Wherever you go, there you are. So there’s no point in running away. And yet I am relocating myself - putting down tender new roots in a new environment. I’ve dropped several thousand feet in elevation only to suddenly discover that I’ve suddenly time-traveled into spring and beyond. I don’t think I’ve ever moved in the spring before. It feels welcoming. Hopeful. New.
Tentatively, I am seeking a new community. Making a new (albeit temporary, but aren’t they all?) home. And I’m doing this without pulling a geographic. I didn’t leave without warning. I didn’t cut off all contact from the community I left behind. I’m not expecting the new place to fix anything. I’m not expecting that I’ve simply left my difficulties and problems behind.
Because wherever I go, here I am.
And right now, I’m taking space - to tend to my mind and spirit and heart in deeper ways. I’m re-constellating myself around an awareness and honoring of my own needs and desires. Breaking the patterns of dysfunction and compromise and resentment that I became so blindly, or not so blindly, tangled in. And I am attempting to take every action and decision now, however mundane or inspired, as though it were an act of profound self-love.
In the wake of having left my home and partnership in the last week, and entering this relationship sabbatical, a LOT is coming up. Today is a grief day. Heavy. Cloying. And yet my heart is still clear. This IS what I’m supposed to be doing.
I have walked through loss before. Sudden loss. Complicated loss. In some cases, I did this sober. In others, very much not. When my mother took her life, my first call was to my little brother. My second call was to my sponsor. When my father took his life, six years prior, my answer was literally three words, “let’s do drugs.”
This is a sober walk. It is also a loss that I am choreographing carefully. It was not sprung on me, like my parents’ suicides were. It did not explode out of me uncontrollably, like when I walked out of my marriage with no warning, throwing invectives and blame, only to find myself surrounded by the wreckage of years of sublimating my needs. It is not like the many terrifying experiences that I’ve racked up, of losing my mind. No. This walk has entailed weeks and weeks of difficult interactions, careful decisions, constant deliberation and course correction, losing ground and then gingerly regaining it. Tuning into intuition and again and again, restraining myself from untoward meaning-making. Refraining from drawing premature conclusions and pre-writing the ‘end’ of this story.
In recent weeks, my partner told me she felt like she’d lost me when I came off my meds. She likened it to losing a partner to active addiction, so drastically did she experience my change. But I feel the opposite - that coming off the meds has been a journey into a new dimension of sobriety and awareness. Because I feel more myself than I have in quite some time. Perhaps ever. A healthier self. A more awake self. Because while I’m feeling more, and that’s hard, I’m also holding more, and holding strong. My capacity is growing. My stability is, well, stabilizing. My self-awareness is sharper, which means my ‘Yes’ is stronger, but also, so is my ‘No.’
As one friend in recovery said to me very early on, sobriety and recovery are not about feeling BETTER. They’re about FEELING better. That’s a big difference.
And I can’t reconcile that difference here, at least not alone.
All I can do is honor my own experience. Now, in this time of separation, the only work I can focus on is my own. So I will identify and then pursue only that work which is mine to do.
I will continue with my somatic therapy. I have added another modality too, which I am hard-pressed to describe. Muscle-testing meets spirit guidance meets the creative orientation that I have been living with, and coaching in, for the last six years. This moment is a master class in surrender and holding creative tension. It feels like I just signed on for a full system upgrade, and I’m guaranteed not to recognize myself when I’m done. It feels like I’ve entered a ceremony with no end in sight.
This is NOT what I thought I’d be writing about, when I started this blog. Somehow, I thought I’d be writing just about me. But we make plans and God laughs, isn’t it? Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht, as the Yiddish goes.
So now I get to surrender to plans that are higher than my own. A timeline more spiral and psychedelic than my own. A vision for myself that surpasses my own.
In living with mental illness, a lot of toxic limiting beliefs get baked into place. Crystalized. Solidified. Calcified. ‘There is something wrong with me’ is one of them. ‘I don’t belong’ is another. When I would swallow my pills, I would be swallowing a story. ‘This is the best you can hope for. This is as good as it gets. Settle for this. Don’t expect more. Get by. Don’t try…’
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
- Joseph Campbell
In the spring and summer of 1997, I was finishing high school, at my third school of the year, around boys for the first time since eighth grade, the new weird kid in a social scene where everyone had been together, literally, their entire lives. To say I was isolated would be an understatement.
Several months out from my inpatient hospital stay, I was cycling through periods of relative stability and bare bones functionality punctuated by dramatic eruptions and meltdowns that would land me and my dad at the ER, if only to diffuse the tension and burn off excess crisis energy. I knew by now how to answer their questions - to make everything sound circumstantial rather than internal - to sound just sane enough to stay on the outside.
The safest place I could go was the special ed room in my school. I didn’t qualify for that space on paper, but the teachers there, Mrs. Pratt and Ms. Picc, welcomed me in. It was a refuge. And when the school year finished, that refuge was gone. I was paranoid. Delusional. Overcome with anxiety and depression and fear. In a completely dysfunctional relationship with a girl who was just as dysregulated as me, just gutting it out through the summer, waiting to leave for college.
College, in that state? Well, nobody suggested that there might be a better path than that. A gap year, or even a single semester off. What might have happened if I’d spent even a few months getting embodied - backpacking, say, or working on a farm? I’ll never know. It was full steam ahead - go to school. Perform. Excel. Pull it together, missy… There was only ever one way. Fit in. Keep going. Don’t rock the boat. Tamp it all down.
