What Isn’t Broken, Part 3: Spiritual Rebirth

Editor’s note: Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here. 

The first time ‘it’ happened — my first awakening — was on my 22nd birthday, just a few months after having quit psych drugs cold-turkey.

The day was unglamorously spent driving six hours back to campus from the beach where my sister-in-law-to-be had hosted her bachelorette party, which gave me plenty of time to think and talk to myself, uninterrupted. I’d begun to deconstruct the language we use, splitting linguistic hairs to discern truth from narrative.

Why do we use words like “good” and “bad” to mean so many things? Why are the same words that denote morality used to describe subjective states of pleasure or pain?

Same with words like “healthy” and “unhealthy.” Something can be healthy/unhealthy for you. But a person themselves can also be described as healthy/unhealthy.

So what does it mean to have “good mental health”? Does it mean you experience more pleasurable emotions? And “bad mental health” just means you experience more painful ones?

Why is “good mental health” equated with being a “good” person? Why is “bad mental health” equated with being a “bad” person — only redeemable if you’re actively working towards “better” mental health?

Why do we conflate health with morality at all?

Why do we conflate emotions with health?

Why do we pathologize or moralize some emotions and not others?

Pain isn’t morally bad. Pleasure isn’t morally good. Neither is the inverse true. They’re both morally neutral. They both simply… exist.

Zero-calorie energy drink in one hand, the other on the steering wheel, my mind felt light and free, working at lightning speed. What did this mean? I wasn’t quite sure. What a joy to be unsure! What a joy to be asking questions! I spent the rest of the drive continuing in this vein of existentialist pondering. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it yet, but I knew one thing was certain: I needed to write.

That night, I began writing a poem titled “Call of the Void.” I continued working on it over the next several days. I would work on it first thing in the morning when I woke up and first thing in the evening after I got back to the dorm from my classes. I would think of new lines in the middle of class — or in the shower or on a run — and scramble to write them down as soon as I could, or repeat them in my head until I was able to do so. Every time I got a chance, I would work on this poem, and any time I wasn’t working on it, I was thinking about working on it. By the end of the week, I had a 25-page epic narrative poem on my hands. I’d never written anything like it before.

That entire week I felt… amazing. A newfound energy was pulsing through me, like liquid starlight through my veins. It wasn’t mine; it belonged to the universe. Everything was so interconnected, I could see it clearly now! The morning after my birthday, I smiled at the construction workers and the birds and the squirrels outside my dorm as I walked by, music blasting through my earbuds, practically floating down to the campus Starbucks for a coffee on my way to class. I love you! I thought. You are beautiful! I wanted to dance! I wanted to sing! The world didn’t feel good or bad anymore, it simply… was. And what a beautiful thing to just exist!

But there was a small, yet present, voice of fear and hesitation in the back of my mind despite this overwhelming euphoria. I can’t let myself get too happy, it said, or I’ll become attached to life and give up my plans to die. This probably won’t last anyway. Just stick to the plan.

It was right about one thing: The feeling didn’t last.

By the end of the week, I crashed. I don’t remember what triggered it. It might’ve been an argument or a verbal insult from one of my “friends,” or it might’ve simply been the law that what goes up must generally come down. But whatever the catalyst, once again I was miserable. All of my new ideas I’d thought were “brilliant” just a few days before seemed stupid and pointless to me now.

Yet something in me was nonetheless changed. I now knew that it was possible for me to feel that way. If I was capable of it once, then that meant it was possible for me to feel like that again. And with the understanding that pain wasn’t inherently good or bad, my suffering had grown, somehow, easier to carry. It simply was.

I continued to write nonstop in my notes app, questioning everything:

Everyone’s all “talk about your feelings, it’s good for your mental health” until you actually do, and then they need to draw boundaries to protect their *own* mental health. How could I *not* feel like a burden?

It’s only okay to talk about mental health/mental illness if you’re actively in recovery. Otherwise you’re seen as just spreading negativity and promoting harm. It’s only okay to talk about the darkness in terms of finding the light. They only wanna hear stories of getting through it, rather than “it” itself.

They don’t care about the feelings, only about the behaviors. Psychiatrists don’t ask you “how has this new medication been making you feel?” They ask about your symptoms, more specifically, your behaviors. “How have your sleeping/eating habits been? How are your grades? Relationships? Are you exercising? Have you self-harmed lately?” The medication isn’t even meant to make you feel better, it’s only meant to make you more socially palatable and high-functioning. That’s why whenever you raise concerns of numbness and emotional flatness, it gets dismissed. You’re essentially gaslit into thinking that you don’t know your own emotions, and you don’t know how “normal” emotions are supposed to feel, since you’re so used to living on the extremes. Well, maybe I’d rather feel my emotions intensely than not be able to feel them at all.

