5783

bring it

While we’ve just finished the Hebrew month of Elul, and we're on the cusp of Yom Kippur and in the middle of Rosh Hashanah manifesting on a new year, welcoming in sweetness and letting go of what we don't want to bring forward, I've realized I need to come clean: I've been quietly losing my mind for months.

I write from a place of lucidity and purpose. I haven't been lucid or purposeful for a while. Things haven't felt clear for too long, and purpose has… not dissipated, but become harder to convince myself of. And there's been such a purge of emotion, and an excessive amount of crying. I haven't cried since, I don't know, 2008. But this is what happens when you're repeatedly challenged in bigger and louder and more extreme ways. You can only take so much battering before you realize that it's time to stop being defined by the battering and instead to break out from the corner you're in. Be slain by the onslaught or pick up the stake and take charge. But that doesn't happen overnight. You have to walk through the fire to get back to safety. And when every single missive that you've put out into the world, whether as a tweet or an essay or a speech or an interview, has been ridiculed and mocked and torn apart, and when your contributions have been rewritten or deployed against you, it's perhaps not a surprise that a person becomes less open to sharing their thoughts, less empowered by their own words, their story, their voice.

So I just stopped wanting to write it.

But the past month has been provocative. I've developed a bout of insomnia that's complicated by irrational fears that I'm not safe in my own home. I lie awake overthinking. I've been mistaking what I see outside for past memories, like I'm having a bad acid trip. I saw a woman on a canyon trail who was lost at dusk one Saturday night and helped guide her back to safety, and it turned out she was an energy healer who read me like a book all the way down the mountain without me saying a single word. “You're such light!” she said, which I'd forgotten because everything has felt so dark. My therapist offered: “psilocybin micro-dosing?” Is that where I’m at? I've been doing multiple soundbaths a week as a form of group therapy, and the woman who leads it sings like Ariel in the Little Mermaid and plays a Tibetan bowl while standing on top of me. She told me last Thursday that the reason I'm seeing bright violet light behind my eyes is because my soul is healing me with the help of the purest of Reiki energy. I have no idea what that means but at the moment I'll take any sign as to how to be more cognisant, dominant even, for the next year in order to tame the beast and make things better.

All these shocks to the system however abrupt are zapping me back to myself, I think.

For the first time I took the idea of an entire month of Teshuvah (repentance) into my daily routine, and I stepped back on a yoga mat. I've been doing back-bending inversions and heart openers, and warrior stances in 100 degree rooms while contemplating how to be better. And it's starting to work. I've been re-reading 'Women Who Run With The Wolves'. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes: “to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

Last night I was at a Rosh Hashanah dinner and I heard the sound of the Shofar and I concentrated my mind on what I want to leave behind and what I want to take forward, and I chewed on the sweet flesh of a date as the blessing for it was read aloud, and it washed away the bitterness I've been holding onto. I just let that shit go. Cheerio. Goodbye. And I chose to feel good, and I did feel good. I chose the moment and the moment felt better. Jews are really good at structure and rituals, you know. If you follow the book, you'll relocate your balance. It's healthy. I'm so lucky it's always there. Whenever I'm lost it finds me again. And it just did. And now I'm here.

I wanted to thank you all for being here with me this past year and for supporting this newsletter. 5783 is going to be better. Shana tova u'metuka. May you have a good and sweet new year, and may you all be inscribed in the book of life. We got this.