Nice post.

Spend too much time playing the onion man and one can become fundamentally disconnected from the authentic self.

Meditation, psychedelics, being alone in nature, fasting & many other practices can facilitate a detached state of mind where one can peel back the layers and reconcile suppressed emotions, motivations and ideas that lay beneath.

My personal experience is that the layers can become thick and almost impenetrable, like callouses on the psyche. So I'm a big fan of using them sparingly and taking more social risk to see how people react to a more honest representation of the self.