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surveys-at-your-service · 3 years

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Survey #425

“evolution repressed by our backwards contest / breeding our torrential demise as we come to this edge”

Serious question, peanut butter or nutella? I think Nutella is a godsend, but I use peanut butter waaaaay more often. We don't even really buy Nutella because I will destroy the jar. Do you prefer baked potatoes or mashed potatoes? Baked. What is your oldest sibling’s middle name? Kathryn. I think. Do you like breadsticks? I just like bread, man. What are your favorite things to spend money on? Tattoos, uuuuugggghhhhh <3 Which would you rather have a new puppy or kitten? Neither, really. Most puppies drive me insane (even though they're cute as everliving fuck), and I don't want another cat. Mom actually talked about getting another, but I really just want my one boy. Roman would get SO jealous, anyway. I enjoy just having my baby. How old will you be on your next birthday? 26. Yikes. Do you ever feel self-conscious when you eat around other people? As "the fat one," I can be sometimes. I would say though that more often than not, it's sort of whatever to me because I'm a human that has to eat. When you opened your eyes this morning, what were your first thoughts? I thought I slept way later than I actually did. What is one thing in the room you’re in that reminds you of somebody? My stuffed meerkat Rebel. Jason got it for me for my first birthday that we were together. Could you ever be friends with somebody who was homophobic? Never again. I was once able to think "agree to disagree," but sometimes by doing so, you're siding with evil by not enforcing what is more than just a belief. It should come with being a human. Also given my own sexuality, it would be a slap in the face to me. Would you ever want to be a supermodel, or date one? Hell no. I'd date one though, if they were modest about their position. Honestly, have you ever made fun of somebody so bad they cried? Wow, no. Honestly, would you rather be complimented on your looks or intelligence? Quite frankly, nowadays, my appearance. I need it. My self-confidence is so far below "shit." Have you ever purchased a pregnancy test, for yourself or otherwise? Nope. You can get one thing, anything, for free right now. What do you pick? Why? Hm. I know I talk about it a lot, but it would still probably be a 40 gallon terrarium for Venus. She needs - and deserves - it. Honestly, have you ever danced naked? NOOOOOOOO. What was the first illegal thing that you did? Did you get caught? Downloaded music. My mom eventually found out, but didn't care much. What is the home page on the computer you’re on? Google. Do you like to write poetry? I do, but I haven't done it in a while. :/ Are your ears pierced? Yes. If so, were they pierced with a piercing gun, or with a sterile needle? Piercing gun. Which, by the way, do not do. There are many more risks with a piercing gun versus a needle by a professional. Do you wear makeup regularly? I never do. Did you eat cereal for breakfast today? No. I've been on a bagel kick lately. When was the last time you tripped over something? Last night, actually. The rug in the living room was slightly turned up, and I tripped in the dark. I didn't actually fall, thankfully. Any obsessive-compulsive tendencies? I'm diagnosed with OCD. I experience more ruminations and intrusive thoughts more than obsessive behaviors, though. Who was the last person you yelled at? Probably Mom. Why did you yell at them? I don't remember. Favorite type of apple? I like pink lady apples. I really enjoy any, so long as they're crisp. Ever seen live horse racing? No. To be totally honest, I don't really like the concept of it. Motivating a horse to run by hurting it doesn't exactly seem moral... How about live greyhound racing? No. What’s one thing, besides the obvious, that you couldn’t live without? The Internet, haha. Have you ever touched a giraffe? No. What does your mom call you? Britt. What stresses you out the most in life? I really don't think I could pick a top one. There are so many. Do you play any PC games? What is your favorite? Yeah. Y'all probably know WoW is my favorite. If you were pregnant, how would you tell the father? Well, that would depend on the circumstances. Did we want a baby? Was it a bad surprise, a happy surprise? I can't answer this with just one idea. What’s the hardest level you can play on Guitar Hero? I used to be able to slam out Expert easily with only very few songs I had to play on Hard, but now it's been YEARS. I've played less than once in a blue moon, and my skill's definitely faded some. It really depends on the song. What ever happened with you and your first boyfriend? He couldn't handle my depression anymore. What’s your favorite country song? "When The Stars Go Blue" by Tim McGraw, probably. What is the worst thing a former boyfriend/girlfriend has done to you? Fail to communicate what he was feeling with me and then make a dashing break for it very, very abruptly after three and a half years. It put me past a state of shock, but trauma with how no less than obsessed I was with him. What were you for Halloween last year? I didn't dress up. :/ I wish I had the money and motivation alike to. Are you feeling guilty for something? I always will. Are you usually quiet or loud? Quiet. How many hours do you spend on the computer a day? Like... uh... all of them, oof. What is the show that you watched when you were little, and you still do? Meerkat Manor. Do your siblings text you? Not really. Do you want a small or big wedding? Small. Have you ever searched for your own house on Google Earth? Not the house I currently live in, but I have before. Who is your ex dating/talking to? I don't know. Ever kissed someone who smokes? No. Does it take a lot for someone to annoy you? Frankly, no. Do you own your own computer? This laptop, anyway. Did you ever have to share a room with one of your siblings? Yes, with my younger sister as a kid and pre-teen. What noises in the room you’re in, do you hear at the moment? I hear the video I'm watching, as well as my fan. Have you ever dated someone with longer hair than yours? Yes. What’s the biggest upcoming event for you? Nothing. Not like that's a surprise. What do you typically order from Wendy’s? Son of the Baconator. @_@ Have you ever been given a lapdance by an actual stripper? No. Those are so awkward to me. What do you love most about yourself? I don't know these days. Have you ever received a hickey from the last person you kissed? No. What are you doing right now? This survey and re-watching John Wolfe play Outlast 2. What’s bothering you right now? I'm immensely nervous about tomorrow. I have my first (and I pray the fuck to God not only) session with my new personal trainer then, and I'm terrified by how my body and my mental fortitude is going to react. Y'all have no fucking idea JUST how out of shape I am, and the muscles in my legs seem basically non-existent by now. I have to do something about my health, though, and I'm determined to make this shit work. More than determined. I know the first day is going to be hard, but I need to do this more than I can explain. What was the last thing you drank? ... What great fucking timing, I have a can of Mountain Dew, lol... That's another thing that needs to change. I've gotta stop the emotional and boredom-eating and chill the fuck out with soda. Be honest, do you like people in general? Quite frankly, no. There are plenty of people I love and think are amazing, of course, but I think I lean towards humanity being too shitty to like "in general." Do you want your tongue pierced? I miss my snake eyes. :/ That was suuuuch a cute piercing. I just had to take it out for the safety of my teeth. I kept accidentally clamping down on one of the balls when eating, and it would cause tiny fractures. Do you change your phone background a lot? No. Have you ever made someone so mad that they broke something? No. Have you ever been strip searched? No. Do you have a funny last name? Does anyone make fun of it? It's not funny-sounding, no, I just think it's too manly for me to enjoy as part of my name. Ever have a drug overdose? What did you OD on exactly? Yes. Oddly enough, I don't remember what I OD'd on now... You'd think I would, given how extreme the situation was. It was some cold medicine. Do you get sick of people who call themselves bipolar all the time? I absolutely do. It's extremely insensitive to people like myself who legitimately suffer - and I do mean "suffer" - from the disorder. Describe your day so far in three words: Dull. Lazy. Anxious. What was the most stressful project you had so far/while in school? Probably my senior project and the presentation I had to do for it. I taught about the fallacies and misconceptions of snakes, and I made a PowerPoint and some drawings to color and crosswords for the special ed children. I was so, so very nervous, but I got through it fine and the kids seemed to enjoy it. I actually still have the recording. Choose one- Butterfinger, Milky Way, Snickers: MILKY WAY. FUCK I love those. Have you ever stepped in dog poop? UGH yes. What was the last thing you spent money on? My niece's birthday present. Have you ever slept in the same bed with the last person you kissed? Yeah. Is there a guy that knows a lot about you? I almost said "yes," but then I realized he doesn't know me at all anymore. I've changed so much, hopefully mostly for the better. He hasn't "known" me in many years. Is there someone you just can’t imagine your life without? It's terrifying to imagine my life without Mom; Sara, too. Do you prefer Starbucks coffee or small cafe coffee? I prefer no coffee. Would you ever consider getting a piercing in your septum? Nah. Do you enjoy being outdoors? If it's cool outside and I have somewhere to sit that's not the ground, yes. Do people tell you that you have an accent? Sometimes. Do you enjoy watching fireworks on the 4th of July? They're pretty, but I don't support their usage by this point in my life. They're a fire hazard, triggering to some vets with PTSD, and beyond terrifying for animals. What’re some unspeakable subjects for you? I get most heated about child molestation. You do not fucking touch a child like that. I don't even write any of my bajillion evil guys committing it in RP because I just can't stomach it. Even when my little sister (a children's social worker) is telling Mom about some stuff she sees at work, I have to not be present, 'cuz that shit isn't rare. It's nauseating. Is there anyone you would take a bullet for? A good number of people, honestly. Do you enjoy tanning? Hell no, I avoid the sun and heat at like all costs. Are you a virgin? This is going to sound weird, but I actually don't know, but I lean towards no. Who’s your celebrity crush? mARK EDWARD FISCHFUCK Did or do you get good grades in English class? I was always excellent in English. What part of your body are you self-conscious about? My stomach. But I'm self-conscious about everything else, too. Are you expected to help fix Thanksgiving dinner? No. Everyone knows I can't cook worth a damn. Have you ever lost anyone close to cancer? Truly close, no. Unless you include pets, actually. Then a few. :/ Do you personally know anyone who is transgender? Yep. When was the last time you got a shot? Earlier this year for Covid. Get your fucking vaccine, btw. :^)

#survey #surveys #random questions #lyrics: ''altaer" by 3teeth

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charlottestarchild · 4 years

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Abuela Ayahuasca

I think it was about 3 or 4 years ago when I read about Ayahuasca in Time Magazine for the first time. What was described there sounded far from appealing or spiritual. The piece was about a Ayahuasca center somewhere in New York I believe, where groups of 20 people would come together to take the medicine and then all vomit into their buckets during the process.

Since then, I came across Ayahuasca a couple of times in various conversations. One very good friend of mine started talking to me about it about a year ago and described it as a beautiful experience that heals the body and the mind. Slowly I started thinking that maybe there is more to it than the image of a group of people barfing violently I had carried in my mind since reading that article.

But I was hesitant. I had been dealing with depression and burn out for a few years and I knew I was carrying a lot of baggage regarding my family, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open that “door” and see what’s behind it. By this description you can already tell what sort of an expectation I had. To me, taking Ayahuasca meant discovering something hidden. Something I didn’t know or wasn’t aware before. Like there was something locked down inside of me that was the reason for why I was just a shadow of myself, never enjoying the present moment, always ruminating. And if only I could open that door and see, everything would make sense and I would finally start to live my life.

Another year passed and my friend told me that there would be a ceremony on the 27th of December. He mentioned it casually but I knew he mentioned it because he wanted me to go. He was certain it would be good for me. Heal my heart and align my mind. Well, that’s what I need right? It’s what I’ve been craving for. For someone or something to finally align my mind and stop me from overthinking every single bit and start to actually enjoy, treasure and value my life.

So after a few weeks of sitting on the idea I decided to go for it. The only reason I was hesitating was because I was mortified of shitting my pants in front of other people or otherwise embarrass myself. And another part of me was afraid I would have an allergic reaction or lose my mind and come out of the experience a vegetable. But hey, no risk no fun. Maybe this is the step I need to take to be free.

I asked my friend to sign me up and asked for some instructions. What to wear, what should I bring, should I stop eating at some point during the day? The first surprise was that the ceremony would go through the night starting 9pm and ending around 9am. Ok... one night in the jungle it is. I knew the place where the ceremony would be held. I had done a Temazcal there a few months back and thought it was a beautiful experience. I knew some of the people but was still nervous because my friend was not able to attend and be by my side (he didn’t have the money, 1500 pesos was just not in it for him right now). He assured me though that his family of friends would take could care of me.

The day of the ceremony I felt slightly nervous. Still mostly worried I would end up in hospital. But at some point I decided to let go. I hitched a ride with another German who also went there and did it for the first time. What a comfort.

We arrived and there was a circle of grass mats in a wide open area among beautiful trees. It was dark already so I couldn’t really see the faces of people and had no idea if I knew anyone or not. There was one familiar face though, a guy - super handsome - from the neighbouring village who met a year ago. I was pleasantly surprised that he remembered me. I sat next to the other German girl, who sat next to pretty guy and we waited for things to settle. It took quite some time and I’m guessing it took about 2 hours of sitting around before things started happening.

The Shaman was from Ecuador and he came with a full entourage who were all sitting right next to us. His “wife and daughters” - which was puzzling me a bit because the 3 ladies right next to me all looked of the same age and it was hard to tell which was which. I could sense scepticism in the back of my head of the credibility of this bunch. One of the women had a small baby, I’m guessing 1 year old.

The Shaman started explaining in Spanish and then translated a bit into English because there was one other foreigner among us. Me and the other German thought to speak enough to understand so we didn’t out ourselves as needing English translation. I felt a bit guilty for making the other foreigner feel like he’s the only one. Guess it would have made him feel better if he knew there’s other non native Spanish speakers.

We were told that you always walk in a circle from left to right and usually you do a full circle before exiting the circe but because Ayahuasca is so strong and has its own ways it’s ok to just go from your place to the exit and back. One should still respect a few rules though, like not leaving the circle when chanting is going on and not crossing in front of someone who is barfing. There it was. Barfing. He said it. So that seems to be a thing indeed.

He continued to explain that if you need to vomit you should do it straight in front of you. Apparently something to do with energy. Someone would then come and put soil on top of the vomit so not to worry. There would be two occasions where tobacco pipes will be smoked. In the beginning and the end of the ceremony and it is recommended to be present in the circle during those times.

Ok. Leave the circle only from the inside walking left to the “exit” but not when someone is vomiting or chanting; if you need to vomit, just vomit. All clear. I think I’m ready.

After quite a bit more talk and explanations on how the dry toilets work, the Shaman took the pipe and started saying his “prayers” and thank yous. Chanting started and then he would take the big glass jug filled with Bordeaux coloured liquid and start to distribute it going through the circle one by one, handing everyone a small shot glass full of the medicine. I’m 4th in line after the wife and 2 daughters. I take the glass, swallow the juice, it tastes bitter but not horrible. A small plate with slices of apple is passed on, apparently to help against the bitter taste. I chew on a slice.

The Shaman walks the whole circle and serves everyone an equal portion of the medicine. And to my bewilderment, he also serves it to a few of the kids. I’m bad at guessing kids ages but I’d say they are around 8 or 9. I’m surprised, maybe a little shocked even. But hey, I’m not their parents and I’m not here to judge. I watch the Shaman finish the circle and sit down. We all sit in silence for a while and then the entourage starts chanting.

At this point I’ve been sitting cross legged for probably 4 hours so I decide to lie down.

I’m not sure how much time passes but suddenly I realize that I’m seeing things. My eyes are closed but I am surrounded by bright white light, more like I’m in an all bright white room and on the ceiling garlands of bright colors start to appear. Many colors, bright rainbow colors, it’s almost comic like, kind of what I always thought it must be to be on LSD. Once I realize that something is happening I force myself to open my eyes. I want to see what the world around me looks like high... So I slowly open my eyes, lying on my back on the ground and I look up towards the sky. I startle a little bit because the trees that are looming above me don’t look like trees anymore. They look more like woven nets or a mosaic made of geometrical shapes and they look like they’re looking at me, for a second I’m seeing a small monster sitting in the crown of the tree looking at me with curious eyes. I close my eyes again, gather some more strength and force myself to look again. And once I get over the initial scare I see how beautiful it looks. It’s a beautiful vision, hallucination and I start to smile at its beauty. Right that very moment when a smile forms on my lips a huge leave lands right on my face and I twitch to the side in shock and quickly wipe the leave off my face with my hand - we’re in the middle of the jungle after all, anything could have landed on my face. But it was just a leave and I start to relax again. I look up at the trees again and they still look beautiful. It’s a weird structure, kind of reminding me of the huichol beaded art that they sell here everywhere. There are no colors though, it’s almost only black and white. I smile again, smiling kind of takes an effort, I need to deliberately command my face muscles to “smile” and it feels like my face is made of rubber.

