To The Mother Whose 21-Year Old Daughter Has Run Away and is Self-Harming

You asked me what you could do.

I don’t know.

Part of me thinks your daughter is going to have to survive herself, and there’s nothing you can do.

Part of me thinks you should find her, force her into your car, and get her to a place that understands girls on fire. Part of me thinks you should rob her of her will and her agency because she’s turned onto herself, and she is trying to kill what hurts. The problem is that what hurts is herself.

Part of me thinks life is too hard for some people and that they need to die in order to finally escape the hell of their life on earth. That feels cruel and weak and ungenerous to write, but it also feels true to me. There are some people who aren’t able to get the help they need, and so the fire rages inside. This is no small thing to be on fire. Think about it! Take a match and light your hair on fire and see how you feel after ten seconds. Now just keep letting yourself burn. After a minute tell yourself it’s all in your head. Tell yourself to get dressed, go to school, to work; tell yourself to lace up your shoes and get on with your life. Tell yourself everyone suffers—you aren’t special. Pain is pain and you can move through this if you just will yourself to keep going.

Meanwhile, you burn.

I didn’t find someone who saw me until I was 52. I’ve had people who have seen parts of me, but it wasn’t until I found someone who had lost a mother like I’d lost a mother, someone who was trying to make the best of her life like I was. We aren’t meant to live alone—and so when a person feels not seen, not heard, not known, she may well want to run away and self-harm because she’s desperate to escape from the pain. Anything—sleeping on the street, cutting your own wrist, your own leg—is better than coming face to face with the fact that you are on fire inside and no one can see it. No one can see you are dying. So you want to die to get it over with.

When I was on MDMA in my therapist’s office, I was able to come face to face with the pain that was in my body, and it was beyond anything I could have imagined without the medicine shutting down my amygdala so I could witness the terror that was in my brain and body. The closest I can come to describing the pain was that my body was full of thorns and they were all on fire. Maybe people used to nail other people to the cross with thorns around their heads (like they did with Jesus) because it was the closest they could come to embodying in the external world how they themselves felt internally. We read about Jesus getting nailed to the cross, but what does it actually feel like to know your father didn’t save you and that you now have people killing you with a grossly violent act?

I don’t think any of us can understand what Jesus felt unless we ourselves were abandoned by our parent and our society. I think the nails through the hands and the feet are physical manifestations of the agony of abandonment. I imagine this girl who lost her mother and who ran away and is now hurting herself is living out her own private life on the cross. She is showing you externally what her internal self looks like.

At one point in my MDMA session, I said to my therapist, “My head hurts so much I understand why someone would kill themselves. It feels like my body wants to die—it feels like my body wants me to finish the job and get rid of this pain.” I didn’t have the urge to kill myself; I was observing the pain and was at a distance from it so feeling it was a safe thing instead of a dangerous, life-threatening thing.

If I were that girl who was living on the streets, I would need a do-over. I would need to go back to my infancy and be cradled by a body that felt safe to me (oh! where is the mother who is grounded in her own heart?!). I would need to be held gently but with clear intention. I would want to be held until I could take a full breath. Maybe I would need to be held for three months. Maybe three years. Maybe I would need to cry and to be babied and fed with a spoon for that long.

Do you have that in you? Can you care for a body that’s on fire? Can you open yourself up enough to try to let yourself feel what she is feeling and stay? Can you, at the same time, let her have her pain? Can you accept her for who she is? Can you keep whispering, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. Everything is going to be okay. Just hold on. Hold on. Hold on. And—let go, let go, let go.

This is the thing. We have to be able to do everything to really show up for another person. We have to refuse and accept. We have to hold on and let go. We have to talk and be quiet. We have to know and not know.

How can we do all of these things?

I wish I knew the answer. My body says this life is hard. My body says hold me. My body says I am terrified of losing another thing. My body says it’s playing a game, and that it’s not really here. My body wants to be here. It just doesn’t know how. My body needs you, dear mother, and is terrified of you. My body loves and hates you because you disappear. This translates into loving and hating life, the self.

When you are on fire, being here feels like insanity. Who would stand in the mouth of the flames and let them burn you all the way up? And yet, what I saw on MDMA, is that is the answer. The flames have to have their way. The pain the body carries from losing its mother needs to find a way out. And the way out is to burn up, to stay until the fire has done its work and has burned up the baby you until only this you, the adult you, exists.

Maybe there is no help. Maybe the internal fire is a private thing that we must work through on our own time. Maybe we can’t receive help until we are ready. I don’t know.

All we can do is to keep talking, keep connecting, trying to figure out how to help our burning babies.