Hi, friend,

 

It is me! I'm alive. And I have a story for you. 

 

Back in September, I did a guided psilocybin journey with my therapist. (As opposed to taking mushrooms for fun, which I did approximately 448 times between the ages of 15 and 23.) The entire thing boiled down to one message that came through with crystal clarity: “stop everything and pay attention to your body.”

 

(Yes. I’m starting this returning-to-civilization email by diving into a lesson from a mushroom journey. So that's how things are going I guess?)

 

So anyway, I got this very strong message to listen to my body, and I knew it was time. I’d been feeling mildly and inexplicably shitty for the past year, working with a naturopath, but not getting anywhere. (If you want to know what it feels like to practice faith, just start taking supplements.) 

 

For about six months, my partner and I had been kicking around the idea of my doing what he’d named Radical Health Care, which was, as the name suggests, a plan for me to prioritize my health. Post-Em & Friends, I finally had the space and time to do it. I just needed to commit. Which I had not done.

 

The day after the journey, I decide it’s time for Radical Health Care. I talk to my friend Nic Antoinette, a long-distance hiker, about long-distance hiking. I recommit to my meditation practice. I download a yoga thing. I decide to let go of some extra freelance work I’d picked up, in order to clear my schedule for RHC. I am like, LET’S DO THIS.

 

And then, the next day, the headache started. 

 

I thought it was a migraine at first, but then it didn’t go away. It was so bad that I wanted to leave my body, to jump out the window, to become nothing. So, on the 8th day of the headache, I went to the ER and got a scan.

 

I was sitting on a folding chair in the hospital hallway when a young ER doctor bounced up. He handed me a pamphlet. He said, “The CT scan found some areas of concern. You’ll need to follow up with your primary care doctor right away.” 

 

The pamphlet was called “Understanding Your Brain Tumor.” 

 

This is not a pamphlet anyone ever wants to be holding in their hand.

The scan showed that the headache was coming from degenerated disks in my neck. It also, incidentally, found found six tumors on my thyroid, and yes, a brain tumor. All unrelated to the headache.

 

Very good news: the tumor is a meningioma, which is the best kind of brain tumor to have. They are almost always benign, and usually grow very slowly, and mine isn’t causing symptoms. But the only treatment is surgery, so at some point in the next couple of years, I will need to get it removed (intense surgery, long recovery). Right now it is being closely monitored, like a teenager who already got caught sneaking out once.

 

The six thyroid tumors appeared to be cancer at first, but then after a biopsy and some newfangled molecular testing, turned out not to be. Hooray! Long story short, I’d been living with some pretty serious autoimmune dysfunction, and this was a symptom.

 

The headache lasted for nine weeks and I still have it, on and off, despite three months of PT to try and correct my terrible posture, and a new ergonomic setup. (I generally don’t believe in telling anyone what to do, but people, I will say this: Do not work with your laptop on your actual lap, bent over a coffee table, or balanced on your thighs in bed… and definitely don’t do it for 12 years.) But the headache is mild now, and manageable.

I went home from the ER and spent the next two months scrambling to find doctors, dealing with insurance and overtaxed hospital scheduling departments, waiting for scan results and more scan results. Waiting for appointments. Waiting for people to call me back. Also, living in terror that I might be dead soon, or back in cancer treatment, or undergoing brain surgery, or all of the above.

 

There is nothing that challenges all your personal growth, all your tools and skills and fucking meditation practice and Buddha garden sculptures, like being at the mercy of doctor’s offices, insurance companies, and your own body. Nothing.

 

I did a lot of screaming this fall.

 

Since October, I have been in power save mode; I made my life as small and manageable as possible in order to do what I had to do. There was a lot of Groundhog Day energy. People talk a lot about the hard work of healing because it’s emotionally and/or physically painful, and this is very often true. But another part of why healing is hard is that it’s really freaking boring. It is boring AF to go to doctors or therapy or meetings all the time, to be on a diet so restrictive you can’t eat any food you don’t make yourself, to take only tiny baby steps because that’s all you can do. Taking care of yourself, like actual self-care, not like a bath and a candle, but like the kind that requires a shitload of discipline, is incredibly boring. Which is probably why I never really did it, until I didn’t have a choice.

 

I’m very happy to report that I am, fundamentally, okay. Everything is stable. I’ll have scans every few months, which I’ve been doing for 20 years anyway for other body parts, after having Hodgkin’s lymphoma in my 20s. I’ll have brain surgery at some point and I will deal with it then. A strict treatment protocol of diet and herbs and supplementation has been hugely helpful for my autoimmune stuff, and I’m feeling so much better, even though it’s a long game. My thyroid function is back in normal range. I didn’t realize how sick I was until I started to heal.

 

I’ve been doing Radical Health Care. Just not the way I thought I was gonna get to do it.

 

But it is interesting, isn’t it, that I got the “pay attention to your body” God-download and then I got the headache, which is what sent me to the ER, and then the headache turned out to be the least medically significant thing going on in my body. I would have been diagnosed with these other things eventually, had I not had the headache, but I would have been sicker, and who knows.

 

I am not in the business of making neat conclusions about anything, much less the nature of the universe. But it is interesting.

So this is me returning to this newsletter, and I’m not going to stress out about making it into something that can be, like, marketed. It will not have a theme that can easily be summed up in a sentence, because I do not have a theme that can easily be summed up in a sentence. (And neither do you.) It will be about being a person and creativity and transitions and menopause and breathwork and IDFK what else. What it feels like to be negative space. Messages you get while you’re on mushrooms?

 

I’m also gonna be doing some new shit in the next couple of months, and this is where I’ll tell you about it. 

 

Fair warning, it’s gonna get weird. And fun. I'm glad you're here.