If I am not for myself then who is for me? And being for my own self, what am “I”? And if not now, when? — Hillel the Elder
This quote best sums the essence of the who, what, where, when, and why of how I have ended up nearly 10,000 miles away from my home and birthplace. In fact, this quote essentially describes the entire reason I have decided upon starting this site and this “blog”, very much despite the internal disdain I have always had for the word “blog,” having had one before the truncated version of “web log/weblog” made its way into the vernacular. “Blog” sounds like the unpreventable noise one makes when burping unintentionally mid-sentence.
I digress.
I have run from myself for so long that I have finally run in a circle and straight into a wall that turned out to be a mirror. Apparently, Aristotle’s physics on undisturbed objects in motion on a straight line holds true for the realm of the psychological. (Ha ha.)
The view of Hauz Khas Complex from Maison des Desserts my first morning in India, a café just downstairs from the apartment in which I am staying my first two nights. – Hauz Khas Village, South Delhi, India
I can no longer stifle myself from what I want to do, and simultaneously this means that I no longer can pretend to be fine when I am not.
Everything is not okay. And I do not mean this purely in a personal sense. I mean, really, everything is not okay.
Things are falling apart everywhere one looks. You may argue that I am being far too general, but my retort is that destruction is now so widespread that generalities accurately describe the details.
The question is not whether this is bad, but what are we going to do? As countries, as cities, as governments, as communities, as families, as friends, as individuals? All these things bother me an immense amount, but before I can take on any of those bigger issues, I first have to understand what I will do for myself.
Destruction is inevitable. It comes in countless forms: break-ups, make-ups, takeovers, makeovers, death, life. Because that is the point of it all—the point of life is to die. The sooner we can accept that, the sooner we can get out of the way of ourselves and begin truly living.
On my flight to Delhi from Shanghai, we encountered significant turbulence. Most of the cabin was asleep, but I had been listening to Nine Inch Nails’ Hesitation Marks and meditating until the unnecessarily rude flight attendant told me to “switch off my mobile,” despite its being in airplane mode and essentially functioning as an MP3 player.
Considering this abrupt exchange, I began to think about the chain of events that led the flight attendant to say what she said to me. I concluded she had behaved no better than a line of programming code, a mindless drone, told what to do without a why. A machine. Not a human.
People say that our metaconsciousness is what separates us from other animals, but I believe it’s more accurate that our metaconsciousness is what separates us from machines. How are we to know that other animals do not possess metaconsciousness? Short answer: we don’t. We cannot even explain exactly where our own consciousness lies, let alone our ability to be cognizant of the process of our own thinking, let alone any other living species. We created machines without consciousness. Some people want to give machines consciousness, but to borrow from Jurassic Park, my sentiment is that maybe we are too busy wondering if we could that we are not stopping to think about whether or not we should. (“Life, uh, finds a way.”)
While I was pondering all of this, we hit a very nasty bout of turbulence. I have been on flights with significant turbulence, but this was, by far, the worst. If anyone had been standing, they would have been knocked down by the alarming force of the plane dropping through the wind shears.
Having just been shaken from deep meditation, I was unwilling to medicate myself with Xanax or oxycodone, and definitely unwilling to procure assistance from the flight attendants for the age-old salve of alcohol—historically what has gilded me and countless others through previous encounters of flight turbulence—not that they would have served me anyway, considering the ferocity of the turbulence. I instead picked up my pen. Not just any pen, mind you, my favorite pen. A Parker Jotter ballpoint pen, black ink, 0.7mm. I christened a little pink notebook I had bought months prior, the cover of which is emblazoned with the statement, “This is the beginning of anything you want.”
Here is what I wrote, while determining to remind myself that any looming terror in the face of potential death due to an airplane crash was nothing more than a trivial fleeting emotion, like disappointment when your favorite bakery is out of your favorite bread for the day.
