Medicine as Mirrors
I like to know what I’m connected to. I’ve traced back the origin story of every medication currently prescribed to me, finding roots back in Japanese soil and sun bears, The knowing allows me to widen my ecosystem, to deepen into what holds me.
I was started on a new medication, and in my usual dive I discovered this particular medication wasn’t extracted from the earth or another being, but designed to mimic a biological function.
Mimicry, in biology, involves taking on the characteristics of another in order to gain some sort of protection.
In this scenario, the thing I am seeking protection from is myself. The faulty wiring of my body, shaped by trauma and surgeries, needs this medication to act as a buffer. Which brought to life this train of thought that perhaps medication can serve as a mirror, and in this reflection what’s asking to be seen?
In the work I do in the world, I teach people every day how to engage in relationship with their bodies, to tell their body stories, and to let everything be a teacher. Worlds have opened up to me because of this viewpoint, and still I found myself resistant to take the meds. We’ve come to associate needing support in healing with failure or weakness, even when both are not true, and I found myself parroting back the things I so often tell others.
If this is a mirror, what am I seeing?
A need for protection. I traced my own scars, highlighting all my body has been through in my years of life. Each one tells a story. My body had begun to scream, and as I was listening she was unraveling the stories of pain we’d lived through that were too much.
The interplay between control and trust (As I wrote this, I wrote control and truth, which also seems fitting), and how control was always the thing I craved. It was the thing I’d been told by doctors over and over since my earliest memory to never lose. Never not be in control. You have to stay in control. In retrospect I can see how this continual pushing of the gas had created dysregulation deep within my being, and how perhaps what was being asked of me was trust. What might trust look/feel like in my body? What might it look like if I loosened the reins of control on my life and instead embraced living it?
When I slowed down, tapped into the questions of my body, let medicine be a mirror reflecting back to me what I needed to see most, I felt the death grip of why I needed the medication in the first place begin to lift.
It showed me that it’s ok to ask for help, to need help, and to receive that support. That there is a balance between intervention and surrender. It highlighted my relationship with my body in a way I hadn’t quite seen it before.
