jump off the cliff, screaming in agony—to my body starting to have my muscles and joints and cartilage and bones and nervous system stable enough that I can go to a dance class, stand on a dance floor or just in my living room and express myself through dance, or go to the gym and lift quite heavy weights in complex movement and experience the real-time benefit of that, mentally and physically....or the contrast between lying in bed day and night for days, intoxicated and drained and frail and pale and lifeless, panting for air and for time to pass—and then being stable enough and fortunate enough to go out into my surroundings and experience beautiful weather, whether a cool crisp morning with wind gusting by, or rain, or sunlight on my face, or fresh air, or touching a waterway, or climbing a tree…I mean, I’ve been climbing trees in the middle of the winter.I’m a stage IV cancer warrior who’s now gone into a second aggressive long bout of treatment rounds and still just recently got to experience five or six weeks of an intense learning, internship, climbing trees, pruning trees, felling trees.So there are so many aspects to how I can find value and pleasure in keeping pushing this rock, this boulder, this f*****g spheroid, up and down the mountain.And I will keep pushing.Best believe I’ll keep pushing.Even though there will be hurdles.There will always be new obstacles.Another theme has now come up in the last few weeks—most probably lymphedema—that Jonna and I started troubleshooting yesterday, and I’ll get to that in a separate episode.But there is always something new.There will always be something new.It will be the same for you as well.But for me, fate just made it come in this very intense, immediate way at this stage of my life.And I need to sustain myself through this process.But best believe: this is what life is about.This is the juice of it.You can choose to cry because you went to the canteen and the menu wasn’t palatable enough for you, so now you’re just going to starve yourself to death.Or you can take what you have on the plate.It is nutrition.It is the components of life.Whether you need to suffer through that plate or not.You need to down it sooner or later.One bite at a time.Otherwise, you’re dead.So life is suffering.I’ve said it before: life is suffering. If there is no suffering, there is only death.So I’d rather have life.So bring it on.Give me all the suffering you’ve got.I’m here for it.Because with every ounce of suffering, there will be an ounce of appreciation.And I’m going to be here for the highs and lows, the uprisings and the downfalls.And the way to sustain myself through this is to appreciate all of it, all the journeys, all the excursions, every single milestone.Whether it is a steady march onward with my supply line and battle-hardened warriors through no man’s land, or whether it is a cha-cha where suddenly we are stuck in cha-cha class doing one step forward, two steps back—I’m fine with that too.Just bring it on.Staring fate straight in the eyes.And saying: I’m here.Right here, right now.This moment.And the next.Best believe I’m here.I’m here for it all.And I’m hoping you are too, fam.That being said:Be mindful of your life force.Talk to you later.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 6. Saturday, April 11th. It’s 04:25 in the night.So, the late compression phase symptoms are ongoing and ever-changing.Tonight’s expected intense sensations have been confirmed.And as I now sit here awake, there is a constant—what I can best describe as—a psychedelic rumbling inside of my stomach lining.It is like a continuous dialogue inside my body, trying to find harmony in the midst of chaos.A Familiar Yet Altered StateThe closest comparison I can make, apart from having experienced this situation before with the compounded effects of aggressive systemic treatment, fasting, HBOT etc, is a memory from many years ago when I went to Portugal.I won’t go into full detail out of respect for others involved, but what happened was that already on the airplane from Stockholm, I had willfully—but not fully informed—ingested quite a large portion of an edible THC substance.The trip began already at boarding.And it persisted for close to two days.I was very heavily affected by this ingested dosage. It roamed around in my gut area and created a sensation of rumbling, rolling, undulating twists and turns.My whole perception—my self-perception—felt like it was rolling inward, being involuted, inverted, twisted.My mental state was deeply intertwined with what was happening in my gut.It persisted for two days before dissipating.I was bedridden during that time. I didn’t want to leave the flat because anything beyond curling up in bed with my eyes closed was too much stimulation. Stimulation that my body could handle. This current state is somewhat adjacent to that, but not the same.It is less intense, but more continuous.A continuous rumbling.The Body That Won’t Stay QuietThis makes it harder to sleep.It’s similar to how you might feel your heart beating—heart palpitations. These are internal signals that ideally we should not perceive in everyday life, because they are meant to function autonomously.If we were constantly aware of all internal sensations in our organs, we would most likely go insane. It would be extremely difficult to relate to the external world if we could not filter out the baseline signaling happening inside our bodies.From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, perception is always filtered.And if that filtering breaks down, the internal world becomes overwhelming.The Gut as an External WorldThere is another interesting way to think about the gut.In a sense, the gut is also on the outside.If you imagine the body not as a sealed vessel but as a kind of irregular pipe, with one opening at the mouth and the other at the groin, then that internal cavity is actually continuous with the external world.And this cavity—the gut—is one of the most densely inhabited ecosystems in the body.It is filled with organisms that do not share our DNA:* bacteria* fungi* archaea* protistsA vast and diverse ecosystem.It’s fascinating to think about all the interactions happening inside my gut right now.There is no way for me to fully understand it, but it sparks curiosity.It also highlights how clearly connected our mental processes are to what is happening in the gut.Because now, with my gut heavily disrupted and imbalanced, I cannot sleep properly.And if similar disturbances were present during the day while living an active life, how would that affect mental processes over time?Are there ways to modulate the gut and through that modulate the mind?The connection is undeniable.Signs of ProgressCompared to the last cycle, I currently don’t feel as much of an effect in my nervous system.So it seems my nervous system has maintained a higher level of stability through this acute treatment phase.That stability was not present during the last two treatments.So this is a very promising sign going into the late compression phase and early recovery phase.Approaching the RiteAnd now I am in that twilight zone.Tomorrow is one of the biggest milestones of each cycle:Breaking the fast.Blissfully breaking my six-day, 144-hour water fast.It might be the biggest milestone of each treatment cycle.It has become a ceremony.Almost a religious ritual.And it is such a bliss to have instituted a ritual that feels so powerful.It is not purely psychological or symbolic.It is deeply intertwined with the physical recovery of my body.My body has protected itself.It has gone into a kind of hibernation.It has been battered by aggressive treatments and additional stressors like HBOT.And then comes this moment.A corporeal ritual.A physical rite of return.From being:* convoluted* involuted* covered* hidden…to slowly pulling back the curtain.Letting the sun in....Let the sunshine in, The sunshine in…The Refeeding ProtocolAs has been the case for the last few cycles, I will stick to a protocol that has worked very well.It begins the night before.Jonna prepares a whole chicken over several hours, turning it into a rich broth.The next day, I reheat it.And then:The first step is a single spoon of freshly heated chicken stock.It is a bliss.True bliss.Then I let my body ease into refeeding.After some time, I add chicken meat, collagen, connective tissue.This is the second stage.Then I prepare small rolled balls of organic minced beef—ideally grass-fed—and add them to the broth.So the first refeeding day is mostly liquid, but with protein and fats.No carbohydrates.On day two, I might introduce small amounts of carbohydrates, typically through cooked vegetables in broth.In the last cycle, I managed to come across a most delicious pre-cooked ramen broth with vegetables, which I on day two served with chicken meat, as well as pork belly. I will repeat this successful and indescribably savoury choice in this cycle as well. By day three, I either continue with the same variety of food sources as on day two, or expand slightly.By day four or five, I increase variety further.By day six, I aim to return to a relatively complete diet—still ketogenic, still avoiding sugar and non-fibrous starches.Lessons from Earlier CyclesAnother reason this approach works better now is that I no longer overload myself with food before fasting.Earlier, during 14-day cycles, I panicked about losing weight and ate excessively before treatment.At one point, I ate so much that I was still passing stool throughout the entire fasting period.That defeats the purpose.The goal of water fasting is to reach full metabolic depletion.To let the system rest.To avoid having food sitting in the gut, fermenting, toxifying, forcing metabolic activity.Now, I enter fasting with a relatively empty system.This time, my last meal was small—an omelet and some greens.And since then, my gut has remained largely inactive.That is a good sign.Now it is slowly coming back to life.And with that, the rumbling returns.Naming the RiteSo that was a summary of my refeeding protocol.And with that, I wish all of you a blissful Saturday.If not quite as blissful as mine will be.Because I will soon be going through this most delectable, irreplaceable rite of passage.What I casually call “refeeding.”But it deserves a better name.If anyone has suggestions for what to call this holy rite in the cyclicity of my life, feel free to share.Because this is so much more than a plain “refeeding.”Wishing you the best Saturday you can possibly have.And remember, fam:Be most mindful of your life force.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 6. Saturday, April 11th, 03:10 at night.Here’s a new draft for a song.No More CastlingLook at me fasting,I'm everlasting,Lay it all out bare,No more masking,No need for asking,I'm done with basking,This here my kingdom,And there will be no more castling, This king stands naked,Yet he's fine with his attire,Don't need no yes men,Rather have some guns for hire,I ain't no saviour,Go to hell with your messiah,Any false icon, we'll throw 'em all on the pyre, Don't call me Sire, Tho' I walk through fire, I aim ever higher, Leap up on you like a lion, I ain't no liar, Spit truth like umpire, Whether it has me seen as idol or pariah. Freer that the friar, Highest bidder, I'm the buyer, Of the truth,Strike Freedom's Lyre, In the booth, Trill like Mariah.Yeah, that’s it.My idea is to have it as a kind of Afrobeat song.So we’ll see where it goes.Be mindful of your life force, fam.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 5. Friday, April 10th. It’s 8:29 in the morning....and the second, and most drawn-out, phase of compression-phase symptoms is definitely upon us.As I reviewed in my previous post, all of the aberrations and warps to my bodily sensations, catalyzed by the peak effects of chemotherapy, have really started to set in.This can be clearly seen in my sleep quality.The previous nights before tonight, starting from infusion start, have been characterized by those most initial reactions to the poisoning, where my body is in a kind of febrile state and is just lying in bed feeling nauseous, but also intermittently collapsing and sleeping for a very long time as long as I am staying in bed long enough.So upon initiating treatment on Tuesday, I slept 8 hours and 24 minutes, and I lay in bed for a total of 14 hours.The night before tonight, I slept for a total of 9 and a half hours, and I lay in bed for 11 hours.In addition, a lot more additional time during daytime was spent laying in bed during these two days, although it was not logged as quality sleep by my smart ring. However, tonight I lay in bed for 10 hours and 47 minutes, yet only accumulated 6 hours and 42 minutes of sleep.So my sleep efficiency was down to 62% from the previous night's 86%...My total sleep was down to less than seven hours despite being in bed for 10 hours and 47 minutes.And this will continue into tonight and for a few more nights, where the disruptions to my bodily systems will simply be too intense for my sleep cycles to handle.So I will have disruptions to many of my sleep cycles with each night’s sleep.The Body Turning StrangeTo add to that, when I woke up just now, I felt even more intensified symptoms in terms of this closing in on a near-psychedelic state, as I’ve brought up before.One of the characteristics is that if I move my body, if I move my head, there is a kind of latent effect in my nervous system, and there are integrated effects in my gut that are felt by moving my body.I have this continuous throbbing sensation stretching from around my neck—the side of my neck, a very throbbing, pulsating sensation—that reaches down along my neck, down toward the torso, toward the gut.And just now I was sitting cross-legged, and something disrupted the nerve impulse and/or blood flow to my right leg’s calf area, and I felt this weird jerk in my calf, like a strange electric sensation.So there are all these weird aberrations coming on in my body.And it will just keep getting weirder, and I will just have to ride it out.Drinking Water Through the DistortionAnother thing, sensation-wise, that will intensify during today is that while drinking water, the water coming into my system will feel very weird as well.So we’re in for a long trip.But we just have to try and enjoy it.And me framing it as a psychedelic-like experience, I think, is very fitting.It is also psychologically smart, because then I can frame it in a more curious-minded way, rather than thinking too much about what is actually happening.Because a lot of things are happening inside my body.Some of it is good. Some of it is bad.But it is interesting to observe it through the lens that there are all these warps and aberrations to my bodily systems, and to think about how they tie together.As the different subsystems in my body are interconnected, how do they tie together?Mapping the SensationsSo now the throbbing around the neck area is intensified.There is a kind of pins-and-needles sensation as I now sat up in the bed.I’m more exposed to the internal temperature in my apartment, and that also feels weird.There’s a throbbing around my loin area.A throbbing on the soles of my feet.It is this inflammatory state throughout my body where things are kind of throbbing and feeling hot—pulsating, pins-and-needles type sensations, sometimes rushing sensations, gushing sensations, like some type of flow.But we’ll ride this one out.And we’ll try to bring back some wisdom from it as well.So yes—looking forward to a long trip… Might relay some more of my experiences from it later on.Until then:Be mindful of your life force.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 5. 02:33 in the morning. Friday, April 10th.So I’m lying here in my bed, as you listeners should be used to by now.And I had a wake-up episode where I had this bodily sensation that my symptoms, around this stage in the cycle, were starting to intensify.There is this weird shift coming on where I feel even more intensely that, subjectively, more and more of my bodily systems are in flux.And this coincides well with the peak effects of the one chemotherapy that I’m getting continuously infused.The Treatment SequenceIf we step back and take it from the beginning of each infusion of chemotherapy, what I’m first getting when starting my infusion is immunotherapy—so antibodies.They have a more latent, modulatory effect as such, so less of an acute symptom-initiating effect to talk about currently.At the moment they only take half an hour of infusion, because I just get one antibody, and then it’s about 30 minutes more of flushing with water.Then the first chemo comes on.And the first chemo is a platinum-derived substrate that, when active in living cells, has as one of its strongest mechanisms the breakdown of the cell’s ability to correctly repair damaged DNA.This molecule has quite a short half-life. I don’t remember exactly, but it might be one or two hours.I’m getting this infusion extended over a two-hour infusion window, so it takes two hours for that poison to get into my blood via the Port-a-Cath.A Port-a-Cath os a specific port that's been installed subcutaneously over my right chest muscle. It is used for inserting a special needle into my chest, pushing the poison into the port, after which it goes down into a tube that the surgeon has implanted into one of the main veins in my circulation. That internal tube has been led straight down to where the main outlet from the heart is, where all of my blood is being pumped out, so that any poison infused will directly be pushed with that outflow into my overall circulatory system.Lovely stuff.Oxaliplatin and CryotherapyAs a side note here, it’s during this two-hour infusion window for this platinum-derived substrate—which is named oxaliplatin—as well as 30 to 60 minutes before and 30 to 60 minutes after this infusion, that I’ll be using localized cryotherapy.Namely, cooling of my hands and feet using appliances that I attach to them, which use circulating cool water in order to mechanically decrease the blood circulation and therefore the exposure of the chemotherapy to my hands and feet.The reason I’m doing this is that oxaliplatin is acutely neurotoxic.One of the most widely reported adverse effects of oxaliplatin treatment is increasing severity of peripheral neuropathy, which is your body’s peripheral nerves—especially in the hands and feet, fingers and toes—being critically damaged, and in many cases not fully repaired upon termination of treatment.That can lead to a severe impact on perceived quality of life and on your ability to fully make use of your hands and feet in day-to-day life.Apart from the neurotoxic effects, which are obviously not only affecting the peripheral nervous system but any nerve cells because it’s toxic to the myelin sheaths—the protective sheaths around nerve cells and their dendritic extrusions that they use to create synapses between nerve cells—it is also clearly affecting my autonomic nervous system.Which means it becomes an amplifier of any other perceived sensations of symptoms due to the treatment, but also any other perceived symptoms throughout my life, basically.As long as this damage to the myelin sheaths is present and not fully repaired, it will cause an amplification of any disturbance in my system.The Acute Poisoning PhaseThe other main subjective component of experiencing acute symptoms from the oxaliplatin infusion, in my case, is that somewhere between the very start of the infusion and the end of it—this time it happened around the two-hour mark—I start to feel very intense poisoning symptoms.This comes on gradually, but once it reaches a certain intensity there is no way for me to hold it back anymore, and I go into a long, drawn-out puking spree.Something in my system is alerting itself at a critical point that we need to empty Victor’s bowels of whatever is in there.And since I’ve been water fasting at this point for more than two days, there’s not much in there, and definitely not much that can come out via puking.So the first thing that happens is that any water still freely moving in the gut gets thrown out via the mouth together with stomach acid. So it will be like a yellowish, relatively watery puke.After that, my body keeps signaling that I’m acutely poisoned, so it keeps telling me to puke.However, my stomach is empty.So the only new things coming into the stomach at this point are bile acids that are produced by my organs and excreted into my gut.And as soon as there is a critical small quantity of bile acids, I once again puke those out.That doesn’t come easily. It’s not just one convulsion. It’s several deep convulsions in order for each bout of bile acid to come out.So each such puking episode, when it’s effective, will occur over maybe five to ten convulsions in short succession until enough of that bile acid is coming out through my mouth and I can spit it out.Which is not a very pleasant sensation.These convulsions of bile acid produce small quantities of a much more acidic and less liquid excretion - starkly green in colour.Then my mouth is filled with harsh acid.So every now and then I will try to clear my mouth with water, just to get rid of that acid.But at this point, I cannot drink water.If I try to push any water down the system, it just comes up straight away, so there is no point in trying to drink.This intense phase, where my body is repeatedly trying to dislodge what it perceives as intoxication—which it obviously is—will go on for around twelve hours.So if, for example, this round I initiated treatment at 11 a.m., then around noon I started the oxaliplatin infusion, and then around 2 p.m., right at the end of the oxaliplatin infusion, was when the puking started, it would then continue for roughly twelve hours.It can vary in intensity, but as for almost any and all previous treatment rounds, it was very intense for those twelve hours.After the Puking StopsWhat happens after that is that the very acute effects of oxaliplatin toxification slowly dissipate.So there remains a latent symptom of feeling acutely poisoned, but there is a turning point where I no longer feel the need to continue these intense puking sessions of bile.From that point onwards, I usually don’t puke anymore, but there is this continuous perception of nausea which carries on all the way up to refeeding, to a larger or smaller extent.But it is there.The 5-FU InfusionNow, going back to the infusion itself: after the oxaliplatin infusion, I’m not done by far.What happens next is that, whether I’ve started puking or not—usually I already have by this point—the treating nurse detaches the oxaliplatin and flushes my Port-a-Cath and tube with water.After that, the second chemotherapy is initiated.It starts with a bolus dose, so a one-shot dose manually pushed into me with a syringe. That takes around ten minutes. It is there to create an initial concentration of that second