I remember a bike ride from Lake George to Glens Falls. There was a lovely bike path, it was a lovely summer day. I was probably seven miles or so from home when a panic attack began to grip me, and I found myself rapidly decomenpensating in the sunny parking lot of a soft-serve ice cream shop. People were laughing, friends and families enjoying themselves all around me. Their very existence felt oppressive. I was overcome with fear and self-recrimination, rooted in place. I had no friends, no allies, no supports. My father was out of town, spending the night with his new girlfriend. I was utterly alone.
I could have been back home in an hour, if I’d just gotten back on the bike. But I could not will myself to move. So I broke down and called my dad, on the payphone, for help. And I waited as he returned to me. It took hours, in which I remained frozen in place, not even getting myself an ice cream, until he came and collected me and the bike, and took us back home.
He came back to me because he was my father. My legal guardian, my appointed protector. He loved me. He’d gotten a place of his own after my psych hospital stay that fall, and I’d ended up moving in with him about six weeks later, in December of that year. We shared a studio efficiency unit - a small, dark motel room with wood-paneled walls that we lived in full time and shared with my two brothers every other weekend. It had two small windows and no privacy. We called it, ‘the Cave.’
And as that summer wore on, I began fragmenting. Coming apart. Something deep within me was cracking. And some part of myself knew that there was nobody who could truly help me through it. Something in me was aware enough to witness my own disintegration. I was observing and inventorying the collapse of my very identity, my whole sense of self. Shards of my personality lay scattered around me, until singular pronouns became impossible to speak.
“I?,” there WAS no ‘I’. There was the angry me, the depressed me, the panicking me, the numb and frozen me. My parts were all disorganized, exiled from one another, and I had no language for any of them. I didn’t even know you could talk about ‘parts’ back then. I couldn’t speak coherently, couldn’t articulate what was going on. I broke things, smashed them. I found ways to hurt myself, to feel something. Drinking until I was sick, smoking pot until I passed out, cutting until I bled. My father loved me, surely, but he had nothing else to offer me than that. He was lost in his own addictions, running from his own ghosts, and so while he posed nothing of an active danger, while he only wanted what was best, he wasn’t actually safe, either. I had no resources. I had no tools. And neither did he.
We ended up going back to the mental hospital, and they offered me a choice. Come back in, inpatient, or stay outside, and take these antipsychotics. I chose the pills. I knew their inpatient services had nothing to offer me (and they would have put me on the same drugs anyway). The pills shut me down. Stifled everything. My self-awareness went offline. My nascent and premature awakening was kiboshed. I could hardly feel a thing. I was hardly alive.
There was periodic bloodwork, and a medication warning to avoid direct sunlight (perfect recipe for depression, no?). I couldn’t make it through a single day awake.
When I did start college, the nurse practitioner in the health center was horrified at the amount of drugs I was on. She couldn’t understand how I was even walking around. Neither could I.
Slowly, she weaned me off the antipsychotics, and then for years we performed a dance - of going on and off of other meds, seasonally, as needed. I would always take myself off of them the moment it felt like the crisis had passed. They sometimes helped, but they never felt like the answer I sought.
Psychiatric medicine only ever treated symptoms. Even diagnoses were nothing more than a label applied to a collection of symptoms. Nobody even tried to get to the root.
I had a wonderful therapist, eventually. I trusted her, I opened up to her. We worked together for years, and I did my homework in between sessions, digging up whatever I most needed to work on and laying it all at her feet. But all that accomplished was to toughen up my tolerance for my own dysfunction. To lower the floor on my breaking point, so that when I reached it, each time, it was more dangerous than before.
Looking back at it now, I can say it like this. Love itself had collapsed. My parents, neither of them, despite their best intentions, had any healthy love to show me or model for me or teach me. I had no love for myself. I was in an evolutionary spiral without the tools to evolve, and the interventions available left me in a state of suspension. Paused. There was no initiation. There was no greater psychic context. I was simply psychotic. Destabilized by my own budding self-awareness. My self-awareness and sensitivity were potential superpowers, but without support, they were instead, in those years, my greatest weakness. Bumbling along like all the other kids? That would have been so much safer. Instead, it was life-threatening just to be alive.
Now, nearly thirty years later, I am circling back to reactivate that spiral. I am coming back online. After decades of working on myself, training my mind, practicing meditation and visualization, coming on and off the meds and then graduating from them to a path of self-inquiry, self-medication and eventually self-destructive substance use… all these circuitous routes have led back to a place where my self-awareness is finally being coupled with the right resources to properly comprehend and perceive and receive and act. Now, I am being rerouted, reconnected. The journey is commencing anew. The evolution is un-pausing. I am no longer drowning. I am swimming towards delight. Shedding my myriad identities, only to come closer and closer to Source (or at least, that is the goal…)
Self-awareness without tools is kryptonite. It’s “oh f*k, this is what’s happening, and I can’t do a thing about it…”
Self-awareness WITH tools is freedom. It’s “oh, all this is happening, and I can hold space for it and address it now.” Now I am walking into the unknown - but with a willingness and ability NOT to need to know. And so I am, perhaps, freedom-bound.
