Chapter 1: On the Mind - Who Is Wellness For?

PART I: JOURNEY TO THE MIND

“The unknown itself is in our own mind as well—our mind is in its largest part totally unknown to us. Therefore, it is not only a relation to the exterior world, it is a relation to ourselves.”

—Roberto Calasso

“The radical emphasis cannot be simply on explaining the political information or claiming the right to information. Information is not enough. You have to train minds that can deal with information.”

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“If you take the character of any man, it really is but the aggregate of tendencies, the sum total of the inclinations of his mind; you will find that misery and happiness are equal factors in the formation of that character.”

—Swami Vivekananda

* * *

My mother has avoided consistent therapy throughout her life. In my twenties, after gently interrogating why, it pained me to hear her describe how it felt to be dulled, to feel less on antidepressants, anti-hysterics, or the medication she was occasionally prescribed. As a person who feels everything, I sympathized. I understood how shocking that reality might be, to be stripped of your compass, to lose your sense of being when you are forced to neutralize a part of yourself. Even if half of that self is shadowed by psychosis, at least it’s your own. The sad thing is, there was a tricky and moral conundrum we found ourselves in as a family. By honoring her wishes, we disarmed ourselves to her perpetual violence. Abuse, in so many ways, exists in the governance of the mind.

Even still, I can’t help but compare my life to my mother’s and acknowledge the immense privileges I’ve had that she didn’t. It’s the weird paradox of accepting complex and nuanced situations. On soft days, when I am feeling tenderness toward myself, I am able to accept everything that has happened to me in my life. I can see myself with clarity and precision. I can hold all the things I’ve gained and lost and honor them separately. I know I’ve had access to many life choices she was never afforded, things that, even if she began to be aware of as she aged, she never fully trusted. For me, with a sister who was committed to “doing the (inner) work” before I knew what that was, I was thrust into spaces of thinking about the mind, of thinking about trauma more holistically. Even before I was an adult who could choose to be cynical, I believed in the miraculous power of healing.

Throughout this book, I’ll keep coming back to the concept of policing the imagination. Saidiya Hartman writes about this in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, stating, “So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.”^[1] One of the hardest parts of healing from childhood trauma, especially parental abuse (or any kind of abuse that requires grooming and consistency) is unlearning the impact of something that gravely affected your expectations and experience of life. This is why mental capacity, strain, and processing are all important aspects of wellness. Sometimes, despite wanting to heal, people are blocked from healing because it is largely inaccessible to them. If my mother refuses to participate in society as a person who takes accountability for her limitations (and therefore refuses to take the steps that will afford her own safety and the protection of others), how do we factor it into the discourse of wellness that suggests the playing field is the same for anyone in the pursuit of a better life?

There are so many ways that white supremacy polices your imagination, and other systems of oppression use similar tactics to keep you small. Abuse is just another disadvantage, though it’s rarely taken into context in terms of how its limitations might define you, and therefore immobilize you in the process of healing. In When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté writes, “Excessive emotional involvement with a parent, a lack of psychological independence, an overwhelming need for love and affection, and the inability to feel or express anger have long been identified by medical observers as possible factors in the natural development of disease.”^[2] Emotions, he explains later, directly modulate the immune system. As someone who has been sick for much of my life, and finding myself in multiple abusive relationships throughout the years, Maté’s work helped me realize the mind and body are inextricably linked, and trauma creates a pattern of a coping adaptive response in both the mind and body.

Working with my trauma therapist to “locate my rage” has been something I find extremely hard to do. Sometimes it takes years, but when I finally synthesize my anger, like everything in my life, I turn bad feelings into gold, I alchemize shit into magic. While I celebrate this quality in me, my ability to alchemize shit into magic—believing it’s what’s enabled me to achieve anything—I’ve also begun to understand that forgiveness is not always the answer. Sometimes it’s necessary to feel anger, to validate the fire within. It’s always been easy for me to fight for justice, for liberation, because once again I sublimated these feelings into something I deemed meaningful. What I didn’t realize was that there was still a lot of unprocessed anger that I was in turn directing back toward myself. It wasn’t until therapy that I realized being forever pleasant and flexible to other people’s needs wasn’t a skill. Through accepting that, I was able to gain a holistic perspective of who I am, one that is not marred by judgment or haunted by the ghosts of my parents, but rather an acknowledgment by a person truly honest with herself in every capacity, good or bad. My own inner voice was so demanding, so mean-spirited, I had developed an acceptance and blur of it, believing that it made me stronger, and thus better.