chemotherapy.After that, they attach directly to my Port-a-Cath an external hose, which goes into a small bottle-like compartment. Inside that bottle there is a balloon filled so that pressure is exerted on its membrane. Inside that balloon is the solution containing the second chemotherapy.That balloon stays with me for the coming 46 hours.It slowly releases fluid into my system via the port, down into the connected tube, which then pushes it to the outlet of my heart, where everything enters circulation.This second chemotherapy is called 5-FU, short for 5-fluorouracil.Uracil has a connection to the T that you might know from DNA. DNA has a backbone, and that backbone has base pairs attached to it. Your DNA sequence is basically a combination of C, T, G, A.This 5-FU is kind of a version of the T in the DNA sequence, but it’s a flawed version.So if it is integrated into DNA or RNA, it will result in replication error, and therefore may result in cellular death.And that is the case irrespective of what cell the molecule gets incorporated into.So, as is true for any chemotherapy, it is not specific to cancer cells. If it is having its desired effect inside a cell, it is not necessarily dependent on whether that cell is a cancer cell or not.You will get similar toxic effects in healthy cells as well as in tumor cells.The effect of the continuous infusion of 5-FU is felt over a much longer time period.And obviously the effects are compounded. There is a synergy here with the other chemotherapy.The more structural effects on a cellular level—killing cells off, damaging them enough that they themselves or the immune system identify them as damaged and clear them up—are affected both by the oxaliplatin, which causes enzymes trying to repair or replicate DNA to malfunction, and by this flawed DNA base analog, 5-fluorouracil.Why I Woke Up TonightThe reason I’m bringing all this up now is that I woke up tonight on Cycle 12 Day 5—Infusion Day 3—and it has been around 13 hours since I removed the pump that was continuously infusing me with 5-FU.So I am close to the peak window of exposure to 5-FU, and I am in the time window where the combined effects of the latent exposure to oxaliplatin in cells and the continuous exposure to 5-FU would be felt most intensely.The mechanism behind this intense feeling is, as I just said, the accumulated damage to cells, as well as the immune response triggered by this damage.Those damaged cells may belong to various tissue types throughout my body.What is also being felt is the immune response itself.One of the main components there is that, upon identifying this vast landscape of damaged cells, some of my immune cells send out inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines.These cause rippling effects throughout my body, leading to sensations of unease, inflammation, and bodily systems being disrupted and shaken at their core.This can lead to disruptions in sleep, sensations of pulsation, throbbing, heat.And there is an amplified component here from my already stressed nervous system, which amplifies these perceived effects of the cytokine signaling and the broader immune signaling that is ongoing.What I’m perceiving now is basically the acceleration of these symptoms.These symptoms will keep intensifying over the coming hours, throughout the night, and throughout the entirety of tomorrow.The Added Layer of HBOTAnd there will be another layering effect here, because tomorrow at noon I will be jumping into an HBOT chamber to undergo hyperbaric oxygen therapy.This adds another layer of stress to my bodily system.There is a clear reason why I add this at the end of the protocol as well as at the start of the protocol.The reason I add it at the end of this compression phase is that it will be an extra intensifier to further stress the cells that have already been damaged.Hopefully, in the case of tumor cells, this means they are pushed past a trigger point where they are not just stressed but are actually so metabolically stressed that they can no longer sustain themselves.Hopefully this is less so the case for my healthy cells.Some of them will be partly damaged, but may be able to recover through this, because regenerative processes may be initiated inside them due to the HBOT, where the oxygen level is increased intracellularly through the combination of breathing 100% oxygen and being in this high-pressure atmosphere.The other effect I am expecting, and one of the reasons I’m doing it, is to trigger my immune defense to more acutely respond to and clean up the debris and damaged cells where oxygenation has caused an increased number of reactive oxygen species that some cells cannot sustain.Hopefully, to a larger extent, the tumor cells.This has been indicated in both in vitro and in vivo studies.Due to the HBOT, my perceived symptoms will become even more severe.As I alluded to during one of my first nightly reflections, this causes a very intensified sensation where so much of my bodily systems are perceived to be in flux and warped that it can feel almost psychedelic at its most intense.I can just lie down in bed and withstand the beating of all of these disruptions, and just have to accept the frailty of my bodily mechanisms at that point.The whole point is that this added stress from the HBOT should hopefully only be subjectively felt, but not necessarily be connected to any additional deleterious damage to healthy cells in my body.And I should come out of that, in due time, more balanced because of a more effective cleanup of damaged cells.I can clearly remember and perceive, and I am convinced, that this has led to a slower recovery for me during these last two treatments, because these were the only prior cycles where I added this modality of HBOT prior to infusion and post-infusion.So the aberrations in my system will be felt for a few extra days, but they will dissipate over time.And hopefully this will give an additional edge in terms of tumor kill-off and restoration of my healthy systems going into the recovery phase of each treatment round.The reason I have added this modality is to intensify the pressure on tumor cells so that I can hopefully get an even more efficient result in decimating them with each iterative round of systemic therapy.The reason I want to do that, of course, is that my latest PET-CT scan looked much worse than expected.Much worse than they have ever looked.So we shall have our first more concrete feedback on how well this strategy has fared somewhere within three weeks from now, as we will have the first PET-CT follow-up scan since restarting treatment, once my system has stabilized metabolically from this third cycle—or twelfth cycle total.What I’m Feeling Right NowSo there you have a rundown of what’s happening in my body right now from a more scientific point of view.What I’m currently feeling subjectively is this ongoing disease—or rather unease—in my stomach.The stomach lining is just like a very sensitive membrane that keeps being very sensitive throughout the day and throughout the night.But since yesterday, I’ve been able to start drinking water again, so I try to do that more regularly, to get down water and rehydrate myself from the first 24 hours where I was becoming more and more completely dehydrated.Life force is slowly coming back to me.But there is this continuous feeling of nausea and very low energy that hinders me from doing much at all.Still, since two days back, I’ve taken one short walk each day.Yesterday’s was a bit longer than the previous one.I even stayed around for a while in the art studio where I’ve been helping out a bit with creating the templates for the mouldings of facade decorations—before heading back home to rest.And tomorrow I will have an even longer excursion, as I need to head to the HBOT facility in Bromma, Stockholm.That’s about a 45-minute commute at this tempo with my current health, including about 15 minutes of walking, one way.So that will be quite an excursion compared to the activity my body has seen in the last few days.And while lying in bed, I’m also trying to stay a bit physically mobile, just to keep my circulation going so that my body can better clean itself of toxins, damaged tissue, and inflammatory chemicals that it is generating due to the toxins.The Blood IncidentI think that rant is enough for now.I need to try to get back to sleep.A big milestone was passed yesterday when the 5-FU pump was removed, but it did coincide with an accident caused by the nurse who came to my home to remove it.What they do is first remove the pump itself, but there is still a small hose externally attached to the Port-a-Cath.Then they flush it with saline water. Either they have a bag of saline or a number of syringes with saline that they push into this hose.After that, they should close the back valve so that there is no pressure coming out of the Port-a-Cath.But this nurse must have forgotten to close that back valve.Then he removed the hose and the syringe, and was putting a plaster over my Port-a-Cath area.When I looked up, I saw drops of blood on the cover he had used to put all his gear on.And I asked him why there was blood, because I usually don’t see blood when they remove that special syringe. It’s like a small plastic syringe that goes in.He said, yes, that can happen.But then he looked down at my torso and saw that it was covered with a pool of blood.What had happened was that when he removed the needle, he had forgotten to turn off the back valve.So when he removed the needle, blood was just spurting out of the opening where my Port-a-Cath was, and he didn’t notice.So it was a good thing that I noticed, as otherwise there would have been blood left in my tissue around the port and the port itself would have been somewhat affected. So we had to perform a second flushing of the port. I had to clean up the blood.It was all over my wool tank top and over my jeans.And that was that.It was the first time that happened.But there are always new things happening.You have to be on your toes in this game.It’s not like any other game.Most games are quite regular. After playing a few rounds of them, you kind of know the rules, and things only change on the margins.Whereas here, anything can basically change in an instant.So with every cycle, there has always been something new.This was one of those things in this cycle.And there will probably still be more things coming.A Poem from the First NightSo now I’ll go back to energy-saving mode.And I’ll leave you with this.Or first I’ll also quickly read the poem that I composed during the first night of the most intense poisoning, right after my continuous puking had dissipated, when I was lying in bed for hours and hours and hours during the day and during the night. I was pulled to write this upon waking and hearing the birds chanting outside.As Night Turns to DayAs night turns to day, Outside my window,Nature shakes off its drowsy veil.Songbirds incantate the dawn’s first ray,Filled with vigor, billowing in play.Inside my window,I lay here - stale, lifeless, and pale.Battles raging deep inside, with no respite,I lay still, in mighty plight,As day turns to night.Namaste, fam.Be mindful of your life force. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 12 Day 3. April 7th, 01:50 in the night.So we are 9 hours and 10 minutes before the next infusion, the next descent into the underworld—the physical underworld that I will descend into for the twelfth time.You might wonder why I am awake in the middle of the night. Why I am not trying to fall back asleep.And I was wondering the same until a few seconds ago, when I realized that there is a clear pattern here.Ever since I started having to go through these aggressive treatments, my body has been telling me something. There has been this clear trend where my body has pushed me mentally.Actually, ever since fearing that I had contracted this disease, my body has kept telling me to relieve itself of baggage—mental baggage, psychological baggage.And I think it is a holistic way for my body to ask me to relieve myself of energy leakage.Energy Leakage and Psychological BaggageOne of the first such patterns I perceived was in terms of feeling that my energy systems were overburdened.Let’s compare me to a battery.The capacity of my battery was lower than I had been used to, and it was clear that some social interactions demanded energy from me, whereas other social interactions, despite me feeling quite weak, could actually charge me.And layered into that was a theme I have come across ever since my teenage years: to what degree each social interaction was veiled in make-believe, veiled in a facade, veiled in preconceptions about how that interaction should look.It became increasingly clear in this life situation that, for me personally, interactions that were more straightforward, more genuine—even if they sometimes caused discontent or surfaced differences between me and the person I was interacting with—tended to give me more energy than those interactions that were veiled in trying to please, trying to create an ease in the room.This was one of the first realizations. A realization that was not merely intellectual. It was a very deeply embodied realization about energy leakage caused by psychological processes.And throughout this journey, it has become clear that my body is kind of jerking itself into motion, calling on me to shed these psychological skins.I think it is a survival mechanism that my body is throwing at me—throwing at the psychological part of me—in order to sustain itself better, in order to save up as much energy as possible, to remove as much internal contradiction as possible, and in that way better shape my body into the vessel it needs to be in order to sustain itself throughout these very draining episodes of treatment and disease.There have been further iterations of this throughout these 19 months or so.And tonight, upon waking from sleep, I had an awakening mentally to one such aspect.The Trap of “What If”It is an aspect I have been brewing on for more or less my entire adult life.Of course, for long stretches of time it has just been below the surface—not something I have actively ruminated on, but it has been there.And you could summarize this internal friction as the what if.What if this had happened?What if, at a crossroads in the entangled mesh of possible strands of destiny, this had happened instead of what actually happened?The what-if scenario can lead you into a make-believe of what could have been.What could Victor Salander, who is currently speaking, have been if this one thing had happened at this point in time and space way back when, as opposed to the thing that actually happened?And for someone who is intellectually minded and analytical, it is very easy to weave a fantasy about how this alternate reality would have played out.But it is kind of missing the point.It is creating a very artificial reality where your internal wants, hopes, and wishes will be reflected in how you simulate that reality.So you are changing one parameter, and you are probably imagining that the direction of that changed parameter will be very influential on how that scenario plays out.But obviously, when you change one parameter in an alternative universe, everything else will change too.And who is to say that things would have turned out in a way that, post hoc, you would feel were more fortunate for you and your destiny?That might be the case.But no one will ever know.And you simulating that alternate reality will not make it come true, and it will not necessarily make you better understand the actual reality you are facing.Because you are simplifying, and you are allowing yourself to be led by your hope about what could have been.But what you have been facing is the reality here and now.And there has never been any past.There has only ever been the here and now.The Victor in a past here-and-now only had the tools at his disposal to make the choices he made, and to be led by the circumstances in the exact way that that past Victor was moved.So it all leads up to the present moment.And the present moment can only be informed by past moments to the extent that the Victor in the present moment has accumulated the tools at his disposal to act, to express himself, and to influence his reality in the here and now.The Body’s Call Before DescentCircling back to my initial statement about my body jerking me into motion and making me reflect on these things, my body seemingly felt it was imperative for me to wake up and make this recording in order to more fully internalize this realization.To more emphatically put a stamp on this impulse that came to me when I suddenly woke up tonight.And hopefully this will guide me into having my energy systems more attuned going into today’s treatment in around nine hours.This emotional alignment, this holistic alignment of my energy systems—having a more pure direction, having a more grounded outlook on my whole being—it will guide me forward.And it reminds me of how I have related to my life situation through the different elements, the traditional nature-belief division of energies in the world into basic elements.And I am reminded of the element of water.The Water and the OceanWater does not allow itself to be restricted by temporary barriers, by the landscape itself. It keeps flowing despite worldly angst, despite worldly obstacles. The water will find its way to flow down with gravity toward the ocean.And similar to water, I want to have all parts of myself flow past the obstacles they feel are there, to meet up in the ocean—which is me.The undivided self.The uncensored self.The unhindered self.Not unhindered in the sense of lacking worldly challenges, because being a part of the world means having worldly challenges.But in some sense, in terms of my energy systems, I want them to turn into water so that they can all mellow out, all harmonize.If my body is an orchestra, I want it to play the most beautiful symphony.I do not want the different instruments to think they are on some soloist career where they are going to play a solo for the rest of the world to see.No.Enough of that.The water needs to flow down into the ocean.That is where it harbors the most vast potential and the most grounded energy of all.The ocean will fill itself, and that is where the depth lies.That is where I will lie, brewing, tempering myself, making myself whole, getting back to the purity.Because the vastness of the ocean can contain impurities. It can sieve impurities from the earth. It can dilute.And with what I am going through physically, I need to be able to dilute a lot of different influences.The Rebellious Minority WithinFor one, the disease itself, which is living within me as a minority in this empire of my body.A very rebellious minority that thinks itself autonomous, thinks itself disconnected from the whole.But just as with this illusion of what-if-scenarioing that I have been processing here, these rebellious tumor cells are living under the illusion that they are not part of a whole.And this whole needs to reintegrate them.It needs to understand and be able to process this rebellious strain from within, the same way as I need to find a way to process and internalize any other internal contradiction, to harmonize my energy systems.Then we have the treatment, which is also causing aberrations and tainting my systems.It is very much putting a stress into the whole.And I need to be this ocean—not only to withstand, but to alchemize any poison that comes into this whole.I need to be the vast ocean.I need to be a vast expanse of alchemical fluids that can engulf any bad energy and metabolize it.And the way to do this is to find any means necessary to create such vastness inside of myself, including mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical processes that can aid in this.Every Victor Is DifferentHopefully this meditation on energy systems will have caused me to have a more aligned continuation of tonight’s sleep, for me to wake up to the challenges that I am to face tomorrow.Challenges that I have already faced numerous times, but challenges that will always be different each time.Even if I can mentally frame this as the twelfth time around, every time is different, every moment is different, every Victor is different.And that is a good thing.Especially given the insight that I need to keep shedding skins in order to continually have the new version of Victor withstand the new difficulties that are to come.So I vow to myself that I will keep moving in this direction.I will keep moving toward the ocean.Keep purifying myself.Keep searching for being more whole and less diluted in all aspects of life.Which includes a certain type of ruthlessness.A ruthlessness that might need to be intensified in some arenas.But in other arenas, it might require seclusion.Any strategy.Any means necessary.To purify my intent and my trajectory.My trend towards a more integrated whole.Amen.Let this be. