Phenomenologic First Aid

Neil Gaiman proposes that he likes “Stories of women who save themselves” — and that’s what I want to talk about today. Long text below.

Were you ever in spiritual Facebook groups, and all of a sudden there’s someone shouting from their keyboard for aliens to not control them through technological devices? I was one of those people a few years back.

It’s quite embarassing nowadays, and thank Buddha it’s over, but in all fairness there is something else to say about this mental phenomenon.

Open minded psychiatrists will tell you that it’s completely plausible for us to go through spiritual experiences that provoke mental issues, most of which are completely solvable if we want them to be. The issue does not lie neither in the psychiatric movement, or in the spiritual aspect, but in our reactions to what happens.

I feel, after being well for a long while now, that sometimes my mind still goes into those questions and wants to do things a certain way that maybe it’s not the healthier choice. I blame that on the years of self-neglect as a dent in my performance, but in fairness, most of my young adulthood and late teenage years were spent speaking about these issues and “swimming through the mayo” as we say around here.

I remember when I spent the last few hours of a party in a balcony that my friends said it didn’t exist. Or way before that, when I was so delirious from a very bad flu fever that I saw things that made no sense.

I’m quite skeptical at my mental phenomenons nowadays, I think there is really a threshold on how much hallucinogens one person can take during a lifetime, it does come to a point where you either accept it all, or go skeptical like me.

Skepticism is a good thing, and a bit of hope for what is good out there is good too. The issue lies precisely on not trusting one’s mind and has a lot to do with being able to discern a valid thought from those thoughts which just present themselves as illusions we accept.

And it’s not like just some people have it, we all have that. Every single one of us knows, that sometimes, the mind is not to be trusted.

Are feelings though? How do you know you truly feel anger towards something, if you’re not thinking rationally about it. If you were, would you be angry? Can we add feelings of love and lust to that?

So, when it comes to most of our generation’s issues: trauma, addiction, depression and that deep feeling with dissatisfaction with life that can only be filled with meaningless sex, vain attempts at love and sometimes, if we’re lucky, a very good friendship, it boils down to self-esteem.

If we do not like our selves, we will not appreciate life like I believe its meant to. And there is a process here of learning how to love our imperfections. And here lies the true issue: others do not have to, and we do need the discernement to acknowledge if those imperfections are morally corrupt or if we simply accept them not to deal with the internal consequences.

We are our own worse critics. Doing parts work in therapy (if you don’t know what that is, google Internal Family Systems), my therapist at the time said something really interesting, my inner critic was a mesh of all criticism I’ve ever gotten in life, and that somehow, my attempts at either ignoring it or taking it seriously, were not paying off for me. Denial or overreactions, if you know me — spot on, right?

The issue then is if we accept what the inner critic says, we begin a journey of deep self loathing that we can only come out of if we start believing unconditional love is actually possible. And when we do start believing in it, we understand that somehow, all the crap we’ve done in life, was not more than attempts at liking the crap we felt we were.

So, me shouting to everyone that aliens were going to take us away, after 20 consecutive weekend drug buffets, today is not more than a weird memory about someone I feel didn’t even really exist. It was a mask, if I was to be honest at that time about what I truly felt about life, left all the anger behind, a lot of people would’ve gone to jail and maybe I had gotten my mental health treatment sooner. It would also suck for everyone involved, so I chose the path of compassion, and since I’m a quasi-Buddist with secular affilliations, trusting in a Higher Power after addiction treatment was not really that difficult. I chose self-esteem and responsibility over my actions.

I think it was maybe 2017… I was sitting in a coffee shop I used to go every morning to read a bit and have coffee and a pastry, and this girl was there just doing Moscatel shots with a guy who clearly just wanted free booze. She started getting really vamped up and start talking to me about stuff I have no recollection of. After that, she got comfortable and told me her mother wanted her to go to rehab for her drug addiction and how she was scared about the 12 steps endoctrination and all that stuff some of us know well about. I told her about other options, which do not rely on a Higher Power, but also told her there are more benefits in getting well than staying in a crappy place in life, even if you have to deal with religious folks for awhile. I have no idea how the follow up went, at the end of the conversation and after me normalizing the paranoias about the whole treatment process, she said she was feeling more okay with it and was going to look for options.

