306: What if you lived someone else’s life?
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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. All of that aliveness was just richly flowing through this body and this experience of self-loss.

of grief, of remembrance, of recollection, of love, of importance. I am here in this moment experiencing the totality of everything relative to this moment in time. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 306. What if you lived someone else's life?

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My paternal great-grandfather's family landed in what was known as the Palestinian province of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. And they landed in Jerusalem. And my great-grandfather continued on to New York, Savannah, and Jacksonville, finally landing in Miami.

Similarly, on my maternal side, my great-grandmother's family was fleeing Russia, landed in Austria. One by one, each of her elder siblings and her were transported over a 10-year period to the United States and into New York, trying to continue to flee. And I don't know that we've ever landed. I'm not sure we've arrived anywhere.

All of that is baked into this ancestral question and into these challenges internally about being here. I mean, like, here as a human. Feeling invited, feeling a sense of belonging in this place. So my father... Yeah, he's a deeply flawed human. He has a hard time following through and showing up.

His words and his actions do not match. Before five years old, I feel like I did belong here in this world. But there was a marker that I think started a path towards not necessarily feeling that safe and secure in that sense of belonging. What I deeply remember is that I was running out of the front door of the house after him.

He got into a car. He drove down the driveway. I ran after him. He started the drive off, and I have this distinct memory of him looking in the rearview mirror of the car and me seeing his eyes. Him looking away and driving away. There was no one else home.

What could a five-year-old possibly do to make you so frustrated that you would leave that kid standing in the middle of the road and just drive off? And I honestly can't fathom what that could possibly be at this age, looking back. I'm not stating it as like, oh, my life was so terrible. Look what my father did in that moment. More like, at the very least, you could do different and better. You could do a whole lot better

foundation broke. A deep sense of abandonment in that moment and an interconnectivity of abandonment and love, of the connectivity between love and belonging and trust. That deep understanding of self and place in the world, all of that stuff just cracked.

And I have tried to feel loved by that human. I have squeezed through those cracks in order to experience what it could feel like to feel loved by that human. I have never felt loved by that human. And there's stacks and layers. I mean, I had a house. There was money. I was not wanting for things. But our relating was dying a death of a thousand cuts from age five.

And I think I develop an ability to like mend the crack, but not permanently. Like a glue that just don't stay stuck. So it just cracks again. And then you glue it back and then it cracks again. And on top and around and surrounding is this glue of protective patterns. Like intuitively, the body just starts like putting all of these intuitive patterns together, which are helpful in the moment.

those protective patterns just started accumulating to the point where it sometimes becomes hard to like identify, is the thing I was just doing me? Or is it some pattern I've developed as a result of like layers and layers of this protective pattern? The protective pattern that was emerging right there was endure.

Deeply connected with it was a sense of shame, like eyes to the ground kind of experience of shame and this kind of like, I'm not going anywhere grit. Can't rely on someone else. I've got this. I don't mean it in like a physical stronger than. I mean it in an energetic internal sense of I don't belong. I will handle that. I cannot look to anybody else. I will handle that.

It's like an aloneness in the world thing that I'm talking about. Not a superior than someone else. A complete alone in the world can't depend on in order to feel like a sense of belonging here. My mother had a really tough childhood. I don't think she could accurately see my father. I think that she had a lot in her history that made her feel like he was a champion early on.

When she met him, she was young. She was a 16 year old who was a senior in high school. And he was, I believe, a college freshman. My father, he's not curious about your experience. He's not curious about the impact that he's having. I feel like my mom is. She really wants to know your experience. She really deeply cares about your experience of the world.

And I feel like both of them did the best they could with what they had. I think I started falling in love with their patterns rather than with any healthy practices. So for my mom, she was just like all cuddly and warm and soft. And so like I started to learn an association of love with that. And so people who were like that with me, I was like, oh, that's love, right? With him, it was all about like kind of challenging you

You might get like a sly smirk from him if you'd done something really clever. If you didn't feel his rigidity, then you had done well. There's a lot about like this notion of being right or doing the right thing. And so if you fit within that like rightness, then you wouldn't feel so much of his rigid. And there would be like a little opening, like maybe like a little heart opening in some way, some little thing he might do.