Most of my life, if people hated me or did something painful to me, I always felt like I deserved it. I’ve assumed most people were, or are, better than me. I’ve assumed they were more moral than I was because I believed I was lacking in some fundamental way and therefore deserved to be punished and taught a lesson. This has kept me in a loop of always needing to prove that I’m the good guy. Happy to learn, to concede, happy to do more. I never considered that this may be something that I was told to ensure I remain small. I never once assumed that my mother was actually recycling ideas that she had of herself, that she then needed to reiterate and project onto me so she wouldn’t be alone in that experience of her presumed failings. I was the little doll she placed secrets, fears, questions, ugliness, darkness, and depravity into. I carried them for her, I wore those feelings because she cracked me open and sunk herself into my spine, crawling into me like a puppeteer’s hand.

Recently I’ve begun to question: Where does she end and where do I begin? Who am I when I don’t have her in my head, when she isn’t speaking for me, or to me? In order to keep me trapped, cloistered by her side, she had to make me believe that I could never leave. I left physically over a decade ago. But I’m still here, and so is she. Thing is, I’m trying to let her go completely so that I can embody who I am. That means looking at myself and examining what made me this way and the impact it’s had on my health, both mental and physical; keeping a record, keeping track, to ensure my own safety.

For more than half my life I’ve suffered from some ailment: asthma, eczema, chronic body pain, dysmorphia, dysphoria, acute unknown sadness, IBS, general gut issues, constant flu/weak immune system, then early stages of vaginismus. I have never felt truly well. My gravitation toward wellness was because I didn’t have a choice. I knew if I didn’t confront what was underneath all the unraveling signs of my mind and body, I would live in this half life. Or else I really would kill myself. Either way, I had no choice, something had to give.

*  *  *

I was bred to take a hit. My mother’s rage could erupt at any moment, so I fashioned myself against her, cowering to be absolved. For vast years of my life, whenever the hits came, I let her use my body with disposability. In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz writes about his father’s abuse so rapturously: “You almost welcome the beatings because it’s a show of some kind of affection—you’ll take anything when you can’t get nothin.”^[3] Not knowing when and what could provoke her violence, I considered my unworthiness the only possible explanation. Even if death was constantly on the horizon, the looming threat of being harmed was a sort of sick safety I attached myself to. The consistency was safe, because at least she was engaging with me, at least in those moments she knew I was alive.

At a young age I realized it was uncouth to talk about my ugly home life, so I hid it. In my teens, a few incidents made me shut out (and up) even more. The first was when I was about fourteen and I gathered a group of girls at my school because I was suicidal. In the space between one class and another, I sat on a concrete hill and shared details of my torrid familial existence. When the bell rang for class, everyone got up like I had done a presentation and walked away. No one talked to me about it again. The second time I went to the school counselor, roughly around the same age, and told them about the knife incident. I needed someone to offer me help so I could take it. My father was called into the school, and when I had to recall what I had told my counselor, I bit my lip against his visible discomfort and undermined myself. As I walked to the car with him later, I was ashamed that I had felt weak enough to ask for help, and stupid enough to think that it would come. The third and last time I was nineteen, just after I had had an abortion. For a Muslim girl this was especially bad news. I felt broken and was beginning to see how the fractures of my life had led me to this moment. Hoping for sympathy, I confided in my boss at a department store I worked at. She told me, point blank, that I had killed my baby when she was trying to have one herself. The three-punch hit of trying to ask for help but being met without empathy or results debilitated me.