Past 12AM, somewhere over India, July 31, 2015
The moon is so bright this high up in the sky
It could fill my heart forever
And only then could I cry tides of crescent waves deep enough to change time
I went to find what I always knew I had lost along the way
Another lifetime ago, in another land
It won’t let me run away
There I go, off the deep end
I’ve been practicing how to lose my mind
It’s the only way to know that what you seek, you will find
Into a thousand faces I’ve stared a million times
Never once afraid enough to shield my open eyes
My body can’t keep up
I haven’t taken care
This body is too weak for what my mind must bear
The balance of the day and night
The summer and the rain
Bring my aching bones relief
Take away my pain
With every move my body makes
With every waking breath
Feeling closer to myself than ever have I dared
The only thing from which I’ve run
So long, so many ways
Is the truth of who I am
But over are those days
Moonlight, shine down on me
Reflection of the Sun
Show me who I used to be
Show me, I won’t run
This vessel shakes with trembling force subjected to the winds
The clouds, the sky, the freezing air
The model of our sin
It’s not the things you do not say that leave you looking back
It’s all the things you wouldn’t change if you had the chance
All the wrongs were really rights disguised as evil truths
All the wrongs will fill your mind when you have nothing left to lose
I’m suddenly alive as I face reality
That nothing I could do right now would change anything
I won’t look back anymore
A pillar made of salt
A monkey on an oxen’s back
A rat that’s made a home
Slow and surely I will trod forward in the wake
Of timeless tales that spin and shrink with the light of dawn’s new break
The Sun burns only long enough to give us all a chance
To look inside, behind, around, and open up and dance
The Sun is really you, you see
Just as much as is the Moon
Two different sides of truth and light
One source; one queen, one king
Hurling bits of space and time
Transcending gravity
Come crashing into here and now
Come falling down on me
They show me Truth without regret
They show me what is real
They let me hear what I must do
They let me draw so near
How did we get here?
We will never know
Where do we go to?
All of life’s a show
We play it endlessly
On this wheel we turn
Doomed to make the same grave mistakes if we never choose to learn
Don’t let yourself run away
Don’t fade into the black
The deepest darks give us the prize of all the Light we lack
The Moon will be there every time
See her face or not
She tells you all you need to hear
She makes you face your fears
She is a mirror of the Sun
A mirror to the soul
Trick the devils that come to steal your pride, your joy, your home
Remember all the stories you learned of in your youth
They’ve showed you all you need to know to truly find the Truth.
Since this is a public forum, I shall quantify my references to pain, and usage of narcotics and anti-anxiolytics for clarity.
I was in a car accident at age six that caused serious back and neck injuries, resulting in increasing chronic pain. I found out I had scoliosis at age fifteen, which would cause my back to lock up in rather inconvenient positions, such as bending over my chair during so-called “national prayer day” at my parochial middle school. By age twenty-three, the pain had become so intense that most mornings, the first thing I would do upon waking was cry, frustrated to have been woken up by my pain, and angry that I could be in so much pain after resting all night. I sought physical therapy, which helped ease the pain a little, and I became addicted to the idea that physical movement could assuage or even prevent my sometimes unbearable pain.
I started running to and from work. Later, I bicycled to and from work and school. I went trail running, hiking, bodysurfing, weight lifting; anything and everything that kept pushing my physical body to its limits to break beyond what I was barely beginning to suspect was a specific kind of illusion of pain.
This is how I came to begin practicing yoga. First at the gym, and then eventually Bikram yoga when I wanted a deeper physical challenge. After completing a “thirty day challenge,” wherein one completes thirty 90-minute sessions in a thirty day period, I was unequivocally convinced that yoga was the answer to my physical problems after waking up one morning and crying, but this time from realizing I was not in any physical pain, and realizing that I had forgotten what that had felt like until that very moment.
This was all fine and dandy until June 10, 2010, when another car accident blindsided me (literally, the other car ran a red light and smashed into me broadside on the passenger rear wheel, which I never saw coming) and sent me deeper into physical, mental, and emotional pain than I had ever known, and believe me, I had known my fair share of those pains in my short twenty-five years at the time.