And so like you started like going for those rewards, like, oh, I didn't feel that like full extent of his rigid rightness kind of thing. And so I'm just going to I'm going to slip into that crack.

So there's this dichotomy that was growing inside to have like love and care and trust coming from one parent. And then also the impact of another parent who didn't operate in the world that way, who you operated in tiny corners trying to slip in to get that love.

And I think I lived really honestly, like all the way up to like 47 years worth of time, just bouncing between those patterns without any awareness that that's what was happening. Late 12, 13, I had noticed that my mom was pregnant and my sib was born a few months before the Jewish ritual of bar mitzvah.

And my parents decided to name them at my bar mitzvah. When my sibling was born, my mom put them in my arms immediately. And the energy of it was, this human's important. And there's a lot of things that go through my head when I think about that. Like, I think about protection, support, deep care, love.

Yeah, this is my person. This is the person that I will be here for. My sense of belonging to the extent that it is here is rooted in that relationship. I was a 12-year-old kid who was handed, like, across a bed in the hospital, this little tiny life to hold.

That trust that was given in that moment of like, this is an important human and I trust you with them. 15 years old, I was in a magnet school for music and theater. And I love performing. I love getting out there. And it's a mask and it's a fun mask. And it's like a super fun way to just like,

release and be whatever you want to be and not just be whatever other masks you have. I went to college and definitely was living a socio-normative life. My first year, I was just basically enjoying the dorm life with a floor of people, several of whom I am still really close friends with.

hanging off the rafters, dancing, enjoying ourselves, and just like being silly, dumb, normie 18-year-olds. But someone from freshman year who I was really close to was Murdoch. And this was my sophomore year when I was rushing the fraternity.

I was coming back from a sailing class trip to Catalina Island and there was a whole circle of my friends that were outside of this friend's apartment. And they were all just sitting in a circle on the ground and I noticed them and thought like, "Well, looks kind of weird." These other two friends come up the stairs and it feels like this incredibly long moment. So they got up and they said, "Friend's name is dead."

It just felt like a collapsing world. The duality of these two things of like the joy I had just been experiencing. And then having a dear one brutally murdered. One of my not yet fraternity brothers was sitting on the front porch area. And he said, are you okay? And I had only known these guys to like party and have fun and all of that was great. And he's like, come up, talk to me.

I have no idea what we talked about. I have no idea how long I was there. I just knew that he stayed and I felt better. I felt seen in a time where I felt really tender and delicate. And I remember thinking, oh, this is a place for me. So yeah, I joined that house and had fun. It was like an environment, a scenescape in a way for life to unfold.

I went to law school and got a master's degree in dispute resolution at two different schools. And for those 10 years, I was split between doing law and doing mediative work. On the mediation side, I built a practice up with another individual, and we got some attention from a big mediation group. And I ended up taking a position with them, moved to D.C.,

I was still connected with my father at that time, and any time that we would engage would be a point of challenge. And there were a lot of different moments that were deeply troubling in that relationship, including within that 10-year arc from like 20 to 30. And also feeling a lot of heartache around family stuff, parents getting divorced, grandparents dying, all of that happening within a very short span of time.

From like 30 to 47, career track was similar in terms of playing both in law and in mediation. And really feeling into like masculinity, and the cigars and the beers, and I've got this, and I'm a litigator. There was a part of me that felt that that felt really resonant, like being super clever and smart and being a litigator. And there's a part of me that's like, this is so not me.

Litigating, you are doing things to people or for them. You represent someone, you're on their side, or you're representing against someone and you're not on their side. That's the litigation realm. There are practices that are more contractual. Private mediation is about like the person saying like, I'm here for the deal. Like we're on the side of the deal. Litigation has its place in this world, a lot of place in this world.

Private mediation that's like deal-making has its place in this world, but also not quite right for me. Still not right for like my passion. It's not the path at this stage of the game of my life, or really what I was realizing at that stage, gave me joy. But it set off an arc and led me to a pathway of restorative practices. In a restorative practice, you can help people find agreement, right?

And that model is like all focused on helping people resolve conflict in a way where they feel heard and met and seen and they have agency. I've done some organizational ombuds work and fell in love with restorative practice work with notions of doing things with people as opposed to for them or to them.

So I feel like I was just living during that time frame, like drinking microbrews, good scotch and having cigars and playing.

