308: What if they couldn’t wake me up?
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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. Hi listeners. This episode today is one I never envisioned I'd be sharing. But as you may know, I had a medical emergency about a month ago that forced us to take a couple weeks off so I could regroup and recover.

So today, as we return, I decided to share my own story here of what happened. Thank you all so much for your patience as we took time off, and for the outpouring of love and support and messages you all sent over the last few weeks. It's been such a gift, not only to be alive, but to come back to this beautiful community and this work that means the world to me. So here it is, my story for today's episode, number 308, What If They Couldn't Wake Me Up?

When I look back at that initial time, that first waking up, that first really precious hour or two hours, I just keep thinking that feeling is what we're all looking for. And I got to experience that feeling. And now I get to be here. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 308. What if they couldn't wake me up?

Today's episode is brought to you by Audible. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or expert advice, you can be inspired to new ways of thinking. And there's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. Currently, I'm listening to Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, a wonderful audio title that challenges us to imagine a new way to lead a

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It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. It was a Thursday night, February 1st, just a few weeks ago. And I was just back from a month-long trip into Asia for two days.

I'd been traveling for all of January to Bali and to Sri Lanka, and it was just an incredible trip.

My wife and I spent two weeks in Bali, and I was able to balance work and keeping the show going with my time out there. While exploring Bali, riding scooters through the villages, visiting the beaches, the holy sites, the temples, it's just a phenomenal place. And actually I was there when we released the story about the Bali poisoning, which was also a really meaningful experience to be able to do that story while I was there.

My wife and I went on to Sri Lanka. She's Sri Lankan and I hadn't been back for five years and it was just beautiful to be there. Between Bali and Sri Lanka, somewhere in the transition, I picked up this cough that just wouldn't go away. These coughs that we've all been dealing with where they just seem to go on forever. And it started to really deplete me on the trip. It was an incredible time but it was also a time where I felt like I was running on fumes.

By the time the end of the trip came in late January, I was really, really looking forward to being home. And I just wanted to ground. I wanted to be back here in the Bay Area. I wanted to see friends. I wanted to root and get back into my routine and not actually travel at all for the next six or nine months.

So I arrive home. Sri Lanka's time difference is 13 and a half hours, so it's exactly the opposite side of the world. Your circadian rhythms are exactly the opposite of the time zone there. And so the jet lag is just wild. It's one of the things I knew was going to happen when I came back, that I'd have to reserve a few days of just putting myself back together, especially having been gone for over a month.

But I was doing okay. You know, you had those days where you would sleep in the afternoon for no reason. And just that feeling sometimes of being like in the twilight zone, where you're not quite sure what country you're in, what time you're in, what day it is. And you sort of lose that sensibility. It's part of that jet lag state of just not really being in one place and kind of feeling out of your skin and kind of not sure who you are when you return from an experience like the experience I had in Asia.

So that Thursday night, February 1st, this was two days after I got back, I decided to meet up with a loved one. We'd missed each other when I was gone, and I was excited to reconnect with her. So we decided to meet on Thursday with all the conditions of, I may be tired, but we have to have just a mellow night. She came over, we had dinner, and we started just relaxing into the evening.

And I was so happy to be back. I was so happy to be back in my place. I was so happy to be back in the Bay. I was happy to reconnect with her. Begin the process of reconnecting with my community here. And all of a sudden I just felt like the world went a little bit sideways.

In the past years ago, I dealt with panic attacks and derealization disorder. And it had a bit of that flavor. Like, the world is just inside out. It's a little scary, but I just was like, this is jet lag. I'd been in this twilight zone space, and I just sort of let it go.

As part of that evening as well, just before this, I'd taken a very low dose of a drug that just helps me relax and go to sleep. And I'd also been taking a couple supplements recently. None of them had any contraindications with each other. And all of them I was taking in doses far lower than I normally would. And all of a sudden, I felt this sensation sort of crawling up the back of my neck on the right side. It was just crawling up the back of my neck and into my skull a little bit.

Now I felt like I was tripping on acid a bit, or something was really, really changing. I could feel the words coming within me just saying, something's wrong, something's wrong, and they just wouldn't come out. And then, nothing. Total blackout. The world went completely black. When I woke up, it was like being born.

Light and images and people and sound started coming in. But there was no frame of reference for anything. And I felt like I had slept for years. There was no memory of the past. There was no sense of what was going on right at the moment. There was no sense of who I was or where I was or what time it was or anything. You just have this slow experience of sensation that has no meaning to it.

And then things started kind of coming in, like little by little, like one thing at a time would come in. Then I started to understand what people were saying to me. So the first thing I remember understanding is Naomi, my wife, just smiling and saying, "You're in a hospital. We love you. You had a seizure." And I was just like, "A seizure?" And all of a sudden I knew what a seizure meant.

meaning making was kind of coming back online again. Then I realized there were these other people around me and they were all just people I loved beaming at me because they were all so happy that I had just woken up. So the first experience I had, this sort of experience of being born, I can imagine a newborn comes in and everyone's beaming with radiance and everyone looks so beautiful. It was like pristine. The next thing I remember, the doctor said, what year is it?

