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I met Rosa at the campsite just a few days ago. We became close quite quickly - we share similar values, the conversation flows very naturally and one of the things I immediately noticed about Rose is her very calm and warm energy, which acts like a lasso on my ego... Yesterday I was invited to an afternoon drink at a friend's house who happens to live here. I asked if I could take Rosa with me. He agreed. It was a very spontaneous decision, and as is sometimes the case in life, it's spontaneity and a willingness to leave one's comfort zone that suggests a good time (although that's not necessarily a requirement, we all know...).

First of all, I would like to point out that I am not a member of any church, nor do I wish to be. When I was about 18 and searching for answers as to who I was, I opened the Bible for the first time. I read in it that God condemns gay people. At that time, I identified as gay, and this realisation prompted me to close the book and never pick it up again. I reasoned that if God rejected me, I had no interest whatsoever in imposing myself on him in any way.

I shall try to explain what I mean. For the purposes of this text, let us set aside the idea that the very life we experience is an illusion – the perfect manifestation of a single consciousness that has created this simulation for itself so that it might experience itself in a world built on opposites. After all, everything we experience as human beings is only possible because of contrasts. In order to truly feel joy, we must first know sadness. In order to appreciate being in love, we must know loneliness. To appreciate freedom, we must first experience what it is like to live in a state of inner bondage. But that is not what this text is about. It is about the illusory version of the world that we, as human beings – shaped by our wounds and conditioning – create for ourselves, and how difficult it often is to see through this illusion.

Before we attempt to answer the question in the headline, we need to clarify one fundamental point – the difference between biological sex and social gender. Without this, everyone will be completely lost in today’s debate on gender.

A personal account of gender identity, psychedelic experiences and a wounded inner child trying to find its way home.

I’m nearly 41. And this is the first time in my life that I’ve written something that isn’t meant to hide anything. No mask. No perfect image that I’ve spent so many years so carefully constructing, polishing and repairing whenever even the slightest crack appeared. No retouching this time. Just the raw truth about who I might be – or, more precisely, about the long, winding and painful journey I’m taking just to get to that question in the first place. Because, I’d better say this up front, you won’t find the answer at the end of this piece. I haven’t found it yet either. But perhaps this is precisely the most important thing I want to tell you: that it’s all right not to have the answer just yet. And that the journey towards it can look exactly like this – unexpected, disorganised, painful and yet, perhaps, beautiful too.

When people in Europe or North America today think of the ‘gender issue’, they automatically regard it as a contemporary, politically divisive topic – something that has only emerged recently and which disrupts the age-old, ‘natural’ order of the two sexes. Yet this ‘age-old order’ is much younger and far less universal than it appears. On the continent we now call North America, there were hundreds of indigenous nations, many of which operated within a gender model that went far beyond the male-female binary – and had done so for thousands of years before the binary Christian view even reached the region.

He refers to himself as Andrew the Mystic. Not because he wants to hide behind a mysterious label, but because it was his journey to mysticism, working with emotions, energy, body and his own mind that helped him find his way back to himself. Today, Ondřej Dudek helps people understand why the same pains, relationship patterns or feelings of dissatisfaction recur in their lives. Outside of that, he paints and reminds us that healing doesn't begin by removing the pain. But by stopping running from it.

They say that if you work long enough, the results will come. That the universe returns the energy you send into it. That if you believe and persevere and don't give up, sooner or later it will break. Sound good? Yeah, it does. Motivational? Yeah. Safe? Of course it is. But what if it's not as easy as it looks? What if you work for years, give it your all, sacrifice security, comfort; everything you've spent years building and relationships too, but nothing comes back? No reward, no breakthrough. Just silence.

Maybe we've really just forgotten how not to worry. Not because the world is more dangerous than it used to be, but because we've learned to see each other as a threat. As "the other." As someone who wants to take something from us, who threatens us, who doesn't belong. It's just... what if it's different? What if the hatred we see all around us today is not a real force, but an illusion? A deception that arises where one has failed to face one's own pain and has never dared to look it in the eye...