There's like a pattern that I experience where it feels less present inside my body, like outside my body a bit. So I'm not really experiencing what is happening in my body. Like my head has a projection of this being a good thing. It makes for a good story in my own internal experience kind of thing, a narrative. That's what I call leave energy.

When I'm in my like leave energy and I'm just letting go of like the me that's underneath it, it's great. But for me, it's partially a conversation around am I wielding that or is it wielding me?

So if I decide I'm going to go leave for a bit and just be with that, there's nothing wrong with going and playing a game. Just do you know why you're doing it or is it happening and you're just like finding yourself in it and then later on struggling with it because then you have to endure. Then I'm in the endure pattern of like, oh, why did I do this? Like if I was talking to like one of my buddies or something like that, I might tell them about the leave story and they might think like, that's so cool. Yeah.

And then I'm left on the other side of like, yeah. But once you've had like one of those moments that feel, oh, I am fully dropped in on aliveness right now. I feel like it's like a quest from there forward to like live your life that way.

And there was definitely a thread during all of that timeframe of like, I've got this, that continuing building theme. And it was bouncing back and forth between, I have to get this and I've got this. I was in an eight year dating relationship, helping to raise a child, a wonderful human who I met when they were eight.

And I'm not going to say it was an easy time. Very complex and complicated and difficult and a lot of different big events. And I look back at all that and it felt tough. So I'm 46 years old and I end this eight-year relationship. And I do feel guilty. I acknowledge that I am leaving a 16-year-old who I've helped raise for eight years.

but it gave me an opportunity to come to the East Bay, to come be closer to my sibling and my mom. My boss, the one who had founded our office, had some pretty significant health issues, and I felt like I was carrying the office, and I was also holding a lot of grief around someone that I have known since I was five. This is my oldest, dearest, best friend.

Just before COVID, his wife reached out to me and said that even though he's been sick for a while and had a bunch of different prognoses that sounded not good, that I should come out because this was it. And he was going to go. And so we had our trip. We had our feelings about this is probably the last time that we're going to see each other. And then he lived.

But with more cancer and more cancer and more cancer. And he lived in such pain and I lived with such grief at knowing that we were sitting here holding this inevitable piece and he was trying to live his best life with that. So I was holding all of that and I wasn't releasing stuff. I was in my own way like pushing it down or diffusing it to neutral information and just holding it.

In the same way, like I think I did when I was five and endured my father, like driving away on the street. It was like, I've got this. I have to get this. So I kept just thinking I could just contain it.

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So I went on a weekend trip with my mom and my sibling for our mother's birthday. I have video of it to be able to prove that I was there. I don't remember.

Apparently we had a great time kayaking, singing. This is what I've been told. I was singing. Went and had a conversation with a 16-year-old kid who had rented us the kayaks. I was like super lucid and aware and awake and attentive and present. And then from there, after kayaking and talking with him, we went down to the front of the beach and had some sandwiches.

And then as I understand from my family, I said something about like, oh, if I didn't know any better, I would think like I'm having like a heart attack or something like that. Like my chest really hurts. And I got up and did a stretch for a minute and then immediately laid down. My sibling put their hand on my neck to massage me and there was no one there. I was dead.

My sibling went running on the beach to try to tell people to get help because I wasn't responding. I was at that point somatically dead. My heart had stopped. My sibling found the 16-year-old and some other people that were at the kayak shop. One person called emergency services and the two of them came over to start doing chest compressions.

I was responsive and then not responsive continuously. So my heart would start up again and I would jump up like half body up and gasp, which is from what I've read, the brain's response to trying to reset the body. So it would try to reset and then I would go back down and then they would do chest compressions again. And this went on for somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. My understanding is that some people gave up.

I guess typically you don't do CPR for more than like 10 or 15 minutes. If your heart is stopped, you've stopped breathing and you're unconscious, my understanding is that you are clinically dead. And so I was periodically clinically dead for that 30 to 45 minute stretch until they finally stabilized the heart. And then at that point in time, even though I was unconscious, I am alive now.

There was a helicopter that was actually flying in the area. The biggest time struggle was that it couldn't land. So they had to clear space and clear people out. So I left the beach alive, but in critical condition. Once they got me in the hospital, they apparently put these like frozen ice packs on your limbs. And they do it to slow down the blood flow in your limbs in order to try to concentrate as much as possible in your brain and heart to give you the best chance of survival.