After that, I started randomly seeing people from the past at a distance and actually met some of them for coffee and man, I had no common discussion to have than to speak about things that weren’t even a blip in my radar anymore.

In early 2016 I had stopped seeing my psychiatrist so often and would only go meet her for a follow up and a check up every six months and see if I needed meds or not, in the middle of 2019 I stopped seeing her altogether and have been fairly well since. I’ve quit meds for the most part, but I still got a lot of anxiety and insomnia — if you don’t rely on joints to sleep, sleep becomes kind of different and it takes years of adjustment.

So when I was meeting these people, I was going through the depressions of the after-addiction and I could sense that none of them understood anything I was speaking about — it’s like we were living in different planets and society was not the same to me or them, there was this divide on being a person that is very difficult to explain. I reached a point there where I simply decided to stop seeing people connected to that past. The redo over and over again of having to explain my sanity was normal, and not the insanity before was tireing and I was exhausted of hearing about my exes every time I met someone. I actually gave an ultimatum to a friend “stop talking about him or I quit this friendship”. I quit the friendship.

Anyway, the thing is that even if those past friends are still people I cherish having in my life back then, the chaos was so gigantic that I started seeing things maybe more according to the reality of an observer rather than a participant. We were living in a nonsensical bubble of coping how we could.

When I finally quit alcohol (in 2018) then things got really hard, if you drink to supress emotions you might want to read this part with caution though… For the first two to three months it was like every single surpressed emotion I had was trying to come out, I was more unstable than I ever was emotionally. I cried going outside, I started having panic attacks, I had moments of complete instability where I couldn’t stand being anywhere, much less my own body. I couldn’t maintain or even start relationships, or even friendships, I isolated a lot and I relied exclusively on meetings for my social needs. It was really difficult, and thankfully I had a great mentor to help me through it, in weekly, sometimes daily, meetings (not 12 steps, I was in SMART Recovery). After that period passed, I started to have to deal with it all. And then the 12 steps process was actually useful in a way. I read a lot and listened a lot to Russell Brand’s stuff and it quite resonated with me that somehow in the midst of all this, we can’t pity or truly be angry with ourselves or other people if we’re just surviving an insane society. It’s really natural to cave, some of us are idiots, others dive into the pits of alien abductions and mind control conspiracy theories.

No one is really to blame how we cope with this unhealthy society until we realize that all we have the responsibility of making life as pleasant as possible. That’s how I forgave most of my issues, and others’ as well.

In light of this, the Spiritual aspect became more interesting to me, when I see it as a way to remain and maintain my sobriety and sanity. Don’t dive into Buddhism if you don’t want to think about demons, though, small piece of advice. But if you are to think on it with some neuroscientific perspectives on how the mind and emotions work in tandem (I really, really recommend this book), you can see it as a way of self development much in line with the thinking of how we can all be good to one another and not see each other as instruments to our needs.

It’s really interesting, because in all of this, I spent quite a few years just in healing mode, no time for intimacy, no time for vain friendships. Parties became like this boring social obligation, until I realized I was not obliged to go to them if I didn’t want to.

And one day, something truly wonderful happened: I found myself. It had been a few years, I’m a bit tired and older, I don’t even look the same anymore, but some friends from way back when started saying how happy they were that I “was back”. And I realized, all those people from young adulthood, older teenager years, they never truly met me and that’s a shame. We were drinking, partying, drugging buddies, but we weren’t truly friends. Some of us did become those people who kind of check up on each other occasionaly just to make sure we are all still alive, which is kind of nice and sad at the same time, if you ask me.

The issue for me was that in between all this I look at that past and my spirituality was my saving grace, it was what kept me afloat and what helped actually accept the help I was given.