And I said, 2022. And they were so happy. They were like, that's pretty good. They were like, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Even though, obviously, it's 2024. But the fact that I could get even close to it, I think, was a sign that my brain was coming back online.

And then Naomi looked at me and said, "What's my name?" referring to herself. And I just said Whitney back to her. I said my own name as though it was hers. And again everyone kind of laughed and said that's pretty good.

Once that happened and I kind of knew I was getting things wrong, it was this strange feeling of like being born, but instead of coming in as a blank slate and learning the world for the first time, it's like you already have a thing that you're supposed to be and you can't recover it. And everyone knows what that is except for you. So that was the first experience of kind of like this uncanny feeling. Like I'm supposed to be something here and I'm the only one in the room that doesn't know who I am.

And it was just fucking weird. However, emanating from me, an internal light of love and just happiness was just like exploding from inside me. Any strange thoughts or feelings or uncanny sensations that I had coming in were just completely washed out by this sense of just total pure love. It was like I was giving messages to people. Like I had something to say and I just kept being like, "Everything is love, like death doesn't matter."

This feeling was coming up of the first moments of a disconnect between my experience of the world and everyone else's experience of the world. And while I was like beaming with pure love, it was the first glimpse that they had been through some sort of traumatic experience while I was out, having no idea how long I was gone or what happened in the interim. And it was actually the first time one of the episodes from the show came in.

Amanda, who was lost in the woods in Hawaii for 17 days, when she came out, she had an experience of transcendent enlightenment, and it didn't match with everyone else's experience of the effort it took to find her and the trauma they went through.

while she was experiencing love and light, she wasn't mirroring their experience for them of what they'd been through. And it created a lot of controversy around her and it created a lot of heartbreak for her, heartbreak for other people. And it took a long time for her to make sense of that.

It was the first time I kind of realized there's a disconnect here between my experience and what other people are experiencing. And I have to sort of like watch how much love I express and how much light I express. But internally, I had this sense that this experience, this feeling of love, the ego is completely wiped out. All sense of distinction between self and other is wiped out.

I was like, this is what we're all looking for. This is what we're all seeking. So all these people are now looking at me. There were five people in the room and then a doctor and some nurses were coming in and out. I could hear the monitors. I had IVs in both of my arms. I was intubated through my nose. It wasn't a full intubation. It wasn't breathing for me, but it was keeping my airways open.

So all of a sudden I could start to feel the materiality of what was happening to me and that I was kind of hooked up and being monitored. And I started to sort of ask some questions. I said like, "How long was I gone? What happened?" And they said, "You were gone for five hours." That was kind of the first time I realized there was this huge blank period of time completely missing. What started to unfold is this feeling of being completely confused by everything that was happening.

And suddenly I started to realize, like, I've been here before. And the way I've been there before is through the stories on this show. I've been there with people telling me about the initial experiences of waking up in a hospital and not knowing who you are.

I've been with people who have had these massive TBIs. I've been with people who have had near-death experiences and I've held them through these journeys. And now in this journey I was having, it was like they were all there with me. It was like this golden roadmap to this experience. And I sort of knew in a sense like what was going to happen next. I could kind of foresee elements of the experience that were to come.

When this kind of roadmap started to unfold in front of me, there was a little bit of a feeling of grief that almost came with it because I was aware that this pure ecstatic love, like the thing that we all want, the place that we all want to be, I knew that that was going to start fading.

One of the early episodes I had done where that was apparent was a guy who was hiking in Yosemite and he was crossing a river and got swept by the current and he was hanging onto a rock off of a waterfall. He thought he was gonna die and miraculously he was able to climb his way out. And I remember him talking about this experience of just like this incredible sense of ecstasy of being alive and being fully alive in your body.

And because I was younger and more naive, I just thought that's with him now forever. And of course then he talked about over the weeks and months how that fades and how it actually becomes quite difficult and sometimes having that experience can actually be harder for you.

There was this sense that, "Oh, this isn't going to be permanent." So there was a bit of grief, but overwhelmingly, the grief was minuscule in comparison to the sense of just being held through this process of uncertainty. And while it was completely unfamiliar, there was like a sense that deep inside, I knew this place. I just had the sense that I'd been here before.

I was looking at these people, all of whom had taken care of me, all of whom I loved and were very close loved ones of mine. But I was like, "Someone's missing from here." And that someone was the person who was in the episode I had just released, episode 306. The guy who had a cardiac arrest at 47, was in a coma and went on an entire journey inhabiting someone else's life experience. And all of a sudden I called out his name.

And I was like, he's not here. I want to talk to him. And again, it was as though my body and my mind and my psyche were like bringing in these experiences because I knew I needed to be held by something else that wasn't in the room. His experience was so present for me because we had just released it literally two days before this happened. And so it was the sense that he was both missing from the room and entirely present in that experience with me.

