Rotten

Not all adventures are sexy… and not all healing is pleasant. When I told folks that I was going to do adventures for things that scare me or get me out of my comfort zone, I believe people automatically assumed it would be skydiving, mine diving, swimming with sharks, etc. But this project isn’t about those experiences… but facing the seemingly everyday adventures that scare the shit out of us: moving to a new state, falling in love again, going to therapy, practicing rejection, learning a new skill…

Or even confronting our own mortality… which is the ultimate fear I have. It’s the thing that makes me most anxious and keeps me up at night. I often times feel like it’s this animal breathing down my neck, as I stare forward trying to ignore it and the terrifying feeling of non-existence.

It was an unusually warm day for the season, as I walked through the wilderness on an assignment somewhere. Could it be in California? The deserts of New Mexico? The woods of Texas? Was this years ago or just yesterday? The details would give too much away, but when/where I was is irrelevant.

I thought in my head as I trudged along through the vegetation that ripped and tore at my clothing: warning me that this isn’t a friendly place to be. Then again, my mind isn’t the friendliest place to be either. The whole area was littered with hundreds of empty beer cans (of the cheap variety), a rusted bbq, a random assortment of Christmas decorations long eaten away by the local varmints and environment. It was a place for squatters, vagrants, and the down-and-outs… I called it the Wilderness of Desperation.

Wilderness: noun. an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region. Synonyms: wilds, wastes, no-man’s-land.

As I said before, where it was is irrelevant, just that you know that it wasn’t conducive to life, not by sheer virtue to the environment itself but what the endless empty bottles and cans that littered the floor represented: a life not lived but numbed.

Methodically wandering, that’s what I call it, in which we wander purposefully in a direction to look for clues. We hop, we stoop, we straddle, and we stomp our way through the maze of vegetation until we find what we are looking for.

I absentmindedly slap the mosquito that’s on my neck, wondering why the hell are they out this time of year. There’s no breeze today, which I’m reminded of as a runnel of sweat drips down my back; all unusual this time of year, but not as unusual at staring at a dead body.

A very faint breeze kicked up the smell around us… that distinguished smell of rot… a familiar foe. I tell the people who’ve never smelt it before that it smells like fertilizer mixed with a tinge of stale alcohol. It’s all those volatile organic compounds off-gassing. The funny thing is years ago I used to not be able to smell it, but one nose surgery later I can’t escape the smell just like I can’t escape the surging thoughts of my own mortality.

We all stare at the scene before us, profound and curious, with a twinge of humility and surprise. No two dead bodies are ever alike it seems, and that’s made apparent as we all collectively soak up the scene.

I can’t help but observe how animalistic it appears, similar to the many deceased animals you’ve stumbled across in your adventure days (some of my colleagues and I joked that I’m grim reaper as everywhere I go I seem to find bones from boars, deer, turtles, dogs, sheep, you name it… I just happen to spot them throughout all my adventures). You tell yourself that of course, to separate the fact that what you’re seeing was once a person. One someone’s baby. They once had hopes and dreams. They had a personality. They had friends and family. I’m sure they felt love at some point, the same feeling you all have felt before, and just like that we’re all connected.

But now they’re just rags and sinew… what you tell yourself so you aren’t crushed by the existential dread that comes with witnessing death. We disassociate.

We were respectful. We take our time with the scene. We work diligently to bring answers and give them a voice. It brings closure to people, but opens so many lingering thoughts within me.

The thing about healing and self-discovery, is that it’s never a linear journey. These are the stories that don’t involve grandiose gestures of bravery and self-disregard, like mine swimming and daring aerobatic loops in a plane. Here in the quiet wilderness of death and despair, growth takes place… and it’s not always comfortable. These are the things you can’t talk about. It’s not great table conversation, yet I speak it so matter of factually as it rolls off my tongue casually… it worries me that I’m becoming desensitized to human suffering. That just stacks additional guilt/shame on something that’s already heavy… that’s not helping!