The detailed story of what ensued thereafter is for another time, but flash forward five years, and I have not yet returned to my pre-accident physical state, despite all the best efforts of the Westernized medical system. Mainly, it was a whole hell of a lot of medication, especially initially—fentanyl for pain, oxycodone for breakthrough pain, gabapentin for nerve pain, orphenadrine for muscle relaxing, ibuprofen for inflammation, sumatriptan for migraines, clonazepam for panic attacks, and diazepam for anxiety, in addition to physical therapy, acupuncture, and massage three times weekly, and regular epidural steroid injections and nerve block injections in the areas surrounding L4, L5, and S1, which were the primary sources of my injuries and majority of the location of my pain. That list doesn’t even include a few other medications I tried that had absolutely no effect or had paradoxical effects, like an anti-anxiety medication that would not let me sleep, thus increasing my anxiety and pain since my body could not get rest.
I had a bona fide pain clinic sitting on my bedside table for about the first seven months after the accident, and took enough of these medications daily that would easily overdose and kill a person who had no tolerance to them, maybe just from the interactions themselves. I was very concerned about lingering effects on my memory from long-term usage of fentanyl and how that could impact my future academic and professional career, not to mention hating taking handfuls of pills everyday that were destroying my stomach. I also could not rectify how I was supposed to know if I was healing if I was constantly numbing my pain.
Fentanyl, if you are unfamiliar, is a patch worn on the skin that is changed every couple days, serving as the equivalent of a constant I.V. drip of opiates, except it’s about eighty times stronger than morphine. To be taking that on top of oxycodone and all those other medications, it’s a wonder I managed to be coherent enough to take and pass classes. I took the summer off, and took half-time classes in world history online Fall 2010, earning an A and an A–, for which I blame the medications.
So, I weaned myself off fentanyl over the course of a few months, the withdrawal of which was horrible in and of itself, but it turned out to be far too premature and the pain was absolutely intolerable. I reluctantly went back on fentanyl for a few months until a new time-released synthetic opioid was FDA approved called Nucynta, which I had learned about in the Medscape medical student newsletter I subscribe to. It was about as strong as oxycodone, but also worked on nerve pain and was much easier on the gastrointestinal system, so I switched to this to eliminate the need for a second medication for nerve pain and get away from the side effects of fentanyl that concerned me. I also switched from ibuprofen to Celebrex for inflammation as this was also significantly easier on the stomach, and got a new physical therapist and doctor who aligned more with my treatment goals.
By that time, a little over a year after the accident, my hip had become locked up from healing incorrectly to the point I could not use stairs or walk without a cane. After a few months of physical therapy combined with the new medications and with the support of my fantastic new medical team, I was able to walk up stairs and even bicycle again, and was able to reduce my medication to just oxycodone and Celebrex, which greatly improved my clarity of thought and memory functioning, and relied on nerve blocks for the searing nerve pain that shot from my lower spine down my legs into my great toes.
Unfortunately, the progress was always short-lived, as somehow or another I got re-injured, or injured something else because of the pre-existing injuries affecting other areas, always just soon after I was starting to feel better. I put on excessive weight from being unable to properly exercise combined with steroid usage, which only made the pain worse, but I kept pushing myself through school and ignored my pain as much as possible, using as little medication as I could handle.
It was not until a few months after I finished my undergraduate degree in December 2014 that I realized that I had been pushing my body too far and not giving it the proper attention it needed to heal.
It broke down. Just went kaput. I could hardly eat anything that wouldn’t result in intense stomach pain, I had no appetite, my digestion was entirely abnormal at both ends of the spectrum to the extreme that I needed to see a gastroenterologist who needed to rule out cancer as the cause of these set of symptoms, which very much on paper could have been caused by cancer. Thankfully, I did not have cancer. I did have a rather painful and symptomatically frightening case of gastritis.
