5 years ago I withdrew from school & I went home to die

That wasn’t the story I told outwardly. I said I was going home to heal.

And that’s what I believed too, when I made the decision to go home. Never once did I want to give up, never did I want to die. Except when I got home, I realized I couldn’t see past the end of that summer. I saw no future for myself. And as I watched friends around me make plans for their futures, I was struck by the lack of future in my own life. This reminded me strongly of one of my favorite books as a child, “Little Women”, where Beth, as she gets sicker and closer to dying, tells her sisters that she no longer sees a future for herself. I felt like Beth, futureless.

I was sure I wasn’t going to make it. I was dying. 

Then, I met 2 people who helped change the course of my life. One of these people was my magnet therapist, who helped me for years after this. And even so, at our first meeting, she too thought that I was beyond help. 

Miraculously, I got better. My body healed. I lived. 

And yet for 5 years I’ve been living like I was about to die. I lived and yet I never dealt with the deadness inside. 

Because in the past, my body was dying. I felt it dying for years, I felt it speed up during my last 6 months at school, where everyday I was scared that would be the day my organs shut down. That every night I might go to sleep and never wake up. 

As I was traveling in the Rocky mountains earlier this month, I saw how healthy my body really is. I hiked 10+ miles a day and felt amazing. I nourished my body and she felt SO good. And yet I also saw, I’ve been holding onto something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It’s been sitting in my body for years. It’s been heavy. I’ve felt it physically and emotionally. Others have been able to see it too. I knew it was there, but I didn’t know what it was.

Finally, near the end of my trip I found it. For the first time in probably a decade, I felt my body, fully alive, every nerve, every organ, every muscle, alive. I looked at myself, naked in the mirror, present, embodied, and in this culmination-reclamation-of experiences, I realized I was alive. 

And that I’d been carrying deadness. That had been covering the life. 

Deadness from the cells that were dying or dead. Deadness from the old versions of my organs that were shutting down. Deadness from the emotional trauma of almost dying because so many aspects of the medical system couldn’t save me, because I had to save myself.

For 5 years I’ve allowed that deadness to rule without knowing it. For example:

➡️I’ve moved around constantly to avoid putting down roots because I still haven’t been able to see a future for my life past a few months at a time. I’ve avoided responsibility for myself, for my life, because I have been too scared to take it on, because I haven’t been able to see the future.

➡️I changed my whole life & moved for a relationship with an amazing person who couldn’t give me fully what I needed. I literally changed my life, lost contact with friends, moved to another country, in order to escape my lack of future and grab onto the one potential future I saw, with this one person.

➡️I made so many other decisions, all at their core because I was trying to run away from being dead. 

➡️As my dearest, oldest friend Louise pointed out to me, in the last 5 years, I’m not sure I’ve made any decisions that were fully for me. Until I went on this trip. 

➡️And the kicker, I matter-of-factly talked about how I almost died. All the time. It’s part of my story, it’s true. And yet I talked about it almost like it didn’t matter.

Never once did I cry. Never once did I look at my body and release the emotional or physical effects of being almost dead. Never once did I allow myself to feel the reality of being ALMOST DEAD.

I just ran. 

I’ve spent this week crying. Being knocked into feeling alive for the first time in a decade and not realizing I’d been letting my life be ruled by deadness—that’s been pretty heartbreaking. And amazing. To finally know what the piece is I’ve been missing for all these years.

There’s more to this than I can fully articulate now. 

I’ve been using shamanic-based rituals and techniques to move the deadness. 

I sat naked under the full moon and invited back in all the pieces of myself I left behind because I thought I was too dead to be them anymore. 

I’m creating initiatory processes that I will be able to share with you all, when I’m finished with this, when I’m ready to share this even further. I am so ready to do this. To be able to share this: whether you’ve experienced deadness or some other kind of trauma, this reclamation work is the epitome of embodiment. It’s the reason for it all.

When I’m finished, when I’m fully through this, I will share this with you all. This is the medicine I’ve been searching for. This is the extra medicine I’m here to teach. 

This is why. 

This is why I’m alive.