217: What if you saw the face of death?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Once I went through this, because it shattered all of my beliefs, I am more aware that we are not necessarily who we think we are. There's more paradoxes in life than there are things that make sense. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 217. What if you saw the face of death?

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To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership. I have a great-grandmother whose name was Florence.

Before my grandmother was born, Florence had a baby girl and she died. The baby girl died when she was two. And after that, Florence just went insane. And after that event, from what I could piece together, is kind of this generational... It was like a tsunami on the family.

When my grandma was born, she was named after the dead baby. And she wasn't, from what I understand, wasn't necessarily wanted and was not treated well. So my grandmother grew up and was extremely abusive. My grandma was a heavy alcoholic. She would lock my uncle in the cellar with the lights off for punishment.

I know that she would keep my mom and my aunt inside for like a couple weeks at a time. One of their cats had babies and then taught my aunt like how to kill the baby cats by drowning them in the bathtub. And so I know for my mom, it was a very confusing home life.

dad, his family is mostly immigrants. His dads were immigrants from Poland. My dad's mom was an immigrant from Portugal. And they were very, you know, the American dream, white picket fence type deal. On the other hand, my mom's side of the family is like almost exactly the opposite. She grew up in almost abject poverty.

There was kind of like this dark, heavy cloud hanging over the last couple generations on that side. So my mom was very, very eager to get out of that environment. And so she met my dad, who is the exact opposite of everything that she grew up with. And she married out of poverty.

And my dad kind of just taught her how to be an adult. And she really desperately wanted like this very happy, wholesome family. I am the youngest of three kids. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Since I was the youngest of three, I was extremely self-sufficient. My mom likes to tell the story that when I was one and a half or two, I potty trained myself.

So from the very beginning, I was very headstrong and confident and curious, and I wanted to be friends with everyone. I had this intense joy for life, and I was just full of life.

My parents raised us very Catholic. My mom is very extroverted, outgoing, life of the party, very bubbly, always has something to say. And my dad is very artsy and stoic and pretty quiet.

There was, in those early years, a really strong sense of stability and balance and so filled with love. But when we moved to San Antonio when I was six was when I remember things just changing.

My dad's company had moved us to San Antonio with the promise of, you know, we'll move you back to Birmingham or Atlanta. And we bought property and built this house on it. Well, after a couple years, there was this big shopping center built behind the house that we had just built. And the property value plummeted. And then my dad lost his job.

So we were stuck with this house that no one would buy. I think the stress of that on top of a lot of behavioral issues that were starting in my siblings is where I can really pinpoint when the chaos started. These episodes, these unexpected episodes of rage started happening in my house. And they weren't just from her.

The tension in my house built up so much. Everyone was always screaming at each other. And not just raising their voices, but unbridled fits of rage.

screaming, throwing things, violence. So what started as just kind of increased stress from life over a couple years turned into, I don't know when I'm going to be subjected to someone's total fucking emotional hysterical breakdown.

And so the pattern was I tried to make myself as small as possible. I tried to never have any needs. I very much took on the role of being the peacemaker and the caretaker and a lot of times hide in my room and try to stay out of the line of fire.

My mom used to use this analogy like, you're like my clean little room. I'm always worried about other rooms in the house being messy, but I can always expect that your room's going to be clean. She had no idea what I was doing to myself in terms of not making any of my needs known ever. And I felt like this empty cup that they were pouring their rage into, even though I didn't understand what the hell was going on.

After the explosions would calm down, there would be these talks of something's got to change. We can't function like this as a family. And then I would always be so hopeful that something was going to give. And then these big explosions would just pass over and it felt like everything just went back to normal. It was very confusing for me. And it made me feel like I was crazy.

And so it created in me this sense of impending doom, very, very intense sense of impending doom that I still have to this day. It's gotten better. But even in my dreams, almost every night, my dreams are about something bad is about to happen. And I'm not quite sure what. Growing up, I was very well behaved. But when I turned 12, everything changed.

I became very, very, very sad. Whereas I used to be able to self-regulate my emotions really, really well. I felt like I was stuck in this emotional rut. Then when I was 13 and we moved from San Antonio to Atlanta is when it was like I stepped through a trap door and I completely changed.