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 11 Day 27. Tuesday, March 31st, 6:14 in the morning.So this morning you’ll hear another Dreamscape Diary.Brace yourselves. This one is quite weird, still. A Ride Through Snow and AirI don’t remember all of the details of the dream initially, unfortunately.But it must have been that we were skiing, because I’m in this mountain terrain and there is snow on the ground.At some point, I’m not skiing anymore. Instead, I’m on a small bike.And I’m going downhill.I had been together with a few friends. I don’t remember who they were in the dream.So I’m going downhill. It’s not super steep from what I perceive. But I’m riding a bike in the snow, which feels very unfamiliar.With time, though, it starts to go better and better.I sense that I’m able to start sliding a bit with the bike when I do turns.Now, upon waking up, I can kind of feel that it’s similar to if you played Mario Kart—that I’m able to slide in the snow.After doing a few slalom turns with the bike, I see in front of me a small jump.From a distance, the perceived size of the jump is that I might fly up maybe a meter in the air.But I’m determined to aim for it.I have maybe 50 to 100 meters left before reaching it.Suddenly, I feel a surge of speed. The bike is accelerating.The closer I get, the more it accelerates.And as I leave the jump, the trajectory suddenly increases dramatically.I’m flying really high.It becomes super high in the air, and I can see the ground far below me. I’m up at treetop height—and higher.Now the trajectory becomes unstable. It’s like I’m starting to drift backwards.I’m above the treeline.And this is the critical part.Because I obviously don’t want to fall flat to the ground from here.Time slows down.At the peak of my trajectory, I start to hover slightly, drifting toward the treeline.And I just manage to grab the tip of a spruce.A tall, lanky spruce.I grab it with both hands.The spruce is very flexible, so as I begin to fall, it bends with me—like a flexible staff.I hold onto it all the way down, as I decelerate.And just as I’m about to hit the ground, I land—without the bike—but still holding the spruce.And I’m not hurt at all.A Shift in SceneThen the dream shifts.Now I’m indoors, in what seems like a mountain cabin.It’s warm inside.I’m sitting at a dinner table with my friends, and they’re trying to teach me some Southeast Asian language.Maybe it’s Thai, maybe Indonesian—I don’t know.I’m trying to imitate them.They’re all laughing at how bad I am.But then one of them says that I’ll pick it up in no time.And that’s when I wake up.Traces From Waking LifeYeah. Wicked dream.But it’s fun.I feel like my dreaming has become more dynamic since this whole ordeal started.I don’t know why, but some of these dreams are very vivid, and they include experiences that feel entirely new to me.Like flying upwards in a way that doesn’t feel physically grounded.And then grabbing the top shoot of a tree to save myself.I don’t know what to make of that.But obviously, trees have featured a lot in my life since September last year.We went on an excursion northwest of Stockholm, to an arboretum by a manor, where together with Börje Drakenberg—who is very knowledgeable about trees and branch structures, especially conifers—we were inspecting different species.For the first time in our training program, we focused a lot on conifer trees.And come to think of it, there was one spruce that was very lanky.Let me look it up.I actually took notes from that excursion.Give me a second.This is part of the format, right?If you’re sticking with this format, you should expect moments like this.I’m scrolling through my notes…And there it is.In Swedish, it’s called serbisk gran—Serbian spruce.Its branch structure was very thin and elongated.It reminded me of those bottle-cleaning brushes—the ones with a thin metal rod and synthetic bristles used to clean the inside of a bottle.That kind of structure.So it was something like that which saved me in the dream.Languages and MemoryThe part about learning a Southeast Asian language probably goes back to my time in China, when I became obsessed with languages.I’ve kept that interest since then, but the intensity has definitely decreased.Now, for me, learning languages isn’t necessarily about becoming fluent.It’s about the doorway it opens.The gateway to understanding and connecting with other people, regardless of where they come from.And also connecting to accumulated human knowledge over time.Through that, I feel I can better understand humanity as a whole—and myself, and our place in this existence.Threads of InfluenceThe biking element in the dream also connects to something from yesterday.I spoke with a classmate about sports, and he mentioned snowboarding.I asked him which discipline—big air, halfpipe—and he said freeride.So going downhill, with a start gate at the top and a finish at the bottom, but also doing jumps along the way, being scored on both style and speed.That clearly influenced the dream.And recently, I’ve also been watching a documentary about Tony Hawk, the most famous skateboarder in the world.He’s known for jumping off massive ramps—just like in my dream.So all these threads are being woven together.Yeah, that was it for today.Be mindful of your life energy.Namaste, fam. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Cycle 11 Day 25. It’s Sunday, March 29th, 6:50 in the morning.And this is another one of my Dreamscape Diaries.I remember suddenly finding myself in a big hall.I don’t remember exactly what kind of space it was, but it might have been something like an airplane hangar. It was very big.And what was just taking place was that I was suddenly part of a cooking competition.On top of that, the theme was desserts and sweets.As you might know, my diet currently is strictly ketogenic, so I don’t touch sugar, which makes things quite limited in terms of dessert choices. And even though I love cooking, I haven’t really done a lot of desserts throughout my cooking life.The main one I’ve made numerous times is tiramisu, but in no way do I have broad experience making desserts.A Dessert Challenge With the Wrong IngredientsSo I find myself running to a table where there are different ingredients to make sweets.Similarly to MasterChef, this table of ingredients is for all competitors to use. Anyone can pick from it.But when I arrive at the table, the only things left are really weird.First, there’s one kind of frozen pudding-type thing that is yellow. So I grab one of those.Then there is some tropical fruit that seems to be melting as well. It’s white-greenish. Maybe it’s not melting, but it’s very soft, and it’s white-greenish on the outside.And then there was a third ingredient that I don’t remember anymore.I have a quick taste of this white-green fruit. Then a quick taste of the yellow kind of ice cream or cream-pudding thing. And the third thing.And I don’t see anything else to pair it with.Everything is super sweet.If you know my taste buds, I prefer more bitter and sour flavors. Everything here is so sweet. I have no idea what to do with it, but I need to get going because in the dream I realize there’s very little time to make the dessert.Then I’m running with this dessert, and for some reason the yellow pudding is starting to melt.So it’s on my plate, and it’s starting to pour over the side.Through the WindowSuddenly I end up in a big room that is someone’s studio apartment.Everything is in one room.There’s a bed there. There’s a guy lying in the bed, speaking to someone on the phone, maybe, or maybe she’s present. And I see a window right next to the bed, along the side of the bed, on the other side of him.And I realize I need to get through that window.So I directly ask him if it’s okay if he helps me through it.It’s not particularly high. It’s more like an elongated window, and it’s at floor level, more or less level with the floorboards.So we open that window, and he kind of holds my hand a bit to support my weight. I’m holding on to the bed, then to the edge of the floorboards, and there’s something I can place one foot on.Then I’m on some kind of fencing, and from there I take myself down to solid ground below.And while moving through this window, I have no idea what is happening to the ingredients I’m supposed to cook with. They kind of disappear in the dream.Then I keep running when I get to the ground level, and I end up in another space where a subset of the contestants are.But most of them are the ones who already lost the previous challenge, so they don’t know anything about the dessert challenge.And I’m asking them: where should I stand to cook? Are there any other ingredients?And in the back of my mind I’m thinking that if there were other ingredients, they should already have been at the other place where I found those three strange ingredients.Something else may have happened that I can’t recall anymore.And then I woke up.Why Food Has Taken Up So Much Space in My MindMy initial analysis was that it’s interesting because this is one of the first times I can remember deliberately waking up with a dream about cooking.And cooking has been a big part of my existence over the last 19 months, because appreciation of food has become such a highly valued thing in my life.That is due to three main causes.One is that I’m being poisoned.And to some extent, whether I like it or not, that poison is damaging my body. It’s damaging cells that divide fast, and one of the tissue types in your body that divides the fastest is the one in your gut lining.It’s been estimated to renew itself every three to seven days in any given human being.So you are not the same person you were yesterday. Your gut lining is not the same as it was yesterday. Give it a week, and your whole gut lining is renewed.This is partly due to the highly acidic environment, and the fact that the gut lining needs to renew itself, and there are many complex interactions with the gut flora.But what happens when you put chemotherapy poison in there is that these fast-renewing cells will, whether you like it or not, be exposed to that poison.And if your body does the right thing, it’s going to kill off those cells. They will kill themselves, and there are mechanisms at play that will successfully renew your gut lining where that happens.So my stomach is being turned inside out, literally.And during that period, I don’t initially think much about food, because I’m being poisoned.But what I’m doing at the same time, as you know, is water fasting.So: no calories in, but there are calories out.My body goes into a starvation mode where it protects healthy cells, but obviously there is a clock ticking. With every hour, with every day that I don’t eat, my body starts craving energy. It cannot just sustain itself forever on internally produced energy. I’m not heavily overweight, so I’m nowhere near breaking any water-fasting time records.The Longest Water FastAnd speaking of water fasting, let me ask a question.Some of you may already have heard me ask this in person, but I’ll ask it here as well.How long do you think the record is for the person who has water-fasted the longest without any calories, without any intake of additional calories?Two weeks?Well, I’ve been fasting six days for 12, 13, 14 times already, and that has worked fine for me, and I’m in no way overweight. My personal record is seven and a half days. So two weeks doesn’t sound unrealistic.Okay, what about a month?When you’re water fasting, you are gradually using your body’s internal resources, its internal calories, its internal energy, its stored building blocks. So to fast for a full month, you probably need a lot of extra resources. You’re supposedly a bit overweight to be able to do that consistently.Okay, but could we go even further?Two months? Three months? Four months? Five?Well, it’s not five.It’s not six.It’s not seven, eight, nine, ten, or twelve months.It’s actually 382 days.That’s more than one calendar year! Obviously this guy was heavily overweight. His BMI was something like three times the ideal BMI. So he walked around weighing something like 240 kilos—roughly 500 pounds—and his ideal weight would have been around 80 kilos.What happened was that he water-fasted for all of those 382 days, and doctors monitored him. This was in the 1970s, around 1973, I think.They published a paper on his fasting and stated that they monitored him consistently. Every few weeks they took blood tests.And only at two points throughout those 382 days did they give any intervention.And those interventions were very minor, given what he was putting his body through.At one point, fairly early in the process, they noticed lowered potassium, one of the key minerals you need.When I water fast, I supplement with the three main minerals:* Sodium, which I get from table salt.* Potassium, which I get from a food-grade ingredient people can also use for baking or brewing.* ...and magnesium, which I get from magnesium chloride, another food-grade ingredient.Those are the three minerals you need short-term to replenish. If you don’t get them from food, you need to get them somewhere else.So I drink water with those salts mixed in during my fasts.What happened with this guy later on—around the eleventh month—was that his calcium levels started going low. So they supplemented him with calcium for about a month.But that was only at around month eleven.And after those 382 days, his weight was around 80 to 85 kilos.And he was able to sustain that weight for a follow-up period of at least five years, maybe longer.Crazy story.Re-Appreciating FoodGoing back to my own water fasting:What happens, obviously—and it must have happened to a massive extent with that man—is that you start craving food, you start thinking about food.And if he had accumulated that amount of extra body weight, it must have come from really appreciating food.So I cannot even imagine the mental journey he was on in terms of thinking about food.A lot of props to him for sticking that out.For me, I start thinking about food from the point when I feel that my body’s poisoned state is beginning to shift.So even if I still feel some nausea, even if I still feel weakened, there can already be a trigger there where I start thinking about food.That has led me, during the initial days when I start to feel that my body is processing the poison in each treatment round, to watch cooking shows.I remember one in particular: The American Barbecue Showdown. It was just heaven for my mind.A number of people are competing. They have different barbecue setups to choose from. In every episode they have two different competitions, and they have to cook different types of meat in different barbecue configurations, plus sides.And they had a meat storage room—a cold room, a freezer room. It was like heaven on earth.And yes, if you don’t like meat, or you have ethical arguments against it, I can buy those to a certain extent.But through my own priming, and the priming of my taste buds, and I think through something deeply biological as well, there is something very special about animal meat for me.When I see that, my appetite for food starts to return.That is the mental part of starting to think about food.Then there is the physical part.And the physical part starts when I begin eating again.I still remember the first time I broke my first longer fast, during the second treatment cycle.The first cycle I had done a fasting-mimicking diet instead, because I wasn’t yet ready to do a full water fast. I had read studies, especially from Dr. Valter Longo, recommending this approach, so I tried it in my own setup—eating less than 1,000 calories per day over seven days before, during, and after treatment.But that didn’t have the same physical and mental effect in me. I had a lot of issues with my gut, and for the second cycle I decided to go all in.This was back in autumn 2024, when I had just started treatment.And when I was to break the fast, the first thing I put in my mouth was a piece of broccoli.I still remember how sweet that broccoli tasted.How rich it was in flavor.How I could almost sense my body starving and reaching for those nutrients—almost like tentacles from my body stretching out to grab the calories from the broccoli.And how the enzymes in my mouth, while chewing, were coating those pieces of broccoli and connecting them to my taste buds.Since then I’ve had many good, blissful experiences of appreciating food and re-appreciating food, both right upon breaking the fast and afterwards.So I now have a very real appreciation for food in my life.I had some of that before, too. I already enjoyed cooking, and my girlfriend Jonna really likes cooking as well. So we have a strong bond over cooking. It’s one of our love languages.We also sometimes go to restaurants to get inspiration and to enjoy cooking at an even more refined level than what we do at home.But desserts—I haven’t really dabbled in them much at all.I’m more of a savory-palate kind of guy.So it was interesting that I was dreaming about making desserts.I do not know why, but I think I know why the theme of food was so present in my mind.Partly because of this deep appreciation for food that I’ve developed over the last nearly two years.But also because my former neighbor, who I’m still in touch with, had just yesterday posted that he had won third place in a cooking competition for cooking students.So I had been chatting with him, congratulating him, asking how the competition went and what his dishes were.And Jonna’s birthday is coming up, so we’ve also been discussing whether to book a restaurant near our house.And then of course my mind is also shifting toward the fact that sooner or later I’m going to get the chance to re-appreciate food again, because I’ll soon be going down into the hole of the next treatment.Now, unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, in a double-edged way—it has been delayed.In terms of continued treatment, that is unfortunate because I need to keep the pressure up.But I do get a few extra days without being poisoned, which in the short term can be nice.Unless I start to feel that the tumor burden is rising again.So mentally I think I’ve already started shifting into that next phase. The weeks where things had started to feel a bit more normalized—they are over now. I’m going back into the trenches.And I think all of that amounted to me entering this dream state and fabricating these things.Problem-Solving in Dreams and Psychedelic StatesBut the trajectory of the dream as a whole is interesting too.At least from my own memory of how my dreams tend to work, it is very often the case that I am supposed to solve some weird, irrational, complex problem or puzzle or riddle.And it is often about moving around in physical space and trying to find a way to solve it.I’ve had similar experiences when taking psychedelic drugs, where I enter an altered state and my brain tries to solve the cognitive challenge being posed to it by a perceptual field that has become warped and skewed.How does the mind solve that?Well, it can’t.Because the whole point is that the field has become warped. There are aberrations. Things are distorted.So the only way to really deal with it is to accept it.To realize: okay, these things are shifted. You are no longer in the mind state you used to think of as the normal one. Now you’re in a new one, so you might as well accept it.So in this dream, maybe it was the same thing: just accepting the challenge, whether it made sense or not.But there was also the additional element that I had to move through space in the dream.I had to go through this weird setting with a window behind the bed of a man I didn’t know, and from there I ended up in another place. There was heat around, so my dish was melting in my hands, or the ingredients were melting in my hands, and I was supposed to make a dessert—which is difficult when desserts are usually something cool.So there is something about dreaming, and also about psychedelic states, where my brain is creating these challenges.Novelty-Seeking and the Architecture of My MindAnd come to think of it, that is also how my brain works in a sober and healthy state.I’m quite far out on one end of the spectrum in terms of novelty seeking and discovering my environment.I can see it in the track record of my life.I can stick with things over time, but I always need to layer new things on top of them, which means I am constantly seeking new stimuli, new knowledge, new spaces, new people, new influences.That can be a strength, but it can also be a burden.It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially in today’s society where you have such immense access to information.And I’m definitely not alone in thinking about this.In my current life position, it has been helpful—but it’s also something I need to guard against.It has been helpful in the sense that I am very thankful, for example, that I live in the age of large language models.Because in no alternative universe without something like that would I be able to have such an intense dialogue with another entity about choices of protocol, evaluating symptoms in my body, stacking different recovery strategies together, and—to a lesser extent—evaluating scientific sources.As you all know, in my experience with ChatGPT, it does hallucinate quite a lot, so I need to be the source of truth when it comes to scientific evidence, and I need to do my own research outside of the model.But in terms of taking the level of evidence I accept and then recombining things, or sometimes offering its own evaluation of different methods, it has been crucial to me.And so has simple access to all the science being published around the world in biology, medicine, and health.That has been immensely helpful.But then there is also so much information out there now that you can overconsume almost any kind of information.So novelty seeking is definitely a double-edged sword in modern society.But you are who you are.What can I change?I think in my position, novelty seeking is also very life-giving. It gives me life energy.So I need to acknowledge that if I do not pursue my natural instincts, there will always be some cost inside my body in terms of friction—in terms of my organism not being aligned with my own nature.And that misalignment causes imbalances.I already have enough imbalances as it is.So I need to find ways to strengthen my bodily systems and have them more attuned to one another, because they all speak to each other.If there is an imbalance in one part of my body, it can absolutely give rise to imbalances elsewhere.So it is a bit like a forest fire.I need to stay constantly vigilant so that there is no single point in my internal architecture where a subsystem starts burning enough to create momentum, a snowball effect, something that becomes harder and harder to deal with.Obviously, the biggest such issue right now is my tumor burden.But there are others.One of them already happened, and it had me fighting for 8+ months to try to curb the adverse effects of treatment: the imbalance in my nervous system, circadian rhythm, and daily hormonal signaling, which caused all of those really annoying symptoms that chopped up my sleep and threw off my energy cycle throughout the day.At times it left me unable to live an active life at all—basically trying to time short walks just to get back toward some level of activity, while having to stop strength training for many months.That was, in big part, due to damage to my autonomic nervous system.That needs to be kept in check, repaired, strengthened, healed.And then also the peripheral nervous system—neurotoxicity, inflammation, damage in the hands, feet, fingers, and toes.You do not want that to go past a certain threshold, because it will absolutely affect quality of life.I know, for example, a Spanish friend whose father was treated with neurotoxic chemo and is now suffering from peripheral neuropathy in his feet to the extent that he basically does not want to leave his home anymore.Then there are other bodily systems.Just now, on Friday, this blood marker suggesting possible liver impact showed up for the first time.So any internal organ—any subsystem in my body—needs to be kept in check.The quality of my immune system, so that it does not erode over time under aggressive treatment.My brain health, my mental health—which I could and should explore even more, even though I have been actively doing that since day one of this cancer journey.I have instinctively appreciated mental health, psychological health, emotional health, dealing with stress, quality of sleep.There are so many subsystems that we cannot go through all of them.But the point is that all of these sum up into my overall health.What is interesting is how much my novelty-seeking behavior is actually helping me troubleshoot things.It is helping me understand how all of these different subsystems interrelate and combine. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they work against one another because I might be pushing the gas pedal on strengthening or repairing one system too early, while another system still needs a dormant state for a few more days before it can tolerate that same intensity.So this is an ongoing battle.A battle inside my body.A battle to find the balance between novelty seeking and problem-solving on the one hand, and just leaning into what is and accepting it on the other.Because we have the sympathetic nervous system, connected to activation, struggle, fight-or-flight, bearing external pressures.And then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is about accepting and resting and letting the body do its own work without external input—without having to novelty seek, without needing to solve some new problem, but just landing in who you are, sitting down, breathing, closing your eyes, falling asleep.And given the crisis inside my body, I need both.I need some aggressive strategy here. The problem is far gone, and there need to be strategies implemented that are not just about passively accepting the situation—at least in my conviction—in order for life to sustain itself.And unfortunately that includes elements that also harm the body itself, the healthy parts, not only those parts you want to ameliorate or eliminate.So it is a dance between acceptance and struggle.Acceptance and struggle.And that will keep going for the rest of my life.I think it will for you as well.It may not always surface with the same intensity that it has for me, but life is a struggle.Life does contain pain and painful episodes.But without that pain, without that suffering, what would there be?There would be no life.That would be death.So I would rather take an ounce, two ounces, a handful of suffering than have no suffering at all.Because having no suffering would mean having no life, no life force.And to conclude there: be mindful of your life force, fam.Talk to you soon.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Saturday, March 28th, 7:09 in the morning.I’m waking up to Cycle 11 Day 24.So you hear the number 24 and you might be thinking: okay, isn’t Victor undergoing treatment in 21-day cycles? And that is correct.However, I had deliberately extended this cycle because I’m trying to combine the aggressive treatment and recovery I’m going through with my ongoing studies in arboriculture—so tree care, plant knowledge, and how to basically take care of a tree throughout its life cycle.This chapter in my life diary will be quite dense.I’ve already put down a number of bullet points that I will go through, so if you’re here for the long ride, it’s going to be quite a long episode.Sleep, Stress, and ResilienceFirst, let’s look at my sleep.This cycle has not had the best sleep of any cycle, but all of them have had crappy sleep, basically.Tonight I slept 7 hours and 12 minutes while only being in bed for 8 hours. So that’s actually quite decent: 90% sleep efficiency, over 1 hour of deep sleep—1 hour 10 minutes—and 2 hours and 20 minutes of REM.That has definitely not been the case most nights during these last three weeks.My lowest resting heart rate went down a little bit, which is good. But it’s been consistently high throughout the last few weeks. It has kind of reached the highest level ever, or at least the highest level in half a year.So now, over the last two weeks, it’s averaging 54 beats per minute, whereas my average heart rate throughout the night has been around 60 to 63 in the last few weeks.And my heart rate variability is consistently very low. As I mentioned before, I used to be up in the hundreds—around 100 milliseconds—but now my weekly average has gone down to 40, 46.And this composite scoring that is pulled from a lot of different measurements from my smart ring, which is called “Resilience”, is at an all-time low.You have the possibility to get the highest “Resilience” score there, which I’ve had for some periods of time. That bracket is called Exceptional. If you get lower, you’re called Strong, then Solid, then Adequate. And the last, lowest bracket is called Limited.I entered Limited on Saturday, March 21st, and it has been consistently going even lower since. So now I’m in the middle of the limited bracket.That score is based on my composite nighttime recovery—how well I sleep at night—daytime recovery, meaning how much recovery time I’m able to accumulate over the day, and daytime stress load, meaning how much stress I’m putting on my body, which also partially includes things like physical exercise.So yes, there’s only up from here in that sense.But then again, I don’t feel as bad as that resilience score makes it look. It’s numbers—they’re indicative—but they are not the only source of truth here.A Further Treatment DelayAnd speaking of numbers, I have now had to very last-minute postpone my treatment even further.The initial plan was to start fasting today, on Saturday, from noon, and then start treatment two days later on Monday. And then, as some of you know, I would proceed with the six-day fast—two days prior, two days during, and two days after treatment.My treatment goes on for around two days. I come home with this balloon of chemotherapy—yes, toxic chemotherapy—that is slowly infused through the port implanted below the skin in my chest area. From there it goes through a small hose that has been implanted and pushed down through a vein to the main outlet from the heart.So poison is able to be pumped efficiently throughout my whole blood circulation, basically.Lovely stuff… But the thing is that prior to every treatment start, you do a blood panel.This blood panel is there to see whether I’m able to withstand continued treatment without any of my organs basically failing. So it’s quite a low bar for continuing treatment. It’s about looking at some main blood markers for different organs in the body and seeing whether they shoot up or point in the wrong direction enough that you at least want to be cautious and maybe wait a while—delay treatment and see whether those markers come back down.What happened was that I had a blood test scheduled for Thursday that I couldn’t take on Thursday, so I took it on Friday instead.I took it before lunch, and the results came back in the afternoon.And without telling me, my oncologist canceled my treatment on Monday.Then a nurse from the treating facility called me up and told me: okay, your treatment has been canceled due to one of the markers sticking out.The marker was ALT, or ALAT, which is a marker related to liver health.So it’s a test of alanine aminotransferase—how much of that enzyme is in the blood. That enzyme exists mainly in liver cells, but it also exists in kidneys, heart, and muscle tissue.Normally it shows quite a small value in the blood, and that has been the case for me as well.I actually looked it up while recording this. The unit that ALT is given in is microkat per liter. Microkat is a catalytic unit, so it describes the catalytic activity of an enzyme in the blood sample.Normally I’ve been showing results for ALT around 0.3 to 0.4 microkat per liter.But in yesterday’s blood sample, my ALT showed a value of 2.23.So that is quite an increase from 0.4.The only other value I’ve had throughout my timeline that was higher was around 0.6. So this is a major jump.What the Elevated ALT Might MeanThen I looked this up, because I wasn’t able to talk straight away with the oncologist.If you have a high ALT, what you really want to compare it with is other liver markers. There is one called AST, which is another enzyme. But for some reason that had been removed from my blood panel, so we didn’t have a measure of AST.The only thing I had to go on was ALT, and then some other markers like bilirubin and lactate dehydrogenase (LD). None of those stuck out enough to show a clear pattern of liver damage.ALT can also be raised because of heavy resistance training, which I have exposed myself to throughout this cycle.There is also a lot of tissue damage in general from this whole treatment-and-recovery lifestyle.But it did stand out that the value was this high compared to any other time it has been measured in me.So the oncologist decided to postpone treatment until I’ve taken another blood test.And it was so late in the day when I got to know this that they had already canceled treatment, and they don’t work weekends, so I couldn’t do much about it.I’m going to do a new blood test on Monday or Tuesday to see what’s happened to this ALT, but also to get the AST value measured.Then we’ll take it from there.I’m not worried about my liver health because I don’t feel any symptoms connected to that.We’ll just wait and see.I don’t think it’s a direct effect of the treatment, and it’s most probably not a direct effect of tumor activity, because that should have shown in some other markers as well.So now cycle 11 is being extended another few days. I don’t know how many.In terms of resistance training, I’m not going to do that this weekend because I want to see whether it’s muscle breakdown causing this.I just had a quite intense strength-training session yesterday focused on the lower body. Every time you do resistance training, your muscles break down in order to be rebuilt.So this weekend I’m just going to do low-intensity movement, basically.Today I might be going out in nature with Jonna. Let’s see.And then in the evening I’m going to play some pool, some billiards, with an arborist friend, which is going to be nice.And then tomorrow I have other things planned, because now my whole life puzzle needs to be reshuffled. I suddenly have more time on my hands before going into the depths of the underworld.A New Friend Around the BlockAs it happens, I recently made a new friend who has his office—or rather his art studio—just around the block from me.He’s an original French man.I’m quite drawn in by his art. He’s very visual, very strong with perspective, and he has an interesting imagination in how he builds up his compositions.I had walked past his studio a few times, and then one day, when I was feeling very weak after the first round of retreatment, I was peering through his window and he came out from the shadows and knocked on the door to signal that I could be let in.Then we started talking, and now we’ve become friends.He’s a funny guy.Currently he’s working on a big commission where he’s not only painting, but also doing sculpture work. That has now led to a commission to recreate facade decorations for a building in central Stockholm.I’ve been following his process—the design work and how he’s creating the blueprint for the moldings that are going to be used to make the final building material.It’s an interesting process. He’s working with stencils, styrofoam, and different types of clay that he’s shaping in order to create the final blueprint of the decorations. That blueprint is then sent elsewhere, where they will make the final silicone mold and create the final pieces to be mounted on the facade.Because I want to get more momentum in visual art, I was thinking it would be a good idea for me to go and help him out a bit—and through that get inspiration and build more tools in the visual space.And as it turns out, he’s also having a workshop on Sunday for a few people to do painting.So we struck a deal where I will help him out a bit with the molding of these facade decorations, and I’ll also join him for this painting workshop on Sunday.So during daytime Sunday I’ll be doing some painting.I don’t know exactly what yet. I have a few ideas in mind, but I’ll bring those ideas to him and we’ll see what turns out.Really looking forward to that.On Weakness, Strangers, and ConnectionAnd on the topic of making new friends, I think it’s an interesting pattern I see in myself that often when I’m weak, I tend at some point in that fragile state of being sick—really contemplating life and death and interhuman relations—to be drawn toward strangers.There’s something special in me that feels drawn to them.Obviously I still socialize a lot with people I know from before, as most of you should know, but there is something special about meeting a stranger and having that stranger reflect your feelings, what you are communicating, and the energy you are sending out—without having any prior knowledge of who you were as a person, and without having any judgment of who you are as a person, or how you see yourself, or how someone who knows you would have seen you five years ago, ten years ago.There is no history there.And I think there is something beautiful when two strangers meet and they can connect on a deep level instantly.For me, that is not something I’m afraid of.Rather, it is something I am drawn to.And even when I’m weak, I’m drawn to it—maybe even more so.Because sometimes in those moments I really feel the capability and the potential we have to build new close connections with people we have no prior history with.And I think that’s one of the things that gives me hope about humankind in general.Because we are not all strangers to each other—not really.Even if we do not know people on the other side of the world, we could know them.So when we do get the opportunity to get to know an individual, unless we have too many other burdens in our lives, I think it’s worth taking the minute to check them out and to have them check you out as fully as possible.Not to build a facade around yourself that protects you from unnecessary social risk or ambiguity in how you relate to others.Rather, allow yourself to be vulnerable.Because that’s when you can actually build new bridges to people.That has been a common theme throughout my adult life, but even more so now, in these last 19 months, that despite being very weak and having low energy reserves, I’ve still been drawn to talking to strangers about my life situation.And when they are able to relate to that on a deeper level, it doesn’t matter where they come from. It doesn’t matter what their background is, how we met, where we met, or where they are about to head next. They might never come back to a place where we can meet again.It’s about that initial interaction.And then, of course, something else can build out of that.Another example: when I was in the gym, I was sweeping the floor a bit because I tend to do that. I was trying to get rid of weird residue people bring into the shower—fabric from socks or whatever. I was sweeping with a swab, or whatever it’s called, and a guy said to me, “Okay, you’re really making an effort here.”And I joked that no, I was just pushing the dirt to another side of the shower space, because I wasn’t fully pushing it into a drain.But then he saw what I have on my chest—my port-a-cath. He asked whether it was a pacemaker.I told him “No, it's where they push poison into my bloodstream”, and then I had to explain my life situation.That led to a conversation about my life situation, which made him open up about his life situation.I’ve had so many of those interactions in these past months, and I find most of them very valuable.Plant PhysiologyWhat else can we talk about?Well, the reason I postponed treatment the first time was because on Thursday I had an exam in my Plant Physiology course.Plant physiology, at its root, is everything about the life cycle of the plant.So it includes how a plant goes from being a seed into a seedling, then into something that grows roots and starts to produce either a stalk if it’s herbaceous, or a stem if it’s a woody plant.From that stem you get shoots, which produce leaves. For flowering plants, they produce flowers and fruits. Those fruits then bear seeds in turn, which can be spread.How are they spread? Through wind, or through animals.Before the seeds are produced, you have the pollination of the flowers, which can be done by insects, birds, and some mammals as well—bats, for example.Other parts of tree physiology include how water circulates through the plant, how energy is produced via photosynthesis, how the tree is able to protect itself from attacks by animals, fungi, and bacteria—so basically the tree’s immune defense.And then also how you as a human would cultivate trees from a seed or from a cutting taken from a branch or root.In the course we’ve actually done our own tests as well.I’ll include images in the post of those attempts. (will add these soon…)The first one was that we were to grow tree seeds.We were given seeds of different tree species, and I picked three different ones, all exotic to Scandinavia.I started preparing them for germination.Many tree seeds in temperate climates need to be put into cool storage, such as in a fridge—a process called cold stratification—in order for them to start germinating. Otherwise they don’t break dormancy.And I’ve actually succeeded in sprouting two seedlings from two different tree species.One is blue spruce, Picea pungens—kind of a blue-green Christmas-tree-looking tree.It has sprouted, though of course it does not yet look like a full Christmas tree. It just has one crown of its first leaves—seven, in fact—and it’s starting to get its second crown. Spruces and their neighboring species grow their branches in strict levels, kind of the way a Christmas tree looks, with rings of branches around the stem and then another level above.The other one I managed to get sprouting is Zelkova serrata, a Japanese deciduous tree.It is not a conifer, so it doesn’t have those thin needle-type leaves. Instead it has flatter leaves, and they’re quite decorative. The leaves are serrated—that’s why it’s called serrata—they have a saw-toothed edge.Then we had another assignment where we were to grow plants from cuttings. Our teacher brought a lot of different cuttings, mainly from bushes.Of course, I took home cuttings from my favorite bush: sea buckthorn, whose Latin name I’ve now forgotten.Sea buckthorn is my absolute favorite berry.It has this very acidic, tart, intense taste, with a bit of sweetness. It is super high in vitamin C—one of the densest vitamin C sources you get in nature.If you haven’t tasted sea buckthorn, I can definitely recommend it.However, some cultivated variants do not have the same unique taste. They are a bit blander, a bit sweeter.I don’t know whether that was an intended flavor choice. I think it is just an after-effect of those plants having been selected for large berries that are easier to harvest.Because the wild variant that grows around the Stockholm coastline and a bit north of Stockholm has berries that are really attached to the branches.So you have to pick them at exactly the right season, at exactly the right time. Basically there is just a window of a few days where the berries are ripe enough to remove without being too firmly stuck to the branch.If they are too stuck, you squeeze them when trying to remove them and they break, or you end up with part of the branch still attached to the berry.On the other hand, if they are too ripe, they just burst between your fingers when you try to pluck them. Then you get juice on your fingers, but there is no berry left in sight.The berries are also very small.And the bush is very thorny.So there are a lot of hurdles to picking them by hand in the wild.But I still love it.I’ve done it a few times.I even convinced my girlfriend that we should go specifically to the one spot I had scouted as the best place for picking sea buckthorn.I’m not going to tell you where it is.In Sweden we do not tell each other about our smultronställe—our special wild strawberry place—or our mushroom place.We don’t kiss and tell.And that’s sea buckthorn for you.The cultivated variants are harvested differently. Either they shake the whole stem of the bush or tree with a machine that clamps onto the base and vibrates it at the right ripeness, with a cloth spread underneath to catch the berries, or they do a more aggressive harvest by cutting off whole branches and putting them in the freezer. Once frozen, the berries become easy to shake loose.Spring Arriving FastWe’ve also been asked to observe the budding of leaves out in nature and in park areas around Stockholm, because now you have leaf budding beginning, but you also have pollen starting.Everything goes very fast in spring.The pollen season is beginning. I think it’s alder that is already sending out pollen. Some of you in Stockholm might already be feeling it.Of course, if you’re in another place in the world, it might be very different.And I was happy to be able to combine my hectic lifestyle—to say the least—with treatment and recovery, while still just about managing to combine it with this course.I’m going to try and do the same going forward.Next week we’re starting a new course—or rather the next part of a course we already started last term—namely Applied Tree Care.So we’ll see how I manage that.Looking Ahead, CarefullyAnd now, yes, let’s see if I have a few days of respite, or if I’m going to start feeling symptoms coming back.Because my tumor burden was so widespread on the last scan that I do not want to postpone treatment unnecessarily.I am quite convinced, and ready to acknowledge, that given the tumor burden seen on the last scan, I’m going to need to be in this for the long run.I do not like systemic therapy.I do not like the whole-body effects of it in terms of toxicity.And over time there is definitely a significant risk of secondary tumors appearing because of the toxicity of these chemicals—inducing DNA damage not only in tumor cells, but also in healthy cells, which might in turn, over time, become new tumor cells.But for now, I do not see any other route than to carry on with this aggressive treatment.And we are planning to do a follow-up scan after the third treatment at some point.So yes—let’s make sure I’m able to get this third treatment as soon as possible.Then within a few weeks after starting cycle three, I should know the results of my next scan, and we will take it from there.There are some alternative scenarios that can play out, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.One step at a time.One step at a time…That’s all, folks.Be mindful of your life energy, and I’ll talk to you soon.