The incident, like the many other bodies I’ve found in my lifetime, doesn’t bother me at first but in the subsequent days I start to feel a sense of unease brooding inside me.

According to psychiatrist Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, “the body keeps the score.” He, along with other psychologists like the ever-popular Dr. Nicole LePera, have been looking at the way trauma leaves imprints on the individual and how the mind and body are connected.

Days later, my sleep cycles become disturbed. Intrusive thoughts begin to linger. I wake up in the morning with headaches and feelings of unease, yet I do not remember what my dreams are about. I look at my habits the previous few days and realize that maybe binge watching “Dexter” and “Yellowjackets” is a poor choice given what happened just prior. I wonder why I didn’t experience any of these immediately after… or why I felt fantastic when I went camping over the weekend. Now, I wake up and it feels like an immense storm cloud has rolled in on me. I start to overthink and overanalyze… I feel less happy and joyous.

When my mind starts to swirl, it goes places I don’t want it to go and fixates on things I don’t want to fixate on. Faced with experiences that trigger physical reactions on my body, suddenly my mind remembers every negative comment and attribute about me from the past year… “Now I understand the comments your Mother made about your insatiable need for attention. It’s making you ugly on the inside.” I fixate on this, and the many other criticisms I’ve had lobbied towards me. It’s a vicious cycle: an experience triggers a physical reaction, the physical reaction makes you believe you’re anxious, the anxious feeling drives your thoughts, your thoughts drive the physical reaction; the cycle seems endless. Soon you start to label yourself by the nature of your thoughts. “I am depressed,” “I am anxious,” “I am traumatized.”

“You must remember, you are not your thoughts… you are merely the thinker of your thoughts,” I tell myself.

Deep in the wilderness, the last thing I ever want is attention. I want to melt away. Is there something rotten in me? Do we all become rotten at some point? Not just in mind, but in our hearts? Do we let what happen to us over the course of our lifetime slowly rot away the goodness and kindness within us?

I become fixated on these criticisms and the fact that people whom I thought genuinely cared about me where just keeping tabs on me. It plays on my already raw nerves about people being disingenuous with me. It leads me to believe that it’s not about them, but it’s about me when in hindsight I know it’s the opposite.

But I’ve grown wiser. I’ve come to realize that when something bothers me, that often times is not the actual thing that bothers me, but something less obvious. Could this also be a misguided feeling? That the “making you ugly on the inside” comment isn’t what’s actually getting under my skin, but that it’s something bigger.

…. Duh. I mean that’s the whole point of this post, people: that sometimes we get lost in our own lizard brains.

Old me would have taken it for face value, but I know myself enough to know that I’m far more complex. This year I have learned a GREAT technique that I call “wait and see.” Instead of immediately reacting to something negative, I’ll pause, breath, and let it play out before taking action. This has worked flawlessly (and comically in a few ways!). So I sit and wait, trying to identify the origin of the feelings I have.

As an adult, it’s running away from the daunting feeling that I soon will die. Talking through it with my partner, Megan, I realize that my whole hyper focus on my flaws and feelings of anxiety were just related to my own fear of mortality.

Remember what I said about the whole “body/mind connection”? Well, this is where it all comes in. I felt anxious and restless, days after my last mission. It was as if this all triggered muscle memory within me, to feel a certain way. My body feels it, my mind notices it, then associates it with whatever (in this case, with some trite comment about me. Watching a bunch of macabre shows certainly wasn’t helping, and once I forced myself to workout, watch happy shows, and disconnect from my devices I felt better.

The storms pass… I feel normal again.

The lesson learned in all of this is simple:

1.) You are not your thoughts, you are the thinker of your thoughts. Be sure to give yourself props for your own growth. Recognizing your patterns is one thing, being able to self-sooth and intervene after you recognize them is huge!

2.) Before you immediately label yourself as broken or defective, pause and look at what you’re doing. Watching murder shows, eating like shit, and getting poor sleep isn’t going to make anyone feel like they’re in a good place. You’re not rotten, but maybe the environment you’re in isn’t helping.