This Scattered Mind, This Animal Body, This Life

Once when my daughter was small, she told me she had washed her hair, and I had not believed her. “But, Mama,” she’d said. “I did.”

“It doesn’t look like you did,” I said, or something along those lines. (It’s so painful to write. My hands are fighting me, getting stiff with please don’t make this real.)

Years and years later I learned that she had, in fact, washed her hair or done her version of washing her hair. What is it like to tell your mother the truth and for her to look you in the eye and tell you that what you are saying is, on fact, not the truth. That red is not red. Red is blue.

What do you do when there’s no one to tell what happened, no one to help you process? How to you absorb the shock of not being seen?

I have noticed something in people, and I think of it as blown-up brains. I imagine it happens when a parent does something, hurts you, ignores you, doesn’t see or understand you in a way that overwhelms your nervous system and so your brain blows up to protect you, and as a result, part of you is numb for the rest of your life.

Or until you find a way to remember, feel the feelings, and process them.

For me, it took a therapeutic session with MDMA and psilocybin to feel a pain in my body that was so intense I didn’t know how I was going to endure it. Therein lies the magic of MDMA: the pain that shut you down at some point in your life is now manageable enough because the MDMA calms the part of the brain that would otherwise have you dissociating and leaving your body. I got to feel what my body had done the at-the-time kindness of shutting down around so I could survive and move on, a shell of who I had been in many ways, but to most people and to myself, fine.

She’s a happy baby. She’s a good kid. She’s a nice person.

Meanwhile, there’s still the stomachaches, the headaches, the worry, the when is the other shoe going to drop anxiety.

It’s tricky to worry about the other shoe when you are the shoe. It’s tough to figure out what the problem is when the problem is you, what you carry.

It has been almost a year since my session, and what I have found is that I have a lot less to write about because my head is quieter as my body gets a chance to come on board and experience life. My body and brain are in communication after years of my body only being heard by getting sick. (Or pooping and farting!) The day after taking MDMA, I kept saying, “I have a body. This is my body. I can’t believe I have a body.” Where my body had been all those years, I don’t know—what a surreal experience to wake up to having something I’d had all along.

I have a body.

When you have a body but don’t “own” a body (being sold as a baby is so complicated!), it’s easy to throw your body away. It’s easy to be reckless, stupid, thoughtless because you are walking around in a big half-thrown away thing anyway.

We live out our thoughts.

Did she throw me away? Did our parent, when they hurt us, didn’t see us, misunderstood us, throw us away? I’ll finish the act, then, because that’s how motion works: it likes to be complete.

If a genie were to give me three wishes, my first one would be to go back in time, put my hand on my daughter’s wet hair and say, “Good job.”

The other two wishes would build on that one.