Reflections #006: Apollo wakes me, Dionysus writes me
Obsessively in between
This one has been coming for a while. You could say the previous reflections were merely the groundwork. Mental stretching before a longer, more deliberate stride. I’ve been orbiting this topic for years, seeing it reflected in the books I read, the music I obsess over, and the choices I make. There are ideas that sit quietly at the back of the mind until they mature, fermenting into something more potent with each lived contradiction. This is one of them. I’m not approaching this like a poet or a philosopher. I’m approaching it like someone who has tasted both ends of the spectrum. And who sees duality not as an inconvenience but as the secret structure of a meaningful life.
The duality of life has long been misunderstood as a defect. An inconsistency to be ironed out, a crack in the pursuit of purity. But in reality, it’s not a glitch; it’s the core operating system. It’s not that life contradicts itself; it’s that life depends on that contradiction. In psychology, we study the interplay of opposites all the time. The conscious and the unconscious. The ego and the shadow. Drive and inhibition. There is no self without contrast. No agency without constraint. The more I experience life, the more I understand this: wholeness is not built from consistency. It’s built from integration. And integration, by definition, requires opposites.
“Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” - Carl Jung
Life between two archetypes
The most enduring archetypes in history reflect this very principle. Nietzsche articulated it best when he introduced the twin gods of Apollo and Dionysus. Not as myth, but as deep psychological truth. Apollo, the god of clarity, order, restraint. Dionysus, the god of chaos, intoxication, creative ecstasy. They are not simply opposites, they are partners in the creative process.
That framework has become more than an intellectual fascination for me; it’s a lens through which I organize my life. Apollo wakes me. He’s the reason I can get up at 5 AM, train in the cold, organize my thoughts, stay the course. He’s the one who tells me to read the next page, finish the next paragraph, rework the next line until it’s cleaner than the one before. Apollo is where I find my edge. He gives me the shape, the form, the skeletal frame that holds my life up when the world gets heavy.
But Dionysus is the one who stirs the madness. He writes me. He’s the pulse that breaks the pattern. The fire that burns through logic. He’s the one who shows up unannounced, usually after midnight, after a Negroni or two, when the playlist hits a certain song and I feel everything all at once. He’s the intoxication that turns pain into poetry. He’s the one who whispers "more" when I think I’ve said enough. The one who smashes the mold just to see what I might build next.
I’ve come to realize they both exist in me. And that they must. Apollo without Dionysus becomes sterile discipline, form without soul. A tight-laced existence of metrics and measurements, where everything is accounted for and nothing is felt. Dionysus without Apollo is pure disintegration. Madness for the sake of madness, a freefall with no direction, art without anchor. But when they work together, when they are allowed to meet in the middle, something rare happens: clarity with soul. Structure with wildness. Fire in a container.
This is not just a metaphor for how I work; it’s how I live. Apollo gets me into the gym, but Dionysus gives the workout meaning. Apollo structures the essay, but Dionysus provides the feeling that seeps through the cracks. Apollo organizes my week; Dionysus shatters it with an impulsive plane ticket or night out that completely derails my schedule. And I welcome it.
And yet, here’s the tension I wrestle with: I’m not a fan of balance. Balance is too polite. Balance implies a compromise, a flattening of extremes. But the extraordinary doesn’t come from moderation. It comes from obsession. From extremes. From flirting with the edge and knowing just when to pull yourself back before you fall. And that’s the point. I don’t seek balance, I seek mastery of the dance. The ability to live in both modes, to plunge into the fire without being consumed by it. To let Dionysus drive for a while, knowing Apollo will get me home.
Music is the clearest metaphor for this. If you’ve ever listened to a Jimi Hendrix song with your full attention, you’ll understand the dance I’m describing. Underneath the wildness of his solos is a baseline, held steady by the bassist. That baseline is the structure. The order. The Apollonian ground from which he departs. And Hendrix, the Dionysian spirit, dances on top of it. He wanders. He explores. He pulls the audience into unknown territory. You never know exactly where he’s taking you, but every time he returns to that base, even just brushes it with a single note, you feel the surge of dopamine. Relief. Recognition. Connection. If he never returned, the music would disintegrate into chaos. Noise. Without order, the beauty is lost.
The same goes for storytelling. The best stories don’t follow a straight line. They seem to stray, to twist, they wander, they meander through tangents that feel irrelevant, until the storyteller brings it all back and everything clicks and locks into place. That moment of return, when the listener realizes, “Oh, that’s why you told me that”, that’s alchemy. That’s the Apollonian frame embracing the Dionysian detour. And it hits you right in the chest. The baseline reappears and the chaos resolves into meaning.
This dance between form and freedom is where real creativity lives. It’s where real life lives too. If you’re all discipline, you become dry, robotic, a spreadsheet with legs. If you’re all chaos, you lose the thread and disappear into the void. But if you can master the oscillation, if you can shift between stillness and fire, between the outline and the improvisation, then you are not just creating. You are living artfully.