I didn't want to kill myself, but I just wasn't interested in being a conscious human being. The feeling of not wanting to be conscious, but not being suicidal very much feels like I want to want to live.

I remember a time when I was happy. I remember a time when I was safe and I want that again, but I don't see myself ever feeling like that. So in the meantime, I just want to numb out or sleep and then hopefully someday it comes back. I started self-harming. I would cut my wrists and my hips. It started out as like, I don't want to kill myself. I just don't want to be conscious, but escalated into, I want to die.

I would do things like wrap fabric or bed sheets or something around my neck and just feel what it would feel like to hang myself.

My parents, thank God, have always been very open-minded and receptive to mental health because right after my mom had my brother, she fell into a horrific postpartum depression. So my parents were very willing to get me help. And when they took me to a therapist and a psychiatrist, they put me on an antidepressant. And that started the whole medication dance for a couple years.

My cutting got worse, and so my therapist recommended that I go to an outpatient psychiatric program. So I went there for a week, and that's where I learned how to do drugs when I was 13.

I would binge drink with my friends. I started moving to prescription drugs. I would find painkillers and I became violently angry towards my parents and my siblings. It turned me into a different kid so quickly. I would look in the mirror and be like, what the fuck is happening to me? I don't like this and this is scaring me.

But no matter how many times I got in trouble, I have to get high. I have to get drunk because I cannot stand being conscious. During that time, I went through some experiences. I experienced sexual assault. And also shortly after that, my first consensual sexual experience was overwhelmingly dramatic. And I still have flashbacks to this day from it.

So after that, I became actively suicidal again and knew that if I continued to black out, I would kill myself. It escalated one night. One of the drugs I was abusing at the time was Ambien. If you abuse it, you hallucinate like crazy, but then you also black out. So you're just like on another level fucked up.

I finished snorting what I had. And then the next thing I remember, I'm standing in my kitchen and my parents asked me a question and I said something really bizarre. And then I remember running upstairs and sitting on my bed and my dad came up to try to sit with me. And I, and I said, I need help. And he said, Kim, we,

used your entire college tuition to send you to rehab. I don't know what else to do for you. You can't live here anymore. This is it. And that's when I opened my window and tried to jump off my roof. But my dad was there and picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. I woke up on the couch the next day and that was actually the last time I have touched any substance. I was 15. That's when I was kind of rescued.

I found this recovery community and everyone was so supportive and they became my second family. When I was 16, my parents split up and they're still married today, but at the time they split up for a while. Both of them were so engrossed in the separation that they were just in way too much pain to really pay attention to me. Two months after I turned 18, I showed up with a U-Haul, I packed my shit up and I moved.

I worked three jobs, went to a community college at night, slept in my car before class, went to class, went back home and did it all over again five days a week. I noticed these patterns where I would feel a shit ton of energy and then I would crash from it.

I would be going 100 miles per hour, and then by the end of the day, I'm curled up on a ball, crying hysterically and feeling this existential despair. So when I was 21, I moved to downtown Atlanta and started going to Georgia State University, the nursing school.

This guy kind of started coming around the periphery of my friend group. We got to know each other a little bit more and instantly became like two halves of a whole. Because of our backgrounds, there was a lot of codependency there, but there was still like this genuine love. The only man I let see me, the only man I ever expressed needs to,

He had been a heroin addict, and so when we met, we both were clean. After about a year and a half, one day, I get a call from him, and he's crying, and he said, can you come to my old house? Immediately, my stomach sank, and I said, did you relapse? And he started crying, and he said yes. I told him, I will stand behind you this once, but if this happens again, I have to leave.

After that, he didn't relapse again. And I was so happy. A few months later, he came to my home and completely unexpectedly broke up with me. And I was hysterical. What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you leave? And he said, I don't know how to be happy without you. And if I keep feeling like this, I will not be able to stay sober. And I couldn't argue with that.