I come from a culture that avoids real confrontation, especially with ourselves, so I abstracted my own feelings in order to dull the warning signs in my body. I hid the depth of my internal darkness, began to blanch myself and dim my dimensions. But projecting stoicism eventually backfires. As a child, I was expected to figure things out on my own. Being born to immigrants meant I was naturally expected to be hardworking and diligent, but with a mother who had various forms of mental illness, I also couldn’t have needs. So, I became ashamed of needing anything, ever, as I felt like it was admirable to be a person who wanted nothing, and accepted nothing, who was just a keeper for others, a container for their pain and desires. I saw myself as a giver, never the receiver. I saw myself as the savior, never the saved. My trauma therapist, E, has pointed out that this is another trauma response. To know your function in a relationship can save you in your youth. To know the parameters in which I existed created a natural boundary for myself. My obsession with being perfect meant that what I deem imperfect—feelings like anger, frustration, rage, pettiness, or jealousy—I hid and dismissed. Disgusted by the idea that I could feel these things, I’ve masked myself in a “kind person” exterior, not knowing that I could just be a person, flawed and human. That it’s OK to have contradictory feelings, and that it’s not a battle to have no ego, but rather having a healthy ego, where you hold yourself and others accountable with the same justice and compassion. This obsession to be perfect, to be good, to be everything my mother needed, neutered my own sense of knowing what I needed at all times. The idea that someone could just love me as I am is quite a wild concept. I presumed I had to have a function in a relationship, and the concept of my own autonomy was so detached from me that sometimes it still takes a leap to remember that I can think differently about myself, that I can ask for more. This role prescribed to me as a “caretaker” doesn’t need to be a life sentence. I can choose my own destiny, in all the ways.

We couch a lot of things as personality, in the definitions of who we are not, realizing that those terms and conditions are subject to change if they’re not working for us. But we run on narratives of ourselves, of our lives—and then apply those narratives onto others, believing they are in on it or that they know us better than we know ourselves. This is also a trauma response. It was not until I began therapy that I realized I had spent my time in this strange purgatory of my mind. A place where I clearly had some kind of autonomy and yet my own desires were imperceivable to me.

The older I get, the more I realize I have to actually face my trauma. I have to name it, to say it out loud and voice the vibrations of my body and experience. Nothing can be decoded if it lives in mystery.

*  *  *

In a criticism of Greek doctors, Socrates once quoted a Thracian doctor’s observation: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.”^[4] With this book I want to isolate and examine each aspect of wellness—mind, body, self-care, and justice—because we need to talk to each other, and understand ourselves, our friends, and communities of healing and be honest about the things we’ve experienced, what pains us, in order to understand what our lessons are in this lifetime. In Iroquois Law,^*[5] there is the idea of seven generations, a code that defines a moral responsibility to the seven generations (past and future) to heal, to face, to overcome so that those same lessons are not passed down. In the realm of wellness, it’s quite amazing, because the act of micro healing—of healing oneself—must also be seen in the context of macro healing, of the community. We cannot be ignorant of the whole, we must endeavor to contextualize ourselves in the larger plight of humanity. Just as the synecdoche of the mind and its workings must be taken into consideration of the larger machinations of the body.

Amita Swadhin, an incest survivor, comrade, and founder of Mirror Memoirs,^[6] once mentioned in an interview that child sexual abuse survivors are the best actors. Child abuse is such a terrible thing, and when it’s at the hands of the parent, it’s hard not to embody that messaging at your core, living your life within the parameters of that narrative. Whether or not this then becomes the compass with which you navigate your entire life, it affects every corner of your being. Imagine if you were raped, molested, or touched as a child—then imagine if that happened at the hands of a parent. Imagine how that would make you feel to carry that in your body for the rest of your life. Many people have to do that every day, without ever acknowledging that pain. Being a child sexual abuse survivor is a warrior’s job, and the personal costs are endless.

At twenty-nine, after some memories of my own molestation resurfaced, I decided that instead of fulfilling a lifelong dream of having a child, my first priority would have to be to look at my own story, body, and life. When these memories resurfaced, I began to understand other parts of my mind, and things began to click. Every time I see a small child, I wonder who is touching them—I fear for them. It feels sadistic, and whenever I think such things, it feels shameful. Through medicine work, especially through sitting with ayahuasca, I’ve gained access to an entire community of others who were sexually abused as children, and many of us share this sentiment, a fear of unconsciously replicating the violence that is so familiar that at a certain point you wonder if there’s life outside of these definitions. I want to end this cycle with me.

*  *  *

Maté’s work has filled in significant gaps for me and helped me understand correlations in mental and physical illness. “I think [her] precocious intellectual development is what happens to bright and sensitive kids when the emotional environment isn’t able to hold them enough; they develop this very powerful intellect that holds them instead.”^[7]

Throughout my life, I have felt like I feel too much for a normal person. I can feel so many different things at once, and they’re deep feelings, oceans deep. Since I was a child I’ve had visions, I’ve seen dead people, I’ve had access to portals that I’m still trying to make sense of. Feeling, knowing, seeing this much is an incredible burden, however. People don’t believe you, and, for someone like me whose very magic was quashed by my own mother, I became a victim of other people trying to make me small, to fit me into a box.

