[4.1] Part One: The Year I Learned to Dance with DARKNESS
healing is unpleasant and gnarly
Today’s essay is a reflection on the healing journey I’ve been on for the past year. TW: mental health, suicidal ideation, death, body politics. There are many who are silently struggling with these same issues. Please check out Ndeye Oumou Sylla’s work to learn strategies for community care. For my birthday this year, I’d love if you would consider taking one of her Radical Mental Health First Aide trainings.
ALSO THE RADICAL BADDIE is now on Instagram!! I’ll be sharing more there as there’s soooo much I want to include here that doesn’t make it into our weekly edition. Check it out 😈💖 Thank you for being a part of this journey.
Reflections on a Birthday I didn’t think I’d make it to
Is that dramatic? Lol
Last year right before my birthday (Dec ‘22-Jan’23), I began with a rush my simultaneous healing and spiritual awakening journey. This consisted of:
Yoga as a practice of healing chronic pain and reconnecting with my body in a juicy, sensual, wild woman way. No longer at war with each other!
Visions of Kali during this time helped me find my way to Kali and meditating on the Dark Divine Feminine. (See this 3-part series on Kali for that story)
This all gets me to start thinking about ancestral trauma and ancestral wisdom, how deeply caste ideology intertwined with my family’s cultural beliefs and values, how that informed the intergenerational trauma endured in the face of other systemic traumas faced in my lineage at least that we can remember (violence against women, colonization, poverty, immigration, etc.)
I spent 15 hours under the needle getting the body art of a lifetime, with the ink still fresh I leave the studio to find my car stolen, and then two days later I went to Palestine for a week on a solidarity trek with other Berkeley and California Graduate Students.
So to process all the chaos of these new learnings and understandings, for my birthday in February, I treated myself to Shiroabhyanga (craniofacial massage) and Shirodhara, an ancient Ayurvedic therapeautic modality that involves warm herbal oil poured in slow steady stream on the third eye.
While the oil poured on my head and over my scalp, while tremors released from my body, I found a peaceful state of dark, infinite void.
And then, a vision emerged.
I watched myself hopping and dancing down a dark spiral tunnel, naked, lit by flame torches. Wild, exuberant, cackling. And down and down and down and down she went, the dark growing blacker, the flames growing brighter.
At the time I didn’t know what it meant. I thought things were on the up! Graduate school was about to be over, I was going to start my business in the summer, finally be released from the physical torture of keeping up with b school and have true peace, solitude, and time to recover from this extreme bout of burnout.
I’d spent most of business school in Orange 🧡😵💫 I felt like I was swimming against a fast current, and no matter how much effort I was exerting, I was still going the direction of the gushing deluge of water.
In my second year, natural therapies (sleep, rest, yoga, whole foods, etc.) and an easing courseload that were more aligned with my research interests helped me inch towards Yellow 💛🫨 Still extremely sensory sensitive, not meeting all my life obligations, still struggling, but moving at least in a positive direction.
As the current slowed down, I noticed I’d also been wearing weighted packs and was tethered to anchors that hurt more than they helped.
Well damn, no wonder it’s been so hard.
I began the process of unburdening.
Summer would be the time that I’d be able to slow down, rest, get accurate diagnoses and proper treatment for my Mind-Body conditions. I was happy and excited to be starting my business, travel, and work on the road.
Things did not go according to expectation or plan, as is often the case when going through major gnarly messy ooey gooey process of transformation.
On the last night of my b school graduation, I have a lovely dinner with my family who all gathered in the city to celebrate. I make my way home filled with relief and gratitude to be closing the chapter of this life.
For the next 36 hours, I proceed to have the most violent sickness from both ends.
And everyone else in my family was fine, so it wasn’t food posioning. A friend of mine joked that my body was fully purging the trauma and toxicity I’d internalized during grad school.
The summer after I finished business school, a time that was supposed to be peaceful and restful, ended up being a Pit of Despair. Apparently a Dark Night of the Soul can’t end without a climactic crescendo. A few days after that violent graduation sickness, daily construction started in my house all day making living let along working very challenging. While in the past I’d experienced mental health challenges in the vein of classic symptoms of depression - extreme fatigue, loneliness, sadness - I’d never experienced this kind of pain, solidly in the Red 👹🔥😫😭 zone.
My body was in full revolt/assault mode. The non-stop gnawing buzz of chainsaws and drills were boring through my skull. Even after they’d stop, for hours I’d still be ringing and vibrating. I’d wake up feeling like somebody had their hands grabbed around my throat, like I couldn’t breathe, my chest was on fire. I felt extreme levels of panic from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. It felt like my home was on fire and nowhere was safe.