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Saturday, March 21st, 10:04 in the morning.So I realized that my previous entry into the diary was a mixture of a dream retelling and me giving a draft to a song.I want to separate those.So if you’ve already listened to or read the full last episode, you don’t need to go through this one.Drafting the SoundYesterday morning, a draft to a song came to me.It’s a drill-type song, and the beat has been generated by me using the app Suno.ai, which is an AI model that can generate music.I’ve been trying to tame it using prompts—being specific in order to get it to create the type of hip-hop instrumental that I want for my purposes.And it’s coming along quite well.So the instrumental that you will hear at some point in the future, when this song is complete, will be AI-generated—but the lyrics are all mine.I’ll read them out a bit slower here than how they’ll actually be delivered in the song.Draft LyricsAnother verse.Let me lift this curse.Give birth.Let out monstrous creations to quench this thirst.F**k propriety.Push my stake in the ground in this hunt for satiety.F**k sobriety.We all censor ourselves in a straitjacket hell of what we call society.Civilization.Building mental prisons.Physical nations.Choking human relations.Path littered with fear and frustration.Ruined souls.Ruminating the fact that we’ve lost all control.All are scared.None are bold.Now we’re all molten in the same mold.Ain’t this s**t getting old?Aren’t you lot getting bored?Time to step to the granite.Just pull out that sword.Time to step to the plate.Put your palms in the fire.Fingers glowing with flames.Now you’re plucking Life’s Lyre.Building the TrackYeah, that’s how far I’ve come.But this is just one minute into the instrumental, which is four minutes long in total.So unless I add a chorus—performed by myself or maybe a friend—there’s quite a lot of space to fill out.Which I like.But it’s going to require a few iterations.I’ve already gone through many iterations for a previous song that I haven’t made public yet, so I should know the drill—pun intended.ClosingSo wish me luck with this creative endeavor.Wishing you all the best with following your own creative inspiration.And be mindful of your life energy, fam. Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 21st, 9:31 in the morning.I woke up after quite a pleasant sleep.I haven’t checked my sleep score yet, but I think it might be one of the best sleeps in this cycle. Let me see—I’ll check it now in real time. You’ll get the verdict.Waiting for your sleep data… updating… analyzing…Okay, it wasn’t too good.I scored 77. I slept a total of 7 hours and 22 minutes, with at least over an hour of REM and deep sleep respectively. But I was in bed for nine hours, so not a very high sleep efficiency at 82%.My sleep debt, which the Oura app has started estimating over the last few months as an added functionality, accumulated to four and a half hours.If I look at the graph showing different sleep phases, I had maybe four or five awakenings.A Stressed SystemI’ve had an issue with my resting heart rate being very high recently. Tonight it was up at 55. I’ve been as high as 59 in recent days.My HRV is down at 50 milliseconds, which is low. I’ve been above 100 on average before, so yeah—my body is stressed.That also shows in the accumulated readiness scoring, which is very low for me now. And my resilience is down at the lower end of adequate.It’s probably even bordering on limited, which is a level I’ve never been at before.So… scary stuff.The DreamBut I did have a dream tonight that I want to relay.So, another entry into the Dreamscape Diaries.As I remember it, it was late in the evening. I was lying in the top bunk of a bunk bed in some apartment.The people in the apartment were my dad, my brother, maybe my sister. I don’t remember if my mom was there. It felt like some version of my childhood home.It was late. I had already eaten dinner earlier that evening.But for some reason, someone arrived at the apartment and delivered hamburgers to some of the people there. So they were eating a full meal—hamburgers and fries—late in the evening.And I was thinking to myself: why are they eating so late? It’s going to impact their sleep.Then there was something I needed to do, so I climbed down the ladder from the bunk bed and went into a kitchen area.I had a brief conversation with my dad, and something happened to him—he was confused, or maybe even fell to the floor. I don’t remember exactly.But that situation stabilized. Nothing continued there.Nighttime CommotionAfter that, I started hearing loud noises coming from the kitchen wall.At the same time, there was building dust coming out of the wall, and I could see the blade of a saw pushing through.And I realized: they had planned to renovate their kitchen in the middle of the night. They were tearing down the whole wall.And I was supposed to sleep there overnight.But obviously, because they had just started this renovation late in the evening, they were going to continue throughout the night.I got really upset.As I walked back toward the bunk bed to grab my things and leave, I was shouting at my dad—asking why they were so stupid as to plan a kitchen renovation in the middle of the night.And then I woke up.Morning LightSo, a very confusing dream—as most dreams are.I’m not reading too much into it.But it’s fun to document them, because at least for me, if I don’t do it straight away, I forget them completely.So there you are.What else has happened?It’s sunny today. The sky is completely blue.There’s a super faint cloud smeared out so thin it barely looks like a cloud anymore. And there’s one airplane trail stretched into a wider band.The sun is shining, and the wind is very still.I’m sitting here on our balcony in Vasastan, Stockholm, just enjoying the pre-spring sun.Very enjoyable.Reading and CreatingIn front of me I have the book I’m currently reading—LSD: Mein Sorgenkind by Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of the LSD molecule.I’m currently at page 182 out of 230, so about 75–80% through.I’m reading it in the original German, so I’m struggling with some words. But like any challenge, if you take it step by step, it goes your way—especially if you find that balance between novelty and familiarity.On that topic, yesterday morning before going to the gym, I was inspired to start drafting a new rap song.The beat I wrote the lyrics to was generated by an AI—Suno.ai—which you have to tame a bit with prompts and specificity. I think I’m starting to get a handle on how to shape it to my liking.You can generate an instrumental in about 5–10 seconds once you’ve written a prompt and hit “create.”That’s very cool.I won’t play it here because I don’t know how Spotify or Apple Podcasts handle music, so I’ll just read it out as a poem.The actual song will be much more up-tempo—a drill-type beat.Draft LyricsAnother verse.Let me lift this curse.Give birth.Let out monstrous creations to quench this thirst.F**k propriety.Push my stake in the ground in this hunt for satiety.F**k sobriety.We all censor ourselves in a straitjacket hell of what we call society.Civilization,building mental prisons,physical nations,choking human relations,paths littered with fear and frustration.Scorch the turf in the purge of our innermost core,like we’ve lifted the crust of the earth.Forced to surf on the lava, we sink even more,drill a hole in our spiritual purse.Ruined souls,ruminating the fact that we lost our control.All are scared, none are bold.Now we’re all molten in the same mold.Ain’t this s**t getting old?Aren’t you lot getting bored?Time to step to the granite,just pull out that sword.Time to step to the plate,put your palms in the fire,fingers glowing with flames,now you’re plucking Life’s Lyre.Yeah, that’s how far I’ve come with it.That’s only a bit less than a minute into the instrumental, and the full track is around four minutes long.So, unless I add a chorus—either myself or maybe with a friend—there’s still a lot of space to fill.Similar to another song I’ve been working on that I haven’t made public yet, this will take a few iterations.It’s about finding the balance between different rhythms and speeds in the lyrics, but also shaping a coherent trajectory in the content over a longer runtime.So wish me luck on that.I wish you luck on your creative endeavors.And I’ll speak to you soon.Be mindful of your life energy.Namaste, fam. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Thursday, March 19th, 2026. It’s 7:10 in the morning.This morning I’ll relay a draft of the chorus and verse of a song that just came to me.So here it goes.Draft LyricsChorusDestiny’s on the moveUncertainty is through the roof nowYou really got some things to prove, brahCan’t just send in all of the troops blindYou’ve got to pick and chooseStill can’t stay still too long and peruseSome battles you will surely loseBut given time, you might pull throughVerseCan’t sit this one outCan’t just scream and shoutNo evac, just bivouacFall back briefly, then attackIn this storm of clout, among stormy cloudsWind is raging loudWar is waged in poundsStill you’re standing proudReeling, but still soundHeavy hitting soundsThunderstorms aboundThunder strikes aboundBound to hit this townConscious, hunker downGot to face the clownWith his twisted frownI’m in suit, you’re in gownIn pursuit of the crownWe will loot, build a moundHeal our wounds, we’ll astoundRally troops, go to townScorching flesh, pink and brownStinky mess, swampy groundWe’ll take flight, heaven-boundSoar with might,Pound for pound.Yeah, that’s it.Keep building.Brick by brick.Mind your life force, fam.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Wednesday, March 18th. 3:34 at night.I woke up intermittently, and I think the reason for waking this time was purely that I needed to use the restroom. A good indication that it wasn’t something else. It might have been triggered by something else, but most probably that was it, as I’m now awake and I don’t feel the intense symptoms I’ve felt ever since starting my journey toward recovery from the last compression arc with aggressive treatment.And tonight I’m not going to retell a dream to the best of my ability. I don’t remember if I was dreaming right before waking.However, as is often the case, right after I wake up—whether in the middle of the night or in the morning—my brain suddenly gets jacked into the socket and starts associating.It is often in the middle of the night or in the morning that my brain is at its freest when it comes to association. It jumps between different concepts, from one idea to another that is related in some aspect, but these associations can come and go very fast. So sometimes it is hard for me to backtrack the chain of associations that originally led me to one concept rather than another.So I cannot fully source where this image came from, but an image came into my mind of someone buying a lottery ticket. And not just any lottery ticket, but what in Swedish is called a Trisslott.The Triss ticket is basically a gamified version of the general lottery that you see in many countries, where there is a long number drawn every week or so, and anyone can buy one or several tickets. What they get is one number with a fixed number of digits. Then, upon the weekly draw, people compare their own number to the centrally drawn winning number. If your number matches, you win the jackpot, which can be a very large sum of money.But according to game theory and statistics, you should never play these kinds of lotteries, because your expected return is normally half of what you put in.So if you bet 100 kronor or 100 euros, your expected return is 50 euros. But you already invested 100 euros, so you have lost half of what you invested.And this is obviously not a good investment.Lottery Tickets and Childhood ConditioningThat made me think about how my own relationship to lottery tickets was formed at a quite early age.And I’m lucky that I was able to realize early enough that this is not a good strategy for earning money.But it is a fact—it is the state of the nation in Sweden—that a lot of families buy similar kinds of lottery tickets, though even more gamified ones.Imagine that you come home with a small ticket, handy enough for a child to hold in their hand, and it has a grid on it. I don’t remember exactly how many fields there are, which is probably a good sign. Maybe it is three by four, or three by three, or even four by four. In each field you can reveal an amount that you might win.You can get 25 kronor, which is the original price tag of the ticket itself, unless they have raised it since I last paid attention to these things, and all the way up to a million kronor or more. Divide that by ten and you roughly get the euro amount.But that is just one number shown in one field. In order to win anything, you need three of the same amounts. So if you scratch off three fields that all say 25 kronor, your win is 25 kronor. If you get 50 kronor three times on the same ticket, then your win is 50 kronor minus the 25 kronor you spent on the ticket.But obviously this is just the same setup as the national lottery. Your expected return is still half of what it costs you to buy the ticket.So you shouldn’t do it.And yet a lot of kids in Sweden are most probably brought up seeing these lottery tickets, and they are often introduced at some of the most psychologically vulnerable moments in a child’s development—moments related to gifting, money, value, and reward.Because if you are gifting lottery tickets to a child, irrespective of the setting, the signal you are sending is that the availability of money in a person’s life is conditioned upon luck. Not upon effort, or skill, or ambition.And those things can be problematic too, obviously. Because as I once heard in that lovely song later covered by Jeff Buckley, A Satisfied Mind:“How many times have you heard someone say, if I had money, I would do things my way. But little they know that it’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.”That was paraphrased a bit, because I missed part of the lyric, but the point stands.As most people know, just because you have money does not mean you are satisfied with your life or your life choices.But having money is still a good thing, all other things equal. It is good to be resourceful. You do not need to accumulate money for all eternity. You can do that until a certain point, and then shift your focus toward other things in life. But if you always feel that money is scarce, you may end up making life choices based mainly on financial concerns rather than on the things that are more fundamentally important to you as a person, and more central to making life feel rich.To be able to express yourself. To realize yourself.Luck as a False North StarComing back to the theme of lottery tickets: I think it is a f*****g deprivation. It is a f*****g disgrace to human potential that we raise people with this idea of empowerment through luck.Luck should not be the empowering factor.Ambition, effort, direction in life, and visualizing how your identity matches your destiny—that should be the guiding star. That should be the North Star. Not clinging to naked, naive hope where mathematics and probability theory prove you wrong time and time again.We should be past this as a species.But we’re not.And you see it in other areas as well. People, myself included, are very often deluded by wishful thinking, which is definitely reinforced by the act of buying a lottery ticket.Let’s say you are a citizen of a country—whether you chose that country or not. That country may end up going to war because of some wishful thinking: that the other side will give up, or that war will somehow rescue the economy, or protect resources, or solve some deep structural problem.If the leaders paint a beautiful enough narrative, they can induce a lot of wishful thinking in the population at large. And this transforms into public support for the powers that be and their narratives, even though those narratives are built on illusion.America will be great again. We will dominate this part of the hemisphere. We will secure our influence everywhere because we are the greatest country on earth.People are deluded by wishful thinking in this way, and they allow for what a bully normally does: puffing themselves up, trying to appear bigger, more powerful, more impactful, more interesting than they actually are.But sooner or later, it always backlashes.And it backlashes not just upon the leaders. The leaders usually know how to protect themselves. They often have the financial or political means to get away relatively unscathed.But the people are the ones who are burnt by these delusions.The Ruler and the RuledIndirectly, my mind then jumped to a higher truth in this setting regarding the ruler and the ruled—an idea stated in an old French philosophical text, which I believe may already have been published in the 1500s or 1600s, though I do not remember exactly. I think the title is The Voluntary Servitude.The author explores how, without the voluntary servitude of the people—without the people accepting the rule of those above them—the ruling would not exist.So implicit in that is the fact that unless the people, in aggregate, do something that forces the powers that be to adjust their agenda and alter the direction they are taking on behalf of everyone else, then they are accepting it.Because without enough acceptance in practice, the powers that be do not actually have the power.It is the same as the bully in the schoolyard. He is just one out of a hundred kids. But without the yes-men in the room, without everyone bowing to the bully, the bully is nothing.If the people serving under him were clear enough in their minds and bodies to say, “I do not serve this bully,” then the bully would not rule the playground.It really is that simple.So as long as the people, on aggregate, are not clear enough about the fact that they are not meant to be ruled by the powers that be, then the powers that be have more or less free rein until a certain point.But in most cases, that point is never breached.My Own Relationship to MoneyBut let’s get back to the issue of money and make this more personal.This is a touchy subject—your personal relationship to money.And I would love it if, now that I’m going to open up quite a bit, any of you reading or listening would also feel willing to open up about this topic of money. You do not need to disclose how much money you have in your bank account. That’s not what this is about.It is about your psychological anchoring to the concept of money or financial resources, and reflecting for your own sake on how that relationship came about from childhood onward, and how it has developed over time.If I go back to my own childhood, I would say money was not talked about.Money was not something openly discussed in the household. Rather the opposite. We did not talk much about money.And still, money was spent—as in all households, money is spent.But I think if you don’t talk about money and money is still being spent, there is already a discrepancy forming in the mind of a child. Because you don’t see the effort needed to earn all that money. You don’t see it accumulating over time. You just see a flow.Someone is working, perhaps earning money, and then spending money.And I can trace this to my own relationship to money. When I started earning money for myself, I was spending it quite quickly on whatever came my way.In my younger years, that meant expensive hobbies. Stupid hobbies, in some cases. Collecting hockey cards. Collecting pogs—those little things you flipped with your thumb. It was partly a game, but even more about collecting.And slightly less stupid, because they at least had some educational or creative element, I got into Warhammer and Warhammer 40K—miniature plastic and metal figures. That too was a very expensive hobby for a child of eleven or twelve. You bought expensive figures, then tiny expensive cans of paint and brushes, and then painted them and played with them. There was a storytelling and fantasy-building aspect to it, which of course is beautiful in its own way, but still: it was an expensive hobby for a child.Then I was buying quite a lot of CDs.And at the end of elementary school, I started collecting LPs. Of course, one could say that was a kind of necessary consumption in order to access music. And I did love music, and it has enriched my life ever since, so that is less of an issue.But then came my teenage years, when I really started to earn money myself.Before that, I had done things like delivering newspapers on weekends. That was my first job. I think I was twelve or thirteen. Probably twelve, because it was before we moved apartments.That money was spent on hobbies.Then in my early teenage years, from the end of elementary school and through most of high school, I was actually working quite a lot in the evenings and weekends after school.And these were shitty jobs.Telemarketing.Selling bad products, or products people could have acquired in other ways, directly over the phone. Newspaper subscriptions. Magazine subscriptions. Cartoon subscriptions. Phone subscriptions. Insurances.At one point, someone came to our school at a company fair and recruited students to work extra for what was presented as a charity fundraising organization. But it turned out to be a scam. We were calling people and thought we were helping them donate to charity, but the little compensation we were supposed to receive for each donation never seemed to end up in our pockets.And then the contract required you to stay with the company another month after seeing your first salary, and you only saw your salary after the second month of working or something like that.Obviously, people are vulnerable to financial scams. And if your relationship to money is bad to begin with, you are not as suspicious.So I was working mainly with telemarketing during high school, and the money I earned I spent during the weekends—more or less by going to expensive clubs and buying alcohol.So I partied away all of this money that I could have invested in my teenage years.But I didn’t, partly because of my relationship to money.Then I finished high school without having accumulated much, even though I had worked a lot.China, Student Life, and No SavingThen I went to China.China did not help me develop a healthier relationship to money, because everything was relatively cheap apart from housing. So financially I could live in a similar way as I had in Sweden. I could survive on a Swedish student loan without much trouble.During my second year in China, I did work for about half a year as a tour guide. I was getting money under the table, in a white envelope. So that money too was just there to be spent. My pocket money, more or less. I did save up a little bit, but not much.So saving had still not entered the picture, as you can hear.I was not thinking about saving.Then I came back from China and started studying engineering in Stockholm. As a student, you’re often still in a similar financial situation. I was working part-time during some of those study years, but my relationship to money did not fundamentally change.Then I had a few years where my finances were somewhat shaky. I had not fully completed my studies and was working in different research labs, sometimes with a bit of a salary, sometimes with none.Again: not much money, and spending most of it.Crypto, Conviction, and ComplacencyAround this time came my first exposure to cryptocurrency.Starting in high school and continuing into my early thirties, I was off and on quite