Introducing: Dr Kylie Harris
I’ve decided to just start speaking my truth
I once asked my ex-boyfriend, “What’s more important to you, freedom or security?” He responded, “Freedom”. A few years later I asked my now husband the same question. He responded, “Security”. Hmmm, I puzzled over this for many years, assuming I could only have one or the other. I settled on security. It seemed safer. Until, one day (not that long ago), I decided, “Why not have both?” I think this was the day I decided to just start speaking my truth.
In 2006, I experienced a personal crisis. Existential, you might call it. In some academic circles, the phenomenon is referred to as “spiritual emergency”. In others, the same experience would be called “psychosis”. The experience largely came about due to my ex-boyfriend’s desire for freedom, and my reticence to let him go. We were soul mates. However, sometimes you just get to a point where you realise and accept that your soul mate is toxic for you. Thankfully, I have other soul mates! One of them is my husband. His support got me through this ordeal. His love is secure. Safe. It allowed me to relinquish my ex-boyfriend, accept that soul mates can be transient, and learn one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my life so far — the art of “letting go”.
So, that was the first leg of my existential journey. I thought I had reached a place of “awakening”. Little did I know it was all going to come around again. Fast forward to 2016. The birth of my first child catalysed my second “episode”. Man, did I flip out. A series of unrelenting traumas left me spinning out of control, literally having to hold onto solid objects to keep my balance. With the security of my husband’s loving support, I again found my way back to some semblance of sanity. And then… 2020. Holy shit! WTF is happening to the world?! Between my first and third episodes of existential crisis, spiritual emergency, psychosis, whatever you want to call it, my journey has included the following:
The death of my father, grandmother, aunt, and friend. The loss of my mother, sister, nephews, and niece to religion. A harrowing birth experience, involving roughly 50 hours of labour ending with an emergency c-section, the resuscitation of my son at birth, pre-eclampsia and other post-birth complications. Postnatal depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. A miscarriage. Unprecedented bushfires. A global pandemic. Oh, and the completion of my doctoral thesis, which looks at the intersection of spirituality, psychological crisis, psychosis, and personality.
I never intended to be an academic. I did a PhD partly through a series of synchronistic events, and partly because I wanted people to take me seriously. That’s what I thought, anyway. Now, I think maybe it was so I could take myself seriously. It’s a funny thing, getting a PhD. People do take me more seriously now. But I’m still talking about the same “crazy” shit I’ve been talking about for years. The only difference is that I have a little more confidence, and people assume I know what I’m talking about. I am an “expert”. If my academic mentor read this article, he would no doubt tell me I had committed “career suicide”. He tells me that many academics start out as activists. I am unclear if the underlying message is that they get lost in activism along the way and eventually come to their senses as academics? Or if their fighting spirits just shrivel up and die?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect academia and science. I wish world leaders would do the same. But academia is a bit of a pretentious wank. It involves a long, slow swim through what feels like a quicksand of bureaucracy and a minefield of clashing egos. The academic publishing process is tediously slow, and is unable to sufficiently keep up with current world events. I do enjoy academic writing a lot. There is a divine satisfaction that I derive from writing as dryly and succinctly as possible. It speaks to my OCD and autistic tendencies. But when you also have a creative soul, it can be simultaneously soul destroying. Creativity is systematically slapped out of you as an academic, like a wet fish in the face, each time a sentence is too “flowery”. Until you slide further and further along the autism spectrum, such that anything other than dry succinctness begins to feel outlandish. I prefer to think that I am an activist who got lost in academia along the way. Lost in the ego of “expertise”.
One of the things I’ve discovered is that we can really only, truly, become experts in one thing — ourselves. And, honestly, it’s probably the hardest subject in which to gain expertise. I think the only way we can really, truly become an expert on ourselves is to speak freely and truthfully. Be open to constructive feedback and accountability. Share our own experiences with the world and (hopefully) inspire others to do the same, in order to create a tapestry of lived experience that can be called upon to co-create our collective reality. So, that’s why I’ve decided to just start speaking my truth.
My truth involves being honest about my personal experiences and sharing them openly. My truth involves trolling government, because I believe freedom involves speaking truth to power. I not only find it fun, I now view it as a civic duty. My truth involves admitting that I want freedom AND security. And I’ve decided to have both. Speaking my truth brings me a sense of freedom. And freedom brings me a sense of security. It feels like surrender. Like faith that the universe has got my back. And this is when serendipity occurs.
Before COVID-19, I had made a decision. I could not cope with anymore trauma in my life. I was done with trauma. I made the decision to be happy, and I came to really understand that happiness (and any other emotion) is a choice. I started to regain some balance in my life. I started to truly heal. Then COVID-19 hit. And I flipped out. My husband looked at me in a way he never had before. I wanted to punch him and hug him at the same time. Finally, he could see that I was suffering. Although, he also thought I was a little bit crazy. The truth is, I was hypomanic. But I had never felt more alive and less crazy. That lasted about two weeks. And suddenly, I was fully mobilised.
I had been waiting for something. I wasn’t sure exactly what “it” was. It was just there, in the background of my psyche. Lingering… I knew I would recognise it when I saw it. It was a nagging feeling, a knowing feeling. A sensation that caused me to ask myself things like, “How can I be truly happy when there is so much suffering in the world?” When I started hearing murmurs about a possible pandemic, I didn’t want to know about it. Nobody in Australia did. We have literally just emerged from the most catastrophic bushfire season ever. Like, EVER. For us laid-back Aussies Down Under, COVID-19 is an inconvenient truth. But, as the reality of a global pandemic sunk in, I realised… this was “it”… this was the lingering, nagging thing that I had been waiting for. And suddenly, the urge to speak my truth could no longer be suppressed. So here I am, speaking my truth. Because I am mobilised. I am awake. Maybe not “awakened”, but awake.
I was once informed by a flamboyant old man, during my “struggling artist” phase in my mid-20’s that, “When you’re an artist, you can be as crazy as you like”. So, I’m allowing my inner artist and my inner academic to collide in a colourful collage of crazy. I am still creating my own unique writing style of blunt honesty fused with academic elegance. So, I guess it’s a bit eclectic. Because I do like the elegance of restraint. But fuck it, life is short and there’s so much to achieve. We are living in EPIC times, during which restraint feels like a luxury. As elegantly and as bluntly honestly as I can, I want to speak my truth, as I navigate this road less traveled, like a naive shaman, recording the journey for anyone who cares to listen.