The doctors, I believe, told my mom that I had 2.5% chance of survival and that a less than 1% chance of emerging without significant brain tissue damage. So there's this question of, do you want this person to survive? What do you root for if you love this person? Do you root for them to die? I've understood from both my mom and my sibling that I was hooked up to every wire you could have possibly imagined and that they would walk in for four days while I was in a medically induced coma.

Part of their heartache was that because of the ice packs, they would see me 24-7 nonstop shivering while hooked up. So yeah, I carry a lot of heartache around the impact that I had on them. And there is no take it off my shoulders. They've tried. That can be done about the fact I didn't intend it by any reasonable definition of intent. I still feel the impact on them.

Apparently, I was trying to remove the intubation tube while I was in a coma. They ended up strapping my arms, restraining my arms. After the attempts to remove the intubation tube, they did decide that I was showing enough brain activity to be stable. And they brought me out of the coma. My understanding is that I was out and in a coma for four days.

And here's some of what I experienced. So one of the main storylines that emerged was that of a rescue diver. In the beginnings of it, I am ethereal, spiritual being not embodied. And there is a conversation going on between a few people.

There are these two divers that are talking with one another. There's a third diver that is talking at them. And there is a person in what looks like a well who is falling down in the water, like drifting down, who looks like dead, drowning, something along those lines. There's a male diver. He says to this female diver, something in the realm of like, should we go do this? And she nods yes.

There was a face on the female diver that I do recognize currently. Just before I died, I had been on one of those dating apps and someone reached out to me. She and I had been messaging back and forth and she was really sweet and light and fun. And there was a spark of some sort. And it's her face that was on that diver. And there's a third person who's like this veteran who's like, don't go.

The person who's drowning is already gone. Let them go. It's too dangerous. And they do this like check-in dance again, this male and this female diver, and they end up jumping in. And they dive, and the person who is drowning is falling faster than they are diving in. And this well turns into more of like a big, vast ocean, and it darkens. It's black, and you can't see in it anything.

And they follow this person all the way down to like this point of stasis. And as they arrive there, the person who's drowning stops and the female diver loses consciousness. And the male diver looks and picks up both of them and shoots back up to the top. And as he's going up and it's much faster at a much, much faster pace than they had gone down, he loses consciousness as he gets up to the top.

And the diver wakes up from the coma, but it's me. I'm not this ethereal being anymore. Like I am diver. I don't have any consciousness of like another me or a separate me from the diver. Like I'm him. And the first questions I ask are, did we save the guy? And they say, no, he's dead. Okay. Where's my partner? She's dead.

And this guilt is flashing back to like the moment of checking in and feeling like I killed her. As I come to like fully understand this rescue diver's role in the world, they're not supposed to die. Like this is some in-between land between what we know and what people might call heaven.

So as he gets out of the hospital and starts wandering different grounds and different spaces, I start to see it's not just one well that's there. There are infinite wells. And there's always someone who is drowning in a well. And the best I can glean from it is that these were all of the dying people of our world. And there are rescue divers who go in to save them. These rescue divers don't die, but she did.

And so I am feeling viscerally like she is not supposed to be dead. This is my fault. This doesn't happen. And I am being given time to heal because of what's just happened and the impact of it and a recognition that this partner of mine who's died is not supposed to have died. And letting me be with the impact of that.

The experience I felt as the diver was that she was of incredible importance to me. And they had forever been in partnership as divers, maybe from the beginning of time. So the guilt was also laced in with just an incredible grief of this loss of this person that is so important to me. Just incredible heartbreak. And you can name all the reasons you want guilt, loss.

It's heartbreaking to lose people who matter to you for a diver person who has no basis to believe that that's even possible. There's this assumption, this is going to happen forever. This is us. We're these divers. We go do this. And the realization that no, this is over and you contributed to it.

No rationalization. There was no piece that mattered to diffuse or lessen the impact of this soul-crushing heartbreak. And as the diver, I literally wandered, just like being with the crushing nature of it and not knowing how to be any other way.

There is a point in there where I am walking in the outside. And when I'm outside, the third diver that had said, don't do it, don't save him, he's already too far gone, is there.