It rocked both of our worlds. I mean, not only did we love each other so deeply, we were part of each other's families. It felt like a divorce. After a couple of months, he was like, that was the biggest mistake I made of my life. Please take me back. And I said, no, it was gut-wrenching to watch. And he never believed that he was as loved as he was. My whole world kind of fell apart.

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When I was put on Effexor, something clicked and I didn't want to kill myself anymore. But the thing with Effexor is if you stop taking it for a day or two, you start to withdraw really bad. Your neurons are misfiring. So it's like the electrical grid in your brain just starts to go crazy.

My highs and lows were at that point pretty moderate. And I was in a really good place. But the Effexor had always given me migraines. And it was at the point where I talked to my doctor. And she said, you know what? We can wean you off of Effexor.

I weaned off of it with my doctor. The withdrawals were pretty bad, but I had a few months where I was feeling really good. And then I was feeling really, really good. I felt like I was on fire and I felt like I could do anything and take on the world. And then one day I was like, I stepped through a trap door and I could not get out of bed.

It wasn't like I was just sad. It was like I went into a different reality. I had this overwhelming panic attack. The next morning I wake up and before I even open my eyes, I feel the panic in my body still there. And I hear this voice in my head that says, we now notice the protective layers of sleep beginning to lift.

And my eyes shot open and I thought, what the fuck was that? And I have a full blown panic attack. When I heard that voice in my head, it felt like it was coming from a couple other people. And it felt like a third party's observation of me, but I could just hear it in my head.

In the panic attack, I felt shaky. It's like a trembling. And it's like a trembling that is from such a place of fear. It feels like its origin is coming from the core of my body. And it feels like there's a fist around my stomach, squeezing my stomach. So when I try to eat, it feels like I'm eating sand. And so I just feel raw, empty.

I actually was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but I think I'm going to increase my meditation. I'm going to increase exercise. I'm going to go to more meetings. I'm going to surround myself by people I love. I'm going to do all the things and we're not going to get back on a fixer. So I was under a ton of stress. And on top of that, I was starting my first job as a nurse.

I had just graduated nursing school and I was determined to be like, people have gone through worse. I'm going to get up every day, show up to my job. But on the other hand, I was still waking up in a state of panic every single morning. I'm trying to force myself to eat breakfast almost every day I'm throwing up from panic. But still, I was like, I don't care if I feel like I'm going to die. I'm going to do this job.

After a couple weeks, I am in a state of anxiety, fear, panic, and it's not going away. It's like being stuck in the same moment. Then I stopped being able to go to sleep. Do you know the feeling when someone pops out and scares you or something startles me? You get a rush of like,

Feels like electricity through your body and your stomach drops and your heart races. I'm laying in bed and I notice I'm having this sensation every three minutes. One of those times I feel myself start to drift off and I hear that same like narrative voice in my head that said, one day, Kim, you will die. And I got this fear like I've never known in my life.

I was not just logically facing the fact that I was going to die someday, but in my gut, I felt my own mortality. And every night was getting worse and worse.

One night, I was laying on my parents' couch and I start to get these, I guess you could call them visions in my mind. I know they're not actually happening, but there are these scenarios playing out before me. And three of them happened. The first one was of a soldier in World War I in a trench.

I have never been in a war. I've never been scared someone is going to kill me. But this felt so realistic. It felt like I wasn't observing him. I felt like I was him. And I was watching this person, feeling what this person felt in this trench, and being absolutely uncontrollably terrified that my life or death depended on whether or not someone was going to blow me up. And I

I had no idea when it was going to be, and I just had to lay there and take it until I got help. And then the scene changed to this middle-aged woman, and someone called me and said that my son died in a car accident.

And it felt like the bottom of my soul opened up. And that grief that this woman felt, that for some reason I could also feel, was almost like this disgusting, spiraling, indescribable feeling. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was nothing I could ever even imagine.

It was such a foreign feeling. It felt like I was seeing a new color for the first time. I was like, what the hell? What is this? The last scene was this woman in a basement and she was on a concrete floor and she was chained to a pole.

She was abducted and being held in some man's basement. And she had lost sense of the days passing, of the weeks passing. She was in this state where she didn't know when he was going to come back. She was being beaten and raped by this person. And she had no sense of time of when it was going to be over. She had no sense of being anywhere else except in that moment and suffering alone.