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To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash adfreepodcasts. That's amazon.com slash adfreepodcasts 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. As I became more and more lucid...

One of the things people said to me is that we've called your parents and your parents are coming. They live in Pennsylvania, 3,000 miles away. And I was like, my parents are coming. Then they said, we called your brother and your brother's coming. My brother lives in France. I was just like, my brother's coming.

As soon as they said, my brother's coming, it was like, this is serious. Like this was not just something they're even notifying him about, but that he's like on a plane. And again, it was another wave of just the depth of what other people were experiencing and I wasn't.

So then I started coming to more and more and I was getting a sense of normalcy. It's late, everyone needs to go home and get sleep. They knew I was now in a place where I was stabilized, my vitals looked good. And I said my goodbyes, one by one, to the loved ones that were around me. And they left.

Then I'm being wheeled to this room and I'm just alone. The doctor leaves, the nurse leaves, they said push the button if you need anything, and now it's time to get some sleep. Pretty much as soon as they left, I sort of lay back thinking that I might rest and then my brain is just on fire.

All of a sudden, every piece of knowledge that I ever had, every piece of wisdom, everything I experienced was just like flooding forward. And everything in the world made sense. Epiphany after epiphany, everything was saturated with meaning.

A lot of these things were like, all these little challenging relationships you have or questions you have about what you're doing with your life, frustrations you might have, things you think you're stuck with, things you want to change about yourself but you never really can, judgments you have about the world that you wish you didn't have but you do. All of that was collapsing.

And I just felt like that judgment makes no sense. This challenge that I have with someone, I was like, that's not a challenge. I love them. I don't need to be in any conflict with this person. Any questions I had about what I'm doing in my life with even the direction of my work, all that started to just make sense. I know exactly what I need to do. This is what I'm supposed to be doing in the world. Every single thing I was doing is exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

I was full of just like infinite forgiveness for myself and for other people. And again, it was kind of that light that was pouring through, but it was as though the light that had been pouring through my heart in the initial phase was now in my mind, in my psyche, and in sort of my soul. It just felt like my brain was now full of the same energy. But at that moment, I realized nothing has been added here.

It's not like a light that's been added to me. It's like all the blocks that I had to revealing that light have been removed.

The original experience was almost like I was on a drug, like I had taken something and like it was influencing and adding something to my brain. But this experience now was like nothing's being added. This sensibility is available all the time, like this is inside of me. It's just that I have blocks around it. I have different armor that I've worn. I've had different wounds that block this light from coming through. This is available all the time.

There's this love within me that's always there waiting to emerge if I can just take the armor off. And in that moment, the armor was just off. It was just gone. Trying to describe exactly what that armor is is tough. But I got the sense that the armor comes from the shields that I needed to put up in my life, throughout my life, to survive, really.

A shield that covers over early wounding. There's a shield of intellect that helped me step into adulthood. There are shields of protection that protect me from perceived harms. There are shields that protect me from myself. Parts of myself that over the last even just few years I've gotten to know that...

weren't accessible because for some reason we shut ourselves off to parts of our own experience to protect who we are and protect a version of ourselves that we want to maintain. And all of those different shields were gone. And it was just this like raw experience of me. So this state of the brain on fire lasted for probably three or four hours. And it started to become really annoying.

And even though I was in this place of just epiphany and what felt like total enlightenment in a lot of ways, it just, it was like my system couldn't handle that. Like I almost got the sense that our system isn't built to be at that level.

I was reminded of the episode "What if you spent 15 hours on the edge of sanity?" and very different experience for him. But in that moment his episode came in and I thought about his experience. He was stuck on a mountain and his friend had fallen and

He didn't know if his friend was dead or not. And so he had to spend an entire night on this mountain just in pure uncertainty. And the way he describes it is just this adrenaline was just so flooded in his system. And after hours and hours of being with that, it was just exhausting and painful. And I just remembered him describing how painful it was to be in that heightened state. And it started to feel like that for me. It started to feel like I was in this heightened state and it was

beautiful and it was opening and it was amazing, but it started to feel painful for my mind to be at that level. Fortunately, it started to wane a little bit and I started to get these little headaches. Like in the back of my head, I could just feel this like stiffness. And I was like, oh, thank you. Thank you for just relaxing and just like, I don't want to be an epiphany anymore. I just want to be here and I just want to fall asleep.

I was just laying there and I was like, finally, I think I might be able to go to sleep. And I could tell that it was actually getting towards dawn at this point. I think it's time for me to drift off. So I laid back and I started feeling like I was drifting off. And as soon as I hit the point where you're transitioning from wakefulness into sleep, I just like jolted up.

It was total fear. All of a sudden, it was the first time in this experience that fear entered the picture. If I fall asleep, I'm gonna die. I didn't still really know what had happened when I was gone. I didn't know why I came back. I can't fall asleep here because I could have another seizure, I could be brain dead.

