Prolog

"Into ruin I am sinking
hostage of this nameless feeling.
Hell is set free, flooded I'll be,
feel the undertow inside me."
- James, Frayed Ends of Sanity

There's a feeling I've carried for as long as I can remember:

Something is wrong.
I have to escape.
There's nowhere to go.
It will never be okay.
I can't survive this.

Then the terror would kick in with a searing certainty of forever. I would feel completely broken. The hopelessness was final, thick and suffocating. But there was an urgency to it. It felt unbearable. I was helpless to change it. That's when I would feel like removing myself from the world. I would feel like the pain was so huge, impossible and endless—there was no way to feel it and no way to outrun it. This used to happen almost daily.

And suddenly, the terror doesn't kick in any more. I no longer spiral. I just stay with the feeling that something is missing. I've been dreaming of it a lot. I think my nervous system is finally processing it. And suddenly, I know what it is. The nameless feeling is neglect.

The childhood when no one came. The needs that were suppressed underneath the terror. The terror used to fuse with the absence but now it isn't hijacking the experience anymore. What's left is the hole. Abuse has events. Neglect has holes. It's the shape left by what never happened. Maybe the terror is gone but the neglect will still need healing.

The plus side is that healing neglect is a walk through an amusement park compared to what came before. Healing abuse was like: how do I live through today, why am I so afraid of people, why is my brain shutting down when I need it most, etc.

Healing neglect is like: what do I really want, what would feel good right now, how can I get more nourishment out of imperfect interactions with imperfect people?

All my life, there was a small boy inside of me who was waiting to be rescued. Who wanted desperately for the terror to stop. He wanted someone to save him from my parents. That boy lived in my subconscious, tainting every interaction and every relationship. Always looking for the person that would somehow make it right. Always judging everyone I met—every friend, every lover, every community—asking if they were good enough to see me, to know what I'd been through, to make the pain stop. I rejected people that didn't meet his impossible standard. I rejected everybody.

Ironically, the ones I made an exception for were people who were violent and unreliable like my parents and who only ended up retraumatizing me. I suppose the lesson had to be learned. The subconscious had to be made conscious. Hard things the hard way.

I needed to remember what happened, to build up the capacity to feel the terror of the abuse and to finally be present enough for the nervous system to have another chance to metabolize it. Turns out, I had to give up a lot for it to work.

And I did. And it did.

Years of grief and relentless work and then the final push with the DMT hitting my system. Curling up into a ball on the couch one last time. Asking the therapist to put his hands on me and watching the terror fizzle out of my body like air from a balloon. And then the need to stretch and move to complete the stress response that's been stuck for 40 years. Fascia releasing tensions that I didn't even know where there.

Breaking through the glassy sheet of ice to take the breath that's long overdue. Only that the ice has been on the inside.

No more shock collar. Finally, a new body. A new mind.

Like switching from forced focus to controlled peripheral vision. But across ALL senses at once.

And then walking through the world as if a fog has lifted. As if seeing color for the first time. No panic, no hypervigilance. Just ease.

I remember going to a contact jam after and having a sudden realization that I'm not tracking every single person in the room, that I don't even know who's here. That's a first.

Other little discoveries: being able to play rhythm after struggling my entire life with it. Being able to sing in tune. Not caring when not. The sense of smell returning after being gone for two years.

The body moving differently. Strength expanding. Coordination becoming easier. Balance requiring less effort. Tensions fading.

Suddenly not feeling rushed.

For the first time being able to decide to ignore background noise. Instead of being debilitated by it.

It's like the little boy inside of me is not frightened of everyone any more. Maybe I finally healed enough and he's starting to accept that no one is coming to save him, that no one can save him and that no one could when he needed it. That he doesn't need anyone else but me any more.

And now he's looking at me while holding my hand for the first time. Talking to me after a lifetime of frozen silence. And he's saying: we have to let everyone know what happened to us.

He isn't asking to be rescued anymore. He's asking to be remembered.

And I do.

And now you do too.

And I'm realizing that there have been more than a few dozen days this year that I genuinely said to myself: today was the best day of my life. Not because extraordinary things happened. Because nothing was missing. Ordinary was enough.

Suddenly, I love being me. And I'm grateful for my experience and the capacities it built.

I used to think that my experience with trauma and healing made me specifically suited to help others. And now I'm starting to realize that I have much more exciting options because after all I've been through there's nothing more extraordinary than an ordinary life.

Happily ever after, motherfuckers.