And then the vision stopped and I was just laying there helpless because all of these unexplainable feelings and visions in my head and physical symptoms are just wrecking me. I couldn't do any activity that was soothing it. I was just stuck in this same mental and physical anguish. I didn't sleep that night.

I don't remember the next day. My days were spent curled in a ball or my mother trying to get me to eat. The other thing I would do is sit on the back porch because the sun helped my body some. And when the sun went down again, I laid back on the couch and

I took that new mood stabilizer. And as soon as I laid down, I started feeling my legs. Like I felt like there were ants crawling in my legs. With some mood stabilizers and SSRIs and especially antipsychotics, you can get a side effect called akathisia. It feels like your skin is going to burst open. And it feels like someone is taking the panic and restless moods

nerve pathway in your brain and cranking it up. And so you cannot sit still, you have to move. And so I'm laying on the couch and I'm basically writhing in the sheets and I feel like an animal stuck in a cage and I'm almost like about to gnaw my arm off just to get out.

And I hear in my head this chattering of like people. It felt like a small crowd talking. And then I heard this laugh and it was this booming, deep, metallic sounding laugh. I don't know if this makes sense, but I could see and feel the colors black and blood red. And I thought to myself, that is a devil and this is hell.

In that moment, I was reduced to nothing. There were no options left to self-soothe. There were no options to regulate. There was nothing to do but feel everything.

I don't know what I did after that, but I do know when the sun came up, a 25-year-old woman crawled into bed with my mother and asked her to hold me. I don't even know what I thought or felt. I was like an infant. My doctor prescribed me Ativan. So I took it and I finally slept. And I slept eight, nine hours and...

was like, that saved my life. And so that's when I decided, like, maybe I can get back on the Infectser and get my life back and just continue to deal with the migraines. I had exhausted every option and I had to get back on this thing I did not want to. And I got back on the Infectser and sure enough, two weeks later, my panic stopped.

When I got back on the Effexor, after several months, I noticed like, hey, I'm not getting these migraines anymore. And I would say my migraines went down from 13 to 14 times a month to maybe three. To me, that was a life-changing victory for me. But it terrified me because the only thing between me and my life being destroyed is this pill. And I hate that feeling. What if I can't get that pill?

The days following the panic going away, seeing those visions that I had and feeling all those things I felt sent me into kind of an existential questioning because I believed in a God or a something, but what I had seen during those six weeks was a reality that I didn't know existed at all.

I saw and experienced a level of anguish that I never could have imagined. I saw the power of the subconscious mind. I didn't know if it was spirits. I didn't know if it was my brain doing crazy shit. I realized I didn't know shit anymore.

I was just cracked open to an entirely different way of existing. And it challenged everything I thought I knew about anything ever. I could not understand how this suffering, not just in myself, but seeing the suffering in others. I could not reconcile that with the idea of good or love anymore.

I saw how deep the human psyche goes and I saw how deep we can get pulled into it. And so if you were to come to me and disclose to me every terrible thing you had done, I wouldn't be shaken at all. I wouldn't be scared. I wouldn't judge it. The human experience goes to that depth, but there is no judgment. There was just total neutrality.

All of a sudden, scary things didn't scare me anymore. Death didn't scare me anymore.

What I found in myself to be character flaws or something didn't scare me anymore. I was just in a place of total acceptance because I knew I didn't know shit. And at the end of the day, whatever greater reality there is behind what we can consciously see and feel is so powerful and so huge. Like, we're living in a delusion. I wanted as little stimulus as possible.

I didn't want to see a lot of people. I didn't really know who I was. And so I wanted to sit with this new person that was starting to form. And I really was in a place of deep solitude.

I had that experience. I lived with my parents for a year afterwards and I kept thinking like, I want to go back to my old neighborhood in Atlanta. I want to slip back into the life that I used to have. But when I moved back to Atlanta, that life wasn't there anymore because I had changed on the inside. Everything on the outside was different. It felt like I was returning to a chapter that was just done.