I could trace the physical symptoms to my feelings - feelings of fear and anxiety of being in the real world, feelings of frustration with my landlord, feelings of grief at the complicated estrangement from my parents.
But there’s this misconception of mental breakdowns, people losing their minds, they’re not consciously experiencing this loss of reality. AU CONTRAIRE I found myself more lucid, more clear, more rational than ever. I fully understood why I was feeling what I was feeling, why the walls were falling in on me, why the fight with my landlord was skewed in their favor, why the fight to get healthcare was so demoralizing and impossible.
My Body did not care about my rationalizations, it didn’t care about the intellectualizing or the analysis. There was so much work I had to do in order to survive and my Body was erupting as irrationally and awe-inspiringly as an earthquake, like a volcano. All my Mind could do was hold on tight and go along for the ride. It’s like it was this highly sensitive tightly wound very powerful spring held in tight for YEARS of hustling, striving, contorting, was now forcefully breaking out of the cage that I’d kept it in.
Now when I say the word suicide it sounds so distant, so absurdly big, but when you desperately need a way out, even a flickering reminder that escape is possible - whatever form that exit takes - can offer a sense of peace. Witches, Brenda Lozano
I could tell you a million reasons why an infinite sleep has sounded better than continuing on this treadmill called life. But aside from the fleeting romantic reflection on memento mori or YOLO, I find most people are deeply uncomfortable with thinking too long about Death and its associates - Pain, Grief, Rage.
Privilege, whether in the form of able-bodiedness or other proximities to “normal”, stands like a thick protective layer betwen Ego and Shadow.
It is incentivized by our systems and therefore easier to compartmentalize, look away, disassociate.
The Ego is far more entertained chasing shiny toys of Accomplishment or Social Belonging than to spend too long consorting with our Demons in our Shadow. Being reminded too long of the unpleasantness of being alive in a world that makes less and less sense everyday distracts from the more comfortable notion of keeping one’s head down and pretending to be like everyone else.
Psychiatry and mental health knowledge/practice has always aided and abetted the settler-colonial and racial project in North America. Indeed, “colonization depends on the maintenance of discipline … in subordinated groups” — and psychiatric institutionalization has historically facilitated this maintenance.
Up until the mid-1900s, Indigenous peoples who violated racial conventions — by arguing with a reservation attendant, practicing their spirituality, or refusing to relinquish their children to residential schools — could be deemed insane and forcibly incarcerated in asylums.
Similarly, former Black slaves who weren’t sufficiently docile to whites were labelled mentally ill and institutionalized.
Read the rest of The ‘Benevelolent’ policing of social work and mental health.
The construct of what behavior is “normal” and “abnormal” is all about power. It was socially constructed alongside gender and race. Meaning the diagnostic criteria and institutionalization of people on the margins who are displaying “irrational” behavior is based entirely on behavior that disrupts the status quo power structure.
Kiera Lawson is a Columbia Law student who has brilliant analysis on the subtle but violent power dynamics around what is considered neurotypical v. neurodivergent Please check out @neuoabolition‘s work on IG and this paper they wrote for Columbia Law Review: The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration.
So often what is labelled in our psychiatric system as Mind-Body dysfunction is actually our Body resisting a System that primarily functions to control our bodies. It is the outward manifestation of unpleasant symptoms that reflect our Soul’s inner turmoil.
When we get sick from overwork or burnout, when our bodies begin snarling out of the cage it’s been put in, it is our Body begging us to resist this constant striving towards the mythical norm that has become so unrealistic and unhealthy to maintain that we are collectively working and surviving ourselves to death.
Honestly, if there was anything that made me crazy it was the “it’s fine, everything’s fine” folks. It was the people who met me in these Red Zone or Orange Zone moments and told me I wasn’t working out enough or eating healthily enough. It was the people who looked at me at a top ten business school!! So successful!! So sweet and sociable!!! and could not possibly believe that I was suffering. Family members would respond incredulously, “I just don’t understand, you’ve always been so happy-go-lucky, you’ve always been so natural talking to people, you bring so much joy and delight…”
It was the people I saw who were struggling with keeping their own demons behind bars, or had relied on coping mechanisms of avoidance for too long to see any other way out.
