Rebirth 

I didn’t understand at the time. And maybe I don’t understand now either, but I suspect I have a better idea. 

The old woman told me in a dream that I was going to die. It was the summer of 2003, and I’d been spending a lot of time doing dreamwork. She showed up sometimes when I was asleep, sometimes when I was awake, and almost always angry at the way the world was today. She would take my body and use my mouth to shout what were probably obscenities, in an unknown language. 

It would be okay, though, she told me in that particular dream. I would be dead for a few years, but eventually I would come back. 

When I woke up that morning, I was shaken. I didn’t take her entirely seriously -- I didn’t believe I was literally going to physically die. I did believe I was in for something, but what exactly I did not venture to guess. 

Several months later I was in a psych ward, refusing medication because, as my psychiatrist quoted in the papers filed as a part of her efforts to have me committed, the medication “would kill me.” I don’t entirely remember saying that, but I do know the sentiment. I didn’t believe it would physically kill me, as the doctor assumed. I believed it would spiritually kill me.

To some extent, I still believe those powerful pills are small mindkillers. They certainly do the job of putting a quick end to that strange world of psychosis, but they do much more than that. The ability to amuse oneself on one’s own, the ability to sense one’s inner equilibrium, the ability to create...all of these are bled out or blocked out. I was not myself while dosed with 3 mg of risperidone daily, was not myself after being off them for a year. 

I started to feel something like myself again about a year later, in a yoga class. Every week after class I would have deep, detailed, beautiful and symbolic dreams. The class felt great physically and mentally. And then one week something ruptured. The dream was of coercion and screaming and a draining of life. I woke up terrified, could not go back to sleep. 

From there? Downhill, and quickly. That which two years previously was put down quickly with drugs was again put to rest by new doctors with more pills. It was back to the underworld for the deepest parts of myself. 

I fought the medicine...took half doses...my partner tells me I cheeked them, which seems impossible to me now because I don’t even know how to do such a thing. I was switched over to something new after a few weeks, stuck to the low dose despite doctor’s orders. Eventually the craziness mellowed. Over months, at glacier speed, I tapered down the dose. I moved north after a while. What little of me there was left connected again with my home turf. I tapered down further from the medication, and slowly I gestated in the womb of the land, the corpse now a new seed. A shock came to my system when my employer notified me last fall that we would be moving to a place farther south than I had ever wanted to live in my life. But it was a job. I uprooted my tiny radicle from the northwoods this summer, and planted myself in the southern piedmont. 

The day I arrived at my new home, I found in the mailbox a gift from one of the friends who had taken care of me five years back. At the time I was hospitalized, I had given her a shirt of mine that I could not touch in my madness, a shirt from which I usually could not be separated. Now, in the south, my signature shirt had returned to me. 

I am not returned to this world quite yet, but the shirt’s return was like the first sensation of sunlight on a seed that has been buried in the ground. I knew I was, and I could feel the potentiality of growth again. 

I attended the wedding of this same friend last weekend, and I danced like I have not danced in years. I broke through the soil at last. There is so much growing to do, and I am looking forward to getting my sustainance from the sunlight again, instead of from that embryo sac of medication.