After a while I decide that it’s time to get up. I can’t be sitting around all the time. So I make an effort to put myself up right to a sitting position. When I get up and look around it’s like everyone is in a trance, moving in wavy motions back and forth. The ground seems to be shifting as well. I think I hear someone barf. The whole scene is rather odd and I’m not sure I’m liking it.

I sit upright for a while, looking around, looking at the fire in the middle of us. I can’t really tell for how long I sit there but at some point I feel like the hallucinations stopped and I have my wits together again. I look up at the sky, the trees and the trees just look like trees again. At some point I think I decide to lie down again. I’m feeling my body, kind of trying to see if I feel ill. But I seem to be feeling fine. Suddenly my stomach starts to squeeze but it’s not too bad. Then, lying down again, I start to feel different body parts, my legs, thighs, my hands, my face, it’s kind of tingling, numbing sensation. It feels kind of nice. I think I’m drifting off into sleep. Suddenly I’m wide awake again and I feel incredibly drowsy and heavy. I thought I was done but out of the blue the medicine decided to kick me into the stomach. I am lying on my side and notice that I’m talking to myself in my head “I don’t want this anymore. Please, make it stop. I just want to go home. I don’t want this anymore”. I answer back to myself “stop whining, you wanted answers no try and live through this and make the best of it”. But my stomach isn’t having it and I realize I have to get to the toilet as soon as humanly possible. So in my utter delirium I get onto my feet and wobble out of the circle. It’s a miracle that I am not falling face flat into the flames of the fire pit that is right in front of me. I walk as fast as my legs carry me towards the dry toilet only to notice that it’s occupied. Fuck. Fuck it. I have to poop. I sit down next to the dry toilet building, pull down my pants just in time for explosive like poop to make its way onto the jungle floor. I squat on the ground and try not to wobble or topple over. I have no clue who is in the toilet and I couldn’t, literally, give less of a shit about that person hearing me shit loudly like I never shat before. At some point the person leaves the dry toilet and walks by me. I look to the floor for him or her not to see my face. I wipe my but with a piece of paper I find in my pants pocket and make my way into the now available dry toilet. But I’m done. I sit for a while and then get back to the circle, again wobbling like I’m made out of rubber, passing people vomiting (fuck the rule of not passing someone who is vomiting), I need to get back to my place and sit / lie down.

I’m not sure what happens next. I think I fall asleep. I’m done. None of this is fun anymore. People left and right are barfing like there’s no tomorrow, loudly as if they’re throwing up their intestines. I feel sorry for them.

I hear a baby crying. Right, one of the Shaman’s harem ladies had a baby with her. It’s crying. And someone is comforting it but it sounds like the person is doing it too harshly. I’m worried. And annoyed. How could someone be so irresponsible to bring a baby into this circle of hallucinations and projectile vomit? Everyone in the circle drank the Ayahuasca. Everyone. Not a single person stayed sober. What if someone needs help? Who would be able to drive to the hospital? All sorts of things could happen.

The Shaman asks once or twice if anyone wants more Ayahuasca and a few people say yes.

Some more time passes and I drift in and out of sleep. I think the worst part is over. I feel ok. Rather sober in fact. I listen to the chanting. It’s beautiful. Also the other people around me seem to be sobering up.

The wife of the Shaman is walking around the circle with a fan made of eagle feathers, doing some cleansing ritual. When she’s done, she grabs the jug of Ayahuasca and proclaims that now, we will all have the last round of Ayahuasca and that, although not mandatory, it is strongly recommended that everyone takes some. She’s saying it in her rooster, cocky kind of way, kind of jokingly but with an authority that I don’t feel she deserves.

She starts to make the round. I’ve made up my mind that I will not have any more of this devils potion. “No valio la pena” as the Mexican would say. Not worth it. I just got over feeling super shit and happy it’s over. So when she reaches me, I politely smile at her and say “no gracias”. She looks at me in astonishment and talks to me like I’m a small child, insisting I take some more. It’s just a little sip and I will be surrounded by beautiful flowers and love and I should have some. Have some. She pushes the shot glass in my face and push-over as I am, I take the glass and swallow the brew. I’m annoyed. This is my first time and a no should be a no. WTF.

I’m only hoping that the tiny bit won’t really do much. And it actually doesn’t. No hallucinations and I only feel a little nauseous at some point. I don’t even need to poop. Well, how could I, there is no chance there’s anything left in my stomach. So after I feel safe that no further run to the bathroom is required I decide I’m ending this and go to sleep. I manage to sleep quite well. I even have a dream but I can’t remember what it was after waking up.

The sky looks like we must be getting closer to sun rise. What a relieve. This feeling is confirmed by the Shaman preparing the tobacco pipe. “We will have two tobacco ceremonies - at the beginning and the end” he said. So this must be the end. He prepares the pipe, takes a puff and starts to talk. And talk. And talk. And talk. I am sure, some of it, if not a lot of it is lost in translation. But I’d like to believe that my understanding of Spanish is good enough by now to be able to tell that what he is saying is of absolutely no substance. All I hear is “let’s be grateful for our sea, mountains, trees, .... listing all possible natural elements.... for our family, our cousins, mothers, fathers, kids, .... listing all possible relatives... and he says that in various ways in what seems an endless loop. Finally he passes the pipe on to the next person. The wife of the owner of the land we’re on. And while I thought “well, she’s surely gonna cut it short since he was rambling for like ever, she too, goes into an endless monologue of gratefulness. I mean like, she talks for 15min non stop.

I don’t want to sound like an asshole here but I am exhausted and all this talk really doesn’t speak to me. The few words that my friend Memo usually says during his Yoga classes seem so much more meaningful to me than this endless bla bla of statements that seem so utterly self explanatory that I just don’t see the point. This is preaching to the quire out of the books.

After the pipe finally makes it’s way back to the Shaman it seems we’re nearing the end of the ceremony for real. We’re all awake now, nobody is barfing anymore and nobody seems to have taken any major damage. Even the baby and the kids are fine.

Water is being passed around. Which again turns into a ritual of endless talking before the first person actually gets to take a sip. The person passing around the water is the owner of the land, my good friend Memo’s friend and the person Memo would say would also make sure that I am fine. When he finally gets to me and passes me the water, I make eye contact and say thank you for the water, we shake hands, say “buenas dias” like he did with everyone and he moves on. Wouldn’t it have been nice of him to ask “how are you? everything ok”. But no. He chit chatted with others but he didn’t seem bothered to inquire about my wellbeing. Fair enough.

They’re inviting us to stay for the Temazcal which will be prepared within 1,5h but right now I think I just want to go home. Not even so much because I feel exhausted, but because I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t feel like anyone in this round was particularly interested in me feeling comfortable. After I came back from the bathroom, it seems my alarm went off and so my phone had been ringing. A lady pointed at my bag and snapped at me “your phone has been ringing for like 5min”. It’s 8.02 so as a matter of fact it had been ringing for 2min. Which can be annoying, I get it but the ceremony was over, people were standing around and chatting. It’s not like it went off in the middle of the ceremony.

And besides, before ANYONE ELSE, it was the Shamans wife who took her phone out first thing after the ceremony officially ended. Give me a break.

It’s funny how even in supposedly spiritual situations like this I study and analyze the people around me. Or more like, how some people stand out for better or worse. There was pretty guy, gay guy, red head gringo guy and there was the Colombian girl who so obviously wanted to be “teachers favorite” that it really annoyed me. The way and the kind of questions she asked and everytime the “mic would be opened to the public” meaning other people than the Shaman and his close circle could speak she would start to speak so fake poetically that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. And of course at the end of her speech she would start crying. Oh my.

But also the wife of the Shaman was, in my honest and very personal opinion, full of Bullshit. A pretty woman, no doubt, and very aware of it she would walk around the circle like a all too proud rooster. And at times, she would even interrupt the Shaman. I might have to give her benefit of doubt due to language barrier but sometimes she would bluntly interrupt the Shaman and she would kind of make a joke of what he had just said. You know, the kind of like when someone says “The sky is blue” and the other person kind of goes like “blue, eh?” as if to say “aren’t you just stating the obvious”.

So what do I think about all this now that a few days have passed? I think my conclusion is that it was an interesting but not a very nice experience. 30 people are way too many people to have an intimate experience. Sure, if you know all 30 and consider them your friends then you might feel alright and comfortable. But for a stranger, it really didn’t work. Neither did I feel save, nor particularly welcome or taken care of. And some things just seemed like bullshit too me. At least I didn’t feel like it was an authentic experience. Maybe if the Shaman would have been on his own yes, but the whole entourage around him - I didn’t get that. I don’t understand for example how his wife had the authority to pass around the medicine. She liked her role way too much and that’s the problem. She was playing a role.

As for the actual medicine. It wasn’t worth the trouble. The little hallucinations I had didn’t feel spiritual in any way. I didn’t feel like I learned something new about myself or felt more connected to nature in any way. And just for some pretty rainbow colors and monsters in trees I don’t need to be surrounded by barfing people for a whole night.

I also couldn’t really say that it would have helped me afterwards with any of my conditions. Quite the opposite. I found myself propelled back into a major depression, my skin issues flaring up again big time. Things I had worked hard to get over and instead of helping me progress I felt I made 5 steps back.

All in all, I don’t regret having done it but definitely feel like I could have spent my time and money more wisely. Maybe I’ll just get a nice massage next time.

#ayahuasca #spiritualjourney #mexico #shaman #medicine #drugs #ancient medicine #ecuador #authentic #self love #nature

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philosworkbench · 3 years

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Yes And, A Good No, and the Dangers of Wing-Walking

I did a weird thing for an improviser to do today. I declined an offer.

“No” is something people say every day. Kids say it a lot. I don't have kids; I had cats, and they would often say something very much like no. But in improv, we're taught to say yes. Specifically, when someone on stage with you says something to define the shared fictional reality, we call that “making an offer.” When that happens, you're supposed to accept it and heighten it as far as it will go.

If your scene partner says that you're both monkey space pirates and it's time to capture the frigate of the talking bananas, well then you just better put on your monkey space suit, pull out your monkey space cutlass, and get ready to fight! Is it ridiculous? Of course, it is. (I mean how are you going to pull out your space sword after you’ve already put on your space suit? Stupid monkey pirate!) Nevertheless, you Yes And! It's banana hunting time! Take no banana prisoners! Eat all you kill! #YOLO #LivingThatMonkeySpacePirateLife #blessed

There was this guy with an interesting online tool for facilitators -- bizarrely enough, a different online tool than the one I talked about yesterday. (I’m networking a lot, y’all. And by y’all, I mean cold vastness of Tumblr.)

This guy was ready to make me his U.S. distributor-partner for his product. No buy-in, all commission, and the ripest territory on the planet. Perfect side hustle, if not a full hustle for the right person.

I said no.

It f*cking terrified me.

Beyond the pros and cons of the opportunity and the reasoning for my decision, what most intrigued me was my emotional reaction. I'm not destitute. My spouse and I are okay, even in the midst of COVID. Why did it freak me out so much to say “no”?

Honestly, I think there are a lot of reasons. Here are the ones that kept me up tonight.

Yes And is great medicine if you have the disease it’s meant for.

If your team or entire organization has become a stalled, “no but” culture, work on Yes And. When you and/or the system has become so stable that it's stagnant and momentum towards a vision has become inertia towards change, work on Yes And. When you need to shake things up and create opportunity for positive disruption, work on Yes And.

Cut to 20 years later.

I’ve done Yes And. I’ve taught it a lot. I’ve seen what happens when a room of people have to make a decision and their only experience running things is from a career spent in improv. It has come to me as no surprise that the hypocrisy of the improv community was laid bare by the #MeToo movement. A healthy respect for no is crucial.

This is when some improv people tie themselves in knots. “It’s not that we’re asking people to say ‘no’ to each other, but to say ‘yes’ to themselves.” Fine. Whatever looks good in your Bullet Journal. Even if improv didn’t need a worldwide reckoning around consent, it would still need to learn how to say a “good no.”

A Good No means Listening to your Full Self

To explain this, let’s go back to why we try to break people of “no” when they first start taking improv classes. It’s because their “no” at the time is usually based in fears.

I’m afraid of looking stupid so I say no to anything my partner says -- I just can’t risk it

I’m afraid of not understanding what’s happening so I say no to anything too crazy

I’m afraid of not being funny so I say no to anything to too normal

And, if you squint enough to read between those lines, you’ll see similar fears that show up in almost every meeting at work:

I’m afraid of looking less valuable so I say no to my peers’ ideas -- they might keep mine from being recognized

I’m afraid of putting my name to something that fails so I say no to innovation -- or at least no until we have all the necessary data (because by then the opportunity will have passed and we can blame a lack of good intel)

I’m afraid of not making a name for myself so I no to the simple, no-frills solution that will work, but that no one will notice

These are the bad noes. (These are not the Glengarry noes.)

There’s nothing worse than watching an improviser try to improv while fundamentally afraid of the art form and uncomfortable with themselves. Improv and all theater begins with a fearlessness around “nakedness.” Don’t really get naked when improvising. We get too many letters. Instead, take Peter Brook’s advice from The Empty Space:

“The creative actor also longs to cling on to all he’s found, he too wants at all costs to avoid the trauma of appearing in front of an audience, naked and unprepared—still this is exactly what he must do.” (Brook, 1968, p.142)

It sucks to be naked like this while doing bar-prov in front of a bunch of drunks at 12am, so we teach Yes And. It’s probably not so much “be more naked on stage,” but more, “it’s awkward to try to cover yourself on stage so we’re all going to just keep covering each other. Trust that your partners are there to keep the grossest parts from hanging out.” That’s Yes And.

When improvisers understand that, you start to see them use “no” again. But now, it’s not an awful, awkward, scene-halting “no.” It’s authoritative, exciting, and directional. A good no can be the best yes and. It doesn’t stop the motion, it transforms it.

Back At Work: Good Noes are Good News

Time to read between the lines again, to see how this translates from improv to the boardroom -- by which, of course, I mean Zooming with your team members while you all pretend to be wearing pants.

Once we have a foundation of Yes And, and our default setting is to rally around each other and support each other. Then, revisiting No makes sense. You can bring your full selves to it. You’re not making the “no” choice out of fear.

This is great news because then you can say no with complete candor but also complete support. You can say, “here’s where I’m at right now.” People know where you stand and can factor in your real, honest feedback. If the team knows that everyone on the team gets what “Yes And” means, they can hear “no” in a whole new way.

So why was I so upset about saying “no” today? Like everyone who's ever done therapy, I blame my stepfather.

The First Law of Wing-Walking

Amazingly, it is not, “you don’t talk about wing-walking.” You apparently talk about it a lot, especially while your stepson is growing up in your house.

My stepdad was in Organizational Development. (So, I guess you could say, I’m a “legacy,” or whatever. #NBD) 30 years ago, he would often say, “Matt, remember the first law of wing-walking:

Don’t let go of what you’re holding onto until you’ve got hold of something else!”

Years on the couch. (For other stuff. Not for that.)

I’m in a lot of transition right now. I’m trying to launch a new company. I’m trying to do right by the companies I work for now. And COVID feels like a bad time to be dreaming big, but I am.

But I don’t feel I am holding onto anything. I’m just keeping a ton of different stuff in reach. I haven’t “burned my boats,” and yet, they are drifting further and further from shore. Without me.

I have a beautiful vision for my future, but I haven’t gotten anyone to buy it yet.

And then comes this guy, and he has something to hold onto.

Getting Lost in the Role

One of the best moments in a long-form improv is when you find a truly interesting character that you can consistently play from scene to scene. You “have” them.

The audience is intrigued. You feel good at improv when you play them. And, best of all, you get to stop thinking about who you are for a while. All of your anxieties about “am I good at this? What should I do next?” have to leave a message at the beep. You’re somebody else now. And they’re busy.

But what about when you’re decidedly not getting lost in the role. You just feel “lost.” That’s kind of where I am at right now. Not as bad as the “upside-down,” but definitely the “in-between.”

And here’s this guy, and he has a branded polo shirt with my name on it if I want it.

But I don’t.

I want a branded polo shirt with my own company’s name on it.

And yes, in his mind, I could have absolutely built my own company while I did this for him as a sideline. There were plenty of Yes And reasons why this would have been a great partnership. He helps facilitators. I help facilitators. Except I’m not really helping facilitators yet. I just want to.

Whose Thing is it Anyway!?

So, now I think I can finally come to the point. Sometimes you have to pass up good things.

When you are not sure of your path forward or not confident the path you want will happen, the universe will sometimes send you lifeboats. And you may not realize you’re only saying yes to it because it’s a lifeboat. It’s better than flapping around in the water.

