I was talking to a friend about the first anniversary of the American start of the pandemic (for me it was 14 March 2020). Of course everyone’s different after the past 12 months, but I told her that my changes include the loss of core beliefs and parts of my personality. She asked what I meant.
“Well, for one thing, I used to not believe there was anything after we die. I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t see. I was like, here we are and there’s no higher being or anyone or anything else. This is it. But after what I went through last summer, I now believe in a spiritual world.”
“Well, that’s good!” she said.
“It doesn’t feel good.”
Someone outside of a person whose core beliefs have been destroyed might see that as moving in a good direction, but it’s an extremely painful experience.
Imagine the person who centers their identity at least in part on white supremacy, or their religion, or some belief that their way of life is better than all the others. Imagine they trust the family and community that taught them these beliefs, and imagine that this person has a nice, safe life in which they know where they stand and where everything belongs.
And then maybe over a long period of time they get evidence that counters what they know, but they manage to ignore all of it until finally they are forced to re-evaluate. Some horrifically painful experience reaches into their heart and shatters their comfortable certainty. Maybe they suffer losses that leave them desperate for help and the only place to turn is the people and set of beliefs they never wanted anything to do with. Then imagine them realizing they’ve had fundamental things wrong, and the world is completely different from what they believed.
Imagine the humiliation of having to align oneself with the foreign views they had stayed comfortably away from. There would be a period of adjustment during which they would have to recalibrate what truth is, what goodness is, what makes sense and what was false. It might change how they see the people who matter most to them, the people they trusted. It will change how they see their place in the world, how much they can trust their own perceptions and whether they can count on getting things right from now on.
Imagine how much that would hurt and how long that hurt would last.
This is where I am after the healing crisis I went through last summer (details of that here). Having accepted that there is a spiritual world, I struggle with this new reality. It’s horrifying to me that as complicated and scary as the world is, there are even more levels to it. It was enough to manage my daily life of physical, mental and emotional challenges, but now I have to keep my balance on the spiritual plane as well.
This isn’t good news for me. The acceptance of an unseen world brings me no comfort, plus it makes my to-do list even longer. If you look at my blog that I’ve been keeping since 2004 you’ll find nothing about a higher power or reincarnation or even the phrase it was meant to be. I hate the phrase it was meant to be. I’ve never wasted a single sentence on healing crystals or Akashic records or even the goddamn Celestine Prophecy.
But since 2016 I have learned to trust my NRT practitioner and she has gradually made me see that sometimes a shaman is what’s needed. And during what I went through last summer I became so desperate to make the pain stop that I was willing to do whatever she suggested. As a result, I spent months working with spiritual healers who helped stop the physical shaking, and the feeling of my air being cut off every time I lay down, and the night terrors, and the exhausted, desperate late walks I took because I each time I started to drift into badly needed sleep I felt like I was suffocating and I’d jerk awake again and I couldn’t stand being in my lonely apartment anymore.
After months of working with spirit through those healers, I was forced to accept that I have a spiritual part to me just like I have physical, mental and emotional parts. And it turns out that spiritual part needs support which is why I now start my days with meditation, breathing exercises, a gratitude practice and physical exercise. Yeah, it’s a lot of goddamned things I’ve had to add to my schedule and who has that much time? But I make the time because my perception of existence was wrong and now I think I see it more correctly.
But I don’t like it. In fact, I hate that I don’t get to be the person I was. I liked that person. I felt smart and confident and not believing in a spiritual world gave me a feeling of superiority over all those American namaste idiots. But over the summer I discovered that I have a sensitivity to things like healing crystals and incense. Using such things consistently causes changes to my physical and mental states and they’re good changes. So what can I do? I’m not going to stop using what works.
So here I am, turning in to “Moonchild Rodriguez” at the age of 54 1/2. I once was lost but now am found but I wish I could go back to being lost. I knew that person. I don’t know who I am now.
Here’s an example of not knowing who I am. When I first started reading, I discovered the children’s ghost story books. I went through every ghost story book in my library and when I got older I switched to horror novels. I was lucky enough to start my teens when Stephen King was just five years into his career as a published novelist and for years I read everything he wrote.
Horror has always been my favorite genre. I used to have movie nights when I’d invite my brave friends to watch a scary film with me, either in the theater or at my place. People who told me, “Oh, no, I can’t watch horror movies” were wimps! Horror was who I was, it distinguished me from others, and it was so much fun.
Well, guess what? Since Juldemort — that’s what I call July 2020 — I have no appetite for horror movies, at least not the hard core ones that were my favorites. I can still watch the ones that are watered down with camp or comedy, but I can’t watch the frightening, supernatural kind I used to relish (like The Babadook and The Ring). Now such movies evoke in me the anxiety and terror of last summer and I won’t do that to myself.
That means I’m learning what kinds of movies I now like and I’m just as lost as my Netflix and Hulu algorithms. In the past several months I’ve watched science fiction, drama, mystery thrillers, historical and the PG-13 horror movies that aren’t very scary at all. Some films like Vivarium and Palm Springs have been good, but so claustrophobic they brought back some of the Juldemort anxiety. I’m careful with science fiction because much of it takes place in confined spaces like space ships, time loops and places the characters can’t figure out how to escape.
I really liked myself better before March 2020. Maybe many people liked themselves better before March 2020.
This is all to say that having the light of truth pierce your heart can really suck. And when it replaces your tidy comfortable beliefs and shifts your whole life, the light-of-truth pain can last quite a while. So be careful with your assumptions about someone who has changed their beliefs and maybe moved closer to how you see things. Their radical change is probably much better news for you than for them.