Trauma and Healing After the Death of a Beloved

I was an exceptionally awkward, self-conscious, sensitive child. A middle child to an exceptionally bright, ambitious, and academic father and a mentally ill stay-at-home mother who was overburdened by the task of caring for three children, I found solace and escape through books. They were my original portal to another reality, and I soaked up as much as I could, burying myself ceaselessly in reading as much as I could manage.

While I felt sympathetic toward my mother’s plight, I was also determined not to be like her and used to proclaim as a child that I would one day earn a Ph.D., following in my father’s footsteps. I am now a 41-year-old single mother, A.B.D. (All But Dissertation), in the middle of writing my dissertation, and still mourning my father’s death, may his spirit rest in peace. My father was an astoundingly accomplished, prolific academic. Now that he is gone, I find myself questioning whether I really want this Ph.D. and even more so, whether I can envision myself staying in academia professionally. My father, who had reached the pinnacle of success in academia, is now deceased, at only 66 years old; do I really want to follow in a similar trajectory?

Mostly, I find myself wondering how to balance parenting, work, and wellness, and what that will look like given my current unmoored state and the liminal state of the world.

I am sure that, just as everyone has contemplated suicide, everyone has, or has had, those moments of being convinced that they are not worthy. The imposter syndrome, but more than that, a sense of deep unworthiness. As a child and even through my 20’s and early 30’s, I found myself continually questioning whether I was worthy. Years of therapy and exposure to the wellness community have taught me that much of this stems from my childhood.

Well, duh. My mother almost exclusively dressed me in hand-me-downs from my brother, which led me in second grade to start wearing only dresses. I still vividly recall my entire class standing up to applaud for me when I walked in the classroom for the first time wearing jeans after my dress phrase. Though I always had thought of myself as inherently shy, I’ve gained perspective as a parent that this was also clearly related to my not being well-socialized as a young child. And so of course the stigma, shame, and trauma of those formative childhood years indelibly left their marks on me.

Add to my generally being in an unkempt state an auto-immune condition that left my skin constantly flaring up and allergies triggered, and you can understand why it took me literally decades to overcome my awkwardness and self-consciousness. I thought of myself as intrinsically inferior, with bad genes (not only my skin and allergies but also unruly, thick curly hair and a proportionally large nose) and a legacy of perceived poverty due to my parents’ extreme, even irrational frugality, that I’ve long struggled to shake off. So when my friends in high school were battling with depression and anxiety and were trying different prescriptions, I barely thought to consider them. Deep unhappiness to me was a part of life. I was resigned to it.

It would be remiss of me to not mention that I did try SSRI’s on multiple occasions — in college and then multiple times since. I never managed to adjust to them and also often had extremely bad side effects (sudden cystic acne and brittle, dry hair, among others). I am grateful for my body so vehemently rejecting these pharmaceuticals, as I had always been skeptical of them and their role in actually helping to “heal” and “treat” depression and anxiety. If two-thirds of the population are prone to depression and anxiety, I could recognize that these states and the accompanying existential dread are an intrinsic part of the human condition.

I hungered for something more, and I sensed it was out there. In high school, influenced by the 90’s D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) culture and my parents’ general abstention from alcohol and weed, I stayed away from substances, convinced they were deleterious. By college, however, I began experimenting. My first strong experience with weed, in the form of a brownie, brought me to a very altered state of consciousness where I simply shed my self-consciousness and was in short, very high. At one point, I was sitting with a circle of people gathered around me, enacting an imaginary caricatured conversation between a grandmother and grandfather. While some of my peers had found me hilarious (rightfully so, I believe), others thought perhaps I might be schizophrenic and that I should stay away from substances accordingly. Yet for me personally, the event had been cathartic; it was the first time, without alcohol, that I was able to live fully in myself, to lose a sense of my ego and self-consciousness, to engage with others without having a profound sense of my own self and my perceived sense of lacking and unworthiness.

I didn’t try psychedelics until my senior year of college, during which time I’d had strong, profound experiences on both acid and mushrooms but found mushrooms to be my preferred substance. On acid I’d had my first and only real difficult trip: first, feeling overwhelmed and claustrophobic from the energy in a crowded room where music with a thumping bass line was blaring too loudly and insistently in my altered state, and then afterward, having fled to the quietude of the outdoors, feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the night sky and all it revealed. Thankfully, I was able to re-focus my energy productively and channel it into painting for the remainder of the acid trip, but those feelings of being overwhelmed by the intensity and duration of the trip have left me more cautious about LSD and drawn more to the natural experiences fostered by “magic" mushrooms.

While my first exposure to psilocybin mushrooms was a magical, mystical experience, I had no knowledge of how to integrate what I had experienced and still struggled with my demons. I continued to seek out both fun and obliteration via alcohol and weed primarily, during college and up through my 20’s and even early 30’s.

I came back to mushrooms a handful of times in my 20’s but did not regularly use them as I did not have easy or reliable access to them. And NYC in the early 2000’s was very much a culture that promoted drinking. I was here for it. I dreaded the black outs and hangovers, but the alcohol-fueled partying gave me the release I craved. I had come to rely on the release of alcohol and mostly convinced myself that my drinking was not problematic, that I was not an alcoholic, as I drank only socially and was a happy, funny, charming drunk. It was what people did.

But time marched on, as it does, and as alcohol became harder on my system, I began veering away from it and started increasingly taking MDMA, mushrooms, and synthetic psychedelics. The lines for me have always been blurred between recreational and spiritual use. As I believe all dichotomies are, I have found that dichotomy to be false for me personally, as what was for me recreational and spiritual bled and spilled into each other. As I have evolved through time, I am so grateful to have gained knowledge of and access to cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms. I have found them key for my healing and wellness, key for me to not stay mired in grief from the traumas of my childhood, the traumas of living in a toxic, disconnected and patriarchal society, and the traumas of experiencing the deaths of multiple loved ones. Our earth has the medicines we need, we just need to trust them and ourselves.