Throat Straw

I’m not sure if I’m ready to put into words what I’m experiencing, but I have some down time and I kind of feel like writing.

The last three days or so I have been experiencing something in my body that is all too familiar. I remember feeling it at the very least in 2011 or 2012 when I was at my wits end at a job I didn’t like. Then when I moved onto another job and that one went sour, I experienced this same thing, every day, right upon waking up and all day long. It is such a mind-consuming experience that it makes life very hard.

I used to call it anxiety. But I am not sure if that’s what I want to call it anymore.

I’m learning about the body. It’s been 2.5 years since I did shrooms and the paradigm shifts I have gone through since then are impossible to summarize. Even trying to summarize them makes me nauseous. It’s some reality-bending stuff to realize I’ve never cognitively nor somatically recovered from the spiritual abuse of being evangelical in the 90’s.

What I am feeling in my body is… it feels like my airways are a small straw that I have to breathe through. And so I spend my day very conscious of my breath and using a lot of strength to get air into my body through my throat straw. I think I also notice very shallow breathing. And yawning. Lots of yawning and big inhales to try to fill my lungs up. This whole experience has me interpreting my somatic experience as I am being suffocated. Not to the point of death. But just enough to be suffocated all day without dying but feeling like your life is constantly being threatened. Probs a nervous system thing.

In the past, I would hate when this experience would happen. I would do anything I could to dissociate. To not pay attention. Because it didn’t feel like I had any control anyways. It never seemed to be correlated to any particular situation I was experiencing. It comes when it wants, stays as long as it wants, and leaves when it wants. So my strategy has been to just dissociate for as long as it takes. Once it’s gone, I like to pretend it never happened. It’s my secret hell. I don’t really talk about it. But it’s a thing.

When I’m feeling more motivated, I’ll try to do something about it. I’ll go for walks. I’ll meditate. I’ll read a book. I’ll exercise. But you know what? Despite doing the things that every mental health professional will recommend to you, nothing really helps. I’ve learned to feel hopeless and helpless. I have no control. My body seems to get to decide for no reason at all to make me feel like I am being tortured and it won’t go away no matter what I do, how I reason, or anything.

And this limited experience of living in my body generalizes out fairly easily. I am terrified of my body. I feel I have no control over my body. I struggle to do the things people say to do to feel well (probs trauma-related). And so when my body speaks to me, I have learned to run and hide until it shuts the fuck up.

I have been desperately trying to be as far away from my body as possible without killing myself.

I haven’t known much about this whole mind/body thing. It felt like a lot of woo to me. In order to survive the insanity of religion, I really had to commit myself to a highly rational way of perceiving my reality and the world. Whether I have been truly rational is debatable, but that doesn’t matter. But it seems that in this, I have been cut off from a part of human existence that is essential for wellbeing. Who knew? Apparently, not all of human experience is experienced through the mind and through thoughts. I had heard many people say “you are not your thoughts” and I always was like “aw, yeah, that’s sweet”. I don’t disagree, but I also don’t know that experientially. Because, in fact, I do experience myself as purely thought. And mostly fearful and repressed thoughts. I had no idea this was going on. I’m still in a state of shock from discovering this.

Apparently there is more to experience than the mind but it takes “work”. Not the classical kind of work, necessarily, but something a bit more intuitive. And what the fuck is intuition to a mind that is separated from its body and doesn’t know it? A mind separated from its body is safe from harm but also in its own private hell. This is heavy stuff to consider. It’s freeing stuff to consider, too. But I feel at such a disadvantage to lean into this integrative stuff given my experiences in religion.

“My experience in religion”. The fuck does that even mean? I have been speaking publicly about religious trauma since 2015, I think, and most of the time my words have been narrative or euphemistic. I don’t have a lot of feeling or experiential data to provide. With my therapist, though, I have been digging into it. And I thought that digging into it would just mean that I am having to tell the stories of what I’ve experienced, finally find the right seat with the right perspective of it, finally grieve knowing exactly what I experienced, and then going on being ME but without the depression and anxiety. But it’s not going that way. “Digging into it” is so much more than the mental labor. It’s not laborious at all, actually. If it was laborious, god knows I already would have been “healed” by now. I have proven my motivation, my endurance, my willingness, and my courage over the last 20+ years of existing in a post-trauma wake. Despite experiencing very little significant improvement, I continue to not kill myself, continue to try new things, continue to pick myself up again despite having every reason to believe I am hopeless. But it’s not labor. It’s not puritan work ethic that will “redeem” me. It’s more subtle than that.

What is it?

It’s this thing that can’t be taught. At least that’s how it feels to me at the moment. If you’re like me and you mostly experience thought and fear, finding other ways of existing within yourself seem like fables. Myths. Pseudospiritual. Or if you’re open minded, perhaps you think you’ll find what you’re looking for if you put in the “work” of sitting on the cushion with your eyes closed, “working” to notice when you are having thoughts and “working” to bring yourself back to the moment. Then there’s that damn word “surrender”. If I had to pick a word for what I’m learning to do, I think it’s surrender. But this is where the religious trauma kicks in. You want me to go into my mind and ask it to “surrender”? Oh fuuuuuuuck, no. Spiritually surrendering in evangelical Christianity entailed losing your identity, your will, your autonomy, your emotions, your dreams, and your power. But the kind of surrendering I think I am doing is actually providing a sense of freedom. Freedom from being locked up with my protective thoughts. It’s like my psyche made a pillow fort for me out of all the pain I’ve experienced. Just want to be clear, I ain’t hatin’ on the pillow fort. But it’s also really hard to exist in the world, to be yourself, whilst living in a pillow fort.

Anyways, I feel like I’m getting off track having fun imagining a pillow fort in my head. But the point is here that the skill that I am finding to be powerful for me right now feels highly guarded. Like there’s a pillow fort around my ability to ingrate into myself. Now this is getting harder and harder to put into words. I might need to slow down how quickly I’m writing and make sure that I’m writing this down as truthfully as I can.

It’s like if you spent your whole life carrying a radio around with you. And that radio station is playing all the painful lessons you’ve learned in your life. At a certain point, you learn how to tune it out at some level. But you’d be wrong to think that you had fully tuned it out and were immune to it. Tuning it out just means that a part of you decided not to allow it into your conscious experience anymore. But that doesn’t turn off the radio and that doesn’t keep it from impacting your lived experience. In fact, by distracting from it, burying it, you are trapping yourself. You are taking your pain and burying it. But of course you did. You didn’t know what else to do with it. These traumas happened at a very young age and it felt like everyone was in on it and so you learned your lessons and you buried them.

I learned lessons about my body very early. I learned lessons about my mind very early on. Religion has a lot to say about the experience of the mind and the body. I have been able to access memories of how I felt in my mind and in my body during worship services. Those experiences were things I had to bury in my psyche. I had no clue how to process what happened. Because of the divinity I felt when worshipping? Fuck no.

But you know what, at this point my mind and body are feeling a bit anxious writing about this. And… I am hungry. So that’s enough for today.