I bought a set of noise canceling headphones. Well, Justin bought them for me. They’re awesome. Anyway, these headphones have helped tremendously in allowing me to see so much more clearly. By see, I don’t mean visually. I mean in the sense of “knowing”...or “remembering”. It’s both somehow. To be clear, it wasn’t the headphones that got me here. I’ve discovered immense inner peace in connecting with my own body through meditation. I had been holding on to and avoiding looking at some very painful experiences because it all came at me too fast and I’d been programmed/conditioned to use ineffective or maladaptive coping strategies to not have to “think about it”. I’m not done by any means, it’s a work in progress, but I feel so much lighter. A little weed has helped me, personally, in this journey as well. I’ll explain later.
I was driving in Providence recently and I passed the street where I thought I might lose Miles, my son, while I was 26 weeks pregnant. The memory bubbled up and I felt it coming fast but never saw it coming. My breathing changed and I felt hot and panicked. I started to cry. My son is nearly two years old. He’s a healthy, happy, amazingly smart boy. There is no reason why I should have had the response that I did simply driving by a street. I knew then that I needed to revisit that pain and work through it. I had never let myself fully feel the emotions at the time I thought I could lose him because it would have been unbearable. So I buried them.
I’ve been dabbling in meditation for a little while. I didn’t understand it at first, but something made me keep revisiting it. I think I was really craving quiet. It’s incredible how distracted you can be by so much stimuli (visual, auditory, touch…) at all times and I was unable to filter it all appropriately. I don’t think humans are capable of filtering it all either. Not at the rate that is poured into us by so many different sources. That’s a circumstance of living today though, I suppose. It’s not to say that we need to succumb to it. Although that seems to be the easier choice, it really is not in summation.
There’s going to be a lot of “noise” all of the time and we have to discern what needs responding to and what doesn’t. You don’t need to put yourself in the position of bearing the burden of it all. That is extremely hard to do when you are inundated with penetrating images on various screens that are aimed at grabbing your attention through emotional response. Just tuning into the news can leave you feeling bereft and without hope. We’ve adapted to “tune it out” but really, we are holding onto this information unconsciously. You may not think so but the mind-body connection is real and this has been verified through science. Negativity from media sources can have a pernicious effect, not just emotionally but also physiologically. I am not an expert in this area, nor am I purporting to be. I can point you to research on the topic through the works of Dr. Gabor Mate (who I discovered on the Ten Percent Happier Podcast by Dan Harris-highly recommend). He has raked through the recent science on how emotional stress is a physiological event and he states that we are “bio-psycho-social creatures” (term originally coined by George Engel) and that the body and mind are not separate. In short, the more stressed we are, the more illness we experience. But you knew that already.
The problem is in the way illness is addressed today. The mind-body connection is pretty much neglected. Dr. Gabor Mate also details how, throughout one population, a number of specific illnesses disproportionately affected marginalized populations. Genetics do not change within a population. So the culprit is, quite clearly, the culture. The environment we find ourselves in can have long withstanding effects on our overall well being, and in turn, the well being of the people directly connected to us.
The good news is that we can manage and set boundaries around our personal “media diets”.
I’ve been able to think so much more clearly now that I’ve been able to remove myself from some imposing factors from time to time. It’s becoming a habit to take the space to think about how to respond and what to respond to and I feel so much healthier in so many ways. Instead of distracting myself from hard things, I am now tuning in to some hard truths that I have been repressing (I’m not sure I understood I was repressing them until recently, either) and I’m committing myself to discontinuing harmful cycles, because that is what the people in my direct orbit deserve and people in their direct orbit deserve and so on.
It’s not just outside factors that matter either. I’m addressing some internal…emotional blocks. You heard right. I think if I read the words I’m writing now as little as 2 years ago, I would not believe I was saying these things. I would be too nervous to just come out and say something that might make me appear a certain way. I would have thought that this might make me seem like a “Woo Woo” individual, completely disconnected from “reality”. To say this now, though, is so empowering and uplifting. I am not saying this to be self-righteous in any way either, I am just recognizing that the opinions of others are simply not my responsibility. It certainly takes some stopping and reminding myself of this, but when I do, I feel like I’m holding a bunch of balloons and dropping unneeded sacks of potatoes…one-by-one.