This happened at the same time that a different set of symptoms caused my gynecologist to need to rule out ovarian cancer, which was particularly creepy because my mother had been diagnosed with the same at the young age of thirty-five. Thankfully, I did not have that cancer, either, but benign cysts. All of this occurred while I was hobbling around with a knee brace on, recovering from a rather painful torn medial collateral ligament in my left knee, the exact cause of which was not known.
Despite this perfect storm of physical problems, I kept on living and going to school in Spring 2015, deluding myself as much as possible that all was “normal,” normal being “things are really tough right now, but just keep pushing through until the end of the semester.” That had been “normal” for almost five years, and to a large extent my entire life, so what difference was a few more months?
It was not until I was anesthetized for a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I realized that I was dealing with very real health problems in my very real body that had the potential to really actually end my very real life should any of them turn out to be the source of my symptoms. I had been mentally ignoring my pain for so long that I had unwittingly ignored my body’s unmistakable warning signs of impending exhaustion.
I had this reaction because my anesthesia experience, quite honestly, scared the shit out of me. My doctor had decided to anesthetize me to moderate sedation, meaning that I would be mostly conscious and able to respond to commands. She and I both felt the risks of deep sedation or general anesthesia were completely unjustified for these routine, minor procedures. However, what actually happened was a complete loss of consciousness, very much the opposite of what we had agreed upon and what I had mentally prepared myself for. This was also a highly unusual reaction, as I have a rather high tolerance to pain medication, having had taken some form or another of prescription painkillers nearly continuously for fifteen years.
My last conscious thought after they administered anesthesia was, “I wonder when this is going to kick in, I hope they used enough, because I don’t feel anything.” The next thing I know I’m suddenly jolted awake to realize I was oriented differently in the room, exclaiming, “Where am I?!” This both startled and amused the nurse in the room, who laughingly told me that most people never notice they had been moved. They had turned the bed around to wheel me out of the procedure room.
Waking up from anesthesia, you remember nothing about not being awake. Obviously, that’s the point, but it’s not being asleep, because how can you define sleep without the corresponding stages of sleep? So then, is it really “waking up” if you are not “asleep”? What the hell is it? We really don’t know, but to be fair, we don’t fully understand what’s going on during sleep either.
Anesthesia was a void, a blackness, and I had never experienced this before. It was as if you are watching a movie, and suddenly there is a malfunction and the screen goes black, only to return to the movie a few minutes later, and not being able to know what was supposed to be there instead. Missing data. Sure, I’ve been blackout drunk many times, but even that isn’t a void, there’s this creeping sense of knowing that something has happened, and blurry, half-remembered scenes pepper your memory. Even if you don’t remember everything and it’s lost, if someone else tells you what happened, most of the time, it slowly comes back, sometimes days or weeks later, usually accompanied by a, “Oh, yeaaaah… now I remember…”
I’ve even lost consciousness accidentally before, but even that was not a void. I passed out from standing up too quickly from a hot bath once, and I saw my body on the floor as if I were hovering near the ceiling, and distinctly remember knowing that I had to go back to my body on the floor, otherwise I would not wake up. As strange as it might sound, that did not freak me out, likely because it was still something I saw, felt, and experienced temporally.
This void of anesthesia was truly like staring into the face of death. It was like seeing nothing, and I mean the philosophical nothing, the complete absence of anything, the empty set. This deep feeling of having felt total emptiness without feeling anything was pervasive, and my mind was transfixed on the question, where did I go?
It shook me so greatly that I felt I had truly awoken for the first time in my life. I suddenly realized all at once that I had very dangerously not been taking my health seriously, all the while going through the motions of tending to my health. It forced me to realize how utterly stupid I had been, and how by not taking my health seriously, I had not been taking the my life seriously.
All the goals I’d had, all the things I’d been doing to work towards my goals, all of these were insidiously crafted illusions designed by my subconscious to fool me into believing I really cared about myself, when the truth was that I was only one step away from self-destruction and had been for some time.