The tightrope between fire and form
When both are held in tension, when you learn to stand in that space without needing resolution, that’s when real artistry begins. That’s when life starts to sing. We see this pattern everywhere: in artists who train like athletes, and in athletes who create like poets. In the brands I admire, like Satisfy Running, UVU, Zach Pogrob’s Aura, Ross Mackay and George Heaton’s Cadence, there is a synthesis happening. The fusion of aesthetic sensibility with Spartan rigor. It’s not just about the product; it’s about the worldview. That duality is not a weakness, it’s a signature.
The willingness to embrace both edge and elegance, to embody taste and tenacity, is what will matter most in a world increasingly run by automation. Because robots can mimic precision. They cannot bleed. They cannot love. They cannot feel. And the future belongs to those who can do both.
As a psychology student, I see this same tension mapped across our disciplines. The left hemisphere and the right. Logic and intuition. The executive function and the limbic system. Freud talked about the ego balancing the id and superego, not eliminating them. Jung encouraged the integration of the shadow, not its suppression. To become whole is not to become one thing. It is to become many. That’s why I tattooed Apollo and Dionysus on my body. Not just to remind me of a theory, but to anchor me in a lived truth.
When I am disciplined, I remember not to become cold. When I am inspired, I remember not to lose form. When I am building, I remember to feel. When I am feeling, I remember to build.
The myth of balance
Some people chase balance like it’s an endpoint. Like it’s the answer to everything. Like if they could just dial it in, just enough work, just enough rest, just enough passion, just enough control, then maybe, finally, life will cooperate. They treat it as a finish line. A state of perfection. But I’ve never bought into that.
To me, balance isn’t a destination. It’s a verb. Something dynamic. Shifting. Unstable by nature. It’s not something you reach, it’s something you ride. A tightrope. And the second you think you’ve found it, it slips out from under you. So no, I’m not a fan of balance, not in the way most people mean it. The kind that flattens your edges. The kind that polices your passions, that tells you you’re too intense, too much, too obsessed.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: some things require obsession. Real obsession. The all-consuming, can’t-sleep, think-about-it-all-day kind of obsession. The kind of obsession that makes you seem like an outlier. That makes your friends a little uncomfortable. That makes normal people question your sanity. And that’s fine. Because extraordinary goals don’t respond to moderation. They’re allergic to it.
If you want to be great, truly great, at anything, you’ll have to abandon the myth of constant equilibrium. Because greatness doesn’t come from staying in the middle of the road. It comes from veering off course, from diving so deep into your craft or calling or curiosity that you stop making sense to casual observers. And that's okay. You’re not doing it for them.
“Balance” has become one of those socially reinforced mantras. Another comfortable word people use to justify their comfort zones. But often, balance is just fear dressed up in self-care. It's a way to avoid the discomfort that obsession demands. Because obsession reveals something primal: a hunger to become, to build, to transform. And transformation, real transformation, is always disruptive.
I’ve lived it. I’ve been in the extremes. I’ve immersed myself in rigorous selection prep while obsessively reading Nietzsche. I’ve trained like a soldier and written like a madman. I’ve fasted in silence and partied until sunrise. And somewhere within all of that contradiction, I found movement. Not stasis. Not neatness. But life.
So no, I don’t romanticize balance. I’m not chasing some airbrushed idea of a perfectly measured life. I’m chasing the full range. The raw spectrum of being. Because obsession, when harnessed with direction, is not a liability. It’s the engine. It’s the thing that makes great art, that writes timeless books, that starts companies, that reshapes bodies and minds and lives.
Apollo, with all his structure and clarity, taught me how to aim. But Dionysus, he gave me fire. He gave me the pulse, the madness, the obsession. And when they work together, when you learn to ride the edge between them, when you stop trying to dilute one with the other, that’s when you stop existing and start really living.
So I’ll take obsession over balance, any day. Because that’s where the real alchemy lives. In the chaos that’s shaped just enough to hold meaning. In the structure that's wild enough to breathe. In the art that’s disciplined enough to last, but raw enough to make you feel something.
Let everyone else chase peace. I’ll chase the storm. Let them strive for neutrality. I’ll take the tension. Because somewhere in that pull, in that beautiful contradiction, I found myself.
The signature of those who don’t fit in
I’ve spoken with others who walk this tightrope; friends, mentors, fellow wanderers. They all describe the same thing: a life that can’t be described in a single sentence. The ones who live between identities. The ones who move through the world with both reverence and rebellion. The ones who can show up in a suit and command a room, but also tear it down with raw truth when needed.
“The creative life is always a walk on the edge of a knife.” - Nikolai Berdyaev
These people are rare, but when you meet them, you know. Because their energy is unmistakable. They carry both chaos and clarity, and they know how to use each when the moment calls.
So no, this reflection isn’t a clean answer. It’s not a guidebook. It’s an invitation. To see yourself not as a project to be perfected, but as a paradox to be explored. To stop striving for a final form and instead embrace the rhythm of transformation. To become obsessed, not with one extreme or the other, but with the possibility of dancing between them.
The final line
Not a conclusion. Just a truth: Apollo wakes me. Dionysus writes me. And I am obsessively in between. I burn at the seam between them.
Let the world categorize itself. Let others pick. I’ll be here, living in the tension, carving my way down the middle.
And if you’ve ever felt like you don’t fully belong to one side or the other, if you’ve felt too wild for the disciplined, too structured for the dreamers, then maybe you’re one of us. Welcome to the middle.