You know that transition time when you're just transitioning into sleep and you start to have weird visions or you might half dream? Anytime that stuff would come in, I was like, "I'm losing my mind now." This is where the effects from whatever happened when I was out start to manifest. Maybe everyone's excited that I came back, but maybe I'm not stable and maybe there's some encephalopathy or there's something in my brain they didn't catch in the scans.

Anytime there was something wonky in my mind, I was like, "This is where I become psychotic or brain dead or I die." I was reminded of Nightmare on Elm Street. I've always been a huge horror film fan. It was one of my early favorites when I was young. I watched all the Nightmare on Elm Streets. And Nightmare on Elm Street is just not that scary in itself, but that movie captures the scariest thing, which is like, you can't go to sleep or you're gonna get killed.

That's how I was feeling. I'm gonna go to sleep and Freddie's gonna get me. I never went to sleep again that night. So now, I'm not in the love state. I'm not in the epiphany state. I'm in a fear state. And these little headaches that were coming in the back of my mind also all started to become signals that everything could shut down. Every single signal in my body became the potential for everything to fall apart.

I know this feeling a bit because years ago I had a series of panic attacks that were also mixed with a derealization disorder. And this used to happen back then where like every little signal became a source of fear. I started to think what if this is something inherent in my brain? What if this is just inside of me? What if it's not even like a diagnosable condition?

What if this is just like an electrical short circuit and I'm gonna have to live the rest of my life on the edge of this sensibility that at any moment I could go into a coma, I could die, I could be brain dead. And this has always been my greatest fear. The thing that might be inside you that you can never really see or never know is coming. Someone asked me once what are the scariest episodes of the show for me.

It's not the bear attacks or the car crashes or the dysfunctional families. It's the episodes where people lose their mind. The episodes where people go into psychosis and they're in a completely different world they can't control. And they see demons or the one where the guy thought his mother was a robot. The one where the woman has a psychotic episode at the LA airport and walks onto the airstrip.

The one where the woman experiences postpartum psychosis and at one point believes her child is a demon. To me, it's the most frightening experience possible. To become a person you have no control over that's causing destruction to yourself and to everyone around you.

And some people have beautiful experiences inside that psychosis, but it's uncontained. And I couldn't help thinking in that hospital, what if I'm headed there? What if I am in it right now? What if this sense of shining is actually just the beginning of me entering a world that I have no control over?

At this point I started ruminating and I move from this sense of like this fear of my own body to the anxiety starts going into like, why did this happen? What happened? Why did I wake up? Why did I go out in the first place? I just started saying why. And then it turns into this larger sense of why and larger sense of why. Like, why did this happen to me? Why am I here? Who am I? And just these huge existential questions come in.

And again, episodes from the show came in. This is a recurring theme in the show and I immediately was reminded, I was like, this is the question why. It often happens when I'm in the middle of an interview and someone starts getting to this point, it's familiar. And I'm like, oh, here's the part where we talk about why.

They ruminate and cycle on why, why, why, why. And some people sit with that for years, especially when they've been betrayed or when something just unexplainable happens. That question why can be some of the deepest and most difficult parts of the trauma. And so that question why was flooding in and I was like, I get this. I was like, this is going to be the hardest part if I stay with it. I cannot dwell on this question forever.

It was a gift, essentially, from the storytellers. I could almost hear their voices say, stop asking why. The whys get you absolutely nowhere. So I just started to relax and I just started thinking, I don't need to take up what little energy I really have left right now with this question.

Now I'm not asking the question why anymore, and I'm allowing myself just to surrender into it. I'm allowing myself just to be with these emotions. I have to learn to just sort of be here with myself. But what started to come in then was this sense of extraordinary aloneness.

I hadn't really thought about being alone. Like, I was wheeled into the other room, but I had this beaming sense of everyone around me. I knew my family was in the air, on their way to see me. I knew there were nurses and doctors a button away. But all of a sudden, I was like, I'm different now. No one else is going through this. I feel completely alone. At that point, one of the stories from the show came in from the fall, which was the guy in Hawaii who had been attacked by the shark.

He gets attacked by the shark and he's bleeding and now he's like swimming in the water. And at some point in his episode, one of the most profound moments, he just says, it's like the ocean stopped speaking. And he'd always had this relationship with the ocean and he would talk to himself and talk to the ocean. He felt like the ocean was something that was really alive for him. And at that moment, he just said like, it's like the ocean stopped speaking.

That was the experience I was having. It was like the world stopped speaking and I was just in this now alone. I'm not sure how long I was in that state, but this feeling floods in of like everyone feels alone in this. He felt alone in that water. So many people who I've heard narrate these experiences, aloneness is something they feel.

If everyone experiences this sense of being alone, I'm not alone in this experience of aloneness. This experience of feeling alone is what actually connects all of us. Our confusion, our bewilderment, the things that we think isolate us from each other are actually universal human experiences. And they're actually experiences that connect us and are points of connection. I was held again.

