On consciousness & survivorship
Hello there, if you are still reading these, yay! Perhaps, tell your friends to subscribe to this newsletter, so they know exactly what kind of a weirdo you are. After all, there are many ways to come out.
Speaking of coming out, I am a psychonaut. I access altered states of consciousness for a whole lot of reasons, from regulating physical and emotional pain, to calibrating my attention, and well, also crazy hot sex, where I get to melt my body and soul in a cosmic goo of unified bliss.
But enough about my weekends, let’s talk about that time when I journeyed on my birthday. It was March of 2020, the pandemic mayhem was about to blossom, and I decided to renew my vows with sacred earth medicine.
A magical thing happens when consciousness is free to roam: you think you’re just making popcorn, but before you know it, with every pop, you’re watching the Big Bang and the formation of the entirety of existence in the 2 minutes that it takes to pop a batch.
Once the overwhelm of infinite beauty settled, my mind collapsed into a realization: everything in the universe had happened in that very specific order to bring me to that very specific moment of sitting with a warm bowl of delicious nutch-and-olive-oil infused popcorn in my lap. How absolutely fucking extra-ordinary!
That moment was perfect, the popcorn was perfect, and I was perfect.
I started wondering. “If everything is perfect, does that mean everything that has led me here has been perfect too?”
My brain immediately went to my ex-girlfriend and the sexual abuse I had experienced over a decade ago.
I tossed a perfect popcorn in my corn hole, and I saw her in front of me. I watched my anger rise, I hugged my sadness close, then I looked into her eyes. Here she was, staring back. Life itself wasn’t big enough to contain my feelings.
Suddenly, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, her presence in my life popped in the right spot. I felt her perfection, alongside mine. All of what I went through, and all that had happened since then, was a part of me.
I searched for regret and came back empty. I wished for nothing to be different. I felt whole. I was integrated.
Since then, I have recalled that moment several times, especially when I connect an activation to the impact of that harm. I can’t say the anger is gone, I don’t dare suggest that it’s still as pretty and regret-free as I remember it feeling on LSD.
But what has shifted is knowing that I no longer need to resist the fact that it happened. It happened, and I lived it, and now I am here. I can accept all of that, sometimes lovingly, sometimes begrudgingly. To me, this is what it feels to integrate trauma, this is healing.