When I found Jessa Reed, and her podcast Awakening OD, it was summer of 2020. I was waking up each day, checking with friends and news/sm to affirm that a “Pandemic” and “COVID” was really happening, and I hadn’t just taken a psychotic coffee break - things were so weird.
I had lots of vantage points on the whole clown world show unfolding outside my window, with info from red to blue, normie docs to anti-vax holistic healers, and everywhere on the woo spectrum. Info overload, really, and I took that dynamic as an urging to wipe off my inner compass and check in more regularly.
The stakes seemed so high if I got it wrong, so at times I felt pretty heavy.
So when I heard Jessa describing the “aliens” who gave her guidance to share in “Awakening” (the OD stands for orientation department), I was ready for a laugh.
crazy nsfw talk, really….
Jessa is a comedian, who outed her woo ways in Awakening, covering interdimensional lands of wonder with irreverence and expletives. The anti-virtue signalling-spiritualist. A great antidote to heavy.
Jessa is one of the funniest, real, raw humans I’ve encountered, and she is up front with her travels through a five-year wormhole of meth addiction. One day, she just stopped*.
Soberish is an earlier podcast she did, and includes interviews with mostly fellow comedians, who share their own addiction space travel. Ketamine, alcohol, heroin, crack.
As an ER doc, “addiction” - with infinite substances, toxicity, withdrawal, and the body/mind ravages - was a part of every shift I worked.
Over years, I left behind the incomplete model of addiction I learned in medical school, practicing an approach that centered on respect for the dignity and humanity of the person I was facing.
Research I found validated the deep longing for connection, self-worth and joy that drives addiction more than any chemical reaction, and I tried to help folks explore the positive passions, building strength in any way they could.
So Soberish was a fascinating bigger picture of real people doing real life while addicted. Every one of the interviews I heard was a story of how addiction lead to facing early life trauma, and setting aside the stand-in-score-drug for the real demons that needed slaying.
This is a warriors journey, and I think those who battle on the front line are largely misunderstood by society, marginalized as people with character deficiencies, or poor birth circumstances, or hapless victims to brain chemistry out of their control.
The insight into human nature, and capacity for healing and wholeness I have gained from opening up to listen to addiction stories - really listen, not to the person as “them”, but more like another me - is priceless and treasured.
Startling and real.
Pretty humbling….
Jessa talked about the “shadow people” she saw while high on meth, the heavy dark forces that felt really bad and came from who-knows-where. A creation of a methed-up brain? Psychosis? Another invisible layer of reality perceived only after going through the gateway drug?
I don’t know.
I do know we won’t know if we don’t look. Don’t ask, don’t listen.
Instead of comparing myself to an “addict” with relief that my life journey includes less chaotic hooks like caffeine and nicotine, I view the field of humanity more like the Native American origin story in which the four tribes were sent out in different directions to explore, learn, and return to share their new-found wisdom about our world.
Every human has a story, and listening to their journey informs mine…informs Ours.
To me, that is because our stories are in-forming Us, and to exclude or deny that keeps up the man-made walls of the artificial normie box.
If connection is what we crave, what we already are in so many ways, where did all these walls come from? Who built the walls? And how can we bring them down?
Is meth a wrecking ball of a sort that is more complex and functional for humans than we as a “polite society” acknowledge?
[Please for the love of Chrysler do not receive this post as an opinion that using methamphetamine is promoted by me - No, I favor less ravaging ways to approach healing our souls.]
In this beautiful post by River Page on Pirate Wires last week, he tells the tale of his dive into the rabbit hole of r/meth subreddit.
Highly enlightening.
Page’s openness to the raw truth shared by the almost 150,000 users of this subreddit group, and connection with the current moderator (clean for 2 years and recently relapsed, according to Page) is what makes the post remarkable.
Page’s report reads as the sharing of an explorer, without judgement, viewing all the intimacy shared as treasure - even if brutal in its truth.
His conclusion:
“I’ve never seen a place on the internet where hope and nihilism co-exist like this. I’ve never seen a place so human.”
