A Medicine Story

You are here. You never asked to be. That is the story of pain, of suffering, of death.

It is also the story of birth, the story of how all of life begins.

What an anguish. What a joy! You are here. You never asked to be. How are you, here, now, in spite of and because of this most dreadful, delightful fact of your existence? How are you, really?

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I came to my work from necessity. By the instinct for self-preservation, which felt for a long time like sweaty palms and eyes darting left and right, sheer desperation, but later on, like an ever-flowing current beneath the current that I think is my soul.

I was born into chaos and trauma and loss, as so many of us are. I was small and tender and ill-equipped to live what I lived day-and-night for all of those years. So, along the way, parts of me stopped living (and remembering and experiencing and learning and growing) in the outside world; and, other parts stepped in to function so that I could continue on - go to school, get a job, buy a car, get married, have a baby. You know, all of the people things that people do.

In my adult years, there was more chaos and trauma and loss. I was primed for fragmentation now, so yet more parts were tucked away out of sight, out of mind, far beneath the surface of my conscious awareness. But never really out of body.

All of those things I couldn’t even remember I’d forgotten were still there in my dreams, my subtle movements, my breathing patterns, my behavior, my beliefs. In my cells, my viscera, my muscle tissue, my nerves, my fascia. And this ever-compounding host of “mysterious” ailments grew and grew.

I was diagnosed with Scoliosis, Asthma, Interstitial Cystitis, Endometriosis and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis before my twentieth birthday. Later came Adenomyosis, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder and Post-Partum Depression, Migraine Disorder, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia, c-PTSD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome, Gastroparesis and Intestinal Dysmotility, and Coronary Artery Disease.

I was a 30-minute block in an electronic scheduling program. I was an ever-expanding list of diagnostic codes. I was an overdue medical claim.

My own story, my own creative way of surviving (how I felt, how I coped, how I tried to feel better, how I carried on) had been subsumed by the western bio-medical paradigm. My own rich language about my experience was replaced by numbers, acronyms and “isms.”

Over the course of 20+ years, every human thing about this perfectly ordinary, human experience of living, of suffering, of continuing to live while suffering, was twisted, othered, made alien, sanitized, contained, kept at a comfortable distance, away.

I became more separate from myself. More dis-eased and dis-orderly. More cut off from my own knowing.

With every new diagnosis made in isolation came another prescription, surgical intervention, or treatment modality meant to manage or fight or eradicate the specific symptoms of that particular “illness, disorder, syndrome, disease.” To solve the problem.

The problem, apparently, of me.

I certainly appreciated the acute life-saving interventions when warranted. But, while the helping professionals fixated only on fixing me, what I most needed to know was never addressed: how to keep staying and keep going.

How to keep waking up tomorrow, keep making the breakfast, keep washing the dishes, keep going to work, keep wanting to live now that I had internalized this perspective that I was broken.

Now that I’d tried all of the surgeries and the meds and the alternative health hacks (that I could afford) and I was still in pain and felt more alone than ever in my pain.

Now that the financial debt I’d incurred had swamped me and my partner, had taken us under, and I viewed myself as a failure and a burden.

Now that any humane way I once had of attempting to relate to myself was lost and I was reduced to nothing but a meatsuit— just a body that couldn’t be trusted, a mind that was out to get me.

Now that I was my own enemy.

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The medical map is not my map.

The medical map for “health and healing” became a secondary trauma that I am softly working to palliate even now. And yet… the disempowerment and dehumanization I experienced within the western medical industrial complex brought me greater depth and breadth with which to live my work, which is wrestling with questions like:

• What does it mean to be well in an unwell society?

• Who is allowed to be well, and who is prevented wellness? Why?

• Can a person be well while in poverty, while working 2-3 jobs, while chronically ill, while grieving a loss, while in recovery, while undergoing medical treatments, while dying?

• Can these human experiences of suffering be regarded as invitations to become more whole, more ensouled, more humane?

• Can the acts of being with what is, not requiring what is to be anything other than it is, allowing oneself to feel whatever one feels, and extending compassion and care toward oneself during these times be part of a well and full experience of living?

• What might this way of being look like in the context of my everyday? Of yours?

• How might this way of being ease suffering, individually and collectively?

• How might this way of being challenge and subvert and subtly shift our culture to be more humane?

The medical map harmed me. It disregarded my culture, my spirituality, my philosophy, my values. It bypassed all of the intricacies and possibilities and even pleasures on my path to living a full, well life.

But/and/also.

It showed me many things about the terrain of my body and mind that were perhaps true, but incomplete, lacking context, lacking mythos. It provided the impetus for further refinement of my work through which I’ve created more wellness. It became the catalyst for my shadowplay (parts work), ritual-making, creative process as remedy, and spiritual practice as affirmation of life.

Sometimes more than one thing can be true at a time. Sometimes poison in a certain amount for a certain time is also medicine.

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You are here.

You are here, still. No matter what you’re experiencing in your life at this moment, whatever you are coping with and however you are doing that— you are not a problem. There is a creative, healing power inviting you to wholeness through your unease, your pain, your grief, your suffering. May your spirit be settled and your body find rest, and may you know your own agency and wholeness.

What is the medicine you are making?