I'm Done

I thought ceremony was going to be gentler this time. That seems almost ridiculous to write now, but it was true. I went into it believing I was in a good place. My body still wasn’t well and I was tired, but I felt more open and present than I had in a long time. I believed I had already done the deepest work, and that perhaps this ceremony would meet me there and help my body finally heal. I didn’t realize how much expectation was hidden inside that hope.

We went out under my tree at sundown. My guide asked for my physical healing, and as I held the medicine in my hands I asked for the same thing in my own way. Heal my body. Help me recover. Bring me what I need so I can live with more ease now. I had come more fully into my body than ever before, and I mistook that openness for arrival. I thought I had nothing left to surrender except illness.

For hours, nothing seemed to happen except that the nausea kept building. I waited for the medicine to open some vision, for some movement I recognized from other ceremonies, but all I felt was my gut turning against me. I couldn’t throw up. I couldn’t drink water. I couldn’t take in more of the brew. I was trapped inside the sickness with no way to change it, and the helplessness of that became more frightening than the nausea itself.

As the night went on, I began to feel poisoned. My gut was boiling, my body weakening, and nothing brought relief. The tree that had held so much meaning for me offered no comfort this time. Eventually we moved into the sitting area in my studio and lay down on the dog beds. I asked my guide to bring me my Soul Wrapture from the storeroom, the last one made with the heavy chocolate sable fur. I had kept it there for years, as though it were too precious to use for myself. Even in the middle of everything, I saw the truth of that. I was desperately ill and needed comfort, yet the thing that might give me that had been stored away because some part of me was still saving it for someone else. 

Someone who deserved it more.

I wrapped it around myself and held one of my pillows to my chest as the sickness continued building. My heart pounded, my chest tightened, my head ached, and I grew so weak that even speaking or sitting up took more strength than I had. Fear began to take over. I thought I had pushed my body too far one more time, and this time there might be no coming back from it.

What frightened me most was how familiar that edge felt. I had been there before in other ways, falling into bed so emptied out that I wondered if there was enough life left in me to wake in the morning. Then I would wake, recover just enough, and eventually push myself to the limit again.

That was the part I had never fully seen.

For twelve hours, ceremony kept me inside that helplessness. There was no vision to carry me away from it, no meaning I could make while I was still in the middle of it, no way to rise above my body and turn the suffering into something spiritual. I had to remain there long enough to feel what my body was actually showing me.

Near the end, the same words kept coming out of me.

I’m done.

At the time, I thought I might be saying I was done living, that my body had reached the point where it could no longer come back. I was that depleted. But days afterward, I heard the words differently. I was done reaching the bottom of myself, recovering, and then using that recovery as permission to do it again. I was done mistaking endurance for strength.

For most of my life, I had lived as though my energy belonged everywhere before it belonged to me. Caring for others, work, creation, responsibility, whatever needed doing came first. My own rest and nourishment came later, if there was anything left.

That night showed me the cost of living that way in a form I could no longer ignore.

The words I’m done were not about leaving my life.

They were about ending the way I had been spending it.

I came through that night knowing my life force was mine, and that if I was going to remain here, I had to begin living as though that were true.

This piece is part of Stories from The Fire and The Thread and is adapted from the forthcoming book The Fire and The Thread: A Living Chronicle of Descent, Initiation, and Embodiment.

Learn more about the book here.