actively engaged in political theory. And now I mean political-philosophical theory, not party politics or day-to-day policy, but more idealized questions of political structure.My main reasoning was that I wanted to promote individual freedom. If there were a political framework or ecosystem that could maximize individual freedom, my conviction was—and in part still is—that it would unleash disproportionately more creative force and more forces for improving human conditions and human collaboration.In other words, I believed, and partly still believe, that it can be worth sacrificing some safety in order to gain more freedom.Through those ideas I was exposed to the rising crypto sphere, with Bitcoin at the forefront.I don’t remember the exact year, but I attended one of the first crypto events in Stockholm. They already had a Swedish company there that was making Bitcoin ATMs and placing them around the world. That company also had a crypto exchange where you could swap fiat currency for crypto.At that event, I did buy a small sum of Bitcoin.And I think I used it up just a few months later. It was only a small amount. But in today’s terms that small amount would already have been worth quite a lot, because this was still very early.I remember discussing with a good friend whether I should simply put in a few thousand Swedish kronor—say 10,000 kronor.I did have access to that money, even though I had not saved much. And we were both philosophically convinced by the technology. We thought it was only a matter of time before it would become mainstream—or if not that, at least remain a store of value, because the technology capped supply in a way fiat currencies do not.Fiat currencies are almost always diluted over time. The question is only how fast, and that tends to depend on the competence of the rulers handling the money.And rulers are not enlightened creatures.Human beings cannot centrally plan problems past a certain scale. That is why spontaneous order matters.So I could quite plausibly have invested 10,000 kronor. I was very convinced about the technology.But I pushed the decision into the future because I had no experience with investing. I did not have a relationship to investing. I did not yet understand that investing is one way for a person to put faith into the future of humanity—or into some subset of humanity, if one wants to simplify it.There are of course many ways of investing. You can speculate short-term on trends. But long-term investment, in my head, is a conviction that something is heading in a certain direction over time, even if not in the short term.You can revise those long-term bets, of course. But they rest on a systemic conviction: that your understanding of the phenomenon suggests it will trend one way over the long run.But I had not learned to project myself into that role.And that, too, is interesting.Because if someone has a healthy relationship to investing in something, they will also probably have a more mature relationship to investing other things than money over time and waiting for accumulated benefits and synergies.If you are well-versed in investing money, you may also be well-versed in investing time. You may understand the value of putting time toward a creative goal, or a personal goal, or a future self.Of course, these things are not black and white. You can be excellent at investing time into creativity while being terrible at financial investing. Or the other way around: you can have a banker’s mindset toward finance but no understanding of how to invest time and effort into something that is self-realizing and meaningful.In my case, I didn’t put that money into Bitcoin, and I have not earned a lot from crypto because I kept pushing the decision into the future.Every year that passed, I kept thinking, maybe now is the time to invest. But I never did.And it was not out of fear of risk.It was out of complacency.It was not a lack of trust in the asset over the long term. It was a lack of trust in myself as an investor. I had no experience of those gains or of the benefits of being a long-term investor.And this trajectory is nowhere near unique.Many people never build a healthy relationship to money, or to storing value over time, or to building trust in something and letting that trust accumulate—whether that “something” is money, a financial asset, or time invested into a purpose.Yet, to my own credit, and to the credit of my surroundings, I think I have learned to invest time through curiosity.I have always invested time. Maybe not in the sense of diving into one area for many, many, many years with compounding focus, but rather by letting curiosity push me forward.That may also be driven more by short-term inspiration than by long-term compounding, so perhaps it is all interconnected.A Late MaturationI think I am at one end of the spectrum here, and many people unfortunately end up even further out on that same end, while others through various means manage to build a healthier relationship to money quite early in life.My relationship to money is maturing later in life, at the very stage when I’m actually earning much more of it and beginning to see real numbers accumulate in my bank account.And it is still a maturation process.I do some investing now, but it is mainly passive—through index funds.And I think that is the correct choice for me, because I do not care enough about following specific market conditions to actively rotate money between sectors or assets.So in general I think it is better for someone who does not care deeply about money to be a passive investor. Because if you do not care, you are not going to put in the work to understand. And if you do not put in the work to understand, then there are millions of people who have done more homework than you and you will end up on the losing side of evaluating assets over time.But cryptocurrency I did care about.So if I had had the psychological tools—if I had been differently conditioned—I think I could quite easily have made accumulated investments there over time much earlier rather than later.And even more fundamentally, if a large part of the population has a poor relationship to investing—whether financial investing or investing time into something that compounds—then that weakness can be exploited.A politician, a political party, the powers that be—they can frame reality in a way that is not true.“It is a good investment to invade another country,” for instance—which it never is.They do not always say such things directly. Often they imply them through action. But people still end up thinking: we need to invade, otherwise we are not secure, otherwise we cannot secure our borders or resources.But it is not a long-term strategy to go to war.Cooperation is always the better long-term strategy on the level of nations.Competition matters on a smaller level, because it fosters innovation and differentiation—whether one is painting, or building a company, or developing a technological product through research. You need alternatives differentiating themselves in a competitive market.But at the civilizational scale, cooperation wins over domination in the long term.Self-ExpressionismSo that is me laying out quite a lot of my background in terms of my relationship to money.Another interesting aspect, which I would love to discuss further with you in whatever forum you end up communicating with me through, is how the relationship to money differs between societies.You can look at one country at one point in history, then move centuries backward or forward. Or compare different regions and cultures geographically. What shaped their relationship to money? To investing? To putting in effort and seeing the fruits of one’s labor?That is a very interesting line of inquiry.Money rules the world, in a way. But money is also just digits. Money is fiat. It is crazy.I spoke earlier about crypto, and crypto too may be turning into another kind of fiat-adjacent asset indirectly, because the fluctuations of fiat currencies and the broader monetary environment are imbuing it with inflationary dynamics, booms, busts, and speculation. I have not studied that enough to speak with certainty. If someone is more expert, they may well have thoughts on whether Bitcoin still fundamentally makes sense as a long-term hedge, or whether it remains resilient despite the inflationary pressures of its surroundings.My instinct says yes.That is why I will stick with my investments.But I do not know what others think.And I would genuinely like to hear your own experiences with money—how your relationship to money, investment, labor, time, and value has formed.Because I am trying, more and more, to open up as much as possible.For some months now I have started calling myself a self-expressionist.That is a reference to the Expressionist art movement, but taken even deeper. Not merely expressionism in the sense of painting a landscape as you feel it while looking at it, but self-expressionism: I am watching myself as an observer, and in order for the observer to fully convey what I observe—which is myself—I try to express it as fully as possible.I try to be as transparent as possible, to a certain extent. I still need some integrity in this world.But I want to peel back the layers of this onion, this ogre, in service to myself, and also in service to the people reading or listening. Because I think this is a way forward for many of us: not to be so overly protective.Because if you are overly protective, you are also hiding things from yourself. You are not just hiding things from the rest of the world. Every day you wake up hiding something from yourself.And if you put a mask on your face, the mask can, over time, melt into your face. Then you no longer know the difference between the mask and the face.And I am working very hard to prevent that from happening.Because, as for most people, it has happened to me at various points in my life. And when I realized the mask was starting to melt over my face, I began carving at it. Chipping at it. Trying to regain the facial features that used to be there.And for me, that is definitely one of the most important life goals—if not the most important.To rediscover myself.To fulfill myself through finding myself.To find my truest, innermost instincts. My truest, innermost thoughts, feelings, and reflections. My innermost relationship to nature. My innermost relationship to other human beings. And to be able to wake up feeling like myself.So with that being said, I aim to wake up feeling more like myself after this second round of night sleep.And I hope you will do the same, the night after listening to this rant.Invest in yourself.Invest in what you believe in.For today, and for the future.Namaste, team.Protect your life force. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026. 6:22 in the morning.So I had my final wake-up just about now.And a bit earlier, I woke up from a second dream of the night that I can remember.I was standing on the bridge—the command deck—of a big vessel, a big boat.I have no idea why I was on this boat, or where it was heading, but looking down I could see the waters in front of me and to the sides.All of a sudden, on my right side, I saw something moving. At first it looked like a small island, but a man-made island. And the surface of the island wasn’t level—it was skewed somehow. So I was thinking: what is this?And then suddenly I saw it more from the side instead of just from behind as we were approaching it.And I realized it was the upper part of a ship.So it was a ship that was gradually sinking into the ocean. It was headed more or less in the same direction that we were, and I could see it slowly going under.As I kept looking to starboard, to my right side, I saw it finally sink below the surface. I watched the last part of the ship disappear.And I was just confused.How did this happen? What was this about?Then I heard some commotion from other people on deck, happening on the left side of us.So I moved across the deck to see what was happening over there.And there we had the same situation.Another ship was sinking.But even more worrisome for our situation was that this ship was also moving toward us with its keel angled in our direction, so it looked as though it might ram us while sinking.It was a very confusing situation.And then I woke up, just as these two large ships—not quite as big as ours, but almost—were very close to us, and one of them was just about to collide.Yes.Scary times.But what does it all mean? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 17th. 2:58 in the night.I just woke up.And I don’t feel too many weird symptoms in my body. But when waking up, I came directly out of a dream, so I’m going to try to relay the contents of that dream, which was a bit bizarre.What I can remember is this:Picture the scene. I think I was partly sitting up in bed in some room. If I remember correctly, the room was quite spacious. There was a large TV screen in front of the bed, some distance away. And I think the apartment had a second room with a few steps leading up to it—just three or four stairs. To the right of the TV screen there was a bigger opening where those stairs were, so it had a kind of open-plan layout.Anyway, it was me, and maybe my girlfriend as well, sitting in bed watching TV.And what was showing on the screen was some crappy mainstream entertainment show that was pretending to be fully live-broadcast, but obviously wasn’t. It was like those Swedish morning shows that I was partly exposed to when I was younger, where a host runs through a set of different guests each morning and they all present something.Maybe someone has just released a book. Maybe someone is a cook and is going to show a recipe to the audience. Maybe someone is a sports star who has recently competed internationally, and now Swedish viewers get to hear how it felt. Or whatever.Very mainstream, very banal stuff.Sometimes they might have some light discussion, like how to promote health, but in a very watered-down way.And in this show, which resembled that type of format, the host was discussing sugar consumption with someone else. Maybe even candy consumption specifically.The way it works in Sweden, of course, is that Sweden has developed an enormous consumption of pick-and-mix candy, but there is also a heavy consumption of sweet buns, sweet breads, and things of that nature.And in this discussion, they were talking about what people’s relationship to sugar and candy looks like. I think the other person in the discussion was some kind of pseudo-philosopher or something. And he brought up the idea that there are three main personality types when it comes to sugar.One is the abstainer—the one who is completely abstaining, almost religiously, from sugar. That might be due to health reasons, or it might be for other reasons.The second is the one who denies that sugar has any negative effects at all.And then there is the third type: the one who consumes it out of convenience, but manages to live in two worlds at once.That is the person who can convince themselves that they do not eat a lot of sugar, but then mentally switch modes at certain points during the day or the week—as is often the case with Swedish people. So their baseline mentality is that they are not really a sugar eater, but then their mind leaves a little room, a bit of wiggle room, so that throughout life they can slot sugar in here and there and convince themselves that it isn’t really bad for them.So they live in two worlds simultaneously.And while I was watching this, for some reason there was candy around me. I was about to go to bed, but I started nibbling away at it.And bear in mind: I haven’t touched sugar, literally, for all of these eighteen months. And before that, I was already very much not a sugar consumer, especially not in candy form. I might have had an ice cream or two throughout a given year, but that was about it.Still, what has happened in my history is that I was brought up in Swedish society, where I was heavily exposed to things like sweet breads, and especially pick-and-mix candy.So I did have a habit as a child of binge-eating pick-and-mix candy. It was basically indoctrinated into us.Every Saturday, company agendas had successfully pushed the idea that Swedish families—parents and children alike—should have a free day of free rein to binge on candy. It even has its own term: lördagsgodis.It’s similar to how Santa Maria managed to push the agenda that all Swedish people should eat tacos on Fridays.And some Swedes might remember how, a decade ago or more, a Swedish chicken company tried to claim Fridays too, with all those commercials saying Friday was chicken time.“På torsdag är det soppa, på lördag är det fest, men fredag är ändå den dagen som känns bäst.”Yeah. Disgusting stuff.I don’t know the full background of how pick-and-mix candy became associated with Saturdays, but obviously there was a lot of advertising money behind that as well. There were probably a few jingles along the way too.Candy in the DreamBut in the dream, I am now nibbling away at this candy, and I think that by the end of the show it has amounted to quite a substantial quantity.Which I feel disgusted by even just conceptualizing.And then, in the dream, I fall asleep.And then I suddenly wake up in the dream.So I’m still not actually awake. It’s not that I wake up in real life and think this happened. Rather, inside the dream, I wake up and think that this actually happened.And then, in the dream, I start pondering the cancer effects of sugar—and specifically the effects of acute sugar consumption in this kind of binge format.Because in the dream I can still somehow relate to my actual cancer situation, the ongoing one, with me having metastatic cancer.And I think I land on the conclusion that a sugar binge might well have some sort of short-term effect, even if it is not the be-all and end-all. So my tumor tissue is not going to suddenly explode because of one sugar binge, but it is definitely not a good thing.I don’t think I had time in the dream to reach any final conclusion about how I would approach sugar going forward.But somewhere around that point, I woke up for real, and I was just laughing to myself about the whole thing.Why would I be sitting there watching this crappy mainstream TV show?Why would I have candy around me?And why would I be binging on it?Aren’t human minds funny and intriguing.So I’m glad I could remember at least some of it and relay it here.Now I’m going to try to fall back asleep. I just need to go and urinate, and then I should be ready to sleep again.So I’m wishing you sweet dreams.But if not sweet, then at least funny.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 15th, 2026. It’s 23:26 in the evening.So I woke up very shortly after falling asleep, maybe a bit less than two hours ago. Upon waking, I noticed that I had a bit of night sweat, especially around the loin and groin area.And upon waking, I also felt this tingling, warm sensation around parts of my body—especially the upper body, the torso, the arms, but also the feet, interestingly.For the first second or two, I had this cautious suspicion: is this tumor activity already coming back this early in the cycle?But then my body and mind reminded me that these were not the same kinds of sensations I was feeling before starting treatment.Those earlier sensations were more of the type where, every now and then, I felt these intense, heavy pins-and-needles sensations accumulating in the hands and feet. I strongly suspect that had something to do with oversensitized nervous system activity, coupled with cytokine activity throughout the body because of tumor activity and inflammation—as seemed to be the case with the blood panel I took close to the latest scan, the one I did before restarting treatment now.That was the first time ever that I got positive inflammation markers.So throughout these eighteen months—from when I first got the diagnosis, or even before that, when I first suspected something was wrong and had this protruding lymph node on my neck that I wanted the hospital system to look at, and then weeks passed without them taking me seriously—throughout all that time, until around the last scan two months ago or so, I hadn’t had any inflammation markers in my blood.So seemingly it could be that this increased inflammation activity with the tumor is causing cytokine storms, and that these can manifest as this weird heaviness in the hands and feet.For some time, when those symptoms started this autumn, around September or October, I first suspected I had Lyme disease because I had been bitten by numerous ticks throughout the summer. That heavy, almost paralyzing feeling in my hands and feet—but especially in my hands—coupled with sudden stiffness and pain in my right knee, gave me the suspicion that I had contracted Lyme disease.And upon drawing a blood panel for Lyme disease—the standard one—I did test positive for having had Lyme disease. But the marker that would indicate active antibodies from an ongoing active infection in the blood, I did not test positive for.I was considering doing a lumbar puncture to check whether Lyme might still be active in the nervous system rather than in the blood in significant amounts, which I never ended up doing, for better or worse. It might still be Lyme layered over all this. Who knows.And then, because it didn’t go away, I tried to fast and see if the symptom would disappear.First I did a four-day water fast, I think, and the symptoms clearly dissipated over those four days. But once I started eating again, the symptoms came back sooner or later, more or less.A month or so later, I did an even longer five-day fast, which I coupled with a number of HBOT treatments. I think it was six HBOT treatments over the course of three days, so two treatments per day.Same result.The symptoms dissipated, but once I came back out of the fast, they returned somewhat.Then I kept doing the arborist courses. I had the climbing course, where I did feel some of those symptoms, but because they were most intense at night and dissipated somewhat during the daytime, I was still able to do all the rope-based climbing required for the course without huge issues. But I remember now that there were some climbing days when my hands were really affected by this.Then additional weeks passed, into the turn of the year, when we had more theoretical classes. I don’t remember exactly how these symptoms felt back then in detail.Then January came, after I returned from a lovely vacation with Jana in Sicily, and the next course after the turn of the year was my first internship.And there too I was able not only to bear with those symptoms and still go climbing, but also to do it in the worst weather conditions Stockholm could offer for outdoor tree care work—climbing ropes, wading through deep snow just to get to the trunks and branches I needed to