Once a month or so, I facetime with two cherished friends who I've yet to meet in person but feel deeply bonded to nonetheless. One I connected with after reading a blog post about her daunting and deeply spiritual experience with Lyme disease, and the other through a virtual kundalini support group after I monologued about pooping to a bunch of strangers while desperately hoping the scarf clad leader would guide me to answers (because that is what you do when you have been struck down by the Gods). Although we have all progressed on this journey beyond our peak “belly of the whale” days, we also aren’t exactly living out the “healed” lives we’d once envisioned.
In the early days (years) of un-wellness, many of us drag ourselves towards an off-in-the-distance vision of resurrection. We channel our inner warriors and hurl our bloodied, battered bodies into the fire, insistent that through the burning we will be born anew, that we will become the phoenix rising. And although I still hold this concept close to my chest, I no longer imagine it transpiring in the single crack of a lightning strike or one sudden, ego obliterating expansion into enlightenment. My far away friends and I have discussed how in place of a brilliant bird beating blazing wings while ascending to the heavens, we liken ourselves to a smaller, less celebrated creature who carries her home on her back while moving forward so slowly that it often requires looking back to affirm that she is, in fact, moving at all: a snail, rising.
After the initial surge of adrenaline fuelled optimism in being able to leave the refuge of my childhood home, falling in love again, and opening myself back up to aspects of life I couldn’t participate in for so long, it is disheartening, to say the least, to feel like I’m backsliding into battles I’d hoped to have conquered. The phrase “healing is not linear” is carved deeper into my bones with each resurgence of symptoms that are seemingly immune to any treatment except for bed and surrender. Following the sense of momentum that permitted me to engage in cautious hope again, I have found myself devastated by the persistence of old afflictions and the familiar dread that has been looming below the surface, awaiting my return. Once triggered, it is all too easy to be ravaged by the “it’s going to be like it was before” of trauma, and far too hard to remember the possibility of any other reality.
Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth, 1948
This limbo- which lasted for twelve timeless days- started as torment, but turned into patience, started as hell, but became a purgatorial dark night, humbled me, horribly, took away hope, but then sweetly-gently, returned it to me thousandfold, transformed.
—Oliver Sacks
In some ways, it was easier to be with these struggles in the years of isolation that followed the big crash, cut off from the much-ness of daily living. Now that I am “back out in the world” trying to piece together a foundation strong enough to build my dreams upon, I brush up against jagged terror in remembering how hard I can fall. I never thought I’d be able to be in a romantic relationship while still in such a tumultuous state of my healing process, and although I am so grateful to have my partner, I now possess an intimate knowing of loss and fear that the spilling over of my burdens will lead to another reason to grieve. Additionally, I now bash into pressures and judgement inherent to being perceived. I am often flooded by a “rushing” sensation that played a large role in my burnout, as though needing to accomplish *all the fucking things spinning around in my brain* by *some due date that doesn’t actually exist* in order to be worthy of my own existence. I continue to find myself hesitant to share about too many positive experiences in fear it will plaster a coat of “all better” over the (mostly) invisible challenges surrounding them and raise expectations of me.
Resisting feeling pain often leads to more suffering than the pain itself and hinders me from finding the pocket of relief in the eye of the storm. It is in the times of being brought to my knees in surrender, of allowing myself to feel what I believed I couldn’t make it through (again), that I am eventually pulled out into the higher perspective and can regain a sense of the larger story unfolding within it all. Here I remember that physical symptoms are often emotional/psychic realities communicating to us and acting themselves out, and that in order to be released, they must be processed.
The Last Days of Pompeii, James Hamilton, 1864
Illness effects its cure, as Hippocrates first pointed out, through a natural process of “coction” or boiling, that disintegrates old forms and translates as “fragmentation and reassemblage.” This is the sacred alchemy we witness every fall, in the dropping of sap, the moldering of leaves, and the scattering of seed, reminding us that life requires death, just as activity needs rest, and health feeds on illness, in the ongoing cycle of creation.
—Kat Duff, The Alchemy of Illness
Both chronic illness and nervous system dysregulation (which are frequently tethered to one another) are ambiguous in nature and offer no clear road map out. They rebel against urgency and pressure and instead call for gentle touch and patient perseverance. Carl Jung spoke of a concept called enantiodromia, “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time”. According to this concept, when something leans too far towards one extreme, it may flip to its opposite in order to regain equilibrium. I believe that my body became debilitated in an attempt to do just that: to protest my entrapment in the disconnected, rushing state of fight or flight, the one that demands a “more” that is never enough. I find further comfort in this concept as it implies that the deeper one has descended into the dark, the greater the potential there is to rise into the light, whether that be as phoenix or snail.
The imagery is spellbinding. Your words are so beautifully expressed. I find myself deeply moved by this post... it resonates with me on a profound level so thankyou for sharing this piece.