Up until then, different phases kind of happened slowly and over time. But this one happened like a bomb in my life. It was like I revisited the bomb site and my home wasn't there anymore. And I was surrounded by also everywhere that James and I used to go. And he was really struggling. And I just had to accept like, it's done. You have to move on. You have to move on to the next phase.

Prior to this episode that I had, I was really confident in some ways, but in other ways, I was very, very, very self-conscious. I felt like...

I don't know if I'm going to be able to be a nurse. Like, what if I give a wrong medication? What if I accidentally like kill someone somehow? What if I look at a patient the wrong way and then they die? Like, I was really scared before this episode. But after that episode, I was like, I can survive an unimaginably painful experience and feel like I'm being tortured. I can learn how to do this.

I made it through nursing school. I passed my boards. I'm ready to learn. And I felt like I had come into my element because in healthcare, you see people at their absolute worst. It takes a certain amount of resilience to show up in that job and not have it really, really wear on you.

I knew that I could do it. I knew I could do all of it. I knew that I had within me a resilience and a determination that I had previously grossly underestimated, and that experience got me in touch with it.

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And he said it had got canceled because of what he said was this new flu that's getting pretty bad in China. And it's starting to spread. I was not too concerned about it. I thought that it was weird he would skip a business trip because of it. But I just didn't give it a second thought. So then we get the first few cases in the U.S.,

And then a couple of weeks later, I guess the lockdown happened. And that's when it became very real. And what happened at my hospital was our patient census dropped because everyone was too scared to come to the hospital. Even people who needed to come, like I eventually had a man who had had a stroke and waited seven days to come to the hospital because he was scared. Meanwhile, our fifth floor starts filling up with COVID patients,

Because the patient census was low, they started cutting our shifts for the people who didn't work on the COVID unit. And I was furious. I was very ready to leave Atlanta. Because after losing James, and then shortly after that, after losing everything in my life, I felt like I was living in a graveyard. I kept thinking to myself, I feel like I'm a stranger living in my own life.

So that's when I started travel nursing. And I put everything I owned in a storage unit, got rid of a lot of it, and took an assignment taking care of patients in a long-term care facility who had had COVID but were having a difficult time coming off of the ventilator. And that's when I saw face-to-face how fucked up it is.

I was at the long-term care hospital from May of 2020 to October of 2020. And then I went to a small town in southern New Mexico and took a night shift COVID assignment there. And I will never forget some of the things that I saw.

I always wanted to be a nurse. I always wanted to work in emergency scenarios. But there's nothing that you can learn in school to prepare you to stand in a hallway of 20 dying people at once. There's nothing that can prepare you for that. There were people who were on the vent for three months and were just not getting better. There was this one patient in particular who

that I still think about him. He had gotten COVID and had a tracheostomy, which is a hole that they put in your throat and attach the ventilator to that. He had, I'm assuming, permanent brain damage and kept pulling his tracheostomy off, which when you do that, you die. So when all else fails, you have to put patients in restraints to keep them from killing themselves.

One of the times before he was restrained, he pulled off his tracheostomy. Someone called it a code blue. And I went in there and that was the first time I had seen someone blue head to toe. They were able to revive him. And that's what he got and put on restraints.

Unfortunately, the man never oriented. And so that poor man stayed in restraints for months. I don't know where family was. My contract was done before I saw what happened to him. One night in particular, I was sitting at the nurse's station. I hear a nurse aide calling out for help. And I see this nurse aide standing in a room like totally pale.

And I walk in and then I see this man laying on the floor and he is blue from the chest up. And this had been a man who had previously an independent patient and now he was on the floor. And so I tell her to call a code and I get on top of him and his eyes twitch up towards me and I start doing compressions and then his head falls to the side. He starts foaming at the mouth.

I start doing these compressions, then I fall his sternum break. And I said out loud, holy fuck, I just broke his ribs. The ribs break early in compressions. And so that was my first experience. Being the one to break someone else's ribs and the popping over and over again made me feel so sick. And I remember the nurse aide next to me saying, it's okay, sweetie, you're doing great. Just keep going.