And when he walked up this time, there was something about the energetic connection that he shifted and he became softer and more compassionate and more understanding. It was like he felt the impact of what I was experiencing and knew there was nothing about what he was doing that was going to help in any direction. And so he checked himself. That's as far as that particular sequence goes.

The scene stops with his compassion. That was the resolution. It wasn't about what I did with it. It was about that, just letting in compassion. So in contrast with the bliss of the diver experience, there's another current that doesn't feel like that. And it takes place in a hospital setting. And who I am in that moment doesn't feel like the diver, probably more me.

There's like a counseling session of some sort that's going on that's advising me about parts of me that aren't right, that need to be removed. And there's this person who keeps coming in to like warn, don't do it. All parts of you matter.

And if I think back to the diver, that's the truth, right? All parts matter. All of the feelings matter. All the hard ones, the easy ones, it all is part of this aliveness. But the storyline that is emerging in this hospital sequence part of the coma is saying the exact opposite. And so it's almost like the warning voice is coming from the bliss sequence. And there's this conflict that is emerging between feeling it all, experiencing it all,

and removing parts. There's a critical moment where the warning voice comes to me as I'm like strapped in to some hospital bed or chair or something like that and there are lights that are flashing. There are voices that are saying things like, we're losing him. I think he's gone. And I'm not.

So the last sequence I remember from that, somehow the warning voice and the person breaks into where that hospital setting is and unstraps me. And we run through the hospital hallways and we hide and we're terrified. And then I remember just the cacophony of the sounds of people busting in. And that's it. There's no more of that sequence. I had chosen to escape from the offer to remove.

into the sense of totality, of like feeling all of it. For me, the totality is about this notion of surrender and invitation, right? Invite in, be with, and let go. Surrendering to the moment that is, being present with the moment that is,

Even with all the grief and the sense of loss, if I pull back far enough as to what I was experiencing as this diver, it still felt like bliss. Even in all the grief, it was like, this is aliveness. This is what aliveness is. It's feeling, experiencing. And yeah, that means taking in these hard to process feelings and

It is mentally hard to process experiences of having gotten the person killed by not checking in. The point for me as diver was that I experienced all of that. All of that aliveness was just richly flowing through this body and this experience of self-loss.

of grief, of remembrance, of recollection, of love, of importance. I am here in this moment experiencing the totality of everything relative to this moment in time. So what I'm describing for you right now is hard-earned memory flashes that have come back over time.

often in large chunks as flashes in a moment. And the images that I experience, even now if I shut my eyes and feel into the diver time frame, it feels stark and vivid and colorful and present and here. As opposed to how I internally feel like I usually experience dream, you may be able to hear it in my voice sometimes,

I can feel the emotions of the diver. I can feel the loss, the grief, as if they are mine. And there's this sense of mine, not mine, that I constantly live with, whether we're talking about me as diver or me as me. There's like a derealization of selves that I am continuously experiencing and learning how to be with.

So I realize and derealize diver all the time. So when we drop into the story, the realization of me being the diver somatically, energetically, emotionally, like all of those things intertwined is real. For me, both there and here are real. I just can't be with them simultaneously without it feeling like I'm busting at the seams a bit.

And so part of the emotion is just trying to contain both in this one body. I have had a lot of people say to me that you fought your way back, including my family. But there is no indication during the coma that I fought my way back to be here. I surrendered into what was happening in the coma and then all of a sudden was here again.

There is nothing that is reflective of anything I have ever heard about near-death experiences, which is why to me this is not that. These stories feel more like I surrendered into something else and now I'm back. When I woke up from the coma, I was definitely not with it as me. I've been told that I woke up saying something about, I got her killed or I killed this person.

I woke up asking if I had saved the guy. That continued for, I think, like the first 24 hours, kind of drifting in and out of that. And then that night, my god-nephew had flown in. He was there with me that first night, and I was drifting into weird dream states. I'm still in critical condition. That lasts for a couple more days before they put me in the cardiac floor or something along those lines.

I remember actually having a fair amount of fun and play while I was in the hospital. I also remember a really caring and thoughtful medical team. I literally owe them my life. That first month of being alive in this life after life was joy. I mean, just tremendous joy.

