As some of you may know, I have been in a pretty significant setback since early September after pushing myself too hard and, if I’m being completely transparent, allowing the overthinking of my future to take over. These past few weeks have been some of the most testing periods I have experienced in the last year alone. Akathisia has hit me full force again, and there have been days when my body has been unable to move an inch from bed while, internally, every cell in me feels like it needs to run. There were moments I found myself crawling to the kitchen, wondering how I could possibly be back here again after everything I have fought through.
And maybe, somehow, this is exactly where God needed me: right here, right now.
Because while a part of me is still very much deep inside this setback, another part of me has entered one of the deepest spiritual journeys I have had yet. I have always believed that sometimes, in order for us to do the deepest spiritual work, the outside world has to become quiet enough for us to finally hear what is happening within us. And ironically, while the outer world grows quieter, our internal world can feel like nothing less than chaos.
But maybe that is part of it. Maybe sometimes the outer world has to slow down; almost to a complete stop-- so there is nowhere left to run, nowhere else to look, and nothing left to distract us from what our soul is asking us to see.
And mine did.
Before this wave, my life was still incredibly limited compared to what most people would consider “normal,” but I had created a little life within those limitations. I was walking. I was doing my social media posts and advocacy work. I was productive around my home in the ways my body allowed. I was going to church, which I miss dearly. I was making it to my treatments. None of these things would sound extraordinary to most people, but when you have lived in a body like mine, they are everything. Then suddenly, I lost access to probably 90% of what I had been doing.
There is something incredibly difficult to explain about being forced to sit completely still inside a body that desperately wants to run. My mind felt like it was destroying itself while my physical body barely had the energy to move. Eventually, I had no choice but to find my breath. I had to start accepting the things I could not control. I had to surrender to whatever God and the univer
se had planned for this chapter, not because I wanted to surrender; not by a mile, but because eventually I ran out of other options.
And then this weekend happened.
Interestingly, October opened with some intense astrological energy. Venus stationed retrograde in Scorpio on October 3, Mars opposed Pluto, and the Sun opposed Saturn on October 4. In astrology, these kinds of transits are often associated with bringing buried emotions to the surface and forcing us to look at attachment, control, relationships, limitations, power and the things we may have been avoiding within ourselves. Whether someone believes in astrology or not, I can tell you that something came to the surface for me, and it came up hard.
In the early hours of the morning, I went outside for a walk. Almost immediately after stepping out of my building, I unexpectedly saw something that deeply triggered me. The details aren't even important because, after the initial panic subsided, I realized what I was actually reacting to had very little to do with what I saw. What came crashing down on me was something I don't think I had ever fully put into words before.
I was ashamed of being sick.
We talk so much about the direct symptoms of psychiatric medication harm. We talk about akathisia, withdrawal, neurological symptoms, insomnia, terror, DP/DR, physical pain, nervous system dysregulation and the hundreds of other symptoms that can accompany these injuries. But we don't talk nearly enough about the shame that can come with being chronically ill. The shame of not wanting someone to know what happens behind closed doors. The shame of wondering whether someone would still want you if they saw the parts of your life nobody else sees. The shame of feeling less worthy because your body cannot do what everyone else's seems capable of doing without a second thought. The shame some people carry for having taken psychiatric drugs in the first place. And then there is the shame imposed on us by a system and a society that constantly rewards producing, moving, achieving and doing.
And while there is a part of me that knows, deeply and absolutely, that we are lovable exactly as we are-- that illness does not make any of us less worthy of love—that old voice still came back. The one I thought I had done so much work around. Underneath all of those layers of shame was perhaps the most painful fear of all: What if being sick makes me less lovable?
I knew it wasn't true. But knowing something and having an old wound activated are two very different things.
That realization broke something open in me because I realized that, once again, I was handing away my reverence for myself for the possibility of fitting in, being accepted or being welcomed into somebody else's version of a normal life. I was looking at myself through an imagined set of someone else's eyes and deciding that the version of me who is sick, struggling, covered up, exhausted or unable to participate in life the way other people do was somehow less worthy than the version of me who could.
After the panic came the only thing I knew how to do: I let it out. I sat in the shame, and then I sat in the rage underneath it. I raged at the world. I raged into my pillow. I cried. I let my body shake. I got sick. I stopped trying to make the emotion spiritual, graceful or pretty because sometimes healing doesn't look like sitting peacefully with your eyes closed while beautiful music plays in the background. Sometimes it is messy. Underneath all of our philosophies, self-help books and spiritual practices, we are still animals, and animals don't sit around intellectualizing everything happening inside of their nervous systems. They move, tremble and shake. Sometimes I think our bodies need permission to finish sentences our minds have been interrupting for years.
Then, this morning, I woke up around 1:30 a.m. and couldn't fall back asleep. I decided to take a short walk around the block, hoping the movement might tire me enough that I could come home and sleep. When I stepped outside, I saw a woman across the street with long braids wearing this long, black, sparkly dress. As I continued around the block, I saw a man walking with a woman I assumed was a sex worker-- no judgment, everybody is on their own journey. I saw a homeless man lying on the ground. I saw drunk men spilling out of a bar, and I could hear the sound of people laughing and having a good time.
For whatever reason, seeing all of these different lives happening around me hit me so hard. There was an entire world happening at 1:30 in the morning while I was walking around the block hoping to tire out a nervous system that still doesn't know how to simply exist peacefully. Suddenly all I could think was: I am still sick.