But is that a good Yes?

Is it going to bring you closer to your path forward? Or will it give you hours of distraction so you’ll have the perfect excuse not to move forward? What will you say when you look back?

“Yes, I really wanted to have my own monkey space pirate ship, but while I was building it, another monkey came by and offered me a chance to work part-time on his ship. I figured I’d get back to mine eventually, but I just kept doing so well on his. His is awesome now! As for mine, I don’t know. Maybe when I retire.”

Just writing that has me shaking a little, like an honest-to-god baby panic attack. Not a full-blown attack, but one you would serve around on a tray at a cocktail party.

I was terrified of saying no today because of all the fear of passing up a good thing.

But now, as I reflect on it, having spent the last 1700+ words ruminating on it, I realize that what’s f*cking terrifying is taking a good thing when it’s not actually your thing.

Don’t get me wrong; many of the best accomplishments have been the work of dedicated people working diligently for other people. If you see an organization with a mission you believe in, that treats you right, and treats the world right, jump on that.

But if you know you need to now do something on your own, even if it fails miserably. If you need to pass up the good thing so you can have the space to create your own, do it.

Say a good “no” to the stuff that isn’t truly for you.

Even when it’s terrifying.

#improv #applied improv #business #anxiety #entreprenuership #long reads #monkey #space #pirates

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gloieee · 4 years

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Limbo

Started this post sometime early July and could not finish in classic fashion because the heaviness weighed me down TOO much for me to continue writing. Usually for me writing is catharsis, but this time it felt laborious because it meant I had to sit with my emotions even more so than during my day-to-day (which was already too much to handle). It was hard for me to even listen to these songs then because it made my entire being ache. Yet, of course, cause I loved the pain, I did and anguished in it to paralysis. Most of these thoughts no longer resonate with me, to a surprising extent, but am attempting to pay respects to the pinnacle and hopefully, the conclusion of a long year+ of distress. Here goes, Limbo.

8/12/2020

_______________________________________________________________________

Good News – Mac Miller

I spent the whole day in my head Do a little spring cleanin' I'm always too busy dreamin' Well, maybe I should wake up instead A lot of things I regret, but I just say I forget Why can't it just be easy?

I think this sums up my days better than any of my own words can. These couple of weeks have been exactly this—spending whole days in my head (doing little else sometimes gleefully, sometimes woefully) attempting some “spring cleaning,” then going on some tangent on things I should fix in my life, attempting to constructively go down memory lane, then things getting too much and wondering the forever questions, “why can’t it just be easy?”

Regret has become a salient gateway word into my life these past two years, not always consistently, but at least with some regularity. It feels especially shocking cause it really had so little presence prior to this. I suppose, some may say that before a certain age, there are no real consequences to one’s actions, hence, no need for regret. But under that logic, I don’t think at 26, I’m that old either, so I wonder what happened at 24 that began this trajectory. It seems extremely fitting that I couldn’t finish the blog post for “Mistakes” in May 2018, because to be frank, since then, a tinge (or more) of regret has persisted in my days. There have been some lateral moves for sure, but never a vertical move past the regret. Continuing on this thread of analyzing my own past actions, it also appears fitting that I started that 2018 playlist with Unhappy by Outkast/ Big Boi because regret rings profoundly (maybe only) when you’re unhappy with your current state. You don’t see a happy woman ruminating on a thought exercise of what could’ve been. At the time, I included the song based on feeling, (as with everything on this blog), but never really discussed it.

Might as well have fun 'cause your happiness is done When your goose is cooked

I suppose this was pretty much how I lived my life this past year. I’m trying not to say it as a bad thing, cause it isn’t necessarily, and I have a tendency to romanticize tribulations. I had a lot of fun, even though at moments I got pretty millennial REKT in the process. It’s less the fact that I had fun (and was very healthy (physically)! Which I am grateful for), but that I had little else. I didn’t feel very fulfilled or feel like I knew myself, or my values, or even what I wanted. I lived nonchalantly, maybe even a little numbed, and got wrapped up in a LOT of distractions. Admittedly, it was nice in the moment to care about such light things, to not have to deal with so much heaviness. I remember reveling in it, in my personal conversations and on this blog as well.

Yeah Right by Joji is my past year in LA told from the perspectives of cynics (aka Me). It’s a simple, almost grossly millennial song. Despite the extremely self deprecative lyrics, I love how the melody feels like a calming, boppy afterthought. There are moments in the track where you’re just super down in the dumps, but also moments when you’re singing with a lopsided, wry, self-taunting smile on your face.

Yeah Right – Joji

Imma fuck up my life We gon party all night She don’t care if I die Yeah I bet you won’t try But you know I don’t mind

I don’t think my motives were ever as extreme or bleak as “imma fuck up my life” but the general sentiment rings true. There was definitely a pervasive detachedness to my days, and a total lack of “trying”. And a lack of minding over that fact.

Yeah, you know I feel right Yeah, you living right now She don't ever pick sides

I unfortunately discovered Joji during the small insanity of quarantine, and of course blazed through all his interviews. I hadn’t fully realized how not picking sides in my life and going along with the flow belied a sense of numbness or ambivalence. This is so how I’ve been feeling/ felt about so many aspects of my life—career, relationships, values, lifestyle. I couldn’t choose anything because nothing pulled at me. I remember telling a friend that I’m at a point of ambivalence where if I had two research projects I would not be able to pick which one to pursue because they would feel all the same to me. I feel almost no sense of what interests me.

Yeah, you bet I go to see you when I'm feeling like a drum without a beat Yeah, you dance so good And I think that's kinda neat

I am/was truly a drum without a beat, just noticing some insignificant thing of slight interest and noting “that’s kinda neat.” Really not a reason to go after a girl/ relationship in the slightest, but I get how it’s all that could be mustered at the moment. And then you shrug and run with it.

Another millennial moment of wisdom from Joji about this song:

It’s not productive but it’s not destructive. And that’s how a lot of people get stuck, in relationships and in life in general.

This was exactly what was happening during the year. I was not productive AT ALL, but I was still passing, still technically going through the motions, going through the hoops. Life was happening. And I was stuck.

What you know about love? What you know about life? What you know about blood? Bitch, you ain't even my type

Honestly not super sure how it relates, but to these lines. Joji explains:

I mean, the way I see life is like, no-one’s special. You’re not born special, if you’re lucky you’re given a certain set of skills and a certain set of resources and you run with them, and then everyone dies. So as long as they know that, and they’re not thinking in a God’s plan sort of way... So just stuff like that

This was interesting as this summer as I was trying to figure out my path and my direction, and grappling with whether I wanted to try to pursue things that I thought I should/ kinda wanted for extraneous reasons/ seemed practical and logical and well desired vs. what I may be better at/ what I knew I wanted before. And there was definitely this idea of a (lost) calling, a larger cosmic reason that I had blindly chosen this much harder and guilt-inducing path. Something that may make it all make sense. I was extensively looking back on my past self and aspirations. I felt like I had forcibly given up things that made me me without gaining the practical traits I had so envied in others; I had become a boring medical student who wasn’t even super productive nor good at medicine. I was obsessed with this idea of a passion, this abstract thing that I seemed to have perhaps had the inklings of at a certain point, but seemed to have lost entirely, all after having sacrificed much to pursue it. It was refreshing to see someone who is an artiste (hohoho) saying these things, since (successful) artists seemed to be the only people who were truly special or passionate enough in what they did, in that they had risked so much stability, and had made it.

Returning to the song, I love how all these serious questions are raised only to be followed up by a super petty “bitch you ain’t even my type.” And indeed, my many deep queries have no conclusions and I find myself returning to the minutiae of daily life.

Back to Good News. The utter exhaustion and endless circle of rumination on past days, a desire to fix the pattern, slight hope, and inevitable resignation Mac sings of make me close my eyes to take a deep breath. His tracks from Circle capture so well the fluctuating inner thought processes of those who are struggling to dig themselves out of something beyond their control:

When it ain't that bad It could always be worse I'm running out of gas, hardly anything left Hope I make it home from work Well, so tired of being so tired Why I gotta build something beautiful just to go set it on fire? I'm no liar, but Sometimes the truth don't sound like the truth Maybe 'cause it ain't I just love the way it sound when I say it But I heard that the sky's still blue, yeah I heard they don't talk about me too much no more And that's a problem with a closed door Then I'll finally discover That it ain't that bad, ain't so bad

The coexistence of heaviness and hope is what I’ve always loved about Mac. I’m obsessed with duality, contradictions, and being conflicted because I think it’s what I have so struggled with for my young adult life (Joji also mentions this is a driving force behind his songs). Also, I think inconsistencies are just something that is so humanizing about people. It’s no wonder that my favorite works of art attempt to dissect or observe dualities—The Unbearable Lightness of Being; the esoteric song by the lead singer of a small Korean indie band that I had to pay 50 cents to download and save on my desktop cause it wasn’t on youtube (it is now huzzah). A minor tangent, in the aforementioned song Jo Woong implores someone to tell him what he did wrong because he sure as hell can’t figure it out. And a line that has stayed with me for years: Aren’t people’s fronts and backs inherently different? Or is it just me that’s lacking something... It’s a play on a Korean saying, but it points out the inconsistencies in people in an aching plea for understanding and sympathy. It’s what too many plagued, conflicted individuals are hoping for.

내가 뭘 그렇게 잘못했는지 모르겠어요 누가 내 잘못 안다면 얘기 좀 해줘요 사람이 원래 앞뒤가 맞지가 않잖아요? 아니면 나만 이렇게 모자란가요

When I listen to Mac with a clear head, aka not in the throes of depression, I hear the hope in his voice and lyrics. It strikes me and warms my heart even more because I know that the hope has shined through despite the darkness. But when I’m on the other side of the equation, I hear how deep the sadness and pain is, and how the hope is not enough to overcome that. It’s almost worse because I know the hope exists, and yet I can’t get there. It feels like a failure.

Everybody- Mac Miller

Everybody's gotta live And everybody's gonna die Everybody just wanna have a good, good time I think you know the reason why Yeah, sometimes the goin' gets so good Yeah, but then again, it get pretty rough

The fatalism of this song coupled with Mac’s slight falsetto embodies a type of pain that is ineffable. The back and forth of things being good and rough reminds me of an addled and empty-eyed shrug.

Surf – Mac Miller

And the days, they go by Until we get old There's water in the flowers, let's grow People, they lie But hey, so do I Until it gets old There's water in the flowers, let's grow Yeah, well Sometimes I get lonely Not when I'm alone But it's more when I'm standin' in crowds That I'm feelin' the most on my own And I know that somebody knows me I know somewhere there's home I'm startin' to see that all I have to do is get up and go

Surf speaks more quietly of possibility even during dark times. The faint sense of having known at a certain point that someone knows you and gets it, and that you could feel at peace again, like in a home of sorts. The desire to grow, the slight feeling that maybe, it we let go (of societal perceptions, of greed, expectations?), something could change. But in the here and now, it’s just a sense and not a reality. A hypothetical thought that has not yet passed the threshold for action:

Gotta get goin', goin', goin' before I'm gone

A break from the melancholy for a throwback to myself, which made me chuckle as well as feel a sense of wistful nostalgia. This short and sweet track seems like the perfect modern-day ode to me. My conflicted state of being in awe of and yearning after impractical aestheticism but simultaneously being terrified of and slightly disgusted by the indulgence and recklessness of art and its values has led me to eschew it as a profession but try to implicate myself in it in other ways. I think one of the slightly problematic ways this has manifested is not pursuing art in my own life, but seeking to be a muse in other’s’ artful endeavors. I’ve definitely probably contributed to the problematic male gaze I’ve written papers on, but in all vulnerable honesty, that is how I’ve been in the past. The redeeming qualities of Kota’s muse reminded me of the past, some of the qualities that I had prided in myself. I woefully feel as though I have lost all these qualities--Doing my own thing, riding my own wave, not being affected by others’ values, particularly the more superficial ones, being grounded, reading (hah, but never self help), low-key taking care of my life, knowing what I want.

She – KOTA the friend

She do her own thing, she ride her own wave Only twenty people on the 'Gram that she followin' Only post work, she ain't tryna be a model chick She believe in white wine, feet up on the ottoman Low-key, got her own business and she mindin' it If she get your number, you'll be lucky if she lock it in She hella grounded, but the plane trips to BnB stay booked Told me I should read the Four Agreements, it's a great book Cracked a little smile and she threw me back the same look, yea

Slowing it down, this song sounds like a warm afternoon sunset on a lake in New Hampshire that’s not even sad. Which is rare for me since I find sunsets heart-wrenchingly empty most days.

Hand Me Downs – Mac Miller

Get away to a place where the lakes such a great view Leave the bank, couple hunnid thou' I made it, but I hate once I build it I break it down Might just break me down And all I ever needed was somebody with some reason who can keep me sane Ever since I can remember I've been keeping it together but I'm feeling strange

As long as I could remember, this is what I wanted. Yet in recent months, I’ve felt so confused about what I want. I’ve been feeling strange, and things don’t seem right, with no proper conclusion:

Get away when it ain't really safe and it don't seem right But what's new? You get used to the bullshit, the screws they go missing It's likely they might be but...

I almost wish that there was something I distinctly missed, since that would at least show that I cared about something. But to be fair, wanting the wrong things have led me down many wrong turns in the past, so maybe this blank slate is not so bad. I’m so very unsure of what I want, but I suppose I just need to keep it up and act like I do* want something. That’s been the conclusion for this past year. It’s sometimes nice and fine, sometimes so difficult, and I’m in the latter end of the spectrum now, but perhaps it’ll click eventually. In the meantime, the detached voice of Giveon soothes me that I’m not only lost soul goin back and forth on the lost young adult pendulum:

Like I Want You – Giveon

I guess I'll just pretend until it all makes sense Like I want you You, ooh, ooh Even if it's true, ooh (Even if it's true)

Early-ish July 2020

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swanslieutenant · 7 years

Text

a place in time - chapter viii

Summary: Emma’s an agent working to reunite missing people with their families when the biggest missing persons case of all time appears in front of her in a flash of bright, white light. Thousands of missing people from throughout history, including one particular pirate, appear on the shore of a lake in the middle of winter: none have aged a day since their disappearance and, with no memory of their missing time, must venture into a strange and uncertain future. Loosely based on the TV show “the 4400.”

Rating and Warnings: Teen. For now.

Check out the artwork by @queen-mabs-revenge, and the gifset by @swanscaptn; they’re beautiful!

Catch up: ch1, ch2, ch3, ch4, ch5, ch6, ch7

Read on AO3

The isolation room is as quiet as Killian remembers.

He lies on the thin cot in his cell, staring up at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest. It’s late in the morning on his fourth day of returning to the isolation room, and apart from the meals shoved under door from a disgruntled guard and the two times Belle has come to see him, Killian’s been alone in the silence. Like last time he was in this isolation cell, his only company is his mind and its twisting, racing thoughts.

And twisting they are.

Though it was apparent from the moment he stood on that cold lakeshore that this world is different than anything he’s ever known, Killian has spent a lot of these last few days ruminating on his long-held beliefs that he’s finally accepting no longer hold.

Well, mostly one particular belief.

He’s not one for believing government officials – not after the catastrophe that led to Liam’s death all those years ago – but the way Swan talked on the way to the sergeant’s office (all we’ve all got a past and you deserve to have a future here) ... well it’s got Killian thinking that maybe, maybe, they’ve been telling the truth about not being kept a prisoner here indefinitely.

At the very least, he hopes so. Swan’s words of a ‘future’ have been echoing around his mind a lot, yes, but it’s her blunt your past is gone that has hit him the hardest, harder than she probably expected it to, because she’s absolutely right.

Hindsight shows him that even if he had escaped, what would have happened then? He wanted to escape a life of imprisonment, yes, but if Killian is being honest with himself, he’d also wanted to just run from this new future, this new uncertainty at what his life has become. To escape, to try to find some normalcy in this ocean of madness, to return to what his life had been.

But just as Swan said, that life is gone. There’s no Jolly Roger to run to, no crew awaiting his return, no one out there with a thought for him at all. They’re all gone, sea foam and dust now, and Killian is still here.

Though he’s starting to accept that this is his new reality, sometimes he can’t help but wonder if it’s not all made up, if he just lost his mind and ended up in a fantasy. How else can he explain it? In the space of a moment, he lost everything. His home, his crew, his world. Even the loss of material possessions is bothering him; everything he owned has disappeared to the perils of time, including the Jolly, and he’s not seen hide-nor-hair of the clothes or belongings he arrived with. Even just to have those would be a comfort, a marker of what had once been amongst the new, strange reality.