I was held again by other people having to go through this profound sensibility. After I was again waffling between these experiences of ecstasy and then fear and then aloneness, one thing that I became aware of is that every state that I was in was going to change.

I was in euphoria. Then I was in brain on fire. Then I was in fear. Then I was in aloneness. Then I was in connection. So there was something about this sense of this chaotic time period where each person

moment of realization or each time I would sink into one feeling or another, I was super aware that that was now going to shift and that things were going to probably keep changing and that I can't really hold on to any particular state or view or way of thinking.

It brings me back to one of the most personally impactful stories for me. It's an episode with Frank Ostasecki. He was the founder of Zen Hospice in San Francisco. And he's someone who's sat with dying people, like over a thousand people. He's witnessed them transition. That episode was so profound for me and it influences so much about the show actually. And honestly, just how I live my life.

Frank talks about how the dying process just strips away every single thing. He has this beautiful way of putting it where he says, the only two things that really matter to people at the end of life, the only two questions that they ask themselves after everything is stripped away is, am I loved and did I love well?

That sensibility was coming in and those words of wisdom from him were coming in because the nurse had come in and she was like, your vitals look good. The doctor had come in and sort of debriefed me on some things. And they were like, you can be discharged in a few hours. The world was coming back in. And somehow that sensibility of like, am I loved? And have I loved well?

This is what I want to carry forward with me as I now start encountering people, as I start being in the world. And I became really aware that other people were having an experience of this that was completely different from me.

Another doctor came in, I think it was the neurologist. You kind of don't know who these people are, but they're just asking you a bunch of questions. The one thing that did come back on the scans was they scanned my lungs because I was in respiratory depression and they noticed this like gray area in my lungs. They identified that as an infection in my lungs and

And the doctor informed me, you know, that I'd been non-responsive for five hours, that they really start to worry around six hours. And it was a little over five hours and everyone was starting to get more and more concerned as that six hour mark approached, because I guess six hours is sort of a general average sort of time at which brain damage can really start to set in.

But he said one thing that did happen is that I started to aspirate, which is when your lungs start to fill with fluid. And he was like, that's when it became life-threatening. And he kind of got serious and he wanted me to know. He was like, this was life-threatening. You were on the edge. And we didn't know.

And so I held that with a lot of humility, I think, because I knew now that certain people were living for hours with the idea that I was on the edge. They knew that information. And so I just knew I needed to have like a lot of humility and a lot of patience, openness to what was going to become when I sort of reentered the world.

The doctor was kind of testing some of my cognitive function and things were just coming out well. Every time I'd answer a question, he'd just kind of be like, huh? And you could see him trying to put the puzzle together in his mind and it just wasn't coming together. Which was both comforting in the sense that I was out of the woods on like, I didn't have a stroke, I didn't have cardiac arrest, I didn't have a heart attack, I didn't have brain bleeding, I didn't have encephalopathy. There was just kinds of a perplexity.

After a few more questions and mulling it over, the doctor finally just zeroed in on the medication aspect. Adverse drug interactions. And you could see this kind of wave of certainty come over all of a sudden. Even though I'd taken very low doses, half or less of drugs that I've taken many times before, I think he thought I was lying. I got the sense that he needed an answer and he found it. Like he needed to arrive at something that made sense so he could move on with his day and close the book on my stay there. And it was so unsatisfying.

I since talked to a friend of mine who works in the ER and it didn't make sense to him either. He said, "You know, I've seen hundreds of people come in non-responsive to the ER." And he's like, "Most of them, you know exactly what's going on. You know exactly why they're there and why they're out. But there's 5 to 10% of them you just have no idea. There's just a mystery to consciousness." So I saw the doctor go from confusion to certainty. And I was like, "This is his story, but it's not mine."

Before they discharge me, they do this little test which is like just having me walk around. My walking is a little wobbly and weird, but she's like, "Wow, you're doing great." We were walking in this hall and you're walking past these other rooms and you see these other people out. And she was like, "You're the healthiest one in here." It was just like, "Oh my god, like I could be any one of these people here." And I'm so lucky. What did I do to deserve this? Why am I the one walking here?

How am I this person and not that person who I could see completely out? And it just... an incredibly humbling moment. Oh my god. Why did I make it? Why did I survive? Followed by, like, wit? Just be grateful. Just surrender. Just be here. My wife came in. She picked me up. She drove me home. Everything was a lot of effort from my brain.

I am using all my resources to walk down the hall, to get into the car, to take in the environment, to walk back into my apartment where this all had happened. Then I laid down in a blanket and then I started really wanting to know what all happened when I was out.