Every time I have cried in front of my mother, she has made fun of me. The most recent time, just before I stopped talking to her, she accused me of turning my sister into a slut. In a moment of deep despair, it all came crashing down and something inside of me cracked like a lightning bolt’s whip. Of the memories I had to blur because I couldn’t fathom their reality. Confusing flashbacks, phantom feelings, shivers, and discomfort were a sign that something bigger in my framework was being ruptured. Perhaps because I was sober, and also because I had just come out of a serious relationship, I was able to look at the blur, and a picture was beginning to form. I figured I had nothing to lose but to jump in.

The first time I had words for this gnawing, clawing sensation was when I watched Leaving Neverland and James Safechuck^* explained that in his twenties he had never quite understood why he hated himself so much. I’d never seen it articulated so close to my own reality. Though something mighty inside of me was breaking, within that feeling I began to feel something dislodging, loosening, letting go. It was one of the most revolutionary moments of my life. Here was a handsome white man who as a child was bright, confident, and sparkly. Yet as a grown adult he was deflated, morose, depressed, and disaffected. It was such a visceral aha for me, as a child survivor, that it was proof to me that Michael Jackson was guilty of the allegations he was being accused of. Because as a child survivor, Safechuck was speaking to me. From his eyes, through his weariness, the bleating abstraction of trauma’s wake, he wore his grief, like me, on his body. He helped me believe in myself. He gave me an instrument to decode myself. I could understand myself now, within this template, and what he was saying was resonating in the very core of my being. He was explaining my own confusion about my life in the same way. I knew this wasn’t happening by coincidence, and these aren’t feelings that arrive in your cellular structure by accident. This was his truth, and it was also mine.

In my own vast memories, there’s no one to blame. Some days, when I look back, it almost feels harmless, even though, now, as an adult, it doesn’t feel good. Two and a half decades later, I’m angry at how these acts created an intense dissonance in my mind, as well as a shattering disruption in my body. A body I hated so much because of guilt and shame that was placed inside of me because of how I made another person feel. All those years I had been silenced, and yet as an adult I was still finding myself around people who were constantly wanting things from me without considering my needs. I was carrying an invisible disease they couldn’t see, so I was doubly invisible. There’s a pattern here, how people feel entitled to me, possessed by me, but when I ask for anything, I am told I am asking for too much. This pattern unfortunately enabled more abuse. The more I existed in this refrain where I felt so lacking, believing I was nothing and everybody else had value, the further away I got from myself.

As Maté writes, “The blurring of psychological boundaries during childhood becomes a significant source of future physiological stress in the adult. There are ongoing negative effects on the body’s hormonal and immune systems, since people with indistinct personal boundaries live with stress; it is a permanent part of their daily experience to be encroached upon by others.”^[8] It’s through the work of thinkers like Maté that my vocabulary around my own experience sharpened. Once I started seeing (accepting and then tracking) these patterns, understanding who I was through a more clarifying image, I began to trust my own vision of myself. I started to see that in a lot of my relationships there was a theme, and facing that helped me gather myself from this abstraction that trauma creates. There have been so many times in my life when I misrepresented myself through an incapacity to fully reveal the layers of truth that I—now through ongoing corroboration, therapy, and extensive somatic and sexual healing—finally understand. I’m no longer showing a half-baked version of myself, believing I am unlovable if I show my fullest self—the messy self, the sad self, the angry and bitter self, the traumatized, scared, and lonely self. Understanding the general composition of childhood trauma survivors has also helped me reflect that to my family. By seeing myself more fully, I am able to give them the kind of reflection and care that I never received. My father’s once brilliant memory has been dwindling over the years, and I’ve seen the way my sister and I have spent most of our lives being chronically ill, existing within realms of illness. In the last few years, I’ve tried to understand that you can’t talk about wellness without talking about all of this. About being unwell, and how ubiquitous that reality is for all of us.

*  *  *

I believe true healing and freedom reside in acknowledging the unacknowledged. We can’t fully understand the impact of something until we look at it completely, holistically, unravel it layer by layer. Not enough of us do this because, I imagine, not enough of us believe we have the time or maybe even the wherewithal. As a species, we are obsessed with pain, yet we rarely talk about it. “Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates,” Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain.^[9] What Scarry is referring to, I believe, is the fracturing that is caused by pain; the split that it causes in the rational self is juxtaposed against the self that feels. If you were raised like I was—to deny pain, to pretend it doesn’t exist—a split is born. But that doesn’t mean it just goes away. In The Undying, Anne Boyer writes about her experience with breast cancer: “Pain, indeed, is a condition that creates excessive appearance. Pain is a fluorescent feeling.”^[10] Like a highlighter on your life, pain, whether physical or mental, pulses like an unforgettable rhythm. It aches, it sizzles, it lingers like a miasmic embrace.

