Holding Hope + Hopelessness In the Same Hand
A chance to listen, again, to try, again.
FIRST! Some housekeeping! I decided to lower the paid option to $5 a month & $55 for the year. When you join the paid option you get 2 writings each month instead of 1. In the coming year I’m also hoping to record some breathwork practices, meditations, writing prompts, and more for everyone who is a paid supporter. I’m still feeling this whole Substack thing out but I want to create a little more accessibility so please join and enjoy! (You are always welcome to join and cancel as you see fit.)
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HNY, readers. We are now, somehow, in 2023. I am for sure still wondering what even happened in 2020, 2021, never mind “wrapping up” this year. The days continue to open and close.
The pressures to be “your best self yet” continue to appear on every platform. I wonder what a “best self” could even be in a rapidly and continuously collapsing world.
It’s an “interesting” experience to be a person in a body that has been revolting, collapsing for awhile now— how that doesn’t just “change” as the year turns or because of a list of “resolutions”. It’s not that I’m against resolutions— I love a goal or some intentional structure in my habits.
But here I am in this same body.
Here I am in this body that is both changing and not changing, yet.
The body, my body, continues to make requests. I continue to be invited to listen, to explore, to stay curious, to fail and try and fail and try to meet the requests, the needs, to hold hope and hopelessness in the same hand. As I gear up for another surgery (second one in 1.5 years but this one is not foot-fracture related), I’m tracing back through time, through these wild few years of body chaos.
In December I went quiet on here and good thing too. A part of me knew that I needed time to be quiet. It ended up being a busy month recovering from some incredibly transformative Kambo* healing sessions in November into early December, wrapping up the work year, filling herbal remedy order after herbal remedy order, planning a huge— and yet still under wraps— project for 2023, of round the clock care of my girlfriend and I’s new pup Pluto post-major, and unexpected, surgery. It was also a month of being pushed past my physical and emotional limits closing the year in lots of tears, exhaustion, and the necessity of a week of doing nothing work related.
Like many others— and maybe many of you reading, 2022 was a year of deep reckoning in my body.
It also became a year of deep healing but before that, there was about 10 months of falling down the hole of uncertainty, few answers, a time of trusting the questions, the process. Of gaining some solid ground beneath only to get more difficult information soon after. I want to share a little about the (ongoing) process in the hopes that if you too are trying to learn and relearn how to care for your changing body, you can know I’m out here doing the same alongside you.
Think of this today as the opposite of the abundant and endless “new year new you” messaging. Instead— here we are in the spiral, again, here we are coming back into contact with ourselves— new in some ways and ancient in others.
For those that haven’t been connected through my Instagram or biz newsletter, here’s some cliff notes for the body chaos I’ve been in for nearly two years:
End of February 2021 I began experiencing long covid symptoms (an incredibly alarming rash and swelling of my face, exhaustion, brain fog, “allergic” reactions to everything) followed by lots of bloodwork and doctor’s appointments. Though I have been the most cautious out of nearly everyone I know for the last 3 years, I did spend the first 6 months of covid-2020 in NYC, my home for 16 years before I moved in September 2020 in a giant leap of faith. The covid case must have been asymptomatic as the changes in my body and bloodwork point to having had covid but I didn’t notice any symptoms until the long covid began.
Before we could figure out too much, October 2021 brought the unexpected death of my young (7.5 year old) dog due to complications of an already “successfully” treated tick borne illness (erlichia).
Within 10 minutes of receiving the news over the phone from the vet, I fell down the stairs, shattered my 5th metatarsal and required surgery a week later.
The surgery was traumatic, much longer than expected— the surgeon literally told me after she “had to get creative in there” and before the surgery, the staff acted in homophobic and nonconsensual ways (not super surprising in the medical industrial complex and yet, truly alarming to experience first hand in my body. I did not file a report, though I had plenty that was horrific, because omicron hit days after.) I also had to have a 6 inch metal rod, to help stabilize the shatter, sticking out of my foot for 2 months.
I spent three months not walking, a few months after learning to re-walk and then learned the metal plate in my foot broke (guess all that “creativity” didn’t work out too well). I started to lose my footing, quite literally, again.
A couple months later, the long covid I had been experiencing since early spring 2021 continued to bloom and with it came continued diagnosis as well as speculations of diagnosis including a continuance of an Epstein Barr reactivation (now widely acknowledged as part of long covid— perhaps even one of the drivers of it), an autoimmune condition, histamine intolerance, and possibly Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) which I’m still undergoing testing for.
By mid-summer 2022 I was exhausted—still, my brain was still completely fuzzy and forgetful, I felt super inflamed and bloated, my body was not digesting— was unable to digest— all I had been served. The reverberations of a lifetime of trauma ever present and magnified with this new triple trauma in my recent past. I felt completely defeated and had very few answers or solutions.