There were challenging parts, like wearing an external defibrillator as a just-in-case to make sure that it snaps you back if it reads that your heart rate is too low. And I couldn't get sleep. I was in terrible pain. I was wearing this thing that I had to explain to everyone who met me. And also, I felt joyous about life. I felt like this state of bliss, like I am here. And I was surrounded by people who love me.

My god-nephew was staying with me. That was a joy. And this person that I had been writing with before the cardiac arrest, whose face had shown up on the diver in the coma, she and I kept texting. I went on this first date a week after being in the hospital, and she was so lovely. She was so caring. She was so engaging. I felt a sense of normalization, of like, I'm going on a date after all of this.

We went to a place called The Well, ironically, as it might be, considering the coma dream experience. I was doing a lot of walking slowly with a lot of breathing challenges still from like the intubation tube that had been in there. And she was so sweet about all of that. We end up underneath this like magical tree and it's dusk and there are owl sounds.

And we're looking at each other and there's just this magical moment where I realized like, oh, we're going to kiss. How amazing is that? I am alive and I am going to kiss another human right now. What bliss to be able to feel this other human in this beautiful way. So yeah, we continued to walk down a path of dating. And in September, that was beautiful because I was in a state of bliss.

In October, it was hard because I was in a state of dread. In November, it was harder. In December, it was really hard. The bliss state eventually turned into dread. If I was to try to pinpoint it to a moment, and I certainly don't want to pin this on my doc because he was being realistic.

But he asked me, do you understand the distinction between a heart attack and a cardiac arrest? I said, well, I think from what I've read, a heart attack is like a plumbing issue. Like there's like a clog in an artery. He said, yeah, that's right. But having a heart attack is not the same as cardiac arrest, because you know what that is. And there was this long pause. And then he said, it means you died. The weight of that...

In the context of like, I'm blissful and I'm going to go back to work and I'm dating this person. The weight of that, it just kind of took the hot air out of my rising balloon. And it started me into a spin of like, how do I not have that again? The flip side of like, I'm alive is like, oh, I could go at any minute. Part of the anomaly is not just that I'm alive. Part of the anomaly is that I died in the first place.

I began a journey of like, what do I need to know? Why did I die and why did I live? I was feeling extreme fatigue in the few months prior to cardiac arrest, death. And I was getting it checked out. I was being vigilant about it. And I went to the doctors. I mentioned past family histories of heart issues to get...

Stress tests and EKGs and nothing popped up. It was basically a sense of, we don't know why you're feeling this fatigue. A paranoia started developing and it continued as I started into cardiac rehab.

I came back into an uncertain world where it wasn't clear as to what my path was. It was clear as to what the prescribed path is, not what the path would be to protect and save me. And the weight of that affected all of my relationships during that time. It affected the romantic one. It affected my family relationships because I was becoming like vigilant, like

Somewhere in December, I started to see that what I really needed from there was to ease off that gas pedal a bit and start dropping into community a bit. So I started to reemerge and find some balance. But Woven In is still the dread, and it stayed Woven In until probably October of this year.

One thing about this death experience is that it seemed to sever the notion of this continuity of self. Such that if I look back at memories pre-August 20th, they felt like they were someone else's. Kind of made me feel like a drop-in or a walk-in at times.

The ways of being in the world that felt like they were in the memory of this body didn't resonate. They just felt like an automatic computer programming.

And that hit every angle and corner that you could imagine, including in romance and sex. It was like I had to relearn how to be with everything from scratch so that it would be authentic to me. And anytime I tried to duplicate the way that the other me would have done it, it just failed.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. The first time I really started noticing a stark difference between this me and the prior version was in late December of 2022.

It coincided with the ending of the romantic arc with this person that I had been exploring tenderness and romance with. I really had no experiential or emotional sense of the me from before August 20th. It was as if it had been removed, and what remained was book memory.

Like as if you're reading someone else's story or watching someone else's story and the duality of knowing that that is the same face, but it sure don't feel like me. And when the images would come back, they would come back like very cobwebbed, like almost not reachable. What wasn't coming to me was that me-ness, that emotion, that experience of those things that makes you you.