Little did I know I was stumbling into the beginning of my critical psychiatry journey. I didn’t know such a movement already existed at the time; I thought I was the first one in the world to invent the proverbial wheel. However, I wasn’t trying to do anything profound, I was just venting my own frustrations. I honestly thought I was in the wrong most of the time. God forbid anyone found out about these ideas — they might think I was crazy!

In order to continue to evade suspicion about my mental state, eating disorder and suicidality, I paid hypervigilant attention to my appearance. I did my skincare routine twice daily and wore makeup almost every day. I tried to wear “cute” outfits while also trying to hide the size and shape of my body under baggy clothes. I made my bed every day and never skipped class, no matter how bad I was feeling. I kept a smile on my face, or at least tried not to cry. I contributed to class discussions, turned in my assignments (mostly) on time, and continued to get all A’s and B’s.

Fortunately, everyone’s continued obliviousness made my job surprisingly easy. But although my goal was to fly under the radar, I still felt hurt by how little others seemed to notice or care. These contradictory feelings confused even me. I wanted to be left alone, and yet the loneliness and desolation were crushing. I felt forgotten, unloved, invisible. Beyond that, as my weight and health plummeted, the compliments — and petty jealousy — kept pouring in, cutting like sugar-coated daggers. “OMG, Jasmine’s serving body goals!” my sister-in-law-to-be had gushed about me at her bachelorette party. “Skinny bitch over there didn’t even finish her sushi,” one of my “friends” scoffed towards me one time after we’d all gone out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. “Have fun being healthy,” my roommate would grumble at me as I went out for a run, having eaten my usual starvation-diet portion of food that day.

My euphoria-like state from before had not returned. I began to doubt the realness of it. Maybe it was just a dream. Or maybe it was just another symptom of “mental illness.” Maybe it was mania. Just a chemical imbalance in my brain — nothing spiritual or meaningful about that. My psychiatrist had once suggested that I might be bipolar; maybe she was right. Maybe the medications had simply masked it up until now, and I had finally experienced my first manic episode.

In the midst of my suffering and solitude, however, there were glimmers. Rather than out-of-body experiences, I would describe these as in-body experiences. I often felt as though I was teetering on the edge of psychosis, about to slip at any moment. Though I never hallucinated, my sensory experiences and perceptions seemed intensified, augmented. I wasn’t sure if I was about to break from reality, or if I already had. Or if, on the other hand, I was actually discovering some truer, more intimate reality for the first time.

Once, for example, while crying in the shower, I took acute notice of the wall in front of me. It suddenly felt colossal, like an entire world of detail unto itself. I studied the wall intently: its texture, color, imperfections, the way the water droplets collected and rolled down it. I placed my hand out in front of me and ran my fingertips over it, feeling how the smoothness of the tiles contrasted with the grittiness of the grout. It was as though, for that moment, that beige shower wall had become my entire world. Then, my tears turned to self-aware laughter. How absurd is this? I thought. Maybe I really am going crazy. Maybe I’ve finally lost it.

Another time, I was on a run listening to a new album. Suddenly, it started raining hard and thundering as well. I used to be terrified to run during thunderstorms; even though the probability of being struck by lightning was realistically quite low, it was an irrational fear I’d always had. But now I didn’t care. What’s the worst that can happen? I die? I tucked my phone under my already-soaked t-shirt and let the tears streaming down my face mix with the rain. I felt like I was one with the storm.

The second awakening happened after an argument with a “friend.” Drunkenly, I had confessed my eating disorder “relapse” to them over text. They insisted that I needed to tell my parents, that I needed their “help.” I explained how, no, my parents always made things worse. I thought my friend would get that. I thought they would understand. Getting “better” in the short-term by being forced into performative “recovery” at the cost of my autonomy was not sustainable or healing. I had tried that before and look where it had gotten me. I felt that I would rather die of my eating disorder than spend the rest of my life cycling between quasi-recovery and relapse.

My friend also insisted — of course — that I needed to get back on medication. Unable to effectively counter my arguments or successfully undermine my self-determination, they eventually derailed the discussion about my personal mental health experiences into a broader debate about “mental illness” and medication in general. Attempting to defend myself against the accusation that my decision to not use medication myself was somehow an attack on those who do, I declared:

Because I don’t like having my colors muted, I like seeing them vividly. I find more meaning when I’m able to feel the good, the bad, and the ugly. I feel so intensely, and yes, it can be overwhelming, but it’s the way I am, and I don’t see it as wrong, not anymore. I don’t want to feel disconnected from my experiences, even when they’re painful. It’s not because I feel morally superior for any of this, it’s just a personal preference. You don’t have to feel the same way. You don’t even have to understand.