Enough about balloons and potatoes though, back to childhood trauma. The way I was taught to show and feel emotion is damaging. That is to “Grin and bear it”, “Pick yourself up by the bootstraps”, “Think of how good you have it”, “Just don’t think about it”, and my personal favorite, “No one ever said it was easy”. I recognized this a while ago but didn’t realize that I was unconsciously still living by these rule-sets. When things got hard, I would try my damndest not to feel the emotion naturally paired with the situation. So, on the verge of my 3rd trimester, walking down that street in Providence when I felt a rupture followed by an intense gush of blood that soaked my shorts and legs, all the way down to my socks, I knew what I had to do. I pretended it wasn’t happening. I sat upright in the front seat on the way to the hospital. While Justin ran red lights, I was eerily calm and quiet channeling every within me to push the terrifying possibilities out of my mind.
I was rushed in, examined, and quickly admitted to labor and delivery. I signed for the possibility of a blood transfusion and got a very painful shot to help the baby’s lungs develop in the event of what seemed, by what the doctors were saying, to be a likely delivery. But there was just no way. I had finally stayed pregnant for 26 weeks. Yes I was warned of the possibility of bleeding when I had had my 20 week ultrasound due to a complete placenta previa (a condition where the placenta covers the cervix) but I did not, at all, think that it would lead to a dangerously premature birth with significantly high likelihood of physical and neurological conditions. And there was the real possibility of death too. For the baby and for me. If I delivered, because of the rate I was bleeding at the time, I could have lost too much blood during the emergency C-Section. I had already lost what looked and felt like a small pond’s worth which is only a slight exaggeration.
The bleeding didn’t stop until I delivered him. Luckily, I did not need to deliver him until a scheduled C-section at 36 weeks. That day, after all of the commotion, once I was on Labor and Delivery receiving a magnesium drip to reduce the baby’s chance of developing Cerebral Palsy, the gushing stopped. After some monitoring, I was transferred to the Antenatal Care Unit where I stayed on bedrest for nearly 70 days up until his birthday. I wasn’t able to have any visitors besides two individuals that were signed off on because of Covid protocols. One being Justin, obviously, and the other was Jessy who you might remember if you happened to follow all of these blog posts.
You would think that that time would allow me space for acceptance and processing of emotions, but it was too day by day. I would bleed every now and again, some bigger bleeds, mostly smaller, but the intense energy it took to not let myself believe that I could have him too soon took absolutely everything I had. I was, as one of my favorite nursing assistants referred to girls with placenta previa she’d see on her unit, a “ticking time bomb”. She told me this after I had passed the 32 week mark when risks associated with early delivery are substantially lowered.
With one other “big bleed” during my two and a half month hospital stay, I was in the shower and my belly obscured my ability to see blood rushing down my legs again. Instead,I saw red swirling at the drain. I finished my shower with no urgency, stepped onto the white towels I used as bath mats and felt bad about the stains but I didn’t want to bleed on the floor. I called down to the nurses station and they were in the room in what seemed like seconds. The nurse who responded later told me she was very worried because she kept telling me to call Justin and I kept ignoring her and trying to hold casual conversation. I was extremely breezy while getting an IV put in to possibly head down to Labor and Delivery again. She also told me later that she went home after her shift was done at 7am and had to have a White Claw because she was so stressed.
I couldn’t have a white claw, so instead, I inadvertently exploded with some PTSD tears while driving past the street of the initial bleeding episode… 2 years later. I hadn’t thought about it. We had Miles and I can’t describe the feeling to you other than to say that even with all of the suffering, intense fear, and trauma absorbed, I feel like we won the lottery. He is nothing short of a miracle and no one can convince me otherwise. But I still need to process what happened. I’m doing that now.
So, yeah. That fucking blew. I was a detached shell of a person for the purpose of survival. Then I had a baby and, I don’t know if you know this but, you don’t have much time for yourself once you’re a parent. I didn’t revisit the emotional hoarding I was doing while on bed rest so it spilled out and caught me completely by surprise. I went home and took a bath. I wore my noise canceling headphones, put on meditation music meant to address emotional blockages and tuned into my body and where I was/am holding onto things that need to be let go of. I think that’s what they mean when they say “let it go”.