In late 2014, about six years ago, I was laying in a psychiatric ward with a straight jacket holding my anger together with a nurse asking if I was going to behave so they could take that off, with tears running down my face begging for some compassion. I spent only two weeks on that ward, and I spent most of the time of my room reading, or in the break room smoking cigarettes and winning fusball matches. At that point, the megalomanias were diminishing and I met this guy who thought he was the Devil. We had group therapy together and laughed a lot about that (I had a period where I believed I was God for a moment there after an extremely weird acid trip), so he did this amazing thing. He apologized to me, for no reason whatsoever, we had never met before. I helped him make peace with his father and we played a lot of chess. It’s like this insane moment, but actually true. In order to fight the boredom we also counted tiles, because it was truly and most of all, boring to be there.

After the two weeks, I was outside and it was so weird, it was like a period of my life ended and I was free to be myself again. Then, the horrors of detoxing, the overmedication, the misdiagnosis and a lot of other crap I had to deal with, but when that was over, here I am, me, sane, safe and with a lot of new ideas about life. Most of all, regardless of those two weeks and the previous two years, I had honestly realized my life was more good than bad. I met incredible people and had done incredible things to be proud of myself, and in the end, that’s what matters.

So in between all these realizations, I understood that I had to help people who were helping me, and began volunteering in mental health internet boards as a moderator and supporter, it was an incredibly difficult journey, I reached a state of burn-out after 3 years and eventually quit, but kept helping folks on the side. The particular issue I found both in myself and other people was the lack of support, emotional and physical support. Even if governments do help out with money, or comparticipation in meds, or psychiatric appoinments or therapy or whatever, there is still the component not only of stigma for those who have had to deal with mental health issues, but also really a genuine lack of support for getting well and a lot of support for reminding you of the crap you had to deal with in the past, guilt trips do abound.

I remember one time a friend I wanted to make peace with called me, I was one year into recovery so I was still shaky and it was really awful, I came home realizing I couldn’t go back to past where I was no longer. Don’t really know how to explain it better. All I do know is that somehow the ideas that I had about how things were, were actually completely different than the actual reality of things. It was messy, it was very human, but it was also very distant from how human beings should behave with each other, to really no fault of anyone involved.

In 2017, three years into recovery, I got really into the idea of self-care and how to take really good care of myself, I went vegetarian, I started yoga, and a lot of other things, one thing in particular was how I started treating myself with care, things in life kinda flowed more soundly. I had better friends, better relationships, I was rekindling old connections, and to this day I don’t really know exactly where the transition was, but I truly began enjoying who I am, and made a certain amount of peace about my past mistakes. My catch phrase was “better safe and sober than drunk and insane” and it bares true to this day.

Now, because of the pandemic and other issues I had to deal with, I started knowing about things through other people and kind of realized I needed closure from all that. I can’t, in good conscience, keep thinking that “it wasn’t that bad, we had fun” because now I know fun and that wasn’t it. And I can’t in good conscience forgive those who provoked violent trauma, and can’t in good conscience forgive those who not only accepted it as incited it. What I can do is move on and give myself closure of a past that is no longer.

I truly feel bad for those who are still in it, and I’ve been glad to know that some got out and got help.

I think, in the end, the spiritual mental phenomenon that caused me insanity, was also what saved me: an honest belief that life is good, an honest belief I am a good person, and an honest belief in unconditional love.

Because who am I to judge the past of those who overcame their most impossible obstacles? Who am I to say that someone isn’t valid, even some people who abused my trust and tried to shred my confidence? Who am I to say that those who wish to tell my story for me, are not simply justifying their own flaws with anger towards who and what I am?

It’s hard to be human, you know? We are given a body and a way to experience life through it, and all we truly can do is the best for ourselves and others. So, I am a woman who saved herself, and I’m quite proud of that acheivement. I am a women who has hope about the future and wants to help build a better, inclusive and compassionate world.

I won’t find the tools for it in a long distant past, but right here, where love is.

Peace.