But that’s another reason why he realizes he’s not mad. He couldn’t have come up with the world he’s in now, with their slightly altered language and the advanced medicine and technology he couldn’t even dream up; it’s just not possible to be untrue.

But it is still disconcerting to think he might have gone mad, and while Killian doesn’t have any of his possessions to remind him of his life before all this, he does have one thing – his scars. In this little cell, the scars littering his body remain as a reminder of his past, a physical anchor to the memories he knows in his soul are true.

At the thought, he shifts a bit to rub absently at his left wrist, at a thick scar that wraps nearly around the circumference of his wrist. He has dozens of scars all over – across his back, chest, legs – but the scar on his wrist is the most obvious and grim of them all. His previous clothes had hidden the jagged band of tissue well enough, with the jacket’s thick cuffs and his shirt’s elaborate sleeves, and even the thin blues scrubs had long enough sleeves so no one’s really taken notice of it. The doctor who had examined him in his first few days here had asked about it, but dropped the subject when Killian offered no explanation, only a cold glare as a response.

Not that he doesn’t remember how he nearly lost a hand, mind. No, the memory of that awful day and the horrific pain afterwards is not often far from his mind (and he doubts even a spell of madness could erase it) but it’s not something he was willing to share with a strange doctor. And today, though the feel of the raised tissue usually brings back the flood of pain it caused, it feels more like just a reminder of his past life and what could have been.

And what is gone.

And he could keep running, keep trying to escape back to a life he has lost forever, but no matter how far he searches, how far he tries to regain what once was, there’s no going back to it.

Earlier, during his first stint in these walls, those thoughts had brought nothing but despair, but these days of silence have lightened them; they’re not as heavy and despairing as they were, and if Killian is being honest with himself, he suspects the reason has much to do with Emma Swan and her words: you deserve to have a future here, in this world, in this place and time.

She said all that even knowing who he is, knowing that he’s a pirate, that his past is full of crime and violence. But she hadn’t condemned him right when she learned who he was. No, she’d known for a long time, and wanted him to have a future here regardless. Still believed he deserved one, that his past didn’t define him.

She still had hope in him.

It’s been a long time since someone has had hope in him.

It’s a strange, unfamiliar feeling, hope. One Killian hasn’t felt in a very long time, and he finds his heart is lighter, his mind less dark, soul less unsettled. Through these last few days, though he’s starting to accept that everything he had is gone, he’s starting to think that perhaps there is some chance of a new beginning here. He hunted for freedom for many years on the high seas ... and maybe there’s still a way he can get in the future again.

But he hasn’t seen Emma Swan in days. Only Belle, and when he asked of Emma, she was mum on the subject. And though hope is unfamiliar, Killian can’t help but hope that he hasn’t ruined things for her here at Storybrooke. The sergeant came across as a strict woman, cold and unmerciful, and more like the tyrannical monarchs of his day than a leader of a (supposedly) compassionate organization. When she’d spoken so snidely to Emma that night of the foiled escape – I will deal with you in a minute, Agent Swan – something in him had snapped.

It was one thing for him to be punished for trying to escape; Killian’s no stranger to punishment but he’s never been comfortable with someone else getting in trouble for his own misdeeds. It is the epitome of bad form, as it were.

With Liam, he’d been the same way. Defiant in the face of his own punishment, sneering and ready to take anything, but swamped by guilt when his brother was punished for whatever he’d done too. And with Emma Swan, sitting there with him in front of Regina as if she’d been an accomplice in it all, the same swooping feeling of guilt and anger had rushed through him.

He was the one who broke the rules, and he meant what he said to Regina; Emma was doing her due diligence and duty in stopping him and Scarlet. He saw her suspicion all week, knew she was aware they were up to something, but he had decided to ignore it, to hope that she would be distracted enough to not notice their disappearance.

Again, with hindsight, he realizes he’s an idiot. Of course she would notice; Swan is both eagle-eyed and intuitive, and nothing gets past her.

Not even, apparently, his true identity.

That starts him thinking again about how she still gave him a chance, even knowing who he was, and it’s selfish, but Killian can’t help but think it – a part of him hopes Swan didn’t lose her position just so he can see her again.

And then, as if summoned by his thoughts, there’s a clattering of footsteps outside his door, heavy thuds he’s come to associate with the guards and a lighter, more determined stride he doesn’t immediately recognize.

“Wait, please, we’re under orders not to –”

“I’m his primary agent,” says an angry voice, one Killian instantly recognizes as hers, and he’s instantly sitting up, staring at the cold door in surprise, rushes of she hasn’t been sacked and she’s still here flooding through him. “I just want to take him for a walk.”

“Yes, but Sergeant Mills was quite particular that he wasn’t to be let out just yet –”

“I’ll deal with Regina,” she snaps back, and its as if Killian can see the icy glare she’s depositing on the guard. “Now open the door.”

There’s another few quiet moments until he hears the lock on his door click, and the door swings open.

It’s just the guard at first, shooting him an annoyed look, but then Emma Swan is moving into the room, blocking him from sight. And though she looks irritated too, her smile is warm when she bestows it upon Killian, and Killian can’t help but think, if this really is a fantastical dream, he doesn’t ever want to wake up again.

“Hi, Killian.”

He only manages to reply “Hello” before she’s crossing the room, gesturing for him to get up and picking up his sweater from the single chair in the room.

“Come on, let’s go for a walk. It’s stuffy in here.”

He hesitates for only a second, before he’s on his feet, taking the sweater from her hands and swinging it over his shoulders.

“Brilliant idea.”

The guard looks furious as Emma leads him out of the cell, but he doesn’t say anything, and no one else stops them as she leads the way downstairs. They pause briefly at the main reception desk to get Killian a warm jacket and hat, the receptionist raising his eyebrows at them, but Emma ignores him and leads the way out onto the grounds.

The cool rays of winter sunlight light the outdoor scene in a calm glow, and Killian’s mood, which has been exponentially increased by Emma’s presence, brightens even more as the crisp air hits his face.

They walk in silence for a few moments, Killian enjoying the outdoor world again, the cool breeze, the crunch of snow underfoot. There are a couple other returnees out for strolls too, but whenever he and Emma pass them on the path, they send Killian annoyed glares. After they pass a particularly unfriendly trio of older men who step out of his way as if he’s carrying some disease, Killian finally clues in.

“I suspect they’ve learned of my transgression the other night,” he murmurs, and Emma’s grimace confirms it.

“Yeah. That’s why you’re still in solitary for now.”

He nods, and his brightened mood dims a bit, disheartened that he’s going to have to return to his sad little cell at the end of the walk. “I see.”

Emma sighs, sensing the change in his mood. “Hopefully it won’t be for too long, just until things settle down a bit. I know you don’t like it in there. And besides that, I know we’re trying to transition to more independent living for all the returnees – I mean, getting you a place to live that’s not on Storybrooke. But that’s still being worked out, so for now you’re still in isolation.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Really? You’re going to let me go?”

Emma frowns, and a flash of hurt crosses her features. “I told you, Killian. We were never going to keep you here forever. It was only until –”

“I know, I know,” he interrupts, “but that is still the plan? Even after ... the other night?”

Her expressions softens, and she nods. “Yeah. I mean, now that the whole world knows what you look like, it might slow things down a bit. Regina will want to make sure it’s safe for you to leave, but yes. You’re not a prisoner here, Killian.”

“I know, Swan.”

That makes Emma look to him, and he realizes he’s just admitted he basically trusts Storybrooke’s word. He’s not sure if he wants to take it back, or to quickly play it off as a quip, but then Emma’s smiling widely, and he suddenly is happy she knows that he is starting to trust them, to trust her.

“I’m glad to hear that. And I’m glad I was able to get you of that cell for even a little bit.”

He nods in agreement, and then realizes suddenly that while his punishment of the cell is still in effect, he still doesn’t know what her consequences were for his actions. She’s walking briskly, rubbing her hands together to warm them in the cold wind, and Killian reaches out a hand, resting it on her arm to stop her trek.

“Swan, wait. I just wanted to say – I don’t know what your sergeant did to you because of my actions, but I want to apologize if my actions had any detrimental consequences for you. That was not my intention.”

For a moment, a brief flicker of surprise crosses her features, but then she smiles. “Thanks for saying that, and it’s okay, Killian. I just had to stay home for a few days, and besides ... I get why you tried to escape.”

Now it’s his turn to be surprised. “You do?”

She shrugs, and for some reason, a light blush of red colours her cheeks. “Yeah. I get feeling trapped in a place you feel you don’t belong in, and wanting to escape. I know I called you an idiot that night – sorry, by the way – but ... well, I understand. So, really, it’s okay.”

Her words ring of familiarity with the idea of being locked away, and Killian realizes that while Emma Swan knows a lot about him, he hardly knows anything about her or her own backstory.

“I meant what I said the other day, Swan. You are a mystery. I’ve not met anyone like you before.”

She smiles, and for a moment, they’re just standing there, his hand on her arm, and he can’t help but think how utterly beautiful she is when she smiles. It’s not like he hasn’t ever noticed how beautiful she is before – it is truly impossible to overlook – but in this winter light her hair flickers between platinum and gold, catching the light as if it too were made of snowflakes; her green eyes seem to gleam as if they’re composed of sea ice and her smile makes the frigid air around them feel several degrees warmer.

Of their own volition, his eyes flicker down to her lips for the briefest of moments, and he wonders what it would be like to press his lips against hers, to see if her smile is as warm as it seems. Emma must’ve seen his glance too because her cheeks redden, eyes widen, and she’s stepping back, his hand falling from her arm, and the moment is broken.

“Well,” she says, lightly as she starts to walk again, Killian a beat behind, “I can’t say I’ve ever met a pirate either.”

“And certainly not one like me,” Killian adds quickly, unable to stop himself, and that makes Emma roll her eyes in good humour.

“Right, of course.”

Speaking of being a pirate ... that reminds him.

“Swan,” he says, and she glances to him, a look of caution to her eyes.

“Yeah?”

“On my first night here, my possessions were confiscated. Will I ever have them returned?”

All traces of wariness disappear from her features, and she’s instantly the professional again. “Oh yes, of course. I don’t know about your clothes, I think those were all destroyed for contamination purposes –” Killian sighs dramatically and Emma cracks a smile – “but I know they kept stuff they could more easily clean. I can go down to Collection and see for you; I know a couple other returnees have their stuff back already. What things did you have?”

“Not much,” he says, and he hopes it doesn’t sound bitter, because he’s trying not to be, trying to not focus on all the things he lost. He supposes it was lucky that he was so sentimental that he kept most of his valuables on him at all times, for at least he hasn’t lost it all. “A sword, a dagger, a handful of rings, an old satchel’s insignia, a flask of rum –”

Emma snorts, and at Killian’s raised eyebrow, says, “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just – well, there’s a stereotype about pirates and rum. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”

Killian chuckles, and he can already imagine what it must be, just knowing the other pirates of his time and his very own crew, not to mention himself. “I like to think I helped with that stereotype.”

Emma hums. “270-year-old rum, I bet that’s something. I hope they didn’t dump it.” The thought hadn’t occurred to Killian and it must show on his face because Emma laughs, and adds, “If they did, we’ll replace it. We’ve got some good rum today too.”

“I’m going to hold you to that, Swan.”

They walk in silence for a bit longer, companionable in the quiet. After a few moments, Emma says, “Tell me more about being a pirate. I’ve always been interested in them. What was it like?”

Killian tenses; though Emma did stand up for him knowing he’s a pirate, he’s not quite ready to share the rest of the darkness that’s shrouded his life, and he replies, quickly, “It seems you know everything about me already.” Then he frowns. “That reminds me – how do you know so much?”

To his relief, though Emma’s eyes are knowing, she lets him switch the subject, and she says, “Remember those moon landing videos we watched? They’re on what’s called the Internet. There’s information on everything on there, so I just Googled your name.”

He blinks at her, running over the foreign word in his mind and coming up blank. “Googled?”

Emma chuckles, but it’s not unkind, and her brow crinkles as she tries to figure out how to explain this to him. “Yeah. Um – it’s a search engine? A way to search the ... global library.”

Sometimes Killian’s reminded of just how different this world is, and he shakes his head. “Well I don’t have access to such a thing, so we’ll have to do things the old fashioned way with you.”

“Me?” Emma echoes, and she sends him a strange look. “What do you mean?”

“Come now, Swan. You know me, and I hardly know you. I think it’s only fair if you tell me about yourself too.”

She stares at him, and shakes her head with a snort. “I’m not that interesting, Killian.”

“You certainly are,” he retorts instantly. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve met here, Swan, and I’ve met a woman who thinks she fell down a rabbit hole and went to a different world.”

Emma rolls her eyes, but her cheeks are pink again and Killian’s not sure if its from the biting wind or the effect his words had on her. “Well, you’ve got to admit, after time travelling to the future, falling down rabbit holes doesn’t sound so far fetched anymore.”

Killian sees the deflection and he raises an eyebrow at her. “Humour me, Swan. You’re the only company I’ve had for days who doesn’t glare at me. Well, not all the time,” he amends, as she deposits a pointed glare upon him. “Besides ... you have said that I should try to learn about this world. How can I do that without talking to the people who’ve lived here?”

Emma pauses again, and he thinks she’ll deflect again, roll her eyes and tell him to shut up, but to his surprise, she says, a bit hesitantly, “What do you want to know?”

Everything.

The word pops into his mind, unbidden and earnest, but Emma still looks like a skittish animal, ready to bolt, so he says instead, “Whatever you want to tell me. We can start with an easy question, if you like. How did you start working here?”

Emma lets out a short laugh. “That is definitely not an easy question.”

She doesn’t offer anymore than that, and Killian lets the silence hang between them. For as much as he still doesn’t know Emma, she’s something of an open book – hidden behind walls, secretive with any part of her own story, and pushing her will only make her scramble further away.

He knows because that’s who he is too.

And Emma must know that too, because she wanted to let him tell his own story, not to assume she knew it all from her Google. Even just now, when she asked more about his past, she let his own deflection stand. So Killian decides to let her keep her secrets, decides he can wait until she wants to tell him in her own time too.

“It’s okay, Swan,” he says, and Emma glances to him with guarded eyes. “I was just teasing. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

The corner of her mouth quirks up in a small smile of gratitude, and they continue their walk in silence for a bit more. They’re rounding the small pathway, coming back up to the barracks, when Emma surprises him again and speaks.

“No, you’re right. The best way to get to know this world is to get to know what it’s like here.” He looks to her, but she’s silent again, clearly at war with herself in her head, but then she shakes it slightly, straightening her back. When she speaks her voice is tight, controlled, and she says, “When I was a baby, I was left on the side of a road by my parents.”

Whatever he was expecting her to say, that is not it and he nearly stumbles on the icy path. “You were – what? As an infant?”

Emma nods, and though her face is solemn and apparently unbothered, she does run her hand up her arm in discomfort; the pain of that abandonment seemingly not as far from the surface as she would like to show.

“Yeah. Luckily a little boy found me pretty quickly afterwards and then the police brought me here to Storybrooke after I spent a few days in the hospital. Apparently I was pretty cold when they found me cause it was October, even with the baby blanket I had.” She pauses, a sad expression twisting her features, and then she shakes her head. “Anyways, when I was looking for a job a few years ago, my old boss re-introduced me to this place. It seemed like fate.”

Killian still can’t believe her story, and he, for the first time in a long time, is lost for words. He understands that not every woman wants their child, but even in his day children would be dropped at orphanages or on doorsteps – somewhere they’d be discovered relatively quickly, at the very least. But to leave Emma beside a road in cool autumn, alone ... well that certainly puts his own abandonment into perspective. He at least had known familial love for a short time before it all fell apart, but this world’s cruelty had dealt Emma a cold blow before she even had a chance.

He reaches out, and grasps Emma’s hand with his own, tugging her to a stop again. Both of their hands are icy cold, and she starts a little at the movement, sending him a startled look, but doesn’t pull away as Killian runs his thumb over the back of her hand in a comforting circle.

“That is truly awful, Emma,” he says, and he really means it. “I am sorry you had to go through such an ordeal.”

A sad smile lingers on her face for a moment, and she nods in recognition. But then she straightens abruptly, and pulls her hand away, stuffing both of them into her jacket pockets.