Because that’s the thing in our crazy, crazy world - there’s a lot of crazy that’s expected and normal.1
In our culture and society, we’re swimming in trauma responses. I see unresolved trauma vibrating out into society in “normal” ways through
The narcissistic boss that is prone to micromanaging and outbursts
The helicopter parents who have tied themselves in knots trying to perfect protective parenting
The men whose emotional range toggles between neutral to rage
The working mother who has deemed everything and everyone more important than herself, proudly embracing martyrdom as “being a good person”
Those who avoid conflict at all costs
The inability to look at genocide and draw connections to our own complicity
Hustle culture, overwork, and achievement worn as badges of honor
Everything is urgent! Everything must be perfect! Everything is life-or-death!
It doesn’t take much critical thinking to connect these behaviors to characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, but even our lack of critical thinking and reflection skills are a result of our binary, compartmentalized way of seeing the world.
Can you see what an uphill battle it is we’re fighting?
Everyday I interact with “normal” people who are simply pressure cooked geysers who will burst at some point. Not a matter of if, but when.
Just like these geysers learned when they were children, I too learned that people only liked being around me when I was cheery, entertaining, the “light” version of me. This was the part of me that people loved, so everything else I’d keep away in my shadow for me to tussle with on my own.
When my body was no longer tolerating the pressure-filled state, symptoms started spilling out, and when I started sharing my lifelong struggles, I found that for most it was easier to say that I was being dramatic than to believe me when I told them something was very, deeply, horribly wrong and I couldn’t continue in this way.
“Dramatic”
Drama, as in Theater, as in Play Pretend.
Because in this world, being Normal is to wear a Facade.
Throughout this descent, this dance with darkness, I found myself expelling my pain in any way that I could. When I write, when I put words to these gripping sensations that topple my world, it is my attempt to translate my internal experience for others. For some, when I bring my shadow to light, they breathe out a sigh of relief as we commiserate over our shared struggles in befriending our bodies rather than continuing to remain at war.
And for others, it’s a painful reminder of all of the work they’ve been doing to keep themselves tied up in knots.
Really it was reading stories of others like me that saved my life.2
Hearing piercingly resonant stories of late diagnoses, high-achieving perfectionist women managing whack-a-mole dysfunction, the patterns of gaslighting from healthcare, family, and friends that dismissed and invalidated their experiences - they gave me language and frameworks to orient to my internal and external experience, tools and practices to find steadiness in the midst of chronic pain and disability, and a root! I needed to find my root within my Self to keep me center, to realize that this wasn’t all my fault, to keep me steady in the long arduous journey of building my self back up again after years of surviving environments and relationships that had entirely eroded me.
Eventually I realized I didn’t have to persuade anyone any longer about the pain I’d been barely managing to keep under wraps. Yes, there would always be instances where translating my experience for others would be important - to get what limited but necessary access to medicine and healthcare I could, to request accommodations, to explain in a few words why my Mind-Body is “so different” from what is “normal.”
But really what mattered the most? I had to believe the pain I was experiencing was real and believe in my capacity to heal.
So what happens when you go down to the depths of your soul? What do you find? How do you come back up?
What happens when you stare at death long enough wishing to merge and become one, but still find yourself here the next day?
💌 Stay tuned next week for Part Two: The Year I Learned to Dance with Darkness
More food for thought:
Meet Norm
Capitalism is Destroying our Collective Mental Health from Mad in America is great overview of research to date on this relatonship
You Couldn’t Possibly Have ADHD Because there is so little research on the manifestation of Mind-Body conditions like ADHD, Autism, etc. in girls and women, there is a lot of misdiagnosis and treatment that is more harmful than helpful.
Being Autistic and Having ADHD as a Woman If comorbidity is something you want to learn more about and/or their interaction with CPTSD, I recommend searching “Audhd” as a search term on Tik Tok/IG to find therapists/experts who are sharing their experiential wisdom and analysis of the dominant system’s failure to assess, diagnose, or treat these Mind-Body Conditions.
Why So Many Women Don’t Know They’re Autistic It is more common than you think! The behaviors/experiences that May discusses here are consistently repeated in first-person narratives online - they were struggling in silence, pretending to be normal and in different contexts/conditions it has been easier and harder to mask or pass. It is also alarming how many stories I’ve heard and personally experienced of western psychiatric professionals misdiagnnosing, mistreating, dismissing these conditions because they’re all what we are sharing is happening in our internal experience, whereas western medicine’s diagnoses are all about what is observed, externally, paternalistically by the scientist/researcher.
Ultimately self-knowledge and self-understanding is the key. I had to become a scientist of my own internal environment and through trial-and-error learn how with what things are in my control I might mitigate pain and help me live a life with dignity.