My mental, physical, and sexual transgression started as a young child and continued up until I last spoke to my mother. For almost thirty years, I lived in fear of domination by her, and for almost thirty years I accepted it. I rose above it. I used the tactics my father and sister used, and I decided it was my commitment to God to withstand this. I nurtured myself in private and consoled myself with dreams. When violence erupted in the household that didn’t involve me, I would be thrown into the ring to calm my mother down. At around five or six years old, I began to notice that I could remedy her the fastest, so I volunteered for this action plenty of times, assuming it was another one of my household roles. “You’re the only one who gets through to her,” my sister would tell me, and so I began to wear this duty with pride. Often I would go and sit with her or lie with her after an outburst. Her rage was all-encompassing, so I learned how to take it, scoop it into my body so it wouldn’t hurt her anymore, so she couldn’t hurt us anymore. I became a garbage dump to my mother’s pain. But after a while, she figured out a direct passage into my body, where I absorbed everything from her, and I became an energetic scapegoat. It was like I was a portal out of Donnie Darko. With no protection from anybody, I began to disassociate from my physicality, an earthly reminder of the violence it carried. Juxtaposed against physical abuse, mental abuse is almost more insidious because its impact is harder to trace. The violence done is almost innocuous; what’s left is just an unsettling feeling, like the remnants of an invisible hand on one’s throat, like the feeling of being watched for prey.

*  *  *

There are years of my life that I don’t remember. I used to think it was my fickle memory, but I’ve begun to allow myself to accept that it’s the impact of trauma. Much of my early life is a blur, with spikes of acute clarity. I remembered what I wanted to remember and forgot all the rest. True wellness, for me, is wanting to remember it all . . . and knowing that I have the capacity to hold and heal it.

The human mind is a complex ecosystem of living within a pattern and swirling it around and around in your head so that everything in your life supports that reality, one that was potentially sold to you by your family or society. In healing circles, we call this the impact of living in a matrix, where capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy—as well as your own personal traumas and ancestral lineage—dictate and govern how we perceive ourselves, and thereby our own worthiness. I know a thing or two about bad messaging and the narratives we learn as children that become the narratives we replicate for an eternity. In Buddhism it’s known as samskara, or the mental impressions and psychological imprints. Therapist Dr. Sue Johnson explains that this is an act of conditioning that determines the way we interact with not just ourselves but others. In her explanation of “demon dialogues,” the particular attachment style we can get into with a partner, she recalls a patient declaring, “It’s just like my mom used to say, I am too difficult to love.”^[11] This is a perfect example of how we create and sustain negative narratives with ourselves and then project them onto our loved ones. You could say, I’m in the early days of paying attention to the patterns, to the loops that I fall into that are just narratives of the mind. It’s important to question whether you’re a truthful storyteller. Can you trust your own memory? This is why, for me, being in therapy has facilitated one of the biggest shifts in my psyche.

Disintegration has its advantages. I’ve been broken so many times in my life, but were these moments just trying to show the cracks that needed to be addressed? Now I’m facing everything. I’m trying to get better, every day, at hearing myself more. Listening, ardently, I take time and consideration to gently hear myself, like a lover. By doing so, I’m absolving myself of centuries worth of pain.

The mind is so powerful, and I want to attempt to understand and clarify my own to harness it as a power for healing, for enlightenment, for compassion, for justice.

Footnotes

* The Iroquois Great Law of Peace is the constitution that governs the Iroquois Confederacy, a political alliance of six (originally five) Aboriginal nations located in northeastern North America, in what is now the northeastern United States and south-central Canada. The original five nations of the Confederacy were the Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga. The Iroquois refer to themselves as the Haudenosaunee, or “people of the long house.” The Great Law of Peace established the Iroquois Confederacy as a type of indigenous, representative democracy, which is widely regarded as the oldest continuing democracy on Earth.

* Leaving Neverland is a film documenting the accounts of two survivors of Michael Jackson’s alleged pedophilic behavior, one of those survivors being James Safechuck.