La Medicina

Ceremony is October 30th.

While I haven't buckled down on Ayahuasca Dieta yet, I have seriously cut down on my weed, dairy, salt, and sugar intake.  I have been trying my best to journal all of it- my hopes to purge all of the dark blob that has lived in my gut since I can remember and also the fears I have of seeing everything in that dark blob manifested in front of me.  I'm both humbled and terrified by the idea of stripping down all of the layers of my personality, breaking through my ego, and seeing what is truly there.  Will I like what I see? Will I even recognize myself?  Sometimes I wonder if there will even be anything left once all the bullshit has been cleared away. 

If you think I'm doing this to trip balls in the desert, you are sorely mistaken.

I'm doing this because I am ready to face that dark blob in my gut.
I am sick of being stuck in the same relationship cycles.
I'm sick of feeling trapped.
I'm sick of superficial conversations and feeling like I'm pretending to be a human.
I'm sick of having to smoke weed to get through stressful times.
I'm sick of being tired all day.
I'm sick of comparing myself to other people.
I'm sick of worrying that revealing my true self will also reveal that I'm mentally ill.
I'm sick of lying.
I'm sick of grieving for people who died almost twenty years ago.
I'm sick.
And there's a reason they call it Medicine.

It's not a quick fix, by any means.  The work that I will do on the 30th of October will only be the start of a long process filled with its own ups and downs.  I am alright with that.  The pills I tried before this only treat the symptoms, and they make me apathetic and lethargic. 

The other night, I let myself cry, really cry, for a long time.  It started out with tears of frustration, but once I opened up and let myself feel the sadness, it wouldn't stop.  Every bad thing that I had seen or done or heard or thought, every death I had mourned, every mistake I had made, it all came crashing down onto my chest. I felt judged in the worst possible way, like I was sitting in a courtroom across from every other human being in the world and they were pronouncing me guilty before I could even open my mouth to defend myself.  For the first time in my life, it was too much. 
I didn't know what else to do.
"PLEASE," I called out to my ceiling and whatever was out there that would listen.
"Please, please, please make it stop!  No more!  I can't take any more!"
The contents of entire rivers poured down the sides of my face while I continued to pray for the first time since Brandon died.
I wasn't praying to the Christian God that I had been raised with.  I wasn't praying to the Patron Saint of anything.  I wasn't even praying to Mother Ayahuasca.  I was pleading with anyone, anything that would take mercy on me.  A higher power.   A lower life form.  Anything that could turn the volume down on my life just until I got my shit together. 
After another minute or so of bawling on my bed, I wiped away my tears, I sat up, and I pulled my shoulders back.
You are a force, a powerful being, I told myself.  You have no other choice except to deal with this shit.  Now DEAL.  After my mental pep talk, I pulled myself off my bed.  From somewhere in my brain, the idea came to me that all of these bad things that I was dealing with- the bad decisions, the abuse, the mistakes, everything that has been beating me down this summer- it was all my doing.  I became aware that I had CHOSEN to have these things happen to me before I even started out in this life.  I had decided before I was even born that I needed all of these terrible things to happen so that I could learn from it.  And that thought, while it disappeared as quickly as it came, did not make me feel any better; it only continued to frighten me.
I marched into my living room with a sense of purpose and general ass-kickery to combat this depressive episode.  In my head, I personified it into this slimy, giant creature, and I was coming out swinging.  I am going to do some yoga, I told myself, to bring myself to center and to remind myself how strong I can be.
And then it happened...
As I pulled my mat from its spot in the corner of the room, I looked over at the framed photographs I keep of my family.  My sister, my mother, my stepsister, my beautiful daughter.  All of them stared at me behind glass, and I did not recognize a goddamned one of them.
I'm not being metaphorical.  I'm not exaggerating.
I could process that these people were related to me and I was aware that they were people in my life, but there was no emotional connection to them.  They could have been any four strangers on the street for all my heart knew.  The more I tried to attach myself to my family, the more distant they felt from me.
It had never gotten this bad before. 
I unrolled my mat with shaking hands and repeated out loud to myself the only thing I could think to say, "There is good.  There is love.  There is good.  There is love".
If you have ever been to my house, you know that I fill it full of things that make me feel good (because, let's face it, when you make eight dollars an hour, you tend to spend a lot of time at home).  My bookshelf, my walls, everything in my home has a purpose, and it all has been put together in a way that makes me feel like I am in my own space.  But my living room that night may as well have been a dark, empty cave on another planet in another dimension.  The bookshelf, the books, the art, even the crayon drawings on my fridge were foreign to me.  Nothing felt normal or comforting.  From where I was standing, I could see no good, no love.  But I didn't know what to do so I just kept repeating it to myself while I tried to stretch and breathe. 
After about an hour or so of poses, I wrapped my arms around myself.  I felt so tiny and weak.  I wondered if this is how my friends feel when I hug them.  I have lost a shit ton of weight since the surgery and the divorce, and I could feel it when my fingers found homes in the gaps in my rib cage.  Nevertheless, I pulled myself even closer, digging my fingertips in further.  "There is good.  There is love". Over and over again.  I felt a little better.
More poses.  More hugging.  More chanting out loud like a lunatic.
Once my house began to feel more familiar, I turned on all of my lights and burned some sage, leading the smoke out the front door of my tiny apartment.  Yes, it's a hippie thing to do.  But after an evening of praying to my ceiling and not recognizing my own family, feeling silly for burning some sage was the least of my worries.
I felt a little better, but I was shaken up for the rest of the night.  To be honest, I 'm still recovering from it.


I debated for days about whether or not to post this story.  It's not a happy one.  It's not even a sane one.  It negates logic and reason and everything that I have held true, and it only reaffirms the idea that I am crazy and incurable.  But the truth is, this is something real that happened to me.  It could happen again.  That's the bad news.

The good news is, wounded and broken, I'm still standing. 
The good news is, somewhere in space and time, I've already taken the Medicine.
The good news is that there IS good.  There IS love.
And I'm going to find it in myself, over and over, until it has become a part of me.