Part I
Last fall I had a number of heart attacks, none of which I remember (they all happened within twenty-four hours, during which time I was sedated to the point of induced coma). Once I was stabilized a defibrillator was implanted, all sorts of drugs were prescribed for me, I went to rehab for a couple of weeks and then was sent home a couple of days before Thanksgiving. (Thank GOD my stay in the rehab facility was well over before Covid-19 hit.) I happily pursued all the regimens recommended by my cardio team, and never for a minute thought I wouldn't recover, get back to my old self in a matter of months. The damage to my heart was minimal, and the overriding atrial fibrillation was nicely controlled by the quarter-sized machine sitting just below my left clavicle. Life was good; I was a survivor; I had not suffered conscious trauma so I was tough and ready to do whatever it took to get better; I was a courageous woman, had always been so. Nothing was too frightening to contemplate, no denial necessary. Hear me roar.
My medical team stood by and watched me canter through PT and the steady, incremental resumption of my previous activities. When I insisted to them that I felt just fine, fine, they all agreed I must be fine, fine, and that I must nevertheless keep my expectations low, not be impatient for full physical and psychological restoration. Impatient? I? Feh; purely realistic, I, and knowing what I know about mind/body/spirit (a great deal, actually), I persisted in my optimistic outlook. Fear is the great demotivator, we all know that, and since I had no discernible PTSD from the heart event(s), then fear had no part in my day to day activity. It never does.
Feeling so good, so psychologically untouched by recent trauma, I decided to experiment with psilocybin. I had read (twice) Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind", and been mightily impressed by his investigations. The revelations I picked up from it were that psilocybin was a work-around of the ego: among many other effects, it cancelled the ego's judgmental intrusions into the creative process, and, blocked for most of my life, I hungered for some solution to my damnable internal editor.
NOTE: I have written before in this forum how crippling is the Ego/Editor to me; it stops me in my tracks from ever going near a blank screen/sheet of paper, from writing truthful and engaging observations of life and love that I am constantly ruminating on in my meditative moments. I know I have a great deal to say, an intriguing way of saying it, all I have to do is do it. But it's risky, says Ego, and you could hurt people if you write truthful things about them, and next thing you know, you'll be abandoned by your closest and most cherished connections. Besides, your writing isn't all that great to begin with; look at all the editing I have to do to make it logical and interesting!
So I contacted a friend with connections to the world of entheogens in her study of Native American rituals of shamanism and other spiritual seekings. She agreed to find me some guaranteed-not-to-hurt-me psilocybin, research the dosage, and to "hold my space for me" while I took a little trip with it. I never did LSD or 'shrooms when it was popular ( at the time hallucinogens were easily available, I had young children and not much money and was working daily with some dangerous woodworking machinery), but had smoked a little dope, gone through a cocaine phase until it proved too costly, and so wasn't particularly worried about the effects of The Next Step in drug research.
My psilocybin experience was not successful, to say the least. For one thing, it was contaminated by a simultaneous case of food poisoning from a take-out carton of Hungarian mushroom soup -- oh the irony -- and any of the shamanic puking I might have necessarily endured was enhanced by a factor of I don't know how much. In between puking episodes (all night long) I was visited by very unsettling nightmares, most of them set in Gothic cathedrals, and hallucinations I don't even remember except to know they were dreadful. My friend commented on how vigorously the ego resists being side-lined, and I may have told her to fuck off. I was shaken to my boots overall, and stayed that way for days. Maybe weeks. Maybe still am.
God and my impulsive nature had found a way to inject the missing factor of fear in my growth process. I had successfully found fear, the erosion of my natural built-in courage, a loss of nerve. I quickly developed a tentative approach to all things new, abandoning my usual sangfroid anything life- and world-altering (such as a global pandemic).
In these recent trying times, I have even felt near to throwing an all-out, all-in nutty, a hissy, whatever one wants to call hysteria. Yes, I. I have always been if not stoic, then certainly the adult in the room, the let's-all-just-take-a-breath director. My mother was the descendant of a pair of naval officers, admirals, both of whom earned a number of decorations for valor, skill, cool temperament. My father was a Marine general, for God's sake, a survivor and Navy Cross recipient after the Battle for Guadalcanal. Witnessed first hand, his PTSD rages were frightening, a cautionary tale against releasing the demons within.
The other two models in my childhood household were my two older sisters, the elder of which was a very beautiful (if Rubenesque) princess who seemed always to be on the edge of either tears or black rage, and nobody wanted to get near those reactions, so we all agreed to keep calm for the sake of overall peace. I had not the slightest wish to follow her example: the attention she got seemed to me not worth the isolation (and contempt) the rest of the family imposed on her. My other sister -- the Middle Child (MC) -- was the Iago to the eldest's less than noble Othello. A brilliant intellect trapped in a small, bony, inept and unattractive body, MC was outraged that I existed at all, and perpetually seeking revenge on the eldest for her beauty and manipulative behaviors. MC was sneaky, too smart for her own good, and there were times when my mother truly felt MC was The Bad Seed, irredeemably, psychotically murderous. She may have been. But she never made a scene, and even though she was riddled with fear every day of her life, she dared not reveal it in the house of a flag officer of the U. S. Marine Corps.
We weren't allowed expressions of grief either; that part of the military culture is almost entirely practical. In a formal battle of any kind, the combatant just can't afford to grieve the loss of any of his fellows: it would sap his energy and his courage, take up valuable time when the unit (or ship) could be seeking and asserting its advantage, and most importantly it would never end. (Besides, if combatants cry, it might make their officers cry, and then whatever would we do?) So, no mourning either, and there was always something to mourn: another household move to a new posting; giving up hastily made but deeply held friendships; death of a pet; and worst of all, the death of a Marine or sailor we all loved dearly. Move on, never mind, let it go. Worry about it later. (Never was a later.)
Ticking off the boxes of the Three Great Disconnectors, that only leaves anger as an expressible emotion. That's all we had. I got really good at it; when something scares me not a nanosecond goes by that I don't flip it to anger. Aside from my physical size, strength and a degree of agility, I am capable of very nasty, penetrating sharpness of tongue, having studied carefully all my family models -- a little Southern Gothic acidity from my father, some quick and withering wit of my Anglophile mother, the threat or actual release of wild rages from my elder sister, and stooping to the vilest scorn and sarcasm of MC. At some point (probably in my adolescence) I let it all go at someone, and the reaction to it was so horrible that it scared ME. I have buried the incident itself so deeply in my psyche that I don't remember it. I only remember horribly wounding someone, someone defenseless, someone certainly undeserving of such venom. The possibility of ever again inflicting that kind of pain has inhibited me ever since. Choke it off; push it down; sublimate it.
I can't help but mourn, but I don't express it, ever. There are gallons and bushels and tons of it sloshing around my midsection, and I am granted weeper movies and some commercials and a few books that will allow a scattering of quiet tears, but the great mooings that are harbored within just aren't allowed up. They come downstairs at bedtime for a goodnight kiss, but that's it: spit spot off to bed, now. Too scary to indulge for long.
Anger I'm good at, and it doesn't scare me.
But fear? FEAR? Well, let's explore that a little. Stay tuned. Watch this space. Shouldn't be long now; we approach the beast.
*****
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