reach to do the work.But also, at the end of that period, when I was getting the results of the latest scan and only weeks remained before I had decided it was time to restart treatment, I did feel those heavy, kind of paralyzing pins-and-needles sensations in my hands and feet begin to come back somewhat.But this sensation now, upon waking, wasn’t that.However, these symptoms I’m feeling in my body can sometimes be layered, so who knows what this is.What I do know is that it does correlate with me yesterday finally managing to do my first strength-training session for this cycle.Returning to Strength TrainingSo, to recap, for those who don’t know about my strength training:I didn’t used to do strength training in the sense of going to the gym and following a strict training program. It’s basically not something I’ve ever really done.I tried in high school a while back, but seemingly my programming back then wasn’t good enough. I also think my body was too young to get the right signals out of going to the gym, so it didn’t really add up to much.Then after high school, during the first year I lived in China, I also went to the gym. Back then I got a bit more out of it when I went to the local gym outside the school together with one of my best mates, Miguel, the crazy Mexican guy who is still around in China.But since then, I didn’t pursue the gym again until just now.And the reason I started was that after initiating treatment I was getting weaker and weaker and weaker, because treatments were ongoing every two weeks and I was fasting for almost a week with each treatment round.That meant I only had a little more than a week after breaking the fast to recover, refeed, regain body mass, rebalance, and recalibrate my different body systems.And that was obviously not enough.What I saw, and what I realized, was that in order for my body to bounce back and recover, it wasn’t enough to just start eating again.After that onslaught of aggressive chemotherapy and immunotherapy and the whole water-fasting process, my body needed something stronger than just food in order to understand: now you need to rebuild, now you need to strengthen yourself, now you really need to reboot your system.Through reading and research, and just common-sense reasoning, I realized that strength training might be the one thing I truly needed in order to do more of a full reset of my metabolism and hormonal systems and everything else.So I tried doing resistance training during those first four cycles, but I realized I didn’t have a clear, disciplined, rigorous strategy.Luckily, a few weeks before starting treatment, I had come across an advert in my Instagram feed from a guy promoting his online coaching for strength training.And that face was very familiar to me.It turned out to be my old naprapath, whom I had seen years earlier for two different issues at two different locations: my neck, which I had long-running issues with due to severe injuries during wrestling practice, and also my right knee, which I injured because an idiot on the mat willfully twisted it during practice. That gave me a medium-sized tear—MCL, or maybe LCL, the one on the inside of the knee—and that took a long time to heal. It probably still reverberates now and then, which would explain why I keep getting weakness on the inside of that knee.So I contacted him a few weeks after seeing that ad, because it seemed like exactly what I needed: a structured approach that would guarantee I got as much benefit as possible from resistance training in the few days of each treatment cycle that I might actually have available for strength training at all.We had a good call where I had to give him a lot of context about my life situation and how it was at a desperate crossroads.At that point I was somewhere around the third or fourth cycle, and I had lost a lot of body weight. Before treatment I had been walking around at maybe 87 kilos. By then I was down to 78. So I had lost 9 to 10 kilos.And if I was going to gain that back—not just in terms of body weight, but more importantly in terms of the capacity to withstand treatment and sustain myself through the long course of treatments that remained—I would need to give my body the right signals.And I would need to give those signals in enough volume and with enough efficiency for it to be sustainable.So I gave him the rundown of how my life was being lived by then, in those treatment cycles.By then I had also decided to extend my fourth cycle so that I was no longer starting treatment every two weeks, but rather every three weeks. So my new reality became a 21-day cycle.That was also key, because otherwise I simply wouldn’t have time to get the breathing window where I felt recovered enough to start doing resistance training.So we programmed things with a split between upper-body-focused sessions and lower-body-focused sessions, and we had two variants of each.So I was going:upper body variant one,lower body variant one,upper body variant two,lower body variant two.And then I just kept cycling those at the start, gradually increasing the weights.And that was a miracle, because I was able to gradually increase weights even though these aggressive treatments were slotted in between the gym sessions.Some rounds, some cycles, I was only able to fit in two or three gym sessions maximum. But still, coming back out of treatment, I was able to increase the weights gradually.And I was also able to increase my own body weight, bouncing back from that all-time low of 78 kilos.Already with cycle four, I was back close to my median weight from before treatment.Then I would go down again.And then I think in cycle five I came back to where, before starting fasting for cycle six, I was just as high—or even higher—than I had been before starting treatment.And around cycle eight, I was up weighing more than I had ever weighed before, due to my body’s ability now to gain weight and regain bodily balance through the strength training.I think during cycle six I was able to very aggressively slot in seven gym sessions within the course of two weeks, which was crazy.So strength training did so much here.And I’m very happy that I’m now re-engaged with Simon for him to fine-tune my strength-training programming for this period as well.Because what I’ve done now, up until we had a talk yesterday, is that I’ve been reusing and refactoring the old initial sessions we did, and I’ve taken it quite carefully at the start.With each new session variant that I introduced now—which were the same as the ones I initially had—I used more or less the same weights, even though they feel light for me now, in order not to overload my nervous system and to let my whole body ease into it.Then the plan is to gradually increase the weights with each new session.So yesterday was the first time I did the second round of the same main session type. I did upper body variant one for the second time now—the first time I redid it during this first retreatment cycle.And it feels good.It feels good to do rigorous strength training again.It feels like the one thing my body needs in terms of physical movement more than any other kind of activity, because of its potent effect on rebooting some of my body systems so that their imbalances can gradually decrease over time, even though there is this shock effect.So the symptoms I’m having now, waking up just two hours after falling asleep, are probably attributable to the effects of me doing strength training yesterday—a session I completed sometime between 10 a.m. and noon today, in the morning.So my initial knee-jerk suspicion that this was cancer, or tumor activity already being this active this early in the cycle, I don’t think there is strong evidence for yet.It is more likely my body’s systems reacting in aggregate to the strength-training session I did.Combining Strength Training With Arborist SchoolAnd I want to do these strength-training sessions every other day.But obviously, since I’m now trying to combine my aggressive treatment-and-recovery-cycle lifestyle with my ongoing school activities—studying to become a professional arborist—I also have mandatory class activities.I have them Monday and Tuesday this week.And Tuesday will be a full day with a long excursion about two hours away from Stockholm.So my next strength-training session will have to be on Wednesday.So I lose one day there.But apart from that, I’m trying to do strength training every two days from the point in each recovery phase when I feel able to return to it.So wish me luck going forward with going to the gym.It’s definitely not an environment—the actual gym—that I appreciate.I’ve looked at other options, such as wellness centers where maybe the energy would be a bit different, but I haven’t found any good enough overall options yet.I also don’t want it to be too far away from my home, because when I’m feeling at my weakest, I don’t want long commutes in order to go to the gym.So for now, this gym of mine is what it is.I’m a member of SATS, one of the gym monopolists in Stockholm—or in Scandinavia, for that matter—and I go to the one at Odenplan, which is relatively decent in terms of atmosphere for being a SATS gym, or for being a public gym in general.But I really don’t like the atmosphere of those places.And their choice of music—I mean, everyone is listening to their own music anyway, so why don’t they just turn off the music in the loudspeakers? No one is listening to it, I think.I, for one, abhor their choice of music.So I need to go there with my in-ear headphones and just pump music into those.The Right SoundtrackInterestingly, before this session I asked Jana what kind of music I should play while doing my gym session.Normally I go for a genre that is quite energetic. It could be soundtrack music from war films, or Viking music, or Afrobeat-type active dance music.But Jana said maybe I should do something more relaxed, more like soul.So I did have soul pumping in my ears, and it kind of worked.It gave me a more laid-back, relaxed feeling while doing the strength training, which I very much needed because my nervous system has been so high-wired throughout this cycle.I haven’t really been able to return to a parasympathetic state, which is why I keep waking up in the middle of the night having these ranting reflections, because my body and brain are in such a sympathetic state in the middle of the night.So it was nice to have those cooler, more laid-back soul vibes while doing the strength training.I’ll definitely keep exploring that.It’s good to have music that is a bit more laid-back, and soul is also something you can dance to.So in between sets, in between exercises, when having a breather and letting the muscles relax a bit, I do tend to loosen up and move around.So it is definitely an advantage if the music is a bit dancey, which soul very much is as well.Even the slower, bluesier kind of soul—you can groove to that.The Gain TrainBut yes, strength training is on again.The choo-choo train. The gain train.It will keep running.We just have to throw in the coal.We have to eat a lot, eat good nutritious meals, preferably not too late in the evening, and just keep at it.Be wary of any signs of potential injury or overexertion in any of my body systems, but apart from that, just keep grinding in the gym.And then complement that with other smoother, more movement-based physical activities such as dancing, yoga, spinal waves, and so on, in order for the body to stay limber and to keep some of those other bodily systems fluid—to help the lymphatic system along, for example.That’s something I discussed with Simon as well.So in order for the other part of the cycle—when I’m not able to do strength training—not to go to waste, and in order not to let my body become too pacified, we want to introduce some more structured, programmed daily sessions of low-intensity but high-fluidity movement, such as spinal waves or other movement-based activities that can help maintain blood and lymph circulation and help calm nervous system activity.So we’ll add that as well.That will hopefully prime my overall system better to return to the gym, but may also help overall by decreasing some of the imbalances my body experiences.So wish me luck for the remainder of the cycle with my strength training.I need all the margins I can get in order to fit in as much strength training as possible within each cycle.I’ve now had a very good catch-up call with Simon to set out our initial strategy here.We have a vision of me being able to complete at least four full, rigorous strength-training sessions within each cycle, and preferably more if I feel there is enough buffer for that.This vision still needs to include the ability for me to ease into strength training, but also to ease into initiating the water fast and going back into the treatment trenches.So yes—wish me luck in the gym.And if you have any suggestions for what I should put in my playlist during these strength sessions, I’d be very glad to hear them: what genre, what artist, what songs give you motivation, what gets your step tapping, what helps you squeeze that extra juice out of your muscles, or that extra ounce of willpower out of yourself.Is it more aggressive, angry energy—the warrior, wartime-mindset kind of music you prefer? Or is it something more mellow that still activates you but keeps you a bit more balanced?Any music tips for the gym are highly appreciated.Even though my Afrobeats playlist is constantly being curated and I’m adding songs to it week by week, it’s always nice to get more variety.So holler at me if you have recommendations.And I also wish all of you that the coming days be successful in terms of whatever habits you want to strengthen and fortify and consolidate and develop within your life.And I’m hoping that those habits are health-promoting rather than the opposite.So be mindful of your life force.Love you all.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 15th, 2026. 2:40 at night.So I just came to an important conclusion.These diary entries are not to be recorded as if I’m speaking to all of you, because that changes my tone of voice. It changes how I reflect upon things. I notice it already: there’s this shift where I start trying to generalize, trying to be more accommodating, trying to speak to a larger audience.And that’s not what a diary is about.So I will do my best to rebalance this—to speak the way I would if these recordings were for me and myself only, as a true diary should be.Let’s see if I manage.But I will try my best to maintain that personal, intimate voice. And the best way to approach it, I think, is to instill this idea in myself when I wake up to record these messages: that they are just for me, and me only.Then only the next day do I think about whether to share them or not.That way I can hopefully preserve more of this genuine diary voice, because I don’t want to placate to the masses here. I don’t want to water something down or speak in a way where I’m consciously or unconsciously modulating how I convey my thoughts just because there might be someone on the other end.I want the closest thing to my own inner thoughts to come out in speech, and then on paper.So I will do my best, with every word that I’m speaking here in this format, to keep telling myself that I’m just talking to myself right now.It might sound insane, but it’s the most sane thing I can do.I’m just talking to myself right now.There is no one else in the room. It is the middle of the night. I’m trying to get back to that genuine inner voice that is not retelling anything to anyone else. It is simply trying to convey, as straight and directly as possible, what is happening inside my mindscape.And if I can keep doing this—if I can hypnotize myself into believing that this is not something I will be sharing with anyone else—I might be able to return to a more genuine state of mind.Although it will probably always be somewhat tainted.Because intentions are very important in this world.The Observer Changes the ObservedMy intention is split here.I want the intimacy of the unique conversation that can only happen between me, myself, and I. And I also want to be able to share that with my surroundings.So you end up with this dilemma of the observer and the observed.It’s analogous to the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, or more broadly to the problem that once you measure a thing, you alter the conditions of that thing. If you identify the position of a particle upon measuring it, that position will not remain the same.I’m able to obtain a certain mind state and convey my thoughts in my own head, even to myself. But as soon as I know there is an observer, that mind state begins to shift.So it is, in a way, a corrupting experience.But now that I’ve let the cat out of the bag, I suppose I need to explore this further down the road.Otherwise, none of this can be shared in the intimate way I would want it to be.The Problem of AddressThat, too, becomes a challenge.As soon as I think of an audience, I feel I need to refer to them in some way. But maybe I need to find a more passive way of doing that—something that does not engage them so directly, because the moment I do that, my mind is reminded that I am actively speaking to someone.The word “you” is quite inflammatory in that sense.It directly affects my psyche. The moment I use it, I begin to feel that I am addressing someone, and that changes the whole state in which I am speaking.So maybe I should use a more passive term. Something like my audience, or the people who might listen to this.But even that brings up the idea that I’m speaking to someone.So what term should I use to prime myself psychologically here?Maybe someone hearing this might come up with a good suggestion.Let’s see.So when I’m recording this, I’m just speaking to myself—and to the people who are not in the room.Might that be a good term?Because that creates some distance.“To anyone listening” is very much the wrong term, because it conveys to my mind that people are actively listening in the very same moment I’m speaking these words, and that does not prime me in the right way.“The listeners”—also wrong.“The listener”—also wrong.Yes. A tough nut to crack.Maybe I’ll leave it for another time.But if there is a good suggestion for how to approach this topic—the dilemma of the observer and the observed—then reach out.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 15th, 2026. It’s 1:52 in the night.I’ve had my first wake-up tonight, and I can clearly conclude that this awakening—at least in part—was caused by my refeeding. My gut currently feels highly wired. It’s as if there are neural explosions happening all around.The closest comparison I can think of is being in an aeroplane at just the right altitude—not too high—flying above a mountainous region where thunderstorms are unfolding below. Beneath you stretches a cloud-covered landscape, and at irregular intervals lightning bolts flash through the clouds, striking in different places.That’s roughly what it feels like.The thunder keeps rumbling in my gut lining.The Thunderstorm in the GutI know at least one factor that contributed to this. It was a risk I could have foreseen.Earlier today I ate quite a large amount of legumes—haricots verts. We received a delivery from Spain, freshly picked beans. Not the small ones you usually see in Sweden that you could span between your thumb and pinky. These were almost twice that length.That’s one factor.The other is that I ate a bit too late in relation to when I went to sleep. Unfortunately, that has been a persistent habit of mine.Over the past eighteen months since receiving my diagnosis, I’ve made many changes to how I live my life. Not just temporary changes, but habits I now follow very strictly.For most of my adult life I wasn’t a heavy drinker anyway, but since the diagnosis I haven’t touched alcohol at all. The same goes for sugar. And I avoid starchy foods that lack fiber.But eating late in the evening has been one of the harder habits for me to correct.I’m not eating as late as I used to—especially compared to when I was working in London. Back then my workdays often stretched far into the evening. I rarely had time to cook during the week, so I would work late, cycle home, and stop at one of three restaurants that stayed open late enough for me to grab a meal.Then I would go straight to bed.To make matters worse, my bedroom was right next to a railway track. The house stood almost directly beside it, perched slightly above the track on a small hill. The railway line was somewhat submerged below the foundation of the house, which probably made the noise resonate even more.Freight trains passed through at all hours of the night—huge container trains booming through central London. Something like that would never happen in Stockholm, but London is a global metropolis with an immense flow of goods and an enormous urban sprawl.Living close to railway lines like that is not unusual there, even if it’s far from optimal.So my sleep quality and dinner habits have improved since then. But it would still be much better if I pushed dinner even earlier.Two Years of Food RecordsI’ve also kept extremely detailed records of everything I eat.Every meal. Every breakfast, snack, lunch, dinner. Every protein shake. Everything that has entered my body since a few weeks before starting treatment in August 2024.The more I think about it, the more bizarre it seems. It’s probably the most obsessive habit I’ve developed during this journey.At the beginning I would sometimes weigh every ingredient. Now I’ve developed a fairly accurate eye for estimating portions. So these days it’s more of a guesstimate, but I still record every ingredient.For almost two years now I’ve maintained this log.At some point I want to analyze this dataset more seriously, but as you might imagine, I’ve had quite a lot going on.Refeeding After TreatmentReturning to the present situation: late eating is one factor, but the main one is that my gut hasn’t fully recovered from the latest treatment.I thought I was being systematic and careful. I followed roughly the same approach as during the previous cycle. I began refeeding very cautiously, keeping most of my nutrition liquid.During the first two days I mainly consumed nutrient-dense broths. Any more caloric ingredients were submerged within those broths. No spices, nothing complicated.But around day three of refeeding I was probably too aggressive in expanding the variety of foods.It seems my gut lining hasn’t fully recovered, and my gut microbiome likely took a substantial hit as well. The equilibrium required to process the type of diet I eat hasn’t fully re-established itself.My diet is strict ketogenic, but it includes a large amount of cruciferous vegetables and some legumes. That means quite a lot of fiber.Even though I cooked the vegetables thoroughly when I began reintroducing them on day