Book 02 - Chapter 01

2024 has been the beginning of a new book of life. The final chapters of the first book were from March of 2023 to January 20th, 2024. This period of my life has been a metamorphosis, the most uncomfortable and difficult transformation yet. Book 02 - Chapter 01 began on March 7th, 2024 when I moved back to San Diego. I have a difficult time articulating the impact and meaning from the last 20-ish months, it’s all still unfolding. I had trouble deciding if this was even worth sharing, but the compulsion to publish this story remains strong each day.

So…shall we begin? March of 2023, San Diego, after The Mustache Bash. 1970’s themed funk party on the Broadway Pier of San Diego. I was living in Los Gatos and having a rough time. I had few friends in the area and struggled to make a new social circle in an area that I did not feel at home. Each visit to San Diego felt like a homecoming. So, The Mustache Bash, I had many of my favorite people in the world with me that day, including the girl I was dating at the time. We all had a phenomenal day dancing and partying into the night. That Sunday I take her to my friend’s house to hang in the sun in their backyard and play with my niece. As we are departing from this hungover daze of a day in the backyard, I begin to cry in the Uber. At that time, I was not someone who cried, even when I wanted to. While on the way to the airport, I felt like I was leaving my family. As you know, I have no siblings, and when I show up at this particular friend’s house his daughter refers to me as “Umple Yack”. It melts my heart every time. It was in that moment in the Uber that I felt what I wanted for my future self: time with my niece (soon to be nieces!), time with my friends, and a woman by my side to build a life with. I felt it all, and I felt I was far from it at the time. So that’s where this begins, the moment I decided to choose a life for myself instead of what I thought was expected of me. It used to be the case that all of my decisions were made based on what I thought was expected of me and what I perceived to be the expectation of others.

Fast forward to July 2023. The girl and I split up, for the second time. I knew it would never be forever with her. I felt a strong drive within me to explore our relationship until the very end, to find myself within the container of this romantic relationship. The man that I found surprised me and empowered me, even in a relationship where I was never chosen, I found I was worthy of love, that I am capable of being a phenomenal partner. While it was often the deepest pain I had experienced, that relationship also brought with it some of the highest feelings of joy and elation. It was a drug with a debilitating hangover. We have not shared any communication since that day. If you somehow come across this, I hope you know that I harbor no ill feelings, that I am forever grateful for what I learned with you. The life I dreamed of when we were together, it’s all happening. You would be so proud. I hope you have done the same with the life you were dreaming of. I wish you well.

The day after we split, I felt completely fragmented. I would have called out of work but the circumstances and obligations of the day would not permit me to. As luck would have it, that day at work was breathtakingly fucked. After that day it all becomes a blurred mess of moving between feeling numb and sinking into deep wells of pain. It felt like I was at the bottom of a rocky pit with the weight of the world closing in on me one day at a time. I don’t remember August. Just…going through the motions. I felt nothing was keeping me in the Bay Area anymore, I was able to really focus on my move to San Diego.

In September, my mother gave me the number of a life coach that her friend was working with. I did nothing with it for a few weeks before reaching out. Somewhere in this timeline I had listened to a podcast on the Tim Ferriss Show with Jason Portnoy. In that episode, Jason mentioned his life coach, Melissa. I remember thinking “I need to find my Melissa, or Melissa herself.” So I was open to the idea of a coach and set up an intro call with her. We instantly hit it off and were very excited to work together. A new challenge for both of us, her usual clients were kids and teens.

Our first session was 2 hours long and at the end it felt like the top of my head was open to the cosmos. We have had about 30 sessions since then and it’s about 2.5 hours every time. There is no way for me to describe the value of this relationship. It has evolved into a friendship for which I am deeply grateful, we serve as guides for one another in different arenas of life.

My goals started off with moving to San Diego and to work through my recent heartbreak. We began working together in September. I quit my job the next month in October…with no plan. Just quit and made the decision that it was time for me to make my life happen. It was either move to San Diego or remain in the dark reality of where I was, earning a decent paycheck in a great industry but feeling empty otherwise. November 17th, 2023 was my final day at the company. December was spent working on mobility training and unwinding physically to allow my psyche to loosen up.

January 20th, 2024. I arrive at a teepee on Native land for an Ayahuasca ceremony. I had done all the work I could do on my own. Journaling. Meditating. Walking. Exercise. Podcasts. Even with all of that, I still felt stuck at a gate. I felt like a boy with all of his toys lost in an amazing imaginative game that came to a gate that I didn’t hae the key to. The only way through was to continue coaching in hopes that I would eventually get to where I wanted to be, or I could drink a cup of vine-juice and step through the open gate. I knew what Ayahuasca was, had listened to many hours of podcasts about it, and had planned to go to the world class facilities in South America. I ended up at a shitty teepee in California an hour and a half from my house. I was with someone who had been there a few times before and she is a very trusted source, so while I had my reservations, I trusted my guide. I went in thinking I was going to find my life’s purpose, something to give me meaning in this life. I thought that’s what I was looking for, that’s what I was missing. I thought that I was going to step through the gate to the other side and find clarity and confidence.