The whole code team comes in, get him back on the bed. We work on him. And then they call it. They can't get him back. And then everyone leaves and it's just me and the charge nurse. What went from chaos was all of a sudden totally silent. And we just zip him up in a body bag and write his name and date of birth on there. And then that's it. That's the end of an entire life.

And it was the first very chaotic code I had been in. And I realized that I was the last thing he saw before he died. The gravity of the career and the assignments that I had gotten myself into really hit me then. The fear of death is the driving factor to so many aspects of human existence. And I was there in the final moments of someone's entire life.

And then it just feels like, alright, the credits start rolling after that. Touching someone in their last moments and being on top of them is this strangely intimate experience. You're there to witness this person's last moment on earth. I get goosebumps thinking about it because there is no other feeling like that. From that moment, for some reason, it opened me up even more. It gave me even more of a capacity to love people.

I feel like nurturing people, whether it's in my personal life or in a career, is my vocation. And sometimes you have to go between, you know, kind of tough love and also like tender love. And it opened me up to more gentle, tender love.

About a week after that, I was drinking orange juice and I was like, oh, this orange juice is like watery. And then I went to drink my coffee. I was like, oh, this is watery too. And then I was like, oh shit. I have pretty bad asthma. So my roommate and I at the time both got COVID. We actually worked together on that floor. It was horrible. I felt like I had been drugged.

It moved to my stomach over the next few days, and then after that was when I felt like I couldn't breathe.

One day when I had enough energy, I stood up to cook. And about 10 minutes after standing, I got really dizzy and really winded. And I laid down on my stomach and I didn't catch my breath for three hours. I couldn't breathe. And I felt like there was something physically like sitting in my lungs. It was very uncomfortable and I couldn't cough anything up.

And it took me a month and a half to be able to work out again because I would get heart palpitations when I would start to work out. After I recovered from COVID, I went back to work and there was a night we get a huge influx of patients and we have to move the entire second wing upstairs to make room for all the COVID patients coming in. On top of that, everyone on the COVID side was unstable.

There's like a screen that measures everyone's heart rate and oxygen saturation level. And I walk out of the hallway and everyone's desaturating. All of us were going room to room. It's like playing whack-a-mole, like trying to keep these people from dying, you

At a certain point, all of us just stood there for a second, trying to, like, calm down. And I just remember feeling a single bead of sweat, like, slowly dripping down my back and being like, this feels almost like a mass casualty event. Everyone's dying, and there's nothing we can do. The ICU beds are taken up. We don't have any more beds.

When you see people at their worst, it's really easy to pass all kinds of judgment on them. But what my experience drilled into my mind is that, first of all, you don't know what someone else is going through. You don't know the depths of suffering that anyone around you has been to. During that time, death became certain to me and death become much less scary for me.

I truly think that being able to face death and suffering and bounce back from it a couple years prior helped me continue to show up and work with these people. The experience that I had made me able to face seeing so much death and so much suffering without totally imploding.

I'm able to walk through it with more grace, I think. And I think I can take better care of myself outside of work in a way that I wouldn't have been able to before.

Shortly after I started nursing, I was sitting on my parents' back porch and it was springtime and they have these beautiful trees in their backyard and these trees have flowers on them. It was at the peak of spring and I saw one of these big, beautiful pink flowers fall off the tree and I got sad because

And I thought, no, like the flowers are starting to die. And there was this voice in my head that said, Kim, the flowers are supposed to die, but they're going to come back.

And I was like, oh my God, I'm always going to face suffering, but then it goes away. And then I'm going to feel joy and then I'm not going to feel joy. It's a cycle. And accepting the fact that the joy is going to go away and the pain will come back. It absolutely will come back. And I will continue to face loss. It is so freeing.

It opens you up to cherishing and to loving in a way that I just didn't before.

After James and I broke up and I moved, I had to not have contact with them because he kept relapsing. And he did finally get clarity that he had complex PTSD, which is a bit trickier to treat than PTSD. But I believe that by the time he received that diagnosis, he was just too stuck in the cycle of relapse. And I always...

kept tabs on him because he was still very good friends with my family. And I was always checking on him through someone else. And two weeks ago, I got a call from an old friend and she said, something happened last night. James relapsed and he died. Four of his family members and I don't know, a handful of our friends all reached out to me and said, you know, like, you need to know that he still loved you all the way up until the end.