It's not reading someone else's story that makes you you. That's their story. It's not unless you can remember experiencing it like viscerally, emotionally, somatically, that it's yours. So late December, these flashes are coming and I'm feeling this sense of like me, not me. And they're getting stronger throughout the course of the day. And then I meet up with this romantic love. We end our thing. She leaves my place.

Within minutes, the flashes get really strong. So strong that I am overwhelmed by all of these images that are coming and the feelings that are coming with all of this. And I start bawling, like wailing. And I'm having like a negotiated conversation with myself. I'm noticing for the first time this like voice coming from like my underbelly,

And the messages start coming up in this realm of what is it all for? I plead with myself that I will tend to all of this if I can just go to sleep. And the next thing I know, I'm waking up the next day. And the question pops back in my head. What is it all for? And it's so gentle this time. And then these images start, but they're much more focused. And it's like every sequence from our entire lives at that point.

And this goes on for some extended amount of time in and out of dream and wake. And then it just stopped. And the word that came up from this underbelly was, enough. And then another one happened. Enough. And then another one and it would stop. Enough. And another one and it would stop. Enough. And this went on for hours. Have the moment. Experience another human being. Experience a tree.

Experience this aliveness, any and every emotion. They're all available to you. And after any one of them, enough. As if any one of them contained the entirety of the whole. You can be in any moment with any person. Good, bad, hard, easy. That is aliveness.

And you get to experience so many of them. That was the message that happened in the end of December. And it started an arc, bliss. And it opened up this notion of bigger than me. An acceptance of something that I am inside of rather than something inside of me.

And honoring all of that in that moment felt really easy and started this bliss arc and questions of like, oh, I inherited these clothes that are in this closet. Do these bring me joy? And so from one perspective, the answer was yes. I have such gratitude that these clothes are here. And also, no, there's nothing about these particular clothes that actually bring this version of myself joy.

And having my sibling and their roommate take me to a store where we could go get different clothing and just like shop and have some fun. And I've been kind of taking that approach with everything. Like, oh, all these things I inherited from first version of me. I also am not obligated to continue with them. And that was the freedom of not having the binding of the emotional and experiential memory from first version of myself. First of all, no trauma.

No trauma from pre-August 20th. None that I could discern anyway. So if someone invites me to a singing circle and maybe I had trauma around singing at some age, not experiencing it now. Now it's just the joy of singing. I get to have a new relationship that's trauma-free with singing and with everything and anything else.

So I love it all, everything that is inside me. And also, I can recognize when certain life patterns are repeating themselves in ways that they need to be loved so that they can release. In Rumi's guest house, like you let it all in and then you let it out and you have to witness it and be with it and really invite it into the house as an honored guest.

So if you've got a pattern and it's one that you're not sure is working so well, what does it mean to invite it in as a guest? It's different than extracting it. It's here. It's been actively operating for probably most of your life, possibly even to have originally protected you in a way that was really vital and necessary. The question is whether it still should be here.

That pattern, being where it is, is going to cause you to repeat the exact same experience with just different faces, different names. That's why I think you release it, is to have a new experience of the world. Somewhere, I believe in like August of 2023, so almost a year after this death event,

More information started coming out from my family about the impact that this had all had on them. They'd kind of been protecting me from it. And one of those is my sibling who, they're much younger than me. I had been the protector in some ways, like a father replacement.

So seeing me that vulnerable and not able to show up for them well as protector, as older brother or anything along those lines as they had known me, it was really hard on them. It was a radical shift. There was a moment we'd gone for a walk and we're sitting in the car and I said something that must have landed as like pokey at my former self because my sibling just like snapped. I loved my older brother.

And something just kind of clicked a bit that they lost someone. And the realization that like, I may not be able to experience self in the same way and might have challenges in it became much more profound at that point. They lost someone who they loved deeply. And a lot of the things that people like celebrate about them are things they learned with the former version of me.

At times I look at my sibling and I think, oh, they're more like that version of me than I am. And then there were other things that just needed to be restored. So we had a grief ritual a year after. And one of the things that my sibling called in was for me to lay down

for them to massage the back of my neck because I learned for the first time that they were still having flashbacks and that they wanted to just give me a massage and for me to look up and say, "Thanks for the massage, Sid." As opposed to what did happen, which was that there was no life in my body. And I think about the impact that that sequence had on them for a year. And I think about the impact of their version of me here but not here.