So, after I had blacked out, the EMTs came, I was on my bed, and they were trying to revive me and they were shaking me and apparently I was snoring super loud. Like it was as though I was in a super deep sleep, I didn't have convulsions or like any of those kinds of symptoms, but I just wouldn't respond to any amount of noise or activity. It was raining outside, it had taken them a little while for the EMTs to come, and I

They wrapped me in a tarp and they kind of like pulled me up and like took me down the steps and put me into the ambulance. And the people there all narrated that as just really weird. As that was being described, I had this extremely uncanny feeling around that. And I started to experience myself in the third person.

So like this blank time period, like I had blacked out and then I woke up in a hospital. There was no time in there for me in my experience. And yet my body was wrapped in a tarp, carried out, and I was put in this hospital. Apparently the doctors do this thing where they kind of like shout at you and they try to like be loud. They shake you and they do all this stuff. And I just thought, who was that happening to? Who was being put in a tarp? Who's being shaken? Who's being spoken to?

There's this period of time where I was just a body. Just like a material piece of meat, sort of, that was like wrapped up, shuffled around, and like everyone else is having this experience of me except for me. And it was so uncanny just to think of yourself like as a body. I didn't have me. I wasn't there. And this is also when the experience starts to feel like a movie.

And again, all the storytellers come back in. This is an experience I hear in almost every single story on the show. There's something I've always thought is almost ironic in some sense about the title of the show, "This Is Actually Happening," because at the moments that are the most real, like the most real thing is happening in your life, you're at the precipice of life and death, and this is real life. That's when people say it feels like a movie.

That's when they say it's surreal, it's uncanny. Even though it's the moment you're experiencing the fullness of life in that moment and what's actually going on feels unreal. That's what was happening for me in that moment. I was questioning everything and this experience of myself in the third person just kept coming up over and over again.

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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.

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You know, it's just immediate tears. Like my parents show up and they live in Pennsylvania and this wasn't a planned trip. I only see them once or twice a year and all of a sudden they're just at my apartment and they're there with such love and they're crying and I'm realizing that they were sitting with this feeling of like they almost lost their son. Of all the stories on the show, the people who have lost their kids is the most devastating and people always say that. That losing a child is an experience that's beyond grief.

And fortunately they didn't sit with it for the whole plane ride. I had woken up before they got on a plane, thank God. And then my sister comes in and then my brother comes in and everyone's there. And it was like the most surreal family reunion. I'm sort of coming to more and more

Cognitively, I'm pretty much there and I can hold conversations, but being with that many people was overwhelming. So we had this experience of having alone time with certain family members one-on-one.

One thing that came forward in that time is those conversations that were going through my head when I was initially in that brain on fire state. All these things that were kind of conflicts or unresolved issues or little pieces that I felt like were still lingering in my system, like all that was kind of washed away. And as my family came in, there were some conversations that I was like, I need to have a conversation like from this place.

I need to carry whatever this feeling is into this conversation right now, and here they are. And I can actually just be raw and forgiving, and we're having some conversations that I wish I could have had years ago. And so that was just an incredible gift, that that sense of love and that sense of the armor being gone was present in that moment to do some healing that needed to be done.

After that, the days start to sort of go by. Singing in a time with family, I'm getting dozens of messages from people I see that other people are now finding out about what happened. I really start to become aware of like the experience of other people. There's a little bit of guilt in there, but I knew this is nothing like I really brought on myself. But there was this guilt that I couldn't necessarily access the pain they were accessing.

If you go through a traumatic event together, you might both have different experiences of this trauma, but you're experiencing the same trauma. You can reference the same event as traumatic and you can process that together. But even though I was at the center of this experience, I wasn't there for the hardest part of the trauma for everyone, which is the hours where they didn't know if I was going to come back, whether I was going to be brain dead, whether I was going to die. My wife, whether she was going to lose her husband, my loved ones, whether they're going to lose someone they cared about deeply, my

My parents, whether they were going to lose a son, my brother and sister, whether they were going to lose a sibling. My sister had her children that week and they had to come with her. And so my two nephews came. It was just so precious to see them. And again, just a sense of what could have been lost. All these other people were losing a husband or a child or a loved one. They were going to lose their uncle.

Just being that young and knowing that I could have had that impact on them. And you do start to become aware of the impact that you have.

If this happens, like all these people would be affected. And right behind that is like, holy shit, I have an impact on people. Like this is a responsibility. This is what it means to be in like love and contact with each other. There's abundance there. And then there's like this precious fragility that's right behind it. And, you know, even if it would have been no fault of my own, the sense that like I could have contributed to that kind of trauma in their life, which was just like a devastating feeling to have.

And you can't help but sort of take that in. And you're trying to take that in while you have a blank there. And so what was pouring out of me was just this like empathy. I was just like, oh my God, it wasn't really guilt. It was just empathy. And I have found myself kind of being there for other people's experience while they were also caring for mine.

One of the weird things that comes out of that is like, there's a narration from people about this sense of abundance. Like, you're back. You made it. Like, oh my gosh, we're so grateful. We thought we'd lost you. And each moment now becomes sort of precious. And it feels like all of a sudden you're made of porcelain. Like, you're this delicate thing in the world. But right behind that was like a sense of scarcity that I could feel coming in.