And I never got a chance to tell him that, that I feel the same because I didn't want to contribute to his relapse cycle. But that man loved me in a way that few people are capable of loving. And I will never not love him. And I never stopped loving him. And even if I had known exactly how it ended, I wouldn't have changed anything because

And I hope now that he has relief from the horrible battle that he had for many years. I hope he can see how special of a human he was that he was never able to see when he was here. And in a weird way, I still, I almost feel closer to him right now. I feel like he's standing right next to me.

I guess his passing reminds me again of impermanence. Even though it did end this way, there is value in experiencing the life we had together, regardless of how it ended.

And that's how I am continuing to try to live. Flowers die, but then they come back and there will never be another James, but that's okay. And there's more in life to experience, you know, and just having the experience is where the value lies.

What I realized during my episode was that because I felt like my pain was never going to end, yet it did end, I realized that literally everything is temporary. And it sounds scary because that means like I'm going to lose everything, but it's not.

It's true. We're all going to lose everything at some point. But the thing is, is that it's cyclical. Like you lose something and then something else comes into your life to make it full and beautiful. Before I went through this experience, I had a pretty solid understanding of who I thought I was. And once I went through this, because it shattered all of my beliefs, I

I am more aware that we are not necessarily who we think we are. These days, I see how there's more paradoxes in life than there are things that make sense.

Our ideas of who we are oftentimes die. And because I was connected with that reality of impermanence, letting go of old ideas is less scary. I'm not saying it's not scary at all, but it's less jarring.

Being thrown into mystery and the unknown and the unseen and the paradox of things opens you up to whether or not I want it to be like this, this is how it is. And so for me, it drove me even more into my practice of meditation. In meditation, the type that I do, it's about simply cultivating nonjudgmental awareness.

In some practices, they call it the witness, like that piece of you that's able to witness from a neutral standpoint. It's like a muscle and the stronger that muscle became. Now when I encounter these mysteries and these paradoxes, I can anchor myself into that neutral awareness and the uncertainty and the ambiguity becomes so much less jarring.

The last year and a half, part of my practice now is a lot of exercising. I do the typical, you know, going to the gym, but then I've also started rock climbing, which has been life-changing for me. It's gotten me comfortable in my body, and I feel like it's starting to actually heal my nervous system.

I think the hardest part of that experience was losing the life that I had known before and not knowing when the suffering was going to end and having to grapple with my idea of there being a loving God.

The idea that there is a loving God underlined so much of my identity and so much of my spiritual beliefs, but I could not in my mind accept that level of chaos and loss with a God that cared at all.

The universe in reality is fucking insane and incredible and terrifying. And what's important to me is that love and joy and caring and truth are things that exist. So I don't try to bother myself with whether or not there is a loving God anymore. I was always scared of suffering. And so I was always scared that somehow I was going to lose control of my mood and my regulation.

It was easy for me to be like, oh my God, I've been through so much, to feel sorry for myself and be like, I never even had a chance to be a well-balanced person. But it helps me to look back

my life up to this point and see how everything I went through led me up to that six-week thing that happened to me and I have appreciation for it now. I'm not mad at it. I'm not anything towards it. It made me realize like I am not strong and resilient and

Because of those things I went through, I was those things anyway. And so it led me to a place of, I don't want to keep hurting. I don't want to keep wallowing in these memories. It happened. It changed me. And that's it.

When you're experiencing something that cannot be captured by words, it is incredibly lonely because you don't know if someone else has ever felt that. And when you encounter someone else that has experienced that, you can feel it. And it's a little tiny nugget of hope. I think what I want to take forward is being that for someone else as well.

And I don't know in what capacity, but I don't want anyone out there to ever feel like they're alone in something. Today's episode featured Kim. You can find out more about her and her writings at her Myth and Medicine blog on her Patreon page at patreon.com slash mythandmedicine. ♪

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.