At no point in time have I thought that they would be better off without me. Rather, the uncertainty of whether it would happen again. The note that I might have that impact a second time. That weight sticks with me. I, by not my own choice, caused harm to this loved one. And there's nothing I can really do about that. The trauma that they experienced is with them. The heartache that they experienced is with them.

No one really knew what we were in for in this waking up sequence. And there's beauty in it and there's hardness in it and we're all experiencing all of the totality of that. Before August 20th, there was like a guard wall that I might let it down here and there by a control mechanism for certain people or something.

my sibling, my mom, and then some really long-term friendships. My walls were down. I let them in. Deeply. New people were a lot harder. I think I went to leave energy a lot more and just stayed in the playful spaces. I have big feelings, but not necessarily love.

Part of unconditionally loving in my system is you, important human. The world is trusting you with this other important human who has just walked into togetherness with you. This puppy, this tree, this earth of importance is now in the same sphere as you. Treat it with care. Find out how it needs to be treated. Treat it with love.

I, world, am trusting you to show up. But I don't think that you can head your way through human interactions. And I don't think you can just heart your way through human interactions either. Learned that the hard way. So when I got into the space of hearting my way through human interactions, I walked in not just unconditionally, but unboundaried, completely exposed.

And there's an interaction with someone that I care about where she's like moving her finger slowly into my face. She realizes like I'm not going to stop it. And it goes all the way to my face. And she says, what are you doing? It's unnatural to not block that or move out of the way. And I said to her, why would I do that? You're someone who loves me. You wouldn't harm me. There's no threat here.

And I realize that may be true with a finger, but if you're approaching life that way, you are putting yourself at tremendous peril. Because people walk around with lots of levels of intention. That human may not have walked around with like malicious, malevolent heart intentions towards me. But messy? Possibly even reckless? Sure, that's part of the human experience. And if you are not boundaried and not paying attention, you are going to get...

So not just heart. Like there's a reason our head develops discernment. And without that head-heart combo helping with open-heartedness and discernment, walking into a lot of pain, I walked into a lot of pain. And it walked me into some patterns from childhood where I had walked in that same way, open-hearted, with a parent, father specifically, and had to relearn lessons.

From a distance, I can have a lot of compassion for who he is and how he's walked this earth and his story. I feel a lot differently when he's near. And learning those lessons about boundaries at five, at six, at eight, at 13, with someone who does stray at times into maliciousness, makes sense why the heart would darken. And it also makes sense why it might just scar.

So do we all need to develop some calluses to be able to deal with like some of the messiness of this human experience? Yes. And do we all need to develop discernment? I think so. But you don't need to darken your whole heart, right? Do we need to like boundary our whole selves and not let in love? No, no, that's such an extreme. And so the people who have come into connection with me in the last year and a half,

These humans have come into my sphere and I have come into theirs. We are important. And the world is trusting us to show up with care with each other. And I want to be able to experience unconditional love with that framing. And I think I have one contingency, which is that we all get much better at figuring out what it means to repair with each other.

That is my deduction from all of this is like, yes, I feel the world's trust in bringing us together. And if you do something to me or if I do something to you, and we will, we figure out what it looks like to own that and we repair because we're important. And we have been entrusted with this opportunity to drop in unconditionally with each other. And we can't do that if we're not owning our harms unconditionally.

So we're faced with this reality of either repairing or having conditional love. And the more you start conditioning it, the more that hardening and wall is going to go up. It's fine to callous each other a bit. It's fine. It's great. We need it because we're messy.

But as the harms are bigger, as they come in more significant moments, you gotta show up and show the person that you know they're important to this world. You gotta prioritize repair. You gotta do the work. That's how I can dedicate myself, is to admitting I don't know everything. I maybe don't know much of anything.

And surrendering to the aliveness of this moment means acknowledging that the importance of each other has been impacted. So let's repair. Let's be in awe of the possibility that we can repair, that we can do better and differently today. Whether you wake up from a night's sleep or a four-day coma, same opportunity. And I really, really hope that we all find a way to just be in awe of each other.

Because everyone has the capacity for deep beauty and love.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits. And Aviva Lipkowitz. With special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, you can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com slash happen.

Thank you for listening.

Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.

To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery+.