“I mean, it was a long time ago, and working here helps,” she says, and her voice sounds distant now, as if she was talking of nothing more than the weather. “It feels like, in a way, I can help people who were like me. To try to reunite them with their families, or if they’ve got no family, to find them a home where they can try to be happy again.”

Killian nods; he can certainly see the passion Emma has for her job here and all the returnees, even if right now she’s looking incredibly solemn and serious. “I think you’re doing an amazing job at that, Swan. Even with bullheaded pirates like me getting in your way.”

Emma laughs at that, and sends him an appreciative smile as they start walking again. They don’t bring up child abandonment again, and their walk back to the barracks is full of light-hearted subjects, such as Killian’s favourite type of rum (“Haitian and Barbadian rums are delicious, but nothing can best Jamaican”) and how exactly they combatted scurvy on the ships (“Potatoes and oranges, Swan. Potatoes and oranges.”)

The guard seated by his isolation room lets out a sigh of relief when Killian and Emma finally come around the final corner, though Killian’s mood darkens as he realizes he’s going to have to say goodbye to her now and hello to solitude again.

The guard opens the door, gesturing Killian in without a word, but Emma rests her hand on his arm to pause him. Killian glances back, and she smiles gently at him.

“See you later, okay? I’ll do what I can to get you out of here, but hopefully we can at least go for another walk tomorrow.”

He nods, and though he’s not looking forward to another day of silence, he has tomorrow to look forward to now too. “Thanks, Swan. See you tomorrow.”

She smiles again in departure, removing her hand, and the moment Killian’s back in his room, the door is swinging shut, and Killian’s alone in silence again. Only this time, with the winter freshness still stinging his cheeks and the lingering scent of Emma’s perfume, it doesn’t feel so lonely.

The guard clearly wants to give Emma a lecture the moment the door to Killian’s room is shut, but she ignores him and hurries back out of the barracks, walking briskly across the grounds to her office.

She rubs her arms as she walks, chilled by the cold, and if she’s honest, a bit thrown by the walk with Killian. She went into it expecting him to be grouchy and moody, but he was the opposite, happy to see her, sociable, and, most surprising, apologetic.

And more than anything, she’s surprised with herself. It’s always been easy to talk with him about this world, to explain new things to him, but she’s surprised how easy she found it to talk to him about other things too.

Like her past – where had that come from? Though she had shied away at first, retreated behind her trusty walls, there’d be a stronger urge to not hide, to share her story with someone, with him. And Emma doesn’t talk about that with anyone and certainly not with her clients here in Storybrooke. But it was like when he apologized for getting her into trouble, one of the protective walls encasing her had cracked.

A slim crack, the beginnings of a break, but still – a crack, because, well, no one has ever apologized for their own actions getting her into trouble.

And then it was only too easy to open to him. Like she said, she knows what it’s like to feel trapped. More than that even, she knows how it is to be broken and hurt and scared by what’s happened to her that she can’t trust anyone around her, even those who just want to help. Him taking the step to trust her, to say that he knows Storybrooke isn’t trying to keep him here as a prisoner ... well it made Emma want to take a step forward too, to trust him with a part of herself too.

She realizes as she finally enters her office building that she didn’t ask him why he had brushed her shoulder in Regina’s office, nor why he stood up for her to the sergeant. But she recalls the brief moment his eyes had moved to her lips and the look in his eyes and well ... that’s all the answer Emma needs.

That makes her quicken her step to her office, needing some privacy and a moment alone to sort through her emotions.

But, as usual for Emma, sorting through emotions means clamping down on them and pretending she doesn’t have any. When she arrives, she pushes all of the thoughts aside and instead, she focuses on trying to figure out a way to get Killian out of isolation because that’s easy, that’s just tactics, that’s something she can do without any silly emotion getting in the way.

She first calls Regina, but she doesn’t answer, so Emma calls Belle instead. The counsellors have more control over this area, being in charge of mental health and all, so Emma hopes Belle can do something more than her.

And luckily Belle answers, but they only talk briefly as she’s headed to an appointment with another returnee. Emma outlines why she thinks Killian should be allowed out sooner – if the guard at Killian’s door is any indication, they’re going to stick to him like glue now, so its doubtful he’ll get in trouble with any of the other returnees. As well, if they’re still trying to convince him he’s not a prisoner, this is the way to do it, and even more importantly – Emma doesn’t want him to have to spend any more time in a little cell than he has too.

To her relief, Belle agrees, and says she’ll do what she can do to get it all sorted. Emma thanks her, and after they hang up, she’s only just picked up a file folder to review another case, still standing, when there’s a soft knock on her door.

The door is half-ajar, and to her surprise, its Graham standing there. She recalls his cool attitude from their phone call that morning, and she can’t help the wave of apprehension that washes over her at the sight of him. His stiff posture, shoulders tight and tense, a file folder clutched in white-knuckled hands, doesn’t help either.

“Emma? Can I talk to you for a moment?”

At her nod, he steps into the room, twisting to shut the door softly behind him; that increases Emma’s certainty that she’s not going to like this conversation. He stops when he’s standing across from her, her cluttered desk a barrier between them, his fingers fiddling with the edges of the file folder in nervousness, and he gestures to her desk chair.

“You might want to sit down.”

Emma sets her own folder down and crosses her arms across her chest, remaining standing. “What’s going on, Graham?”

He hands Emma the file folder he brought with him. There’s two names typed across the label, DAVID NOLAN and MARY MARGARET BLANCHARD, and while Emma doesn’t know who David Nolan is, she does remember the small dark haired returnee named Mary Margaret. She’s the returnee Emma collided with down at the lake, and spoke to briefly with Graham a few weeks ago, the one who was looking for her daughter.

“Is everything okay?” Emma asks, flipping absently through a few of the pages. The folder is full of counsellor and doctor’s notes she just skims over, as her attention lingers on a few sheets that have complicated looking laboratory jargon on them, the words genetic counsellor under a signature on the bottom, and she frowns. She doesn’t know what that means, but it can’t be good.

“Has something happened to them?”

Graham lets out a sort of strangled cough, and Emma glances up sharply to him. “Not – not to them, per se.” He pauses, making Emma’s eyes narrow even more, and then continues, in a strained voice, “You – you remember that day when you met Mary Margaret in the cafeteria with me? And how she mentioned – how she mentioned she was looking for her daughter?”

Emma nods, slowly, and the memory of that conversation floats to the forefront of her mind. She doesn’t think much of it, not sure why Graham’s brought it up, until a particular line stands out to her –

It’s just my daughter. Her name was – is – Emma too.

Goosebumps trickle down her spine, and she has to suppress a shiver. Coincidence, she thinks firmly, and trying to prove it to herself, to have Graham cull her terrifying train of thought, she demands, “What about the daughter?”

He hesitates again. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

Emma just glares at him in response, and he sighs.

“Okay, okay.” He pauses again, chewing on his words. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Emma. I’ve been trying to come up with a way all morning. We did so many tests, and I didn’t believe it at first either, because I mean, what are the chances, after all this time and in this way? But all the tests came back positive, and we even checked things over with the genetics team a few times to be sure and they’ve assured us the tests are accurate –”

He’s rambling, and though Emma’s starting to feel a heavy pressure in her chest, a dam about to burst, he hasn’t said it yet and that means there’s still a chance she’s misunderstanding, that her whole world isn’t about to flip in a moment –

“Graham. What are you talking about? Who is their daughter?”

He takes a deep breath, rambling stopping in an instant, and he says, “Emma – it’s you.”

#cs ff #cs mc ff #captain swan #ouat #a place in time

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tinymixtapes · 7 years

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Music Review: Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me

Mount Eerie A Crow Looked At Me [P.W. Elverum & Sun; 2017] Rating: 5/5 “Everybody, it’s gonna happen. You know it’s gonna happen. It happens every day. Billions and billions of people have already died. You too will die. Sing along with us, won’t you?” – Daniel Johnston, “Funeral Home” We are always dying. We die because we fight over shiny stuff. We die because we drive with our eyes on our screens or swallow the wrong things. We die because we extract ancient dead things from the ground that in turn pollute our lungs and synthesize the hydrocarbons that do us harm. We die because our country told us to, because sometimes our stomachs are denied nutrition, because sometimes it’s easier to die than to engage in culture. Of course, we most often die because our cells stop dividing — a phenomenon we equate with ageing. We get old, we die. But sometimes these cells express the opposite: uncontrollable growth and division, which can then lead to a lump, the potential for spreading, and then, sometimes, death. When my wife told me in October 2013 that she was diagnosed with breast cancer, my first thought arrived as a question. It wasn’t about what type of breast cancer, how advanced it was, or which treatments would be required. It wasn’t about how to tell our son or our family or our friends. None of that crossed my mind. As I stood there shocked and unable to mutter any sort of consoling platitude, wrapping my arms around her as she sobbed, the only thought I had in my mind was: Is this person I’m hugging right now going to die? --- My wife is fortunately still alive, but Phil Elverum’s is not. On July 9, 2016, Geneviève Castrée — Phil Elverum’s wife, artist/musician, the mother to their daughter, and his 13-year companion — died from pancreatic cancer. A Crow Looked At Me is Phil’s open-letter tribute to her, an 11-song album that details loss and grief wearily and pensively, but with a clarity of mind. Similar aesthetically to works like Dawn and Little Bird Flies Into A Big Black Cloud, Phil presents his thoughts here with stunning candor, using just a laptop and a microphone to capture his characteristically amorphous guitar lines and thin yet comforting balm of a voice. It was recorded in the room that Geneviève died in and performed mostly on her instruments. The lyrics were written on her paper. But the specifics of its sounds and details of its creation feel as irrelevant and unimportant as any “review” of it (which is why the rating above means absolutely nothing). This isn’t just an album about death. It’s an album that lives death. Death, here, isn’t simply a cessation of bodily functions; it’s an implied process: the process of dying, the process of grieving, the process of performing these processes of death and grief. It’s a testament to how death paradoxically roots itself in life, smudging our desire to concretize abstractions and couching our anxieties in the very human tendency toward wonderment: What is death? What is life? Why does her body look this way? Why do I feel bitter? What do I do now? Rather than wailing existential poetry about the universe and anthropomorphizing the elements through his typically keen, self-aware wisdom, Phil has adopted a no-bullshit, matter-of-fact lyrical approach whose trailing musings and minimalistic narratives resemble those of a diary, a memento mori that acts more like a generous reminder of death’s impact than an artful expression of it. The resulting lyrics are shockingly simplified, but utterly disarming because of it: “I can’t get the image out of my head/ Of when I held you right there/ And watched you die,” he sings on “Swims” over swaying electic guitar, strummed as if it were a nylon. On the gorgeous “Ravens,” he softly croons over broken chords: “I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away/ I’m sorry.” Because Phil deliberately foregoes using metaphors and “big-picture reflections,” much of the album’s strength lies in the excruciating specificity of the domestic and the mundane: old underwear, bloody tissues, her squeaking chair, taking out the garbage, logging time and place with a journalistic rather than artistic flair. The latter loosely brackets off various moments in Phil’s grieving process, as if to ensure their transience. Reflection here is more about remembering than ruminating, Phil shifting from lyrics like “Our daughter is one and a half/ You have been dead 11 days” (“Seaweed”) to “Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?” (“My Chasm”). There are some truly sublime moments — the verses in “Ravens,” the refrain of “Soria Moria” — that join some of Phil’s greatest melodies, but it mostly sounds like he’s feeling his way through the chords and, ultimately, letting the words shape the songs. As a result, the melodies feel decidedly less worked over, oftentimes arriving loose and lopsided, almost indistinct. This approach, coupled with his avoidance of the towering, expansive textures of his recent work, ensures we don’t get too absorbed by our own thoughts, that we don’t get overly seduced by its musicality lest we forget that “death is real,” the album’s pseudo mantra. Which is fitting: we don’t sing along to this album, we cry to it. There’s an entrenched realism in play here, a constant, weary reminder of our soggy corporeality and our oftentimes futile attempts to transcend it. Because, for Phil, it’s not just that grief flails under a “crushing absurdity,” but that it also manifests physically, with knees failing, brains failing, faces contorting, bodies collapsing. Geneviève, too, is not just a dead wife and dead mother. Before becoming “burnt bones,” “dust,” and “ashes in a jar,” Geneviève is depicted as a dying face, a body transforming, a wife chemically reduced to something “jaundiced and fucked.” Because cancer kills, sure, but the destruction happens over time. I don’t know what it was like in Phil’s household, but ours was constantly on alert, self-isolating ourselves from the world because we were terrified of germs that could derail any progress. There were unexpected allergic reactions and multiple emergency trips, fallen hair gathering in the corners of the wood floors, trivial fights and overbearing guilt and bitterness that we are still working to get through. Intimacy was replaced by hospital gowns and premature goodnights, the body ravaged by toxic medicines, the body dismembered and, later, reconstructed. It all weighed on our then three-year-old son, who at first couldn’t understand why Mom was always sleeping and why she couldn’t play with him. But time can be an asset, and on this album and in my own life, it acts not to heal, per se, but to deteriorate memory, to exploit its imprecision in order to make us remember less clearly. Death implies replacement, substitution, a clearing of space for someone else to breathe the air we breathe or buy the shit we buy or do the other ridiculous/awesome/mostly ridiculous things that humans do. But trauma, devastation, loss — they’re not things that just go away if you’re still breathing. They linger, reduced in severity over time only because they become less functional to the social whole and therefore less necessary to dwell on once grief is internalized, once it changes our composition, effectively allowing us to be “post-human in a past that keeps happening ahead of you,” as Joanne Kyger put it in the poem gracing the album’s cover (RIP Joanne Kygerb, who sadly died this week). It never feels right to “move on” from death, whatever that means, but the world does anyway, seemingly indifferent to our pain. So, we too join in — sometimes without realizing it, sometimes with an unbelievable awareness. As Phil sings on “Toothbrush/Trash”: “Today I just felt it for the first time three months and one day after you died. I realized that these photographs we have of you are slowly replacing the subtle familiar memory of what it’s like to know you’re in the other room, to hear you singing on the stairs, a movement, a pinecone, your squeaking chair, the quiet untreasured in-between times, the actual experience of you here. I can feel these memories escaping colonized by photos, narrowed down, told. My mind erasing.” I took a couple trips recently, one to visit my cousin and another to visit my aunt. But both trips were actually painful, awkward goodbyes: roughly a week after each visit, my cousin and my aunt would be dead, both due to cancer. “Auntie Shenshen died,” I told my son shortly after it happened. He paused, then replied, softly: “Don’t tell me that kind of stuff.” --- It’s not easy to hear about death, which is of course why A Crow Looked At Me is a challenging listen. Because unlike some of Phil’s earlier work, the album isn’t a simple aestheticization of death. “This new album is barely music,” said Phil in an interview with Pitchfork. “It’s just me speaking her name out loud, her memory.” But although the lyrics are ostensibly about his own experiences with death, Phil’s documentation from the frontlines of tragedy acts, in the end, as a selfless reflection of love, carrying Geneviève’s memory in and through song, letting his admiration for her override anxiety about who he is now and how he and his daughter fit in a world without her. As he put it in a note released with the album: The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known. As listeners, we are implicated through knowing, with the understanding that interpretation and value judgments here are essentially irrelevant. The album defies being used as an accessory for identity construction, and the words — most of which are written to Geneviève herself, except the faint glimmer of hope expressed in the final track to his daughter — are too direct, too intimate, too real to foster casual or interpretive listening. With A Crow Looked At Me, Phil — who had kept much of his family life private until last year’s GoFundMe campaign — has laid himself bare, sharing a dark, devastating moment in his family’s life with an open vulnerability that’s complemented by the strength and generosity required to give voice to it in the first place. Over many songs and many albums, Phil’s primary aim has been to communicate grand ideas, to be understood, and his own perception that he’s been unable to do so without misunderstanding has always haunted how he writes — sometimes awkwardly so. As he put it in an autobiographical essay, “[T]he truth is that I am sensitive to any thematic or lyrical misunderstandings because I actually do want to get my idea across, beyond just me, and I continue to try to get my blade sharper.” But by plummeting into the depths of his own cavernous pain on this release, relinquishing the obscuring metaphors and telling “everything as it is,” he has transformed personal grief into something like a universal sorrow, grounded in a loving, caring lucidity unlike any of his other works. Those who have suffered through loss will have much to relate with on A Crow Looked At Me, but it won’t be a salve for your despair. There are no instructions here on how to deal with grief, no moralistic epiphanies or clever grandiose poetics. But it could, at the very least, help some of us better understand how grief functions in our own lives, how being reflexive about loss can help us accept that “We are all always so close to not existing at all” or offer insight into how we too can function when “someone’s there and then they’re not.” In the context of our own narcissistic pretenses and the technologies that mediate our interactions — our constructed identities, our social media performances, our avatars and their simulations — the act of being brutally honest, of being uncomfortably direct through the highly flawed, imperfect thing we call language becomes an act of boldness and, for me, a source of inspiration. This is why I’m writing not as “Mr P” in this review, but as Marvin Lin: a longtime admirer of Phil’s music and a fellow caretaker, griever, and father, scared about the future but overwhelmed by feelings of openness and kinship. And it’s helping. http://j.mp/2mX2miL

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juliettespencerus · 5 years

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Women, Food and Health Interview with Marc David and Dr. Kelly Brogan

Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating Dr. Kelly Brogan, who is Board certified in psychology, psychosomatic medicine, reproductive psychiatry and integrative holistic medicine. She’s the Medical Director for Fearless Parent and an advisory board member for GreenmedInfo.com, Fit Pregnancy, Pathways to Family Wellness and lots more. In this compelling interview, they discuss how Dr. Brogan helps her patients get off what she calls “the ping pong” effect of trying alternative medicine then end up back in the conventional model, which can make it challenging for patients to engage a linear progression of betterment and wellness.