My sister (who I called the night I began my first miscarriage-one of 5- in 2019 because she worked at Women and Infants hospital) works on the floor that I was admitted to for bedrest during this 70 day stint. So I was lucky in that I had an extra visitor since Covid prevented friends and family other than the two I was allowed. What are the odds of your sister being one of the odd, anomaly-like-condition, patients on a long-term stay on your unit? When she had downtime, she would come into my room and we’d chat. She’d bring me food because I was limited to notoriously unexciting hospital menus. And when I was sleeping, sometimes she’d tip-toe around my bed to steal leftovers. I guess I owe her that since I never let her eat my Kit-Kats, growing up. I’ll share that story another time.
So here’s the even weirder thing. At the same time I was absolutely terrified and feared for my unborn son’s life as well as my own, I somehow also knew it was going to be ok. I can’t fully explain it to you with words but I can tell you that raccoons play a big role in this saga (If you want to know more, read my last post “In Other Words”).
It was one of the very first days after I had been officially admitted long term. I was busy doing absolutely nothing. A video popped up on my phone under Justin’s name. He was on his way back to the hospital after stopping home to feed the cats. The video was an adorable raccoon poking its head out of a hole in a tree on a side street close to our house. He was about to climb out of the tree when he spotted Justin and pulled himself back in to hide. Curiosity kept him peeking back up to assess what this dude was all about and he kind of just stared back at him while Justin captured everything excitedly to show me and brighten up an otherwise extremely shitty situation. That’s the picture you see at the top of this post. It’s also the picture that Justin had blown up and now hangs above Miles’ crib.
I’ve come to certain realizations in practice (meditation) and they make so much sense while I am “in it” that I leave feeling renewed. Yet, somehow, I keep forgetting. Because I am opened up to all the noise once I return to the social constructs that have been created up until now. I get sucked into the void still, even though I’ve cultivated this sense of “knowing”. Negativity is pervasive by nature. The difficult part is realizing that one of the most important life-forces is connection to it all. Isn’t that confusing? We need connection. Don’t get me wrong. We need to choose the good. I want to make it my life’s work and purpose to react mindfully for the benefit of everyone. Again, it’s not easy. It takes practice. I want to write it down to help myself remember. Maybe this might be helpful for others too.
I’m where I’m supposed to be at this moment. I just need to keep remembering what I have found within myself and to keep working towards a sort of reprogramming for the least destructive paths of life and that takes practice. It’s not easy, but it’s not too hard either. You can do it and it’s worth it.
In keeping with my balloons, you may disagree with some of the zeitgeist’s themes that I’m expressing, but I’m just not interested in anything other than the truth. The truth is that there have been some significant missteps of calculated division for the benefit of few opposed to all, that has permeated generations and caused significant guilt, shame, pain, fear, and suffering. It was passed on to me and I am trying my hardest to be as mindful about not passing it on to Miles. I will fuck up. I am not perfect, but if I can keep remembering the importance of maintaining a sense of mindfulness, I can try my best to minimize pain and suffering. Compassion for yourself and for all is where we can and will see positive shifts for the future. It takes consistent practice and remembering. Again, you can do it.
Talk about your feelings! Allow yourself to think about them, feel them fully and express them in healthy ways and model that for others. Because if you hold them back, your ability to be mindful becomes stunted. The built up feelings cause you to react unconsciously and quite unhealthily. If it’s not meditation for you, maybe it’s therapy, maybe it’s medication options, or psychedelics (administered under the care of professionals in a controlled environment, of course). Maybe it’s a little THC. A good 5mg gummy, for me, has been super helpful in allowing me to see where I hold back emotionally in even the smallest and seemingly inconsequential decisions. Again, holding back from the truth is just sacks of potatoes. Find what you need and know that the universe is absolutely on your side. It is not punitive or spiteful. It does not smite, alienate, or turn its back on you. It wants you to live so abundantly and you deserve to. Oh and noise canceling headphones! 10 out of 10. Highly recommend.
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