Not long ago, I shared with the world a film about my desire to divorce myself from the identity of woman and finding myself in alignment with the genderqueer experience instead. Today, I found myself more connected to womanhood than ever before.
I had my eighth ketamine infusion in the search for emotional wellness. Previous treatments have brought varying experiences from beautiful alien worlds to childlike giggling to hours of crying. None of those trips could have prepared me for today’s hurricane. The infusion itself was dark, isolating, and full of voices telling me I wasn’t meant for this world. That I’m a being that never should have been placed here. That my existence will only ever be one of pain.
I drifted back into sobriety with a slow roll from my back to my side. I clutched my pillow with an arm above my head, unsuccessfully shielding my face from the therapist sitting a few feet in front of me. I begged the universe to let me melt into that red chaise lounge and dissolve into the ether. I wanted nothing more than to disappear from my body and become nothing. Or everything. It didn’t matter which, as long as I could leave the pain behind.
No such mercy found me. Instead, a silent tear rolled from my eye, wetting my pillow’s canvas. My other eye followed suit. Soon the droplets became streams and the streams rushing rivers that refused to be silenced. It wasn’t my first time crying in front of this woman, but today was different. Today I was a child curled up in the fetal position, horrified by the thought of opening my eyes because the real world was too scary.
I quickly realized this wasn’t a cry that could remain quiet or wait for the privacy of my apartment’s walls. It was coming now and it wasn’t asking permission, so I submitted. I released guttural sobs into my pillow, clawing at the fabric, and squeezing my other hand into a white knuckled fist. My body tensed and stretched in agony, exploding with the pain of my twenty two years of life. My brain begged for answers. How can I possibly live with this? How will I ever move through this world in this fucked up body with this ruined mind? How can I be expected to withstand this as one human? I received nothing and unleashed more. Snot mixed with salty tears coated the corner of my pillow and smeared across my face. I did nothing to prevent it. I brought that fabric between my teeth and screamed with wracking waves of despair that ripped themselves from the base of my sacrum and straight out of my throat. I didn’t care who could hear. I couldn’t care who could hear. The universe was pulling emotions through me so visceral that I lost all control of the way they chose to exit my body.
Eventually, the child metamorphosized and became an adult. I rose to my knees, not yet ready to lift my head from the cushioning that cradled my face. I pressed the heels of my hands into my forehead and stretched my toes into the chaise below me. I was desperate to exorcize this pain out of my soul as though if I could press with enough force, it might leave me alone. I screamed for it to leave me alone. I wailed for peace, for freedom, for death. My body coughed and sputtered the mucous of life in defiance of my wishes. I was sick and exhausted. But of course, that is always when we find we are stronger than we could have ever conceived.
In the midst of swirling thoughts and fears of being incapable and falling apart, I peeled my face off the slime comprised of tears, snot, and sweat and pressed my arms down. I trembled on my hands and knees, but I allowed myself to be moved by the tremors. I rocked forwards and backwards as I labored through the suffering of my ancestors. I became acutely aware of my breasts hanging down and swaying in the void of my billowed shirt, just as the breasts of the women before me would have swayed with their pregnant bodies in the natural birthing position. Rivers continued to pour off my face as I gave birth to the pain of my mother and the pain of my mother’s mother. I purged their traumas alongside my own. I experienced generations of pain that had been gestating long before my own conception emerge from my womb. I was an egg inside my mother’s womb as she developed within her mother’s womb. I absorbed and grew into the traumas they endured and I took them on as my own. Today I gave birth as they once did, only the new life I created was a future for myself without the burden of their suffering instead of a human child that would carry on the cycles they sank into. I would fight the battles they weren’t strong enough to fight. I would claw my way into the light they couldn’t find. I would do it for them, but more importantly I would do it for myself. I would do it for my infant self, my child self, my adolescent self, and myself today. I would endure this labor and expel this ancestral agony in my own honor.
My body relinquished any semblance of control and gave way to shivers as I saw myself in a lush green field, coated in sunlight, surrounded by nude women dancing, howling, and lamenting as a tribe. We all immersed ourselves into the needs of our physical, emotional, and spiritual forms together, as one. We were united in sorrow, in whimsy, in rage. We were living as humans were meant to live; as primal, untamed animals connected by the roots of our souls that found one another through the soil of the same earth our feet dug into.
I burned off the fever of my grief for a life so free that I would never be able to call my own. I sweat out anxieties of capitalism, shame, and isolation that come with the modern world. An ice pack was placed below me and I dipped my forehead to meet it’s cool touch that held my hand through the fire. I was raging out of every pore at the collective decisions of our species. I was mourning the death of a healthy society that we lost innumerable generations ago.
The wails quelled with time and the rivers dried to streams. I collapsed, buried my face once more, and allowed the sobs to die off in tandem with my hope. I permitted myself to speak dreadful thoughts into existence and shared my worst fears with my therapist. She held the distress with care, ensured I knew she understood, and encouraged me to continue releasing until the aftershocks came to their natural end.
I eased back into the sensation of my body becoming my own once more. I wiped off my face and blew my nose. We spoke of grief, my mother, and my grandmother. I told her about how I knew I was a good kind person that loved so many people and so many things and how the pain of the world was too much for me to bear because I felt all of it. I explained how I’ve always carried the weight of every person I’ve met’s suffering even when it wasn’t requested of me. I asked how I could possibly move through the world that way and continue living this life. She assured me that in that moment, I didn’t need to have an answer to that question, and that all I had to do was be. Sit with the feelings, go home, and rest. All I had to do was exist and everything else would follow. So here I am, existing, waiting for whatever comes after birthing three generations of suffering and questioning the nature of my connection to womanhood once more.