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Transcript:

Marc: Welcome, everybody. I’m Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are back in the Future of Healing Online Conference. I am here with an amazing woman, practitioner, a thought leader, Dr. Kelly Brogan. Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly: Great to be here, Marc.

Marc: I’m really glad you’re here, thanks so much. Let me take a minute or two and brag about you for our viewers and listeners. Dr. Kelly Brogan is Board certified in psychology, psychosomatic medicine, reproductive psychiatry and integrative holistic medicine. She practices functional medicine, which is a root cause approach to illness as a manifestation of multiple interrelated systems.

After studying cognitive neuroscience at MIT and receiving her MD from Cornell, Dr. Brogan completed her residency and fellowship at Bellevue and New York University. I used to live right there, by the way. She’s one of the nation’s only physicians with perinatal psychiatric training who takes a holistic, evidencebased approach in the care of patients with a focus on environmental medicine and nutrition.

She’s also a mom of two and an active supporter of women’s birth experience. She’s the Medical Director for Fearless Parent and an advisory board member for GreenmedInfo.com, Fit Pregnancy, Pathways to Family Wellness and lots more.

She practices in New York City and lectures all over. Dr. Brogan, it just seems like you kind of burst onto the scenes and have really been holding an important voice I think in a lot of places in health and wellness and mental health and physical health. Can you just give us a sense of how you got on your journey as a doctor, a psychiatrist, a healer? What prompted you?

Kelly: Sure, yes. First of all, that’s very flattering to hear. I’m not sure my impact has been quite that widespread but I do have a big mouth and I’m trying to spread the word about a couple of things.

I have a very sort of defiant personality, to my parents’ chagrin, and have always been somebody who felt that I had to pave my own path. I have been very interested in brain health and in behavioral medicine since college since I worked on a suicide hotline at MIT. Apparently that’s quite a relevant role to play at that college unfortunately.

In studying psychiatry I really felt like I had relinquished my interest in women’s health and all of the wonderful things around caring for women that I think come very natively to me. There’s a specialty in psychiatry called reproductive psychiatry, as you mentioned in my bio. It’s sort of a burgeoning specialty. There’s about 300 or 400 specialists around the world. The nature of the specialty is to explore the literature and try to help patients around informed consent.

If they are going to take a medication during pregnancy or breastfeeding, what does the eminent literature support? I spent a number of years medicating women with all sorts of medications after they would consent, given the information I had to share with them. It wasn’t until my own pregnancy during my fellowship that I began to sort of look beneath the hood a bit. I began to research obstetrics and sort of what my OB at the time was telling me about what my options were around ultrasound frequency, around birthing parameters in the hospital.

It’s like looking behind the curtain at Oz when you realize that it’s a house of cards that pharma built, that we as doctors are really inhabiting. Once I started to investigate that and obstetrics, then I finally shone the light on psychiatry with the help of a very important book by a journalist named Robert Whitaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic. I remember reading it in 2010 and just crying because it was so disabling to me. I could barely meet with a patient again and pick up my prescription pad, which had been my only tool before then.

It really inspired an activism in me. I care for patients, I come to my office every day, I love my job but I also have a burning core that things need to change and that transparency and patient empowerment and grassroots activism are the answer to that. That’s really what I wake up thinking about and go to sleep ruminating about every day.

Marc: All right, good for you. Kelly, in your years of practicing psychiatry and seeing patients, do you notice any trends when it comes to people’s health or people’s mental health that just sort of catch your attention? Sometimes the research might show this, that or the other thing, or not. The clinical eye notices trends, notices patterns. What do you tend to see?

Kelly: I think most of the clinicians you’re speaking to in this summit would share my perspective. I was even just talking to a friend about this the other day. When I started practice functional medicine, whatever it was, six or so years ago. I took a left turn from my conventional training. I used to see a patient who maybe had some PMS symptoms and was considering coming off of her Zoloft at some point before pregnancy. It was easy. It was very simple interventions. It was really quite straightforward.

These days I have patients coming in who are my age, look fairly well actually but have come in with 24hour home health aides because they cannot even function. They cannot hold a job. Nobody knows what’s going on. There’s a constellation of physical impairments that precludes seeing any given one specialist because it’s so broad and encompassing of their physiology. These patients have often seen many other functional medicine or alternative medicine providers and haven’t necessarily benefitted from targeted interventions.

It’s a testament to how sick we are becoming and in what complex ways. That’s really what has started to help me orient patients that I work with to my ethos. I’ve gotten patients well again in a relatively short period of time, mostly through dietary intervention. Then I’ve had patients take an antibiotic, start on a proton pump inhibitor, get a vaccine or start on birth control and not disclose that to me, let’s say for a month or two, and then come in symptomatic. Often the undoing of that, particularly in the realm of vaccines and antibiotics, can be extremely complex and sometimes outside of the realm of what’s possible, I think.

To begin to think about health more through a lens of radical holism, through a lens of holding your body to a level of integrity that really precludes pharmaceutical interventions is where I get my best outcomes. I think it’s when patients try, and it’s understandable, right? They try alternative medicine, maybe it helps a little bit and then there’s a crisis and they end up in the conventional model for dealing with the crisis. Then they try to undo that. It’s this pingponging that I think can make it very challenging for patients to engage a linear progression of betterment and wellness.

There’s no doubt that we’re getting sicker.

Marc: I want to say I love the image of the patients pingponging back and forth but I see that so much. I think it’s such a great piece to underline because it’s almost like we have this dichotomy set up for us. You either do the holistic practitioner who might not give

us the kinds of interventions that we need or just doesn’t have the whole picture and then we bop over to the medical model that we’ve been used to for 40 or 50 years, which can bring us down a black hole sometimes.

I’m wondering how do you as a clinician when you’re starting to help people kind of graduate from the pharmaceutical model and work in a different way, how is that for you going against the grain, so to speak?

Kelly: Well, it’s fine. It’s where I belong. I’m only comfortable here. This obviously will resonate with you. I think a concept that is very operative in my practice, and actually even my engagement with my friends and family around their health, because of course all of manage as the point people for the health of our friends and family for the most part. It’s this concept of fear. We know that it is potentially one of the most determinant factors in clinical outcomes.

I think I’m just built this way. I don’t know that I cultivated it, although I do work on my spiritual practice fairly diligently. I am somebody who is fairly unhindered by potential consequences. In fact, I feel what I’m doing is true and right.

When I work with patients I think I transfer a bit of that. There’s probably some effect clinically of that, just being around my perspective. For example, if I have a patient who wants to come off of psychiatric medication, and that’s a lot of what I do these days in my practice is tapering people off of medications they’ve been on sometimes for 30 years, I won’t start the taper until we have worked around an empowerment model where they actually feel they can relinquish it. If they are whiteknuckling it and they feel like the moment that last dose is given that the other shoe’s going to drop and what’s going to happen, I don’t have my safety net and I’m naked out here in the world. It’s just this feardriven process. It’s really a waste of their time and my time to do it because it’s not going to work.

In psychiatry there is a really fascinating body of literature that supports the role of expectancy. It’s this word for essentially the placebo effect or the nocebo effect. I love this topic because when I was in training the idea of a placebo was really just this nuisance to sort of get out of the way and how do we solve for it. It’s a fascinating phenomenon in human physiology. Why some people have an effect versus another is actually something that’s being studied the way we are studying any other epigenetic phenomenon.

In psychiatry it’s particularly relevant. I talk about a study that came out a couple months ago. I think it’s just such a good example of this. Patients were treated on Prozac. These are the patients who would tell you, “Yes, Prozac totally saved me. I’m doing great. I’m really so, so thankful that it exists.”

They were told that they were going to be randomized to either placebo or continued on their dose. This was a crossover. Continued on their same dose that they took on Monday, now on Friday they’re just going to take it again. The mere suggestion that they might be given a placebo resulted in depression symptoms and loss of gains in both groups across the board.

The power of belief in psychiatry has been studied I think most thoroughly by a psychologist named Irving Kirsch who has done really brilliant analyses. Two very important ones, one in 1998 and one in 2008, where he really started to look at the power of what he calls the active placebo effect. Essentially in these trials when patients are given let’s say Prozac versus a placebo, Prozac has side effects that a placebo obviously doesn’t. Immediate side effects. Headache, gastrointestinal, activating side effects.

As soon as those kick in it’s like all of these decades of direct to consumer advertising programming about what this medication is going to do to fix your brain are activated. These are healing pathways.

When you’re using an inert placebo as opposed to an active placebo then you’re really doing what’s called breaking blind. You’re no longer engaging the classical model of an experiment. It’s the belief that is powering, according to him, the vast majority if not the totality of the drug’s effects. Maybe it’s particular to psychiatry, but maybe not.

That’s where he’s focused.

We have to really look at the types of beliefs that we are supporting and engendering. The ones that I obviously feel most strongly about are those that suggest that it’s all in here, it’s all inside. The complexity, in chiropractic it’s called vitalism. The complexity and the regenerative potential of our physiology in concert with our psychology, with our mindscape is limitless. It’s just a matter of tapping into it. We sort of the humor is involved in thinking that we’ve cracked the code.

I was a neuroscience major at MIT and I really loved studying that because it’s the allure of thinking we’ve figured it out. We’ve figured the brain out is so preposterous. Psychiatry really is one of the greatest offenders. Reducing human behavior almost to one chemical, serotonin, maybe norepinephrine and dopamine, when the complexity of what goes on on a second basis in the brain not only involves 100 at least neurochemicals, but also the immune system which when I was in college we didn’t even know it existed in the brain. Clearly there’s a level of unraveling complexity that should be exciting. It shouldn’t be something we resist or sort of feel even daunted by. I guess it’s about your perspective.

Marc: Talking about perspective, here we are living in a time where it seems that depression is around us. It seems to be there. There’s a lot of depressed people, there’s a lot of people on antidepressant medications. What is depression to you? Forgive me if this is an impossible to answer question but I would love to hear the impossible, what is depression? From your perspective why do you think it’s with us to the degree that it is?

Kelly: That’s a great question. It’s the leading cause of disability in the world. We have about 11% of Americans on psychotropics. We have toddlers. It’s cradle to grave medicating. Our foster system is particularly implicated. We have one in four women of reproductive age, which is of course my demographic of interest, potentially moving into a pregnancy and all of the largely unexplored epigenetic effects of medication exposure every day.

It does beg the question do we have more depression? Is it better diagnosed? I think it’s both and, right? It’s that we do have more depressed people in the world. Why? Depression is this largely meaningless wastebasket term, in my opinion, for all of the malaise that is the accumulated toxicant burden of our daily life.

When we look at concepts like mitochondrial dysfunction, we look at concepts like dysbiosis, we look at nutrient deficiency, we look at endocrine disruption. The inevitable clinical outcome of those exposures in a vulnerable person are going to include the symptoms of depression: mood changes, sleep changes, energy changes, changes to sexual appetite, changes to metabolism. These are sort of epidemic proportions of people who are dealing with this sort of layer with disruption. It’s almost become a new normal.

Then, of course, there are the people who are more disabled and more severely impacted. They’re often caught in sort of the chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, sometimes Lyme disease nets. They always have psychiatrists involved, right? Psychiatry has become sort of the last stop for a lot of patients for whom conventional medicine is ill equipped to help.

For example, your conventional doctor runs a thyroid panel and your TSH is 4.1, it’s within normal limits. That’s all they check. They’re not interested in whether or not there’s any autoimmunity or whether free hormones are optimized. You’re going to be told your thyroid is fine, you’re fine, I see nothing here and you probably should see a psychiatrist. In that way the limitations of conventional diagnostics which, of course, are totally antiquated at this point really set patients up for psychiatric visits. So does our lifestyle.

Then there is the other I guess darker underbelly of how we are potentially promoting epidemics in two ways. One is because of diagnostic criteria ballooning. We just had the DSM5 come onto the scene and if you look at how the DSM has ballooned from the 1950s this isn’t evidencebased medicine. It’s essentially a dictionary of terms that a bunch of white men sit around a table, most of whom have pharmaceutical ties, and they come up with terminology.

Maybe some of them have good intentions and they want to help patients and they want to encompass more people, bring them into treatment, but I certainly don’t have that rosy perspective on it. I do have concerns that what we are in fact doing is creating a broader pharmaceutical market without any objective testing to preclude prescription. You got a psychiatrist’s office and what do they do? They chat with you sometimes for 15 minutes and you get a prescription. There’s no blood work, there’s no spec scan, there’s no EEG, there’s nothing.

There’s not even an awareness that that should be a gatekeeping diagnostic procedure just so that we’re not medicating people inappropriately or dangerously. There’s not even a fear of liability because it’s built into gold standard practice now to medicate before you even think.

Then there’s, as I mentioned, Robert Whitaker’s work, which really asks the question that you’re posing, which is we have escalating rates of disability from depression. We

also have escalating treatment, right, as I mentioned. Shouldn’t those be inversely correlated? Shouldn’t treatment yield less disability? Isn’t that actually the point of it?

He explores a lot of the longterm data, most of which is not industry funded, and essentially comes to the conclusion which, of course, is very provocative but makes sense to me that it’s actually the medication treatment itself that is promoting disability. We are turning something that might have been a single episode of depression in the 1960s, spontaneously resolving within 12 weeks, certainly within a year, we’re turning that into a lifelong condition that essentially disables patients chronically. Where their quality of life is implicated, where their work potential is diminished, etcetera. There’s a lot of subjective parameters.

We have now I think a better understanding of how and why antidepressants, for example, but he really leaves no stone unturned. He looks at stimulants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, all of them. Why these medications force the body to adapt in a way that is wholly unnatural. In a small segment of people it may actually be an adaptive effect called by Joanna Moncrieff, another psychiatrist, called a drugbased effect.

In the same way that alcohol might help with some anxiety, that’s a drugbased effect. In some people antidepressants and the adaptive effects that the body engages may actually be helpful for them, but in the majority of patients their body adapts over time, they lose whatever potential transient benefit if they ever had one, and now they’re in a state of a dependent relationship with a chemical that is sometimes impossible to come off of.

That’s frightening. I used to prescribe. I never sat a patient down and said, “This is what we’re going to do for now but there is a possibility if we don’t reevaluate this in three months that you could never, ever get off this medication until you die.” I never said that to anyone. Now I see it. Now I see it in the flesh that this is a real issue.

These medications have been around now for the better part of several decades and so we see the longterm effects. I absolutely think Whitaker is onto something.

Marc: It seems like we become so accustomed, it’s almost as if pharmaceuticals and antidepressants, it’s kind of like candy. We give it out and it’s motherhood, it’s there, you just do this, we don’t question it. The fact that we’re giving it to our youth, we’re giving it to our toddler, we’re giving it to our pets for goodness sake boggles my mind.

To me sometimes it just feels like all part of just sort of the larger psychiatric picture that we face which just feels like there’s a sense of fear and disempowerment as soon as there’s a glitch in the system, like, “Oh, I’m not feeling good, I’m feeling depressed, do something.” There’s almost like a panic button, it feels, that happens when I have any symptom.

