On getting out of the wasteland
How limitations can be abundant :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON NOVEMBER 26th 2022
I keep walking around thinking that I am the least confident I have ever been, when really, I think it may be the opposite. Because my confidence or my self-esteem is no longer contingent or acquired as Gabor Mate would say.
I can’t say I would have gotten to this point if I didn’t have my mom to rely on. And I have complex feelings about that. I am an adult woman sometimes incapable of taking care of myself. Of course, it’s like, I have several diagnosis that prove this to make sense, but that doesn’t really matter to me. I have had many diagnosis since a young age and I always held myself to a standard where I had to show up, perform, take care. Because my survival depended on it. Maybe, also, I just shouldn’t feel guilty or bratty. I was often a child who had to be an adult woman. Maybe the things we deserve come at the times we least expect them. Sometimes, things are out of order, or we get them from a different source than we expected.
For a long time I didn’t trust my mom to be relied upon. I have had one long envious thing for as long as I can remember - this envy of people who had parents or spouses they could count on. Now I have one of those - in fact, she’s so resourced for me that I can and I have been able to fall apart. Because that’s what it really is isn’t it? It’s about being able to fall apart. Not everyone can. And I am under no delusion around the fact that this is a privilege I have at the moment. It’s not fancy - it’s barely getting by shit, but it is enough.
It is a privilege I didn’t always get. And it is a very complex privilege, because many people have it and don’t take it. Instead, they get sicker and sicker and hurt and harm other people. And also, many people don’t have it and will continue not to have it and there is immense survivor’s guilt associated with that in my own personal life and in my life when I consider myself as a part of a collective. I am very intimate with survivor’s guilt, to the point where I think it stopped my falling apart. Survivor’s guilt is complicated too - it makes you both gaslight your own experience and it also sees the real truth of something at the same time - that it’s not necessarily fair; life and people and circumstances - and it’s hard to know what to do when you have more than another person you love has - whether that is internal or external. Do you not take it until everyone can have it? It’s also really hard to be on the other side of it, not having access to things you would need access to, and to experience both vis and vis each other in your different identities is… difficult.
It’s hard to tell what my body would have done if my mom hadn’t been here. I am not sure my body could have kept keeping on. I attended this autistic burn out workshop a few months back - with Mind Your Autistic Brain - great work they do - and we were asked to rate our burnouts. Mine was the spiciest version of it all. I don’t think even my close friends knew or understood how bad it had gotten. It’s one thing to tell people oh hey I am in autistic burn out, and it’s another thing for them to understand what that actually means and how dangerous it is.
I feel like most of this newsletter this year has been about me letting you in on certain parts of the journey of falling apart, when you have feared your whole life that would mean death. And also, the very real notion, even if I didn’t mention it superbly out loud, that I would die if I didn’t fall apart.
How weird it is to stand in that journey when in your nervous system the idea of letting go and having to be taken care of, without much power, means you will be greatly harmed, and how you are simultaneously so exhausted, tired and sick, that if you don’t stop, your body will choose it for you. In fact, it already is choosing it for you.
My ex partner, a month or two ago, told me that my whole thing is that I got really good at not being powerless. And I am damn fucking good at it.
You got really good at not being powerless, he said.
Yet, he said, all you want is to be able to fall apart and be safe doing so.
He was right. I want to be able to let go and not be hurt while or as I do.
Not have anyone hurt me in my powerlessness. It goes back to me as a child - the deep calcified pain of being helpless and dependent and deeply wounded. Resented for existing and having needs. It shows up everywhere for me. For a long time, I could work with not being dependent on anyone, because I could earn what I needed.
And when the possibility to earn what you need leaves you, what happens? This is losing the privilege of being able-bodied.
Face to face with my wound.
If I am dependent, I will die.
If I am weak, or vulnerable, or not able, I will be harmed.
What if there is a different way? What if I could be dependent and not die?
What if I could need and not be resented?
What if I could fall apart and be safe doing so?
It’s idealized best case scenario questions. Like I said, it is a very complex, nuanced, fucked up, unfair privilege to get to fall apart. Especially, under the wasteland, as Sharon Blackie refers to the world under patriarchy where extraction and exploitation is the norm.
I think illness, or burn out, or anything that limits us profoundly or significantly can be a source of abundance in its own way, because it is ripe with the opportunity to let our egos die.
In the wasteland, if we have any chance at getting out of it, we have to let our egos die.
My ego has died this year. Anything that was left of it has fought and gone to battle and realized that this was not ever its native land. My ego’s entitlement has realized herself.
If my self-esteem comes from a deep connection with myself, and not from the outside world, illness has taught me something. Illness has forced me, not begged me. Illness does not act like shame, something that is not actually all that powerful once you truly decide to bunk with it and tell it you’re not going away - no - illness is like shakti, she is female. She is invasive yes, unwanted perhaps, but she is also firm in her stance - for she is nature, clear on her boundaries, she is omnipresent - unable to be silenced or taken out. Because you do not exist without her and she knows this. And if you try to silence her or take her out, she will wail and she will create earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes and unbearable heat and bite your cheeks with sharp wind, freeze all your fingers off, until you pay attention and make things right. She will make you understand where you went wrong and she will not calm down until you do not extract from her or exploit her any longer.
Perhaps illness is trying to prove something to you, or to your loved ones. But either way, I have learnt that she seldom stops until the message is clear: to stop this fucking shit.
I am familiar with illness. It is not my first rodeo. I have been sick on and off since I was a teenager. It’s been at least 15 years.
Yes, I could blame and I do blame the actual biology of illness/ disease. I definitely got mono as a teen and got post viral illness from it. That is all one million percent real.
My nervous system also was in such high sympathetic arousal due to chronic toxic stress that most of my bodily systems - like my immune system or my digestive system, were not working at their full capacity. This is very real physiology and truth. The impacts of a high ACE score. I believe all that truly wholeheartedly.
But what about the spiritual connection, not as a bypass, or as the only factor, but as an important factor? Spirit, our souls, trying to learn things down here.
Are we listening to our bodies telling us about ourselves, or our lives? Do we ask to our bodies: what is the story you’re trying to tell that I have suffocated from you cognitively?
Are we looking out to the world, to the land, to nature, and asking her, what is the story you are telling me?
Or do we keep on going with our egos?
What is my soul, through my body, trying to tell me? What is the Universe, through nature, trying to tell us?
Sharon Blackie, in her book, “If Women Rose Rooted”, says that she now burns all her bridges back to the wasteland, because when you feel better or when you’re scared for your survival or in need of an ego boost, you go back. I relate to this. And each time you go back, failing to get the lesson, too afraid to face the wound fully, unwilling to see your inherent worth, or hell, just simply believe in it a bit, the land attempts to teach us again.
The land will not change her mind, or stop trying to prove her point that healing is necessary, until we have changed our minds about destroying her and decide to finally connect with her. And it is truly in that way that limitations can be blessings if we are wise enough to spot them as such.
When the snow arrived last week, all at once, she took the power with her for a whole day. It is getting dark starting at 4ish now. There was something peaceful about being nobody with zero buzz from the fridge or the lights or the wifi. I was sad when I had woken up in the middle of the night to the kitchen light back on.