Though frustrating — much like playing chess with a pigeon — this conversation also reawakened something in me. The feeling was finally back.

In the following days, I came up with an idea for an album that I would name Booksmart and I wrote eight out of the ten songs within the next two weeks. As with the “Call of the Void” poem, my creative drive was insatiable. Once, I couldn’t stop thinking of new lyrics during my volunteer shift at the hospital, so I scribbled them down on the back of my patient sheet so I wouldn’t forget. Every chance I got, I went to the practice rooms in the basement of the music building to sit at a piano and write. Sometimes I would stay there until midnight, one or two in the morning. Like the song I had written over the summer (which would also end up on the album), these songs felt honest. I wasn’t trying to complete a narrative I thought others wanted to hear; the story they told was mine. My voice felt stronger than ever.

This time, I wasn’t afraid that the feeling would end. I knew it would, but that didn’t scare me. I want to be wherever I am, I wrote in my notes app. I am home. Not as in, I am at home, as in a place, as in a fixed destination point. But rather I am home, I am being the home, I am embodying it… I am a vessel for experience to flow through. To resist, to cling onto, or to force, are to create a blockage. Like running water through a dam, experience will eventually (inevitably) flood through. This is nature.

By now, my starvation-suicide method was starting to take its toll. Though my eating disorder — now half as old as I was — had been chipping away at my health for years, its effects were escalating at an unprecedented rate. My hair was falling out in clumps. The skin on my hands was constantly cracking and bleeding from dryness. Sometimes I had to lay down immediately after getting out of the shower because I felt so dizzy I thought I was going to pass out. Practically all the bones in my body were showing, as my weight was the lowest it had been since middle school.

During a visit to student health for an unrelated issue, I ended up getting “caught.” As soon as they had me step on the scale backwards, I knew what was going on, though I pretended to play along. When confronted about my weight loss, I communicated that I wasn’t interested in recovery at the moment, thank you very much. The doctor was understanding, but insisted that I at least come back for another appointment to run some labs and such. She expressed concern that I could be at a dangerous point.

I looked her dead in the eye and boldly professed, “I’ve been suicidal for most of my life. I’m not afraid of death.” I did, however, agree to come back for testing.

I left the appointment very pleased with myself. All day, I felt triumphant, yet a slight feeling of unease was creeping in. By evening, I broke down sobbing. Suddenly it hit me. I could die. Oh my god. I could really die. What if I don’t wanna die? What if it’s already too late? Of course I was scared of death. I was terrified. I was just a scared, sad, 22-year-old kid who’d tried to be too strong for too long. How could I not be scared?

Over the next week, my physical health hit a shock threshold. I felt nauseous almost constantly, was having heart palpitations, pain in my abdomen, and extreme exhaustion. I finally skipped classes for the first time all semester. I spent most nights tossing and turning, unable to sleep due to the myriad of physical symptoms I was experiencing. Sometimes I would simply stay up, or go on my phone, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.

One night as I lay awake in bed, I grabbed my phone and impulsively typed into the google search bar something like “mental illness isn’t real” or “depression isn’t a chemical imbalance.” I don’t remember my exact wording. I clicked on the first result. It was an interview with some guy named Robert Whitaker who’d apparently written a book. Wait a minute… this guy is saying all the same stuff I’ve been saying! I thought, in disbelief. He mentioned having a webzine called Mad in America. Rapidly, I went back to the search bar and looked it up. Oh my god.

I only ended up getting one hour of sleep that night. All night long, I read article after article. I couldn’t believe it! There was an entire community of people out there who thought just like me, who’d been through things just like me, who had already been saying these same things for years.

The next morning, on November 13, 2023, I started eating disorder recovery. This time, on my terms. I wanted to live.

This wasn’t, however, a happily-ever-after. It was only the beginning. The most difficult parts of my journey had yet to come. I soon discovered the gravity of my own psychiatric drug harm, including side effects I’d experienced that I hadn’t even recognized as side effects at the time due to the lack of informed consent. My protracted withdrawal lasted over a year since stopping the medications, and I am still in eating disorder recovery now over two years later. These experiences, for better or worse, have shown me who my real friends are. I’ve lost many relationships to sanism, and many more for the fact they were emotionally abusive and I finally realized I deserved better. I’ve had so much to grieve during this time, yet it has made room for so much new life as well.

My suicidality was right about one thing: Something had to die. It just didn’t have to be me.