Kelly: Yes, and it’s because we have been divorced from any sense of traditional wisdom. Particularly here in America but we’re really coopting that in other countries as well with our capitalistic influence. Any sort of appreciation of spiritual growth. When’s the last time you went through a really dark time or had a tough time? I bet that you came out of it shifted. That you came out of it evolved and that you took something from it that you don’t want to give back. You took something from it that you value.

Today we are raising children and we have certainly my generation is really living under the illusion that stress is pathological, it’s something to be suppressed. It’s not just that. We feel that way about fevers, aches and pains. We’ve lost this sense that it’s actually a message from our body that something is off.

Our body is highly skilled at recalibration, right? Homeostatic is a powerful force. When that is not possible it’s because there is a burden so large that the body is not able to respond without support.

This concept that there’s a free lunch, that we can just suppress a symptom, I referred to it as the whackamole phenomenon. It doesn’t work. It just absolutely doesn’t work that way. It’s, again, that fear that I believe the industry in partnership with media has really grabbed onto. We worry. It’s part of survival instinct. Rather than worrying about resolvable conflicts or allocating our fear appropriately to external stressors, we worry that we don’t have it in here to fix ourselves. We don’t have the intuition, we don’t have the wisdom and we don’t have the resources.

I think a lot of it is sort of like a crisis of that wisdom feeling disconnected from the natural world and the fact that we can’t just bomb germs into nonexistence. I mean, have we not learned that that doesn’t work? Everybody across the country knows that antibioticresistance is an issue, right? I think most. That’s entropliaic consciousness. We know that there’s no way we’re going to beat Mother Nature. It sounds so cliché but it’s totally true. It’s a ridiculous and preposterous notion.

I really try to educate patients about relocating that fear and really fearing pharmaceutical interventions for appropriate reasons, for documented adverse effects. Things like Tylenol, that that is an over the counter medication is astounding to me because of its lethality let alone its potential for chronic adverse effects. This is something that we should be afraid of, not a fever, for example, which is a native reflex aimed at recalibration. That’s what it’s for. It’s not just an annoying thing that your body is doing to get in your way.

We’ve just like totally lost patience, I think, really. It’s patience for ourselves. I’m an incredibly inpatient person. I’ve been working on this for many years. I get it. I totally understand wanting results quickly, wanting results yesterday. If you don’t work with your natural physiology and you don’t embrace distress that is appropriate to circumstance, then I think you’re really going to end up with an unfulfilling life when you look back. It’s a risk.

Marc: To me you brought up what I think is a fascinating topic which in a way is our relationship with time these days. Oftentimes this, too, shall pass when it comes to the fever, when it comes to the symptom. It seems like, yes, there’s this rush to get it over with so I can get back to whatever this thing is that I’m doing which is I’m working, I’m being busy, I’m important and all these things have to happen. We are busy and we do have important things to do. Yet time is so precious, it feels like. We want to make sure we speed up out of whatever seems to be stopping us.

Kelly: Yes, yes, absolutely. Again, I can relate to that. There is in the cultivation of mindfulness this idea of watching oneself with a dispassionate eye. There is in that an ability to identify things that aren’t serving you and to really start to look at what it is that you want. What is it you want out of this experience in life? Sort of Death of a Salesman style, we all know that the drudgery of our hyper stimulated existences for the most part is not where we derive fulfillment, right? People are living for their vacations, they’re living for this, “I’ll be happy when,” type of a thing.

One of the most powerful books I’ve read. I love reading books, if that’s not obvious. They influence me a lot. A book called Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. It’s short and sweet and it’s really sort of like straight to the point. Whereas I’ve read a ton of mindfulness texts and some of them are prescriptive and they tell you what to do in

four weeks and whatever. This is sort of no instructions, when you’re ready to live this way read this book and just do it. Just do it.

The idea is that you have a choice. You always, always have a choice to engage in lamentation, to engage in sort of the cluttered mess of our minds and to take the bait, to take the bait that if only you do this, if only after that, if I just fix this. It’s so urgent and compelling to try and focus to the point of acute anxiety on resolving our problems, but it never makes us happy. Think about it. Think about how many problems we’ve resolved and so many of us are still searching.

Personally, I’m a bit of a nihilist myself so personally happiness is not something I think is the Holy Grail, but I do think that a sense of ease and freedom and purpose are very important qualities for human existence.

When I’m working with patients I’m not really looking for them to come in and say, “God, I just feel so happy.” I don’t think that’s ever happened. I am looking for them to come in and say, “You know what? I feel ready for whatever’s coming and I’m okay with it. I’m okay with whatever’s coming.” It’s a sense of resilience that I think you cannot cultivate when you are in a dependent position relative to a paternalistic medical model and a pharmaceutical intervention. You have to be in charge. You have to be in this position of agency.

Marc: What do you see? How do people get there? Is it just, okay, they show up in your office and I’m ready and that’s who comes to you? Do you have to educate them? What do you see as the process by which people sort of arrive at this doorstep?

Kelly: That’s a great question and one that I continue to refine. I obviously have synergy with some patients from the moment we meet and then there are patients who I really have to drag down the path. That’s challenging.

I do think there is an element of readiness that sometimes I’ll meet a patient for a consultation and I’ll say, “I’m going to give you your road map. I have a sense you’re not ready yet, but when you’re ready it’s here. My door is open if it’s in six months, if it’s in two years.” I’ve had that happen. I’ve had patients come back to me after years, two or three years, and say, “Okay, I’m ready. Ready to roll now.”

I know that this doesn’t work for everyone but I have a very uncompromising approach where there’s essentially like dietarily, for example, I hold a fairly rigid bar. You probably could poke a lot of holes in that approach from a psychological perspective, but I do think that once you show patients that they are capable of adhering to a protocol that they otherwise would have felt they had no room for, we can expand to encompass a lot of stuff.

You show them they’re capable of doing it and then the results are selfevident. That becomes its own turbine engine. That becomes its own motivating force. I really can start to let go of it because they’ve already demonstrated to themselves that it was all in front of them.

Then there’s frankly minor help that I could offer in terms of nutrient support and supplementation and then resources for little crises that do come up. I really do think that it’s part of engaging a strict initial protocol that yields very high results, and then the patients can sort of it’s a process of selfeducation and connecting dots. I think that’s really all I offer people some of the time, is making sense out of this mess of dots in their life and trying to help them understand that this causes that. If I remove this or restrict this then I don’t suffer that. If I choose not to then I might suffer that, but at least I know why.

It’s so, so basic and simple but many of us need external accountability for that. I think that’s natural. A lot of us need trainers at the gym, nutritionists to keep us on the straight and narrow or a physician to help frame the entire process.

Marc: By the way, just so you know, I wouldn’t call your approach rigid when you set a high bar. To me it’s more like it’s thoughtful, it’s clear and it’s targeted. As you just said, sometimes that is what we need. Sometimes what we need is a little more vacation time and a little more spaciousness and a little more rule breaking. A lot of us, wow do we need some very clear guidelines to move through.

Kelly: Right, because how many times have we halfengaged a diet or tried half a bottle of supplements or went to a doctor once and then followed up eight months later? Not only is that sort of a waste of time and money but it also sends this sort of unempowering message that your efforts in the natural world are low yield. I resent that. It’s a metaissue because it’s absolutely not the case. The yield that I get and that my colleagues get in natural medicine blows conventional outcomes out of the water.

I have radical cures in my practice. I’m cool with that because that’s the patient’s perception. On a weekly basis when I was prescribing, it never happened one time. Not one time. I have developed sort of a mentorship relationship with Nick Gonzalez, who’s a holistic doctor here in New York. I think he’s one of the most shining examples. His outcomes using just targeted nutrients and detoxification support and his particular approach to healing, he has outcomes that have never been evidenced in clinical literature in the cancer realm, period, end of discussion. I think that’s profound.

How could you ever say that natural medicine is a window dressing treatment the way Memorial Sloan Kettering and all these integrative hospitals here in the city treat it.

You’re here for your chemo and radiation, and if you want you can go do a little yoga and maybe take some ginger root. When you really put it as the thrust of your treatment the potential for outcomes is just profound, it’s inspiring. It’s a bit about framing that perspective, I think.

Marc: It shows us what’s possible. It seems and this is where people like you, myself, once you understand this, I was just blown away, by the way, when you said when I was just doing pharma and giving people prescription drugs I didn’t have cures. I didn’t have the supposed miracle changes happening. Wow does that say something about what happens when a practitioner transforms her or his practice and steps into a brave new world. The possibility is wild.

Kelly: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Particularly if it’s a partnership that is predicated on a mutual respect for the potential of the work. Those are when the best outcomes happen and it’s, I do believe, because it has to do with the fact that when you meet a patient with the right energy you can help them to shed fear they don’t want. They don’t want to live their life feeling like they have to run to the doctor every second and they can’t live without pharmaceutical meds and they’re just putting out all these little fires all the time. People don’t want to live that way.

They want, I think, like a shepherd. You should never fake the funk. If it’s not your natural orientation it would make no sense to practice that way. Certainly if you feel passionately about it sometimes I think people just need to feel like they have partners in the journey. It can be that simple.

Marc: Kelly, where do you see the future of healing going when it comes to mental health, when it comes to who we are as physical beings, as emotional beings? Or I can say what would you like to see as we move into the future?

Kelly: I think they sort of dovetail because rather than being sort of pessimistic and end of days oriented around where things are going in terms of the medical industrial complex and associated legislation seeking to rob us of our civil liberties around health, I do think that on a consumer level, on a patient level, there is a growing dissatisfaction and a growing awareness of the limitations of a model that is so antiquated. Medical schools should be shut down today apart from emergency rotations, let’s say.

Frankly, I can’t even imagine being a conventional doctor in practice, how you meet patients with their myriad complex needs. It must be a horrible experience. We know that doctor burnout is a very real phenomenon.

There are a lot of efforts to expose corruption and lack of checks and balances at the level of the government and its association with various medical authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. I do think that there is an awareness that something is up.

It’s like the Bucky Fuller quote, it’s this idea of creating something else. Not working within a paradigm but creating something entirely different and making sure that it is so appealing that you don’t even have to really advertise it, it speaks for itself. That’s really what I think all of us are doing, fighting within the paradigm. While I am interested in doing it, interested in associated activism, it’s going to be a very slow road. A much quicker path is to just start to live well and feel well. Then people will ask, “What are you up to?”

I have two children who are never sick, never take an antibiotic, never have an ear infection. I had people ask me, “What do you feed them? You’ve never been to an emergency room?” These sorts of questions. Some of it is just a matter of truth in advertising and the medium can be the message. I do see that. It’s really a lot about social media, unfortunately. All of those EMS we’re absorbing every day off of our devices.

It’s a matter of the transfer of information happening at the speed of light in ways that it never could have occurred at times of needed revolution in the past. I like to remain

optimistic that we’re all interested in learning more about what we don’t know about health and human condition and remaining open to learning.

The articles and abstracts that I read on Pub Med every week are so exciting and mind blowing. There’s a lot of very smart people out there doing very cool things to elucidate our relationship. About the microbiome, for example, or our relationship to plants and the information that we receive from them on an epigenetic level. It’s just really cool science out there. I think there’s enough of us trying to put a megaphone to those brilliant researchers that were allowed to get into the homes of the Ohio soccer mom. I think that’s really exciting. That will be my part.

Marc: Yay. Well, I so appreciate your perspective and your approach and your voice. I know that on one level stepping outside the system a little bit and seeing things from a different perspective comes natural for you. At the same time looking from the outside it’s a fabulous talent and a fabulous quality. Really thank you for all your amazing work. How can viewers and listeners learn more about you, what you’re up to? How do we stay in touch?

Kelly: Awesome, I appreciate that, Marc. Coming from you especially. I have a website. It’s just my name, KellyBroganMD.com. I have a newsletter where I try to, again, digest these quarrels, make them clinically applicable. I call them snippets, so it’s just tiny blogs. I also write long, boring ones as well. I try to keep people updated because there is a ton of information to digest. I know very well that it’s hard to do that. Yes, that would be where to find me. I am on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of it as well.

Marc: Thank you once again for being a leader in new psychiatry, new medicine. Much kudos to you and really appreciate the conversation, Kelly.

Kelly: Thanks, Marc. Thanks so much.

Marc: Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Once again I’m Marc David on behalf of the Future of Healing Online Conference. Lots more to come, my friends. Take care.

from Healthy Living https://psychologyofeating.com/women-food-and-health-interview-with-marc-david-and-dr-kelly-brogan/

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anothergirlrecovering · 5 years