- River Page, in “The Strange and Fascinating World of r/meth”
My experience, after I shed the box of med-school conventional “addiction” thinking, echoes this dynamic. The people that share their stories of a life journey with forays into the darker alleys of addiction…those that survive to speak their truth…all seem more real, more whole, larger.
While the crushed form of an addict is what we typically envision, and our mental models of addiction wage War on Drugs, isn’t there (as always) more to the story?
What makes us turn away from the full reality - the human stories - of those lives deeply transformed by addiction?
Is it our own discomfort with our pain? Our wounding? Do we - the non-meth-etc-choosers think that our own addiction-coverup schemes are better? Stronger? More prudent…responsible…right?
What makes us choose to box up a group of humans, with the leaky walls of a comfortable narrative, when clearly there is pain and suffering to be healed?
What more can we do to help healing?
I wonder if the beauty and truth I see in River Page’s story, a re-telling with plain truth of the r/meth stories, is the humanity.
With “normie” life shattered for most meth users, their walks go to places few would venture willingly. Yet, for many, the expansion into more of what being a human - the co-existence of nihilism and hope - is on display…for those who have eyes to see, openness to read, and choose to listen.
Maybe we are afraid of “the other”, afraid of those similar parts of ourselves we battle into submission lest we grow out of the boxes built out of “what a human is supposed to be”.
Without seeing those parts of our own face in the mirror, without lovingly accepting and understanding their role in our wholeness, maybe we can’t look at what the world mirror shows us.
With our own murky depths unexplored, we live a limited life, with a bandwidth that seems to fit a mold of “society”.
Hiding the light of our wholeness, we walk the Earth with the illusion there are no shadows, no shadow-people, blaming evil on the “bad humans”.
But how can we ever see the fullness of our own energy, our own souls’ potential, with blinders on?
Are those who journey the roads less traveled, with “strange and fascinating tales” of adventure, worthy voices for a species in jeopardy to take a listen?
I think so.
I found this quote on the interwebbies:
“In most original cultures/tribes , no one is ever abandoned, orphaned, or left without food, dwellings, or help.”
To me, this is a reminder that we, as a species, have already done this…already existed together in ways that listened to the needs of all, and met all needs together.
Somewhere along the way, I think we parceled our wholeness, hid exactly who we were from others, and then learned to hide who we are from ourselves.
And forgot.
Layers of forgetting, I think.
And the scavenger hunt for humanity is heading towards “Hunger Games”, when we have voices of experience, humans who have lived with shadow people, slayed demons, and found out how much more whole a human can be.
Exactly who are you?
Is “living large” having the right sneakers, or an Escalade…a corner office or the perfect front lawn? Or eschewing “material” for a paradigm of spirituality that favors the chosen?
How much larger would our lives be, if we lived individually in wholeness, as a part of our larger body of humanity?
Here’s a crazy idea: what if, unwittingly, the methadventurers in Page’s post were exposing so much of their truth, tapping into more human capacity than they could handle, that their “larger than life” lives were throwing shadows no longer invisible?
Like with each high, the question was posed: are you going to face these fears, this muck-filled human legacy of horror, and be the one to break this chain? Bring the parts of yourself together again, show Us how to move past addiction, bondage…show us how to be truly free?
Free to navigate the reality of human life, “where hope and nihilism co-exist”.
Humanity - Us - bound to each other, and this planet, and enslaved until we expand our understanding that freedom is that bonding.
Seeing ourselves for exactly as who we are, sharing space so others are seen and heard by us, clearing away the legacy shadows.
So, after your lifetime of adventuring…exactly who are you?
Are you seeing your own fullness, listening to your own stories, and exploring any shadows you find?
Savoring the treasures, marveling at the brilliance of your own special light, and curiously willing to explore life as you?
Accepting the uncertainty, the rainbow-spectrum of emotions, the mystery and wonder of it all?
In Page’s article, his pithy assessment of the people behind the posts on Reddit’s r/meth is this:
“Unlike the mysterious shadow people, many r/meth users are more than willing to show people exactly who they are.”
Thank you, weary travelers, for sharing your stories. Thank you, River Page for your window into the soul of Us.
And, if you read this far, thank you…here’s a little easter egg. (Umm…it’s waaaay out of the box ;)
This is a beautiful perspective, thank you for sharing! ♡