I was like this piece of porcelain and also everyone wanted time with it. This time with me that I didn't know if I was like available to really give. And then I could feel this grasping of just like, "I want to be around you. I want to process this with you." And some big emotions were coming out. For some people it was anger. For some people it was sadness. For some people it was grief. And we were just kind of sitting with a lot of it. This abundance and scarcity.

Fortunately, I think through that process, and this sense of having the armor down was so valuable during that time, just to be able to be raw and surrender to what was happening. I was texting with a few people, and one person just said, "How are you feeling?" I remember writing back and I just said, "I'm feeling everything." It was as though those successive stages of that joy and the grief and the fear, now it was all jumbled together.

This is what it is to be fully alive. All the feelings were just there, and everything felt true at the same time. And what actually came in at this point was not just the lessons from storytellers, but the lessons from listeners. Something that's been a journey over the years in this show is just...

How do you sit with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people showing up online with their opinions about something you put out in the world every single week? Not only are these stories that are sources of empathy, but they raise deep questions for us. And I'm so aware that what we do on this show asks so much of listeners.

It asks you to sit not only with someone else's pain, but with someone else's complication and someone else's contradiction and their shadows and their light. And listeners show up with every single range of emotion that you can bring. And we see it in the comments every single week. And sometimes that's sympathy and tears and sometimes it's absolute outrage. Sometimes they're arguing and in conflict with each other.

One of the biggest gifts from the show and having to sit with the range of emotions, opinions of listeners is just you learn over time to set yourself aside and just say all of these things are true. The truth of any given story is all of it. It's every single experience someone has of it is a truth of it.

Just like it's true for the guests that show up on the show, it's true for anyone who's listening. Whatever they're going through is just true and you just let it all in. This is like a lesson that was coming into me in this moment because everyone was having their own various different reactions to what I was going through, some of which was related to me, some of which was completely their own stuff. But it was all part of it and I just, I was really trying to let that like full range of the human experience in.

What happened over sort of the hours and days since then was this sense of trying to be alive with everything and stepping into that, trying to take care of myself. But also sitting a little bit with this sense of the unknown.

There are all sorts of rough details in the aftermath. For four or five days I was coughing up blood. And apparently that's just an after effect of intubation. But in that state, every time you look in the sink and it's all red, it just sends these signals to your body like something, what's wrong here? Something's wrong. And eventually it clears and then it's just gone.

It feels like I'm all back, but I know there are pieces of me missing. And at the beginning, the pieces that were missing felt kind of good. It was like, oh, I'm missing this armor. Like, I'm missing this pattern. I'm missing my attachment to this wound or this story that I had of myself. And now I'm also like, maybe there are good parts that are missing also. Do I still have cognitive deficits? You know, at this moment right now, it's a little over two weeks away from this, and I still haven't driven a car.

It feels overwhelming and I'm just allowing myself to not drive and I haven't spent a night alone yet. You know, is there a part of me that I need to grieve? And I don't even know what I might be grieving yet. Every day I keep finding out little things that seem odd. I'm interacting with certain relationships differently than I used to in subtle ways, but it's there.

The foods that I like to eat are slightly different. For some reason, I only want sourdough bread and butter now. And I remember the day after my parents came in, they were at a hotel, and I visited their hotel, and I brought a bag with me that was just a water bottle and a book and some things and just a huge loaf of sourdough bread and butter. And we were all sitting together and talking about things, and I just pulled out a piece of bread with knife and knife

Started eating and they just started cracking up and I'm like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's happening here But I'm like this is so grounding for me right now

It's something that we often aren't actually able to capture when we have people on the show because they're usually five years, ten years out of it, sometimes a couple years. But very rarely do we inhabit the space of someone in the two weeks after something like this happens. And I'm aware so much of something's different and I don't know what it is yet.

The other part of that that's really odd is from the outside everyone says, "You're back. You're here." And it's comforting. Like, I'm glad that I'm received in the world as someone that's familiar to everyone else, but it means that there's kind of like an invisibility to what churns underneath. A bit of like the internal experience is just you can't really convey it because people really want a continuity of who you were before. And

They're just picking up on the parts that they see that is like who you were. But I'm not even aware of or able to articulate how things are different yet. And so there is this bit of invisibility that's present. And again, this is an experience that I've heard from many people on the show, this sense of this invisibility in the world. That's also been comforting. Like it's been comforting to know that this invisibility is just a piece of the experience.

The other day, in conversation with a loved one, she said to me, "Whenever someone in my life is mean or aggressive or dysregulated in some way, I think to myself, 'What don't I know about that person?' And I thought how brilliant. And at the heart of that practice is something I've needed a lot recently. And that's grace. I've needed so much grace in this process. Just for people to be patient with me, regardless of what I'm going through. This is really what this entire show means to me.