In response to the new information, by August 2022 I had completely changed my eating habits (no more gluten, dairy, extremely minimal alcohol, sugar, and too many other things to list). As of now, I am still maintaining this.
Alongside all of this I’ve also maintained a full-time healing arts practice— herbalism and breathwork. In my work I’ve felt fine, capable, even a bit more intuitive, and quite honestly, these last few years have ushered me through even deeper grief and illness work and this is coming in quite handy for where so many people I work with are. And yet, I know how hard I work, how fast I work is not going to be possible indefinitely. I’ve already made shifts in the way I work over the last few years and I’m sure there will be more ahead.
In August I had an astrology session with dear friend and colleague Renee Sills. (I highlllly recc checking out their workshops and yearly transit guides and horoscopes!) I’ve worked with Renee many times over the years; I’ve been deeply grateful for the way Renee synthesizes the physical body with the astral body, finding the overlaps and points of connections. Over a couple years now, Renee spoke to me about how the model I had built my healing arts practice in had changed— that I desperately needed to heed the call of moving out of cycles of overproduction where I am giving outwards and instead move into a cycle of turning towards myself. In turning towards myself, I would find opportunities to share and speak with others— less from a place of “answers” and more from a place of “questions”— of being in the questions together.
Renee reminded me that my chart is one of utilizing my own pain, my own crisis points as a way of connecting out, of finding community. And it’s true— I did it with the Queering Sexual Violence anthology, I’ve done it through countless herbal formulations for resourcing our mental health, for processing the deep trauma and grief so present in my own life and the lives of so many others. I’ve done it through my writing.
In talking with Renee, it became clear that the next 30 year cycle I’m stepping into next month is asking for more me, more transparency about the difficult roads I’ve been traveling, more writing and teaching and being with what feels wildly difficult to stay attuned to.
Hearing these calls to shift the ways I’m working were not new. Instead they were reminders to stay the course, to trust what kind of changes will be needed.
Ok, back to the body chaos.
In late September I went on a two week roadtrip with my girlfriend and had a major autoimmune flare— breaking out, again, in a rash that covered my neck and face— among many other symptoms like popping joints, outrageous anxiety and more. Turns out, I could not take a vacation from my problems. We got home from a beautiful but also not very relaxing trip to learning there is mold in the rental house bathroom and we had a gas leak (possibly for a year and a half) in the stove.
Are you laughing yet?
Learning about the mold and the gas leak made me feel giddy with excitement— FINALLY there was something solid to point to, something we could fix for immediate health shifts.
But I didn’t laugh too hard for too long— from there, I realized I needed to spend even more time tending to my own care as my health was getting even more complex. This path is familiar to me— I’ve had to rebuild and resource myself over and over in this lifetime. Here we are again.
I’ve also struggled to more fully share my own healing process in the last year or two because healing is so personal, so individual. I also haven’t arrived anywhere just yet. I’m in the process, no end point as far as I can tell. I’m doing the work of being human, of finding my way again after a deeply dark period. What has supported me won’t necessarily support you. And also I know sharing opening about my experiences might offer a little light in the dark for others— breadcrumbs that might support some first steps.
In and alongside this deep work with my own body, I had moments of remembering the lengths I am willing to go to in order to care for myself. A strong driver since my 20s, believing that a more balanced and health-full (again, personal) life is possible has invited me, over and over, to commit to my own healing at any costs.
In the last nearly 2 years I’ve been working with doctors, acupuncture, surgeons, deep tissue and lymphatic drainage massage, kambo ceremonies*, LSD, meditation, mushrooms, medical specialists, antihistamines, breathwork, THC, Vitamin D and other supplements, hiking, so many incredible herbal tinctures (most formulated by me). At different points different kinds of supports have been needed. I’ve been lucky to have Medicaid covering medical costs with me covering the rest (and even that has been $$$).
But remembering my willingness to go to “extreme” lengths was never so present than when I did 3 private kambo* sessions in November and December 2022 due to the possibility of autoimmune condition support. As I was gulping down 70 ounces of water in 10 minutes, vomiting and shitting my brains out during the ceremonies, I was mostly in the “Wow why on earth did I do this!? There must be something deeply wrong with me.” In fact, there is nothing wrong with me for making this choice, it was really hard physically and I was missing the more trippy, wisdom components I was used to in other medicine work. As the physical pain subsided, I found myself in a tender place of calm. My last session was a month ago and my body, especially my digestion and the overall inflammation, is better than it’s been in a long time. I’ll continue with some follow up ceremonies this year.
On the hour drive home each time, however, I found myself in a state of grace, weeping, in awe of how hard we humans work to heal and keep healing. Grateful. Nourished. Deeply present to my body. Damn near energized and ready for more.