Well…Ayahuasca lovingly laughed in my face, not only blew the doors off of their hinges but eviscerated the doors, and Sparta kicked me through a portal into the psychedelic abyss. I fell spirit-first into a space of psychedelic visions in an infinitely expansive 3D geometric space. It was horrifying. No separation. No individuals. Nothing but pure creative space. I felt the sense that this was death. This is where we return to once we are complete with our time as humans. Terrified, I clung to my life, afraid that if I fully surrendered that I would not come back to Earth. The very real sense I had in this space was that if I wanted to, I could pass on. “If you really want to, you can move on. Think of the amazing light and lessons that you would be leaving behind for all of your loved ones. What a beautiful source of light you have been.” Words were not spoken, but this is what was translated to my psyche. FUCK. That’s not what I want! I have so much more to do! So much more left to experience! I can’t go now!

Going into this psychedelic ceremony, I was really searching for gratitude. Previously I had attached my sense of gratitude to all the material things in my life. A roof over my head, to have grown up in a privileged position, on and on and on. When I came back to a physical reality on Earth after a fucked up trip through the psychedelic realm, I was relieved to be back…grateful. Shaken up, fragile. Absolutely naked and vulnerable and fucking rattled to my core. I was so grateful to get in the car with my friend and her husband who picked us up. I was grateful to be here on Earth. Wait…grateful? It was this simple the whole time? What I learned in that ceremony was that gratitude was much simpler than I was making it. I am grateful to be alive. That’s it. Gratitude is rooted within and extends out to the external, but that’s not where it begins. I am grateful to be here on this playground that we call Earth. I realized how special this experience is, to be human is a cosmic gift. To be in a body that feels, that perceives, that moves, that gets to experience emotions and relationships with other souls and beings. It was right under my nose. It is my nose. It is all of me and everything else. I had made gratitude a complicated mess, like I had complicated everything else in my life. I learned that I need to ask for help regarding my direction in life; that I have a deep sense of loneliness; that I am here to build, re-build, and create; and that I am gifted with the opportunity to experience this life in this incarnation as Jack Oswald Zicovich, that my light is bright and powerful.

The lessons continue to become clear, the untangling is still happening. I am un wrapping myself in a web of confusion and complication. I did die in that ceremony and emerged naked and grateful to be reborn. The blockage that kept me from crying for most of my life was gone. I often cry when the overwhelming sense of gratitude rushes through me. What an incredible gift it is to be a human here on Earth! I began to feel grateful to be who I am, a foreign feeling until then. I came to understand that we live here in Heaven, that this world we occupy is a playground. I believe many of us forget that, myself being one of the biggest offenders of that.

I tell this not to be the “I did Ayahuasca” guy, but because it is an integral and foundational event in my life story. It was a catalyst for change that I am forever grateful for but I cannot recommend that anyone do it. It was the most difficult experience of my life yet and can be fundamentally destabilizing. It was a hail-mary throw into the cosmos in hopes of breaking the mould I had cast myself in. I am here as a resource if anyone reading this is considering it.

Within a short period after this psychedelic trip into the creative void, I secured a house in San Diego with my best friend. We moved in March 8th, 2024. Since then I have been getting our house decorated and put together, picked up gravel cycling, fell back in love with skateboarding more than I ever did as a kid, and I spend as much time with my loved ones and as “Umple Yack” as I can. I took the time to explore other career options outside of real estate since I never did that post-graduation. It has been an absolute dream to be back here in San Diego. I often get asked what it feels like to be back…it just feels normal. I felt like I wanted to go home when I was in my parent’s house in the Bay Area….that’s a fucking awful feeling to be at home feeling like you want to go home.

Within a very short amount of time I changed my life to fit the vision I had for myself. With the help of my coach, we made it happen. Only recently have I acknowledged and given myself the credit for the volume and depth of work I did to get here.

Oh…remember that podcast I mentioned about a life coach named Melissa? How I wanted to find a Melissa of my own? My coach is her niece.

For most of my life I have felt like I was a problem to be solved, a puzzle unfinished, like I was the only one who had issues and everyone else was perfect and ahead of me in life. This led me on the path of self development and improvement which can be great, but it can have the underlying motivations of not-enoughness that are as poisonous as self improvement is beneficial. In my own lonliness I have excavated the depths of myself and found a beautiful light that I was not nurturing. This light is one of deep understanding of the depths of life, and a desire to let everyone know that they are not alone, that this life is a gift, that we are all from the same source material. My role is to be a mirror to all of you, and to myself. My hopes in sharing my story are that you feel you are not alone in whatever you are struggling with, that you have an ally in me in this lifetime, and that the path to the light is a journey into yourself.

At the time I am writing this, I am in a holding pattern with a company I am interviewing with, in the proverbial waiting room. I am working on being as I am, accepting where I am at the moment and allowing myself to enjoy things as they are. Practicing patience with myself. I am still working on my habits of problem solving every moment of my life and learning to enjoy the process. I am so so so excited for Book 02, Chapter 01 has been about reorienting and soaking in the life affirming sun in San Diego. Thank you for reading this far and joining me on this delightfully strange existence. Until the next chapter.

With love,

Oswald