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Lynn 110

Lynn arrived while I was in her waiting room talking on the phone to a doctors office trying to get scheduled to have labs drawn for tomorrow. After I finish scheduling and I went into her office and apologized explaining that I was scheduling a doctors appointment for the labs. She said it was totally fine and then she grabbed a cup of water and came back in and sat down. She said that she felt dehydrated and was like yeah sometimes I feel dehydrated and then I’m like and here I am not drinking water and being confused about having so many UTIs and I was like you need to just get one of those really big cups to keep by your chair so that way you can drink it all day long and I said that’s what I do and she was like yeah and you know I’ve bought all my kids jugs like that so I need to just go ahead and do the same for me. I said yeah and she asked how my appointment with Peggy went. I said that it went well and I had gained a pound. She was like OK will that’s good but you can tell that she didn’t really know if that was good or not but I was like yeah and she was like so what else did Peggy say and I was like well I ordered the food and feelings workbook that we’re going to go through together and I told her about going to the doctor tomorrow and Continuing with the meal plan. She asked how things were going with the CBD oil and I said honestly it actually has decreased my anxiety and then but it hasn’t helped at all with the ruminating thoughts and so I’ve agreed to then I will go ahead and see your medication person and Lynn asked if I wanted to see somebody in my area or her is and I said her is because I don’t really want to see providers who work with my clients and also they all have a wait list anyway and she was like I think my person may have a wait list but I don’t know I’ll need to check with her and she was like honestly now that I think about it she owes me one so maybe she can squeeze you in anyway I am. I explained about my teen Client with OCD who had medication manage so well for his symptoms that he’s perfectly fine now and that he had been forgetting to take his medicine for like a week and he realized that even though some of the thoughts came back he was able to manage it really well because he’s been able to practice managing it with the medicine and so he’s considering eventually weaning down off of the medicine and I guess it sort of gave me some hope that I could do something like that where if I use it for now just to stabilize and get better mastery over my thoughts and she was like did he say it helped with his obsessive thoughts and I was like yeah his actual quote was that it helps him not get so stuck in his head and it was like yikes that’s me. So Lynn was all for them and said that she would talk to her person and get back to me. I said that was fine. She brought up just how incredible it will be for me to really work through this and how she wants to keep me out of the hospital and really see me get better and how I’ll be able to not share my story with clients but to be able to give back to them in a different way because I’ve had this experience of learning and working through it and I joked and was like I’m not a social worker so I could share my story and she laughed and was like I mean OK and I was like you know because you guys have like the strictest rigid personal space boundaries and she was like yeah I can absolutely see why the boundaries are there but I also see that they aren’t really necessary for everybody and I was like I literally feel the same and I wish that there was more wiggle room within those boundaries because I can see were certain people really need type boundaries but then there are so many situations where I think it would actually be more beneficial to not have such tight boundaries.She asked how I’m doing and I said I’m OK and I said about how I set boundaries with my dad and then I told her about how I told the A-Team about struggling and just how I had reflected back on this being the first to my my life when I actually chose to reach out for support and how different it is stepping back and realizing that the people that I’ve chosen to put my life genuinely do care about me and I matter to them as a post to my family who I’m kind of stuck with. She was really proud of me for both and was like and no guilt with setting boundaries with your parents and I was like no not really because I think initially I did feel guilty when he texted me but I think after talking to my husband about it and figuring out a response it helped me to feel like we were a team in responding back about our boundaries as a couple and not necessarily just me standing up to him so I didn’t have any guilt. I told her about Ashlee and I was like she’s just super harsh and blunt, she’s like you but times 10 and Lynn started laughing and was like I don’t know if I like that and I was like OK direct and honest and she was like OK I can take direct and I explained how our dinner went and how I was surprised by how supportive everyone has been and I explained about Amber and I was like so and ended up being like now that I’m glad she’s struggling but at the same time I’m glad that I can at least recognize now that she had her own stuff going on and it wasn’t me and she was like yeah so like I said last week it was her stuff and I was like yeah pretty much you’re always right Lynn and she just kind of laughed and she asked about how things are going with my husband and I was kind a like hit and miss swearing like he only threw something once and it was a dish in the sink so nothing broke but I don’t now I explained that part of it is that it’s so hard for me to keep track of little details over numbers I’m like on the one hand yes I can definitely remember numbers in general wanna comes to calories and overall weights but at the same time when it comes to throwing a timeline with that I have a hard time remembering the specific timeline of which weeks I weighed in at what weight and I made the comment that it’s like he wants me to fail and so he got really triggered by that and I’m sad and was kind of like do you really think I want you to fail if I wanted you to feel that I wouldn’t care this much and be so worried and so she asked how he responded to the idea of marriage counseling and he was kind of like why so that another therapist can tell me what every other therapist has said and she was kind a like what the heck and I was like I think his experiences have mostly just been where he’s come to therapy with me to support me and so everybody has this directly pretty much minimize his experience and told him to just trust that the treatment team is taking care of me and basically just that I’m super glad he’s not talking to his mom which Lynn agreed would not be a helpful idea to get her involved i’m pretty much suggested that he get his own EMD our therapist who can help him recognize that some of the explosiveness and reactions are coming from earlier childhood wounds and she was like why don’t you flip it on him and ask him you know kind of EMDr questions like in those moments How do you want to feel about yourself when you are throwing the dish or in general how do you want to feel about yourself in regards to my recovery or how do you want to feel about my recovery you or me struggling and what not. I had a really thought of it that way and I was like and maybe asking Ashlee about how her husband handled it because he did ask me how he handled it and maybe seeing that there is an alternative way to cope because I think on the one hand he just feels really scared and doesn’t see that there even is an alternative way to handle everything. She was like how are you feeling about the stuff that we worked on last time and I was like we didn’t do you any EMD our last time if that’s what you’re referencing, because you gave me a serious talk about how I needed to gain weight or we needed to look at referrals and she was like oh that’s right and she was like well OK so two weeks ago in regards to some of the stuff coming up about being perfect and your parents and wait and what not and I was like I mean I think in terms of that specific stuff there’s part of me that is better able to separate out what things my parents are crazy about like probably their beliefs on vaccines or the fact that my dad outlandishly texted me to have a baby but there are some things like where there is still that internalized parent and it’s just a lot harder to shake and where it does feel like they are still the authority on it and she was like like what and I was like well honestly now that I think about it I guess just food and body image because it’s not even religion anymore and she was basically like I’m glad to see that you are starting to separate some of those believes from them and I mentioned how I have been trying to figure out what is the feeling behind feeling fat because Peggy had asked me is fat a feeling because everybody in the evenings Waterworld says fat is not a feeling and I was like the only thing that I can really think of is just that it brings this feeling of embarrassment and I just really can’t handle embarrassment and so I don’t know and she was like so essentially what is the opposite of fat if you don’t wanna be feeling fat what do you want to be feeling and I was like honestly I just want to be feeling nothing like I don’t want to be even thinking about my body and registering it but it’s like I can’t stop those thoughts from obsessing over that feeling of hyper awareness and she was like that’s not really what I’m asking But I couldn’t really figure out what she was asking but she was like if you aren’t fat then what is the goal and I was like I mean to be thin and she was like well where does that come from sort of like I don’t have explain how we got to it but she was like OK why don’t we do some EMD are around this specifically and so she had me notice about being thin coming from my parents and what is thin And I noticed that I was like I honestly don’t know because it feels like a lose lose where it’s like even when I was in treatment which then I was 3 pounds lighter and my mom was still like oh you don’t like that send you look good do you really need to be in the hospital so it’s like even at an anorexic wait it wasn’t thin enough and then I noticed that it’s like a lose lose because on the other hand a few weeks into treatment my mom was like oh I could tell in your engagement pictures that you looked too thin but in the engagement pictures I wait a few pounds more than I did when I was in treatment and so it felt like there’s never any way to really get it right and then I noticed that I was like I mean I guess truly The only time that I can remember them being happy with my weight and not saying anything about it was before I started my period when I was like a kid up until 14 but when I think back to that because when I turned 14 and got my period and gained all that weight the office he started drawing a lot of attention to it and it sort of went downhill from there but prior to that like I feel like they were happy with it but I was so underweight like grossly under weight to wear now that I look back at those pictures I’m like 99 pounds 5 foot seven that’s so sickly and it shows like in all of those pictures I look so gangly and I tried to describe where I was like I think every anorexic has this mindset or at least most of us where it’s like you want to be skinny like Victoria’s Secret model skinny wear your underwear in your bones show and you look dainty and fragile but then there’s this sort of sickly appearance with anorexia where you go past that point and you just look so sick and more like a cancer patient and when I look back at those pictures of me being so underweight at the time I looked so sick and I thought about how Peggy was like I’m so shocked that you even had a period given how underweight you were and that it might have delayed my period. For whatever reason I started to think about how I guess just that after that it’s not like I even got fat and maybe that was part of why they didn’t draw a ton of attention to it after the fact because I stayed fan and the doctor told him not to worry because I know he’s been so underweight I was thinking about how when my brother turned 13 he started to gain weight and my parents didn’t put him on a diet but started to try to restrict him from eating certain things and arming them constantly yelling at him for eating pretzels and they would try to not buy foods that he couldn’t have and they definitely made fun of him for having a belly and I remember my extended family making fun of him for having a belly and I remember one time that I was like trying to be controlling and I made a comment to him about his weight and I don’t even remember what I said I just remember him flipping out and screaming that I was just like our mom and he started to cry and I felt so terrible and I haven’t said anything to him about his weight since but I was just thinking about that dynamic of like everybody was literally making fun of him and I would love to think that I was like being this healthy wonderful nice sibling by trying to make a comment to him about his weight as a way to protect him from being made fun of but honestly I think I was just saying it because I was embarrassed by him having his weight and Lynn was like so thinking back to all of this you were how old and I was like 17 and she was like where does the 17-year-old learn all of their information around food and body image from and I was like them and honestly I learned all that shit from my parents and truthfully 17-year-olds are pretty self centered anyway developmentally so and so it makes sense that I would’ve been more worried about myself and I noticed how I don’t think I realized how abnormal my Family really was around food and weight and body image until much later in life really in more recent years and even now I have a hard time acknowledging that some of those things are abnormal with them because for so long it felt so normal and in thinking about it I was like you know the majority of my time was spent with my family or with my best friend and her family who she developed bulimia and then the other family that we spend a lot of time with my mom‘s best friend her daughter developed anorexia so it’s like a lot of the people that I was spending my time with were all people who obviously didn’t exactly have the healthiest of family dynamics or dynamics around food and body image. She said we were at a good stopping place and so we closed it up and then she took out her calendar and was like we scheduled for next week right and I was like no we actually didn’t she was like wait really and I was like yeah you didn’t schedule me last time but I didn’t want to Seney thing because I wasn’t sure if you were just waiting to see if I was actually going to gain weight this week and she was like oh my gosh you know I would never do that to you like that and I was like you never know and she was like first of all I said it would be a transition not a cut off so even if we were going to go that route we would have some time to transition where like yeah we might’ve said today that you needed to schedule an a valuation with an eating disorder specialist but then I would still see you next week and then you would see that specialist and then we would have a session to process it and then we would either transition like you have a few more sessions with me and the other person or you alternate and see both I mean or both the same week I mean that really is up to you and honestly we would do it however you need to even though I don’t think that sing to Therapist at the same time is really helpful and I was like I guess would depend on how separate your goals really are and she was like maybe I was like because I need to start a therapist would be very specifically working on addressing where my irrational beliefs around food come from which we all know are my parents and she was like so kind of some of the same stuff weare working onandI was like at the moment yesand she was like OK well just rememberI would never do thatTo you like thatandI was like well U neverKnowandShe was likeIDon’tThink that’s therapeuticandIWas likeWellI’veHadsomeprettyNon-therapeuticterminationsBeforeand she was like and I know that which is why I would be even more careful with transitioning you. I said I appreciated that and I paid her and I headed out.

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thinkgloriathink · 7 years

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Why I stopped doing Pre-med (my lengthy and candid explanation)

If you know me personally, you might be surprised to hear that I’m not doing pre-med anymore. In fact, this massive pivot happened so quickly and dramatically that I, too, am trying to figure out how my seemingly robust pledge to pursuing a career in medicine toppled like a tower of toothpicks the literal instant I entered college. Surely enough, I dove head first into some intensely angsty rumination sessions to wrangle apart this ugly mystery, and I scraped together a semi-coherent analysis of how this happened to me. Here’s the best explanation I can come up with:

Any good scientist knows that to properly appraise the strength of a scientific theory, you shouldn’t just be scouring for examples to confirm it, but rather scouring for cases to disconfirm it. Looking back into my past, I’ve discovered that I did a whole lot of confirming, and very little disconfirming. All my life, since showing an early propensity for biology, the life sciences, then medicine, I’ve gotten puff after puff of ego boosting encouragements. At a dinner party, people are always asking you what you want to be when you grow up. I’d say medicine, people would nod their heads with recognition, no further questions asked. As a result, I’ve lived my whole life full of self-assurance without self-examination, enjoying the cushiness of people’s approval. Once I established that I was going to be a doctor, everything I saw and all the ways I behaved seemed to fall into place, conveniently fitting the narrative. I’m not squeamish around blood? Pure doctor material! I’m skilled at memorizing anatomy terms? You’re on the right track, Dr. Feng! Soon, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I’d purposely act in ways that would be in character, because future-doctor-Gloria was my identity. When I started having my first doubts about pre-med during the first few months of college, I surprised myself by how flimsy I became when I was confronted by the question: Why do you want to be a doctor? Up until then, I've been going at it with 110% confidence because I liked it, and my liking it made sense to other people. Chemistry class sucked, but I was able to make it through the semester because I told myself that it’s all part of the process. “I want to be a doctor” became a mantra that I’d remind myself time and time again through times of intense stress, but the more I said it, the more unfounded it felt. I reached a point in the year where I would tell myself repeatedly that I was in it for the long haul, but feeling less confident every time I said it. God forbid, if someone asked me “Why?” during those anxious times, I would’ve imploded under the weight of all my existential angst because I literally felt as though I had no good answer. “I want to help people.” Nothing felt more fabricated to me than that weak ass reason, which alone is hardly a justification unique to a career in medicine.

Here are the few pivotal moments and thought trains that poked holes in my confidence for being a doctor. Note: these are explanations, not justifications. If you’re reading this and are still on the track to doctorhood, I will root for you like the aggressive soccer mom you never had. All I ask is that you check in with yourself every once in a while, honestly, so that you know for sure your life is heading in the direction you -- and only you-- truly want.

I tried and failed to get accepted into any of the combined medical programs I’ve applied to last year. Of course, considering the incredibly low acceptance rates to these prestigious programs, the odds were not in my favor, and it’d be foolish to expect acceptances to roll in easily. But this did plant the first seed of doubt in the back of my head that all these admissions officers who turned me down were seeing something in me that I might not have been aware of at the time. I felt as though I’ve poured my heart and soul into the “Why Medicine?” essays, writing with as much candor as I thought was possible. When you’ve laid out all your cards like that and you still get the thumbs down, it’s hard not to think that, just maybe, I’m not as equipped or compatible to be a doctor as I had thought. Maybe this was some kind of sign. This was a fleeting thought that didn’t initially shake my resolve at the time, but it reemerged with a different effect on me once my doubt train started to pick up speed this past year.

All my friends were getting their asses kicked by their computer science classes, but the challenge seemed to make them like it even more. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass beat by my pre-med classes, but my motivation seemed to be way more fragile. I was performing, for the first time, average in my class. While this sounds pretty unremarkable and expected at an elite institution where you’re no longer the big fish in your tiny little pond, it was a major source of frustration and disappointment for me. The fact that this rank-consciousness mattered so much to me, and the fact that so much enjoyment in the subject seemed to evaporate once I realized that I wasn’t the highest performer anymore indicated that I might’ve only enjoyed my pre-med classes in high school because I was good at them. I sat down in my virology class one day after having one of these revelations, looking at the powerpoint slides with almost a different pair of eyes. I have to memorize all the types of RNA and DNA polymerases and the different ways they could stack together DNA crumbs to build a new strand? Why and how is this knowledge important to me? Oh yeah, I need to shove this down my brain so I can regurgitate it onto a sheet of paper next week for a grade. I don’t actually find any of this interesting. What am I even doing here? Something I found even more curious is the fact that I've survived my statistics class second semester, which I thought beat me to a pulp at least as bad as chemistry did, but I liked it even more because of it. In fact, that class even managed to restore in me a modicum of confidence in math, an area I was sure I was going to avoid like the plague in college. In fact, I'm really glad that I took it, as I actually feel like I've learned something valuable and enriching if not directly applicable to my life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Neuro and Chem.

I was totally getting high off of the youthful optimism and individualistic spirit of Carpe Diem of the college students around me. After being immersed in all these big-picture-thinking communities at school, or reading 21st century lifestyle design books like the 4-hour workweek or Nassim Taleb’s books, all I could think about was seizing the day and making the most out of the present. I lost some faith in the idea of super-delayed gratification— the idea of enduring a dreary and soul-sucking life now so that you can live a happier and more comfortable future down the line. When I was down in my depths of existential gloom, all I felt I had going for me was the good faith that the future me— Doctor me— would enjoy my life, even though the current me did not. But what a waste of your livelihood would it be, I'd think, to spend the most important decades of your life jumping through hoops while stressed and broke, when you can technically engineer your life such that you can work hard, ride its ups and downs, AND enjoy its fruits now. After all, your life is really just a massive sum of today’s. If you keep living for brighter tomorrows, you’d go through life squandering all the today’s, which are actually all we’ve got, and all we’ll ever get.

I remember just hanging up from a video call with my sister while I was sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Sciences Library, when I entertained this train of thought. I had just won a Hackathon at MIT by randomly deciding to take a leap of faith and flex my creative muscle, and had one of the most novel and eye-opening experiences of my life. I came into touch with (cw: intense self-flattery) the fact that I was an adaptable person with many talents, a person with a creative eye, a knack for playful intellectual thought, a slightly unconventional character, with visions and ambitions that seem a little larger than life sometimes. All of these parts of myself, which I didn’t think fit the qualities of the prototypical pre-med student, felt more to me like diversions and hindrances than assets… which made me sad. Somehow, I thought the competitive straitjacket of pre-medicine and the highly standardized structure of pre-professional training was forcing me into a mold that missed so much of what I liked about myself. Sure, I knew I had characteristics that would make me a good doctor--that hasn't changed about me. But at the time, when I felt like college was just starting to set me off on my personal renaissance, sticking doggedly to the competitive-as-hell premed plan that I no longer felt super passionate about felt pretty damn stifling.

I've begun to realize recently that I actually might also enjoy doing other things besides medicine (whaaaat?). Before college, I'd always choose classes or study the things that aligned with the pre-med path. When selecting my courses for Columbia SHP, for example, I'd only choose to enroll in physiology or biology classes. I had the choice to take other things at the time, but my a priori assumptions were that I simply won’t like what isn’t pre-med related, so I didn’t try them. Before second semester I shrugged and said “what the heck” and enrolled in an economics class, and I also said “what the heck” for applying to work at Kinvolved; my expectations for both were initially quite low, as I was secretly hoping that these would dispel my what-if questions from first semester, as an obvious distaste for them would reassure me that medicine was the way to go. Lo and behold, I was taken off guard by how much I actually enjoyed these experiences. All my life, I’ve never had to make any hard choices between medicine and other appealing alternatives, because I've never given myself one. In essence, closing doors on the other things was a lot easier back when I didn’t have a clue about what was behind those doors. Pre-med has been all I knew, and everything I thought I liked, until college showed me otherwise.

Lastly, the difficulty of my pre-med classes did (and still does) intimidate me. This reason does fall secondary to the first five I’ve just stated, as, I think, if I were really 100% set on being a doctor, I’d be resourceful enough to find ways to tolerate the workload. But having to shoulder a very taxing course load throughout my first semester, while feeling isolated and unsure the entire time, even in the presence of the hundreds of other pre-med students, was not a great feeling. I guess I blame this unsavory experience (and I forgive myself, of course) on the rocky adjustment period of first semester freshman year, and my underestimation of the importance of forming supportive study groups. Can this problem be remedied easily in the future with a little initiative? Of course. But did this nevertheless paint my first semester experience with an extra shiny layer of demotivation and disillusionment, and propel my I-don’t-wanna-do-medical-school-anymore spiral? You betcha.

#pre-med #note to self

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