And then came the questions. Why? Why is this my life? Why am I still sick? Why did this happen to me? When does it end? When do I get to participate in the world without calculating what every ounce of energy is going to cost me?
I rushed home and messaged some of the spiritualists who have become part of my tribe throughout this war because I wanted answers. I wanted someone to explain why. I wanted God explained to me. I wanted the universe explained to me. More than anything, I wanted my future explained to me because somewhere inside of me I still believed that if I could just know what happens next, I could finally feel safe.
After an hour-long conversation, I could feel my neurological pain increasing from absorbing too much information, analyzing everything and once again trying to control the world around me. Eventually, I crashed back to sleep. But when I woke up again, something suddenly clicked in a way it hadn't before.
Why am I entertaining all of this?
I started thinking about something I have thought about many times before: What if life is a game? Not a game in the sense that suffering isn't real, because God knows I would never minimize what people endure. I mean a game in the existential sense. What if this is somehow an experience our souls signed up for? What if there are parts of the game we don't get to understand while we're inside of it?
I have watched life move in seasons over and over again. Things open and things close. People appear and disappear. Bodies change. Circumstances change. And yes, because astrology is part of my spiritual belief system, I watch planets change positions and then watch the flavor of different periods of my life seem to shift with them. There are moments when things seems to be just a bit more easier (though nothing about this jorueny is easy), and others when everything slows down and feels like it's going to shit. So I found myself wondering: why am I exhausting myself trying to control every single thing that happens next?
I know some of that is simply the human condition, but I also know that control is one of my deepest wounds because control has always promised me safety. If I can figure out what happens next, I'll be safe. If I know what someone thinks about me, I'll be safe. If I know when I'm going to heal, I'll be safe. If I know whether I will be loved, I'll be safe. If I can calculate every possible outcome before it arrives, somehow nothing can hurt me.
But is that actually safety?
Because sitting here worrying about my future doesn't feel very safe. It feels like suffering over what is happening today while simultaneously suffering over a hundred things that haven't even happened yet.
The more I have lived through, the more I have come to believe that these things don't just happen randomly. I now believe things happen for a reason, that certain moments are lined up in ways we may not understand when we are living through them, and that certain people, experiences, endings, beginnings and even painful chapters arrive exactly where they are supposed to in the story. I have seen too many things line up in my own life to believe that everything is simply coincidence anymore. And if I believe that, then it brings me to one of the biggest existential questions I keep coming back to: What exactly is free will?
Most spiritualists will tell you that even if certain things are written in our charts, chosen by our souls or destined to cross our paths, we still have free will. And maybe free will was never supposed to mean that we control everything that happens to us. Maybe certain parts of the story are already written, while our freedom exists in how we meet them, what we do with them and how much of ourselves we lose trying to control what hasn't happened yet. Maybe the people who are meant to cross our paths will cross them. Maybe certain chapters are unavoidable. Maybe there are experiences our souls came here specifically to have. And maybe our greatest freedom isn't in rewriting every part of the story, but in choosing how we experience it.
I think I am beginning to understand free will differently. Maybe my free will isn't controlling what happens next. Maybe my free will is deciding how much of my life I am willing to sacrifice worrying about what happens next. Maybe free will is not obsessing over everyone else, not living according to other people's opinions, not constantly questioning whether I am lovable, not demanding that I know exactly when I am going to heal and not requiring tomorrow to reveal itself before tomorrow arrives.
And I am not saying we should sit on the couch and never try. Although, for many of us healing from psychiatric drug injury, the couch is sometimes exactly where our bodies need us to be, and there should be no shame in that either. What I mean is that maybe our job is simply to do what we can within the capacity we have in this moment, this hour, this day, this week, this month or this year, and stop judging ourselves against the capacity we wish we had.
Because this morning I realized something else: if life really is a game, there are different ways I can experience it. I can be the character, where everything is happening to me and every event becomes something I need to personalize, interpret or fear. I can be the player, constantly strategizing, making moves, trying to influence the outcome and figuring out where I need to go next.
Or I can become the observer.
Something happens, and instead of immediately chasing it, fearing it, interpreting it or trying to control where it leads, I can become curious about it. There is the event. There is my reaction to the event. There is the fear coming up inside of me. There is the story my mind immediately created around it. There is that familiar urge to figure everything out so I can feel safe again. And then comes the part I have rarely allowed myself to consider: maybe I don't have to follow any of it. Maybe I can simply notice it.
Being the observer doesn't mean I stop participating in my life. I will still work in the capcity i can from home. I will still love in the way a part of me can... I will still dream, pray, advocate, pursue healing and take chances when my body allows me to take them. I will still have hopes for my future. I am still human, and I'm sure there will be plenty of moments when I completely forget everything I am writing right now and find myself trying to control the universe again.
But maybe I don't have to grab the steering wheel every single time uncertainty appears.
Maybe instead I can start asking a completely different question: What happens when I stop chasing life long enough to see what life brings to me?
What stays when I stop gripping it? What leaves? What returns? What finds me without being forced? Who chooses me when I'm not performing for their acceptance? Who am I when nobody else's opinion gets a vote? What happens when I stop treating every unknown as an emergency?
I don't know.
And maybe that's the whole point.
I have spent so much of my life believing that freedom would finally come when I had enough control to feel safe. Maybe I had it backward. Maybe freedom begins when I realize I was never supposed to control the entire game. I was supposed to experience it.
And maybe being the observer; the person who can still love the character, participate as the player, but occasionally step outside of both and simply witness the game unfolding-- is the closest thing to free will that I have ever known.
One Love
Malissa