When we listen to each other, when we honor our own story and the story of others, when we do so with love, the unknown becomes bearable. We can walk through it together. It's important for me, for some reason, to share all this with the listeners here, with you guys, because I really carry these stories in my heart. Like, this show is not just a show for me. It's a full experience of life. It is a gift.

over like 300 stories now, and all of them have been these teachers. And I've known that over time, but I know that now. I can feel how these stories and all of you live in my system. And it's just, I don't even know what to say. It's just...

It's so powerful and it's really overwhelming and there's just like an amount of gratitude that I can't even express for all the people who have shown up here like this, like being in the chair that I'm in now and having gone through way, way worse than like what I've been through. It's just, just so humbling.

When I look back at that initial time, that first waking up, that first really precious hour, two hours, I just keep thinking that feeling is what we're all looking for. And I got to experience that feeling. And now I get to be here.

Each day is a new challenge and a new insight and a new version of myself shows up. But part of me just keeps returning to that feeling. This is what we're all looking for and I got to see it. And I get to be here. I get to be alive. It's not easy.

A lot of other stories come up when I think about that time. I think about the story of Tiki, who was hang gliding in a desert in Mexico, and she crashes in the middle of nowhere and help can't get to her, and she's dying in the heat of the sun. She feels herself dying, and she gives up at some point, and lays down and feels herself surrounded in this golden light of death.

She speaks of it with the same quality of just this incredibly precious time. And then she gets rescued and all of her senses come back and her suffering comes back and the heat comes back. She sort of re-enters her body. And that was the trauma. That's where her suffering was. Back into being alive.

And of course I think of Jose, a very precious episode to me, who gets electrocuted, rushed to the hospital, he dies on the table, he leaves his body, and he floats off and he meets his father, and he turns into a ball of color. He sort of merges with the universe and experiences this total bliss. And again, it's when he comes back to life, when he's sent back and he comes back into his body and into his life, it's chaos for him.

And I think of all these people because I'm so new after this experience I have no idea where it's going to lead. I'm in that raw period where every day it changes.

I'm not sure who I'm going to be now. I'm not sure how this will affect me. But in each of those stories, and in my own experience right now, there's this part of me that just keeps returning to that feeling. That initial feeling. This is what we're all seeking. And not only that, but it's inside of me. This is what lives inside of me. It's not something I need to discover or find out there. It's already in me. And I get to be here again.

One of the hardest parts of this experience I keep returning to is just how to hold my own experience and the experience of others. Because while I'm integrating what's happened to me, so is everyone else around me. I'm at the center of an experience they're having that I really wasn't a part of.

One thing that's been so clear is just to see how people project what they want to be true onto the experience of another person. And it kind of began with that doctor. I could see him reaching an interpretation that worked from a medical perspective. And I knew he needed that, but it's just not my experience of it.

Other people thought I was pushing myself too much, taking on too much with travel and work. Some people thought it was hidden memories or traumas from childhood that were bubbling up, and I needed to retreat within myself into a coma state to address them. Some people thought it was a spiritual attack, entities in my house that needed to be removed. Some thought it was a spiritual initiation, like I'd slipped between the veil and witnessed something my conscious brain couldn't handle, and so my system shut down.

All of these feel like they have a bit of truth to them. They could all work. But one thing that's been clear is that every time someone has an interpretation of what happened, it's for them. It's not for me. Some of these interpretations really fucked me up. They can really get inside you and it's like there's a part of you battling for your own sense of what's true. But you can't help being influenced by what other people are saying, especially when you're in such a vulnerable state. You can't help but absorb what they're going through.

But there's kind of a power in going through that and swimming in the interpretations of other people. One thing that starts to arise comes from anger. And of all the emotions I'd went through, fear, loss, anger was actually one of the last things to come through. Feeling this anger come in. And the anger is saying everyone's entitled to the story that they need, but this is not their story.

I have to choose what this is and what it means. And more than that, I get to choose. I get to choose this story. And that's allowed to change and morph and evolve over time, but it's mine. Even though I didn't physically die, a part of me died that night. And so much of this process has been trying to figure out what died. What do I revive? What do I want to hold on to? And when I really ask myself, like, what is emerging from this? What happened?

What died and why? I think maybe this is what I needed to learn. I get to write the story of my life. I get to write the story of my past. I get to write the story of my future. I get to write the story of who I am. And not only is that something no one else should do, it's something no one else can do. Some of that armor I spoke to earlier are these adaptations we do. The ways that we take on the stories of other people as our own.

And it becomes almost impossible at some points in your life to figure out, what's my actual story? What do I want my story to be? And I don't know exactly what that is yet, but I know that it's mine to write. And as I've been learning to write my own story and inhabit myself more fully, it keeps revealing itself as the story of us all.

of the loved ones who were there when I woke up, beaming with love, who saved my life. My family who's been there from the very beginning. The doctors, the EMTs, the night nurses, the janitor who keeps the floor clean every day. The amazing team here on the show who make what we do here possible.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westbrook.

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.

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Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.