three, my gut microbiome still seems reactive.Hence the thunderstorm.Lightning strikes here and there in the gut, rumbling in the background like distant thunder.The overall internal environment clearly isn’t optimal yet.The Reboot StrategySo I’m now thinking about how to correct course.The best strategy seems to be reverting to the simplest version of my refeeding diet—the one I used on the first day.Chicken broth. No spices.Perhaps adding a small amount of animal protein.I’ll follow that approach for a single day. It won’t allow me to reach my ideal caloric intake, but for one day that’s acceptable.After that I can gradually ramp things back up again.One complication is that I want to return to the gym tomorrow. I haven’t yet managed to start strength training during this cycle, and the timing window is closing.If I don’t go tomorrow morning, I’ll lose the rhythm I established during the previous cycle, where I managed four sessions before the next treatment round—two upper-body sessions and two lower-body sessions.Soon I’ll enter the compression phase again, where I taper down food intake and begin preparing for the next fasting period. Two days later the systemic therapy begins again, along with the added stress of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.So the plan is to attempt the gym session tomorrow morning regardless.Life Between Treatment and LivingTomorrow I also hope to meet my girlfriend—actually, my wife. It still feels strange to say that. We married recently, somewhat spontaneously.We’re planning to meet a couple of friends who are briefly passing through Stockholm. I haven’t seen them in quite some time.One of them unfortunately seems to have developed a parasitic infection after injuring her foot in Mexico. Situations like that always interest me—not out of morbid curiosity, but because there’s often so much to learn from how people deal with adversity.After that, I should ideally study.I’m currently trying to combine my studies with the disease and the aggressive treatment cycles I’m undergoing. That combination is difficult. When your body is constantly navigating life-and-death stakes, it’s hard to find motivation for activities that, while interesting, aren’t existential.Still, I enjoy these studies.Studying Trees While Fighting a War in the BodyI’m enrolled in a two-year program to become a certified arborist—a specialist in tree care and tree climbing.The training covers planting, maintaining, pruning, and felling trees and shrubs. At the moment we’re studying plant physiology, which aligns perfectly with my background in biology and biochemistry.The subject fascinates me.But combining it with treatment is extremely challenging.Two months ago, after seeing the results of my latest scans, I seriously considered dropping out of the program entirely. Initially I gave myself permission to quit.Then I reconsidered.Instead of making a final decision, I decided to take things one step at a time and see whether it might still be possible to combine both paths.So far, it has proven difficult.Recently I had to attend class at 8:30 in the morning on day five of refeeding—the eleventh day of the treatment cycle overall. That schedule clashed badly with my sleep rhythm. I had to set an alarm, which woke me in the middle of an REM cycle.I was completely off balance that day. After arriving at school I managed to stay until lunch, but eventually I had to go home.Back home I tried to nap, but again woke at the wrong point in the sleep cycle.Sleep disturbances have been a constant challenge throughout treatment.The Orchestra Without a ConductorOne of the most fascinating aspects of this whole experience is observing how the body’s different systems try to recover after the shock of treatment.The systemic therapy, combined with prolonged water fasting and hyperbaric oxygen exposure, creates a kind of internal disaster. Afterward, the body tries to rebuild itself.But the systems are often out of sync.It’s like an orchestra without a conductor. Each section is trying to resume the piece from memory, but everyone starts at a slightly different tempo. Some attempt to lead, others attempt to follow, and the result is temporary confusion.Sleep regulation, endocrine signaling, nervous system responses, digestive recovery—all of them are trying to re-establish equilibrium simultaneously.Because of my background in biology, I find it fascinating to observe this process almost like detective work.I’ve also become very attuned to the subtle variations in bodily sensations.Different symptoms often point toward different systems:Heat and heart palpitations can indicate endocrine signaling—perhaps cortisol rhythms or HPA axis activity.Pins-and-needles sensations or prickling often point toward neurological processes, particularly in the peripheral nervous system.Changes in blood pressure, pulse, and throbbing sensations reflect cardiovascular activity.Even the lymphatic system makes itself known. Because my disease has spread through the lymphatic network, certain areas of my body sometimes feel pressure when lymphatic drainage occurs during sleep.All these systems are interacting in complex ways.And in trying to understand them, I’ve also had help from my digital “squire”—the large language model I often consult: ChatGPT.Together we examine the subtle interdependencies between these systems as they attempt to restart themselves.At the moment, however, the digestive server hasn’t rebooted correctly.So tomorrow we try again.Forward MotionHopefully I can fall back asleep now.Tomorrow I aim to wake early enough to return to the gym. Strength training has become one of the key pillars of my recovery strategy.It helps me rebuild strength after the aggressive cycles of fasting and treatment. I’ve already seen good results from it, and I intend to continue.And I wish the same for you.Find habits that feel life-giving. Stick to them long enough that they build momentum and eventually bear fruit.In my case, with my restrictive diet, that fruit salad would consist mostly of berries—freshly picked, in season, and unsweetened.Over and out, team. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

March 14, 2026 — 8:40 AMGood morning, team.I woke up after my most decent night’s sleep in about a week. Not perfect, but I managed six and a half hours of effective sleep time, so I feel somewhat more rested than I’ve felt over the past several days.Upon waking, I started thinking about the topic of why people keep diaries.One big reason, I think, is that diaries allow people to look back at their own evolution. They help you get to know the person you once were. In a way, it’s a form of time travel.If you’ve been consistent with a diary for a year—writing daily, or whenever you have meaningful thoughts, worries, or reflections—you create a record of yourself over time.When you reach the end of that year, you suddenly have a backlog: a full year of history of you, the historical version of yourself.Meanwhile, you’re constantly renewing. You’re changing as a person, accumulating knowledge and experience. And because of that, you can do something quite fascinating: you can dig through the archive of your own mind.Through that process, you can probably get to know yourself at a deeper level than most people who don’t keep diaries.Finding the Right FormatI’ve kept diaries before, but very sporadically.I think that’s mostly because I never felt I had the right format for it. In the past, I would make occasional entries in a notebook, and eventually that notebook would disappear somewhere and effectively be lost forever.But now I think I’ve found a format that works for me.Instead of writing everything down by hand, I can simply record a voice message. For me, speaking is far more efficient than writing. When I try to write, the hand and the pen are always lagging behind the brain.The voice, on the other hand, feels like a direct interpreter of my stream of consciousness.And now, with modern AI tools, it’s possible to automatically transcribe spoken words with fairly high quality. After that, all I need to do is lightly reformat the text so it becomes more readable.From there, the whole thing can be stored and shared easily.Sharing the JourneyI’ve set this up so that these reflections can be shared both as audio recordings and written text.For those who prefer reading, everything will be available on Substack, where I’ve named the publication Victor’s Odyssey—a reference to my own journey through life, especially after encountering the existential biological crisis I’ve been going through.For those who prefer listening, the recordings are also available on Spotify, as well as Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms that pull from Apple’s feed under the same name.My hope is that this new technological pipeline—these tools and intermediate steps—will allow me to be more consistent with recording and sharing these thoughts.And honestly, I feel very grateful for the possibility of sharing this with you.I don’t know how many people will actually listen to long-form reflections like this. Our entire digital environment is pushing us toward short-form content.Which brings me to a side topic I want to explore more deeply at some point: attention spans in the modern world.Books on Attention and MediaOn my nightstand right now I have two interesting books related to this topic.A few weeks ago I saw a YouTube clip discussing how the attention span of humanity has been shaped by the types of media we consume. That led me to these two books.The first is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It was written during the rise of television and explores how television changed the way people process information, replacing the culture of the written word with visual entertainment.The second is The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which moves the conversation forward into the age of the internet. Carr explores how digital media fragments our attention even further.As anyone living in our time knows, that process is only accelerating.It’s a topic I’d like to dive into later, but I have a few other books ahead of it in my reading queue.A Fungi-Themed Reading JourneyInterestingly, my current reading streak has become a bit thematic.It’s indirectly connected to a big life decision I’ve made: pursuing a new professional path by studying to become an arborist—essentially a tree surgeon and climbing tree-care specialist.Trees, as many of you might know, are deeply interconnected with fungi. That connection led me to my last book:Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.It’s a fascinating book, filled with remarkable insights into fungi from many different perspectives. I can highly recommend it.After finishing that book, I thought: why not stay within the same theme and pick up another book related to fungi?And it turned out that I already had one.Albert Hofmann and the Story of LSDThe book is written by Professor Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD while working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz.The book is in German, and I’m reading it in the original language with some difficulty. Its title is LSD: Mein Sorgenkind, often translated as LSD: My Problem Child.In it, Hofmann describes his complicated relationship with the substance he discovered.LSD was originally isolated from ergot, a fungal parasite that infects grains like wheat and rye. When ergot grows on grain, it appears as a dark, abnormal structure among the normal seeds—almost like a black protrusion on the wheat stalk.Historically, ergot caused severe disease outbreaks. One form, called gangrenous ergotism, could cause people’s limbs and tissues to deteriorate and die. These outbreaks were devastating in earlier centuries before the cause was understood.While studying compounds derived from ergot, Hofmann synthesized LSD.According to his account, he accidentally absorbed a tiny amount through his skin and began experiencing unusual sensations on his way home. This was effectively the first accidental LSD experience.What’s remarkable is how little LSD is required to produce effects.A dose of about 100 micrograms—not milligrams, but micrograms—is already a significant amount capable of strongly altering perception and consciousness.Hofmann’s book describes the entire journey of the compound: its discovery, the early scientific research, its entry into psychiatric experimentation, and eventually its explosion into public awareness during the counterculture and hippie movements of the 1960s.From there, governments around the world heavily restricted it.The book also recounts Hofmann’s encounters with well-known figures—artists, writers, and psychedelic advocates—who helped spread interest in LSD during that era.In many ways, it’s an atlas of the cultural and scientific history of LSD.What makes the substance unique is that it doesn’t behave like typical drugs categorized as stimulants or depressants. Instead, it acts more like a modulator of consciousness, dramatically altering perception and cognition.Closing ThoughtsSo at the moment, fungi has become my main reading theme.But to wrap up: I’ll do my best to continue using this format to share my thoughts in a long-form way.It benefits me to record these reflections, and hopefully somewhere out there it might benefit someone else as well.Love you all.Be mindful of your life force.And hopefully I’ll speak to you again soon. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Alvaaaro Achbar, Alvaaaro Achbar...En episk saga är på väg mot sitt slutgiltiga avgörande.----------"ALVAAAAARO ACHBAR!!! ALVAAAAARO ACHBAR!!! ALVAAAAARO ACHBAR!!!"* ljudet från hundratals avfyrandes kalshnikovs ** skottljuden smälter samman med tonerna från ett mexikanskt storband som spelar *Tusentals människor - vuxna, barn, gamlingar - kastar våldsamt sina kroppar i alla väderstreck, likt en vildsint och oberäknelig havsstorm. Ett myller av svettigt mänskligt kött håller på att koka över av kärlek och ursinne, i en zapateado för äga alla zapateados, ja alla firanden över huvudtaget, som någonsin ägt rum i denna dimension av Verkligheten.Det är nu det börjar.Den sista dagen.Den sista anspänningen av de aztekomusulmanska bågarna i kampen mot Kaosets krafter.Aztekomusulmanernas härförare Simon Nenita Axolotl Al-Hamburguesa de Tabasco Villanueva, El Conquistador de Marte y la mitad de La Via Lactéa, blickade ut över slagfältet och de horder av slavsoldater han lyckats uppbåda inför denna ödesmättade otta, alla tidigare varsamt initierade i den föregående ceremoniella krigarriten. En rit som innefattade att under 60 dagar inta enorma mängder kraftfull psykedelisk svamp av arten Psilocybe mexicana tillsammans med den heliga ayahuascabrygden höll nu precis på att nå mot sitt slut. De logistiska och ceremoniella förberedelserna inför dessa riter hade tagit 1372 års arbete från 348.500 slavbarn.Det vidunderligt vidsträckta landskapet täcktes av trupper så långt ögat kunde se: Aztekomusulmanska långbågsskyttar, artilleriet med Nenita-skjutandes kanoner, de genmodifierade mexikanska fribrottarna, det jihadistiska lamakavelleriet, de rättrogna alpacaryttarna, de caracaraflygande Kamikazepiloterna, förtrupperna av fradgatuggande frenetiskt vildsinta minderåriga capybararyttare."Mina barn! Låt vårt blod spillas denna dag! Till sista droppen!!!"Luften, ja hela atmosfären och marken började vibrera och skälva av kraftigare och kraftigare skakningar från stampandet av miljontals och åter miljontals fötter..."Till sista droppen... Till sista droppen! TILL SISTA DROPPEN! TILL SISTA DROPPEN!!!! ...." This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com

Middle of the night, March 11, 2026.I woke up again after the second day of refeeding. I’m deep in detective mode right now, trying to hack my way out of this lingering imbalance caused by chemo poisoning, prolonged water fasting, and the accumulated pressures I’ve been placing on my body. That includes the added detail to my protocol: two intense HBOT sessions per compression arc — one on the second day of fasting, the day before starting chemotherapy, and another on the day of or the day after removing the chemotherapy infusion.During this secondary treatment cycle — total cycle 11 — I scheduled the post-infusion HBOT session in the afternoon immediately after removing the pump. That might have nudged things one inch too far. I have a feeling that was the final drop that pushed my system into further disruption.What’s interesting is that I noticed something else tonight: physiological sighs. That wasn’t happening a few days ago. Even last night, at most, there might have been one short, meek sigh. Tonight was different. A full, involuntary release. And as I lay there reflecting on that, I had another realization.I need to start using these logbook-style diary entries not just for myself, but as my primary way of communicating with the world.Long form suits me better. It’s more true to who I am. I need nuance. When communication gets compressed into bite-sized, shareable fragments, something essential gets lost. The more people you try to reach, the more you abstract. The quicker the message, the more you simplify. The more “snackable” it becomes, the thinner it gets.I don’t like that.To me, communication is like cooking. Even though I strength train and need a lot of calories, I would never sacrifice the quality of what I’m eating just to fill my stomach. I’m a gourmand and gourmet at the same time. I want the texture, the flavor, the micronutrients — but I also need the quantity. I need the full extraction of nourishment.That’s how I feel about expression. I want both depth and amplitude.Right now, my life feels like a roller coaster. Mentally, I am trained not to be afraid — but I also know I need steadiness. Even through the ups and downs, there must be a stable axis. Physically, however, this journey is undeniably volatile. With aggressive water fasting, aggressive systemic treatment, and what at least for now appears to be spiraling disease progression, I am constantly trying to recover ground.I need to initiate supercompensation within short windows. I need to catch back up to where I was before the last setback. That requires depth of understanding and reflection — not clickbait.And I’m done with clickbait.In today’s world, if you want a message to spread on social media, you almost have to sensationalize it. With the rise of AI-generated sludge, even honest messages start resembling clickbait. It feels empty. I don’t want to be part of that.So long form it is.Maybe I’ll still post the occasional Viking berserker warrior carousel — those images weren’t meaningless. That warrior spirit has been crucial in sustaining momentum throughout this ordeal. I was diagnosed in June 2024. It’s now March 2026. Almost one year and nine months.That warrior energy has carried me through storms. Without it, I would have been a sinking ship — gripping ropes in hail, patching torn sails, scavenging for materials to repair broken oars. The warrior stands in the storm.But if all you have is the warrior, you only have a gas pedal. No brake. No gearbox. Just raw combustion. Fire consuming everything — wood, metal, air — melting resources in order to move forward.War analogies helped me metabolize this crisis in the beginning. They were essential. But they are not the whole story.Alongside the warrior stands the General — cooler, strategic, calculating. The General studies formations, supply lines, weather patterns. He doesn’t charge blindly. He plans.And even beyond those two, there are more archetypes at play.There is the Joker and the Dancer — necessary for emotional release. The Shaman and Mystic — guarding spiritual integrity and reconnection with nature. The Monk — maintaining inner coherence amidst chaos. The Poet, the Painter, the Cook, the Psychologist — each representing a vital dimension of the human tribe.I want to show all of them.This journey is an expedition into unknown terrain. Not a casual hike — more like cave exploration. Speleology. Descending into the earth’s crust, navigating darkness, molten edges, unpredictable chambers. You cannot convey that in short captions. It requires logbook entries. Raw, detailed accounts of twists and turns.I am not moving mountains physically — though I try in the gym — but I am moving mountains internally. Miles of effort. Miles of suffering. Continuous cycles of breakdown and rebuilding. Repairing subsystems. Reinforcing weak points. That process deserves space.There’s another metaphor that fits too: imprisonment.Physically, my life is extremely constrained. Systemic therapy binds you to a narrow geographical radius. For days at a time, I’m stationary — first upright in a hospital chair during infusion, then battling waves of nausea and bile, then lying still to conserve energy. Even in recovery phases, I limit movement to preserve resources.For months, my world was a tiny triangle: home, hospital a few hundred meters north, gym slightly northwest. Sometimes it felt like a straight line. Walking to the gym, I could see the hospital looming in the background. I might need to switch gyms just to shift that psychological vector.But the broader point remains: I am both explorer and prisoner.And what do prisoners often do to preserve sanity?They write.They document their thoughts to prove that their internal world still matters. If no human can sit with every thought in such intensity, the page becomes witness. Many prison diaries eventually became books. There’s an entire literary genre born from confinement.That’s another reason for this shift.Long form is truth.Summarized experience is diluted experience. If you want the raw human reality of navigating illness, suffering, resilience, doubt, and rebuilding — you need the uncompressed version.I’ve always preferred one-to-one conversations over group talk. Group conversations tend to flatten into lowest-common-denominator exchanges. I’m not interested in that. I want the deep flavors of life. That’s when life force rises in me.And I need life force.I need it to feed the furnace, to power the steam engine pushing toward an ever-shifting horizon. Some days the horizon looks bright. Some days it’s storm-dark. Without the long view, you miss the weather patterns.You don’t have to read everything. I doubt anyone could keep up with every stream of thought that runs through me. I’ve already rehearsed many of these ideas internally hundreds of times. But this format — raw and expansive — feels honest.I want to show all sides of myself, not just the warrior.This life situation demands more than one archetype. And maybe, if you stay with me, this can serve as a guide — mentally or physically — for some of you navigating your own unknown terrains.Love you all.Bless the life force in you.May the life force in me resonate with the life force in you.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com