Initiation
Chronic illness is cyclical, not a straight line.
I wrote the line this morning in my journal over a hot cup of coffee. There’s this idea or this pressure that we achieve healing, we become healed and move on to the next phase of our lives. Chronic illness and medical care are always focused around this idea of recovery.
I thought transplantation marked my finish line, that I would cross over into what came next and I would be “healed.”
I’ve been through many health initiations since then. My body has become my greatest teacher. And there’s been no such thing as being healed.
When I look at healing as a place to arrive, each symptom as a personal failure that I didn’t do the right thing or try hard enough or learn the right lesson the first time, I pile on shame. And shame has never been a tool for healing. When I view myself in the flow of healing, with each moment a new layer, another circle back around, I allow myself space to become.
Transplant, and any major health crisis, has a way of revealing the hidden. It’s the great initiation, the pivotal capstone moment. However we arrive there, we are not the same after. It’s an experience many people pay thousands of dollars for, and yet we are thrust into it, often unwillingly.
I wonder if my willingness to charge face first into transplantation made my initiation easier, but I don’t know if anything would prepare one for the dark underbelly that exists, and that one must walk through, to emerge on the other side.
Sophie Strand talks about pain the same way when she says its like a psychedelic. It’s this deeply embodied experience, this awakening moment if you let it be, that people travel half way across the world and use drugs to achieve.
It’s all an invitation. An Initiation. One most people are unwilling to receive.
I’ve long since viewed my personal health experiences as a hero’s journey of sorts. A continual returning to the underworld, one where I can alchemize my grief and return with medicine for the community. It’s a place I’m particularly comfortable, and when explaining this to a friend once I discovered that this isn’t the norm.
Initiations are incredibly painful. They require three parts. First is the brutal collision into the realization that something has shifted. You got the call, there’s a diagnosis, there’s a death. This is the line that marks the before and after. Then there’s the radical alteration in identity. Who we are is different. And the third part of this initiation is the realization we can’t go back to what was. There is no back to go to. There is only now.
The medical system, while focused on recovery, is not focused on healing. I’ve said this before, that the objective of a system that is monotropic is always to return to a state of productivity, of being of service to the greater systems and participating in society. The main objective, I would say, is to return to what once was.
And I see this daily. I see it in how I am spoken to by doctors, and how I can only be taken seriously when I can say how my symptomology is affecting my daily life and ability to work, to how the main objective of my transplant team post surgery was how quickly i could return to activities with less concern for my mental and emotional wellbeing after having endured such a major trauma, and I hear it in every group that I lead when people discuss their own transplant stories.
We’re grateful to be alive. We’re trying to return to the life we once had. We liked that life, we were comfortable in that life.
I don’t think we’re supposed to return to that life.
There is no going back. But we try, and we try, and we try.
We waste a perfectly good near death experience on trying to return to what was, rather than accepting the initiation and becoming something new.
And I get it, that something new is scary. There’s this societal idea around feeling the hard feelings, and if we acknowledge the grief we will not come back. It’s far easier to sweep it under the rug and say things like the treatment was successful, go back to your life.
But isn’t what's scarier the unlived life we accept in an attempt to return? We are breathing, alive for all intents and purposes, but are we really alive? Or have we just become walking dead.
Until we grieve, and come face to face with our initiation, all medicine has succeeded in doing is preserving human functionality. They have not given aliveness.
We can be living and grateful, and missing a huge part of what it means to be alive.
We are a culture that loves hero stories, we love a good before and after, we love the underdog. And I wish healing was that straightforward. But its not. Becoming, initiation, grief, healing, they require the alchemy of the dark. They require we face our shadow, our mortality, our traumas and our embodied stories of grief. Or we will only ever be the walking dead.
I’m considered a transplant success story. I’m living, breathing, back to work, contributing to the capitalistic society in which we live. But if that's all I ever did, I don’t think that should be called a success story. The integration, the initiation, sitting with my own grief and returning with medicine for the community over and over again, that is the true work we are being invited into, and the real measure of success.
Are you breathing and calling it a life? Are you wasting a perfectly good near death experience? Or are you existing in the head, focusing on only the medical fact that being alive = good without ever integrating the truth of your story? (I know so many people that fall into this category).
Tell me, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?