I foolishly believed that because I was not as depressed as I had been just a few months ago, that I was fine. I had been depressed most of 2010–2014, in varying levels of severity, but I have dealt with depression for nearly my entire life. (More about my extensive experience with and thoughts on depression and its various treatments some other time.)
I realized that all the things I had been doing were a lie, and I had not been living authentically. What was worse is that I could not run from the fact that the underlying reason for all of this was fear. A very deep fear of rejection that had been instilled in me before I was even born, and that had played itself out in my life repeatedly and managed to elude my recognition of it until this time. This fear ran so deep that over and over it had caused me to push away anything and everything that had been familiar to me out of the classic pseudo-self-preservational impulse to “reject before rejection occurs.”
So, the only thing that I could conclude was that I needed to act opposingly to this fear, in complete defiance of it. Instead of hiding, I must come out into the light and face my fear, which at the core of a fear of rejection, is a fear of being one’s authentic self. If you cannot be yourself, then what is the point in living? Do or die, as the saying goes.
This site, sharing my story, is directly a result of acting opposite to my fear of rejection. I have been terrified of speaking openly about my experiences for many reasons, but ultimately a fear of being rejected or condemned by those I know. However, I have come to understand that if someone rejects me for who I am, then I do not want that person in my life in the first place. I’m through with living in fear of what others may or may not do to me. Anxiety is all about real or perceived fear, and I am consciously choosing a different perception of my self and my place in the world from now on.
I have rejected this fear of rejection, which I humorously like to think would be the fear of rejection’s ultimate fear. I refuse to let it stop me from really living any longer. I used to encourage myself through the hardest times of my pain by reminding myself that my experience of chronic pain and severe injuries would only serve to mold me into a better, more compassionate doctor, and I regularly sat in thankfulness of this aspect of my experience.
Now, I am grateful that I have had the experience of it so intimately for so long, because I would not be able to understand myself without it. Life exists because of fear: fear of death, fear of not surviving, all of these things drove all of our ancestors to survive and procreate such that you are reading this right now. Fear is an integral part of life, but it does not need to define us or keep us hidden. Fear is a clue that you need to do something, often the thing you are afraid of. Fear, truly, is an illusion, and crumbles as soon as you look it in the eye, and all that is left is the truth of who and what you are.
That is why I am in India. That is why I have come here, and that is why I am traveling to Rishikesh today to undergo the intense study of yoga and Ayurvedic medicine over the next month. I have severe problems with Western medicine because of my own experiences and observations of it that I cannot ignore in my scholarly quest to become a doctor, and that have uprooted my entire belief system of what “medical help” in the United States is. I need perspective, and I believe there is no greater perspective one can attain than putting themselves into a foreign situation, be it a different city, country, social group, or thought system. I also have serious problems with the divorce of spirituality from yoga in its practice in the West, and while I will save my thoughts on spirituality and religion and how it all ties into this for another time, that is another fundamental driving force to my present actions.
My experiences have led me to this place and time, and I refuse to believe that I have experienced such debilitating pain nearly my whole life for no reason. If that is true, then my life has no purpose, and I should end it right now without another thought. Life is fragile and yet ferociously resilient. I have come to understand experientially and not just intellectually that living is a choice, while merely existing is a sad, sorry imposter of living.
It is my sincere hope that through sharing my story, that perhaps even just one other person might not feel as alone as they believe they are, because being ill in any way for any extended period of time cultivates a very specific feeling of loneliness in oneself that all too tragically ends fatally. I don’t need to wait until I earn my doctorate to understand the pain of others or understand the human experience through its highest highs and deepest depths. I can do that right now. I can see now that I cannot keep my thoughts to myself any longer, and to do so would bring more harm than good to me and who knows who else. If just one other person benefits even minutely from hearing my story, then I truly believe all of my pain will have been worth it.
Welcome to my life, dear reader. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Living area in apartment the night before I leave for Rishikesh. – Hauz Khas Village, South Delhi, India.