I share this because I think many of you reading might relate. Having been a healing arts practitioner for a number of years now, I’m still blown away by the incredible hope and bravery people come to me with. We experience these soul shattering things, we sink lower than we can imagine going, and then, grace comes in, possibility comes in, trust comes in. We find the resourcing within ourselves to take a chance, we find the people, the healing tools, the practices to hold us in the hardest of times. We believe and we take steps towards something generative, dare I say hopeful.
I’ve often considered myself not very hopeful. There’s a heaviness in my, borne of deep, continuous traumatic experiences, that pulls me away from the force of life, of aliveness. But that heaviness is also the same part of me that drives me to study, learn, grow, share these findings with others.
I find myself bouncing often between hope and hopelessness. When I first started dating my girlfriend Rose I told her about the deep hopelessess in me. She was quick to counter that— to remind me that I had committed myself to my own healing, committed myself to being in the process of healing with countless others. This, she said, could not be sustained by someone without hope, in fact it was proof of my unbreakable sense of hope, of what’s possible.
And it is true. My hope has always been there— might actually be the primary driver in my life. As I’ve gotten older and experienced even more suffering, even in the heavy I know I am reaching for more aliveness.
Hope and hopelessness.
Health and illness.
We bounce in between.
I never started doing this work I do with so many others from a place of being perfect, from having all the answers, from being the one who is “healthy” and “healed”. I came to this work, like many, a deeply wounded healer— a person who had fought to stay alive, to find tools to support my aliveness. I did work for a very long time on and with myself before I began expanding outwards. The work felt possible, the healing felt possible, because I had experienced it first hand. I came to this work so thrilled and inspired to share these practices with other survivors, queer and trans people, people navigating the deep crevice of the margins, people searching for growth, change— for life!
And yet I find myself shrinking sometimes, falling into patterns of keeping what I’m navigating to myself. An example: I’m having another surgery in two weeks (a septoplasty to correct a 14-ish year old injury that left me with a very deviated septum) and I’ve barely told anyone. I could blame this on my often too-self reliant ways or because I’m afraid of being a burden but I’m also just kind of tired of having to communicate all the steps I’m taking to experience more dynamic and sustained healing. And also, even though I’ve been someone who has navigated disability in some way for most of my adult life, I’ve had to navigate new layers of internalized ableism and shame. It’s felt raw, not ready for others consumption quite yet.
We humans, we really struggle with binaries. We believe that “healthy” people are capable and “unhealthy” or sick or disabled people are incapable. And if you’re in the mainstream wellness world, those kinds of ideas are literally baked into 99% of the “self-help gurus” whole work and worldview.
The absurdity! How easily so many push aside the dark, generative, mud forgetting that the mud is what supports the lotus’ bloom. How each high and low in our own lives is a part of being human. How easy it is to forget that those of us who experience disability hold a powerful ability to be in our bodies, a powerful type of embodiment because we can not afford to turn away. The calls are too loud.
I’m starting to wonder if the medicine, the healing is simply in the listening and responding, the tuning in and staying deeply present to the shifting needs of our bodies. It’s not about “getting back” to any way of feeling and being from “before”. Now it’s about staying with the suffering, bringing a soft heart. Now it’s about recognizing each seeming “failure” or flare is an opportunity to say “Hmm ok that wasn’t quite right. How about now? What do you need now? I can try again.” In this model deep trust can emerge.
When you hear the call of your body, can you see if it’s possible to meet the call? If the call changes, can you rise to meet it again?
And so, for 2023 if you want to join me— hope and hopelessness in the same hand. Allow them to feed each other. When you feel really hopeless, allow yourself to feel hopeless. When you find a glimmer of hope again, shout it from the rooftops.
Continue saying yes to your humanness, to our collective humanness. I will do the same.
*Like many traditional/ original medicines, Kambo is having a complicated moment being touted as some sort of “magic pill”, even though it’s not even a pill, a time ripe for exploitation and appropriation. Those of us who have worked with traditional/ original medicines as well as psychedelics/ entheogens know, deeply in our bones, there are no magic pills. There is however deep, hard work required to experience the sustained gifts of these medicines. I come to this work humble, aware that my whiteness makes me vulnerable to an extractive, bypassing nature. It is my intention to come to this work in honor of the traditions, cultures, and the healing potential if I’m willing to put in the work. If you are interested in kambo, I highly recommend doing a lot of research, work with a facilitator who has direct and ongoing roots in the communities it comes from and/or is in deep, reciprocal relationship with the medicine and its tenders.
You can listen to this podcast episode on Inside Eyes where I talk a lot about my past experience with traditional/ original / psychedelic/ entheogenic work. That whole podcast, actually, is incredible and interviews survivors of sexual trauma who have used psychedelics to heal.