It's Not All in Your Head; it All STARTS in Your Head
“Unpopular opinion: your mental health is more important than your fertility.” - Jess Milanes
My whole life I’ve known I wanted to have children one day.
But also, my whole life, I’ve struggled with feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, depression, and the notion that none of those feelings mattered because no one around me seemed to care, anyway.
When I was a freshman in college I took Xanax every Thursday night so that I could get drunk quickly without a hangover in the morning. I babysat on Friday mornings and that was the only thing that truly made me happy at that phase in my life. And to those of you who knew me then and might be calling BS now — know this: I was faking it, really well. After all, my mom was a trained actress and pushed me into acting from a young age, too…
Speaking of my mom, when she came to visit me towards the end of that year I told her I thought I was depressed and she simply said, without any hesitation, “No, you aren’t.”
I was.
I dropped it there because I knew how things would unfold if I pushed her to hear me. We’d been there before…
Here’s some of the reasons I was depressed: My dad was murdered when I was 12-years-old and then she moved to a foreign country shortly thereafter. I sent myself to boarding school because on some intuitive level, I knew I needed guidance in a way I would never find in an essentially parent-less home.
Instead, I ended up in a toxic, elitist environment bred by generations of misguided gender norms and “traditions.”
Surprise, surprise — I developed an eating disorder in the stead of my need to control something, anything at all.
That control gave me a semblance of false happiness that was rooted in the idea that I had finally found one thing that no one could take away from me or stop me from doing — throw up everything I ate and then work out for hours out of the day to cancel out the calories that couldn’t be thrown up.
I wanted negative calories.
I wanted to disappear into thin air.
I wanted to not exist.
When my boarding school eventually caught on, they essentially kicked me out until I met their (again misguided) requirements. They sent me home to the same place that planted the seeds of my depression in the first place. They also sent me to a therapist and told my mother she had to be the one to take me. On our way to my first appointment, she said, “if your dad we’re here, you wouldn’t be behaving like this…”
As if it was a behavior issue, not a mental health issue.
Now, I know — she didn’t know any better and I forgive her for that. She didn’t know the damage that was being done with her careless words and it is 100% not my intention to hurt her in writing this today. My intention is nothing more and nothing less than one thing — telling the truth.
The same year she told me I wasn’t depressed, my aunt and my cousin were also murdered. I know this is probably alarming to most people reading this, and it should be. There is darkness in the world that I have had the misfortune of being all too close to it. There are underlying truths to this story I will never fully understand, mostly because I recognize (after some digging) it’s probably unsafe for me to even try to.
Regardless, what IS safe (and in fact, necessary) for me to understand is the following:
I was no longer throwing up everything I ate anymore because I found cannabis and Xanax and a bunch of other coping mechanisms that made me want to — at the very least — be there every Friday morning for that little girl I was babysitting in college because when I looked into her eyes, I was seeing myself.
In caring for her, I was caring for myself.
To rewind a little and give you a fuller picture of where I was coming from mentally: when I was 16 (just two years prior) I went on vacation with my family in Uruguay and the whole time I was envisioning ways I could fall off the balcony, smash my head between the sliding doors, or somehow magically vanish without anyone noticing. And, I want to be clear on this — I never wanted to kill myself, I wanted to die on accident so it wasn’t my fault. I’ve never told anyone this before.
Then, when I was a sophomore in college: my Xanax use trickled into Tuesdays, and Mondays, and most days until I was arrested for speeding (and then some) on a Texas highway after a night of binge drinking, partying, and then taking a pain killer in order to fall asleep. It was my own prescription that I had had since I was 13 due to chronic pelvic pain and I usually only took those for real pain. But, this was the first time I ever took it just because I felt like it.
That morning, before I started driving, I said to myself, something has to change. And it did.
After I was arrested, the late nights out were replaced with shifts at a restaurant to pay my deferred probation fees. That means it’s not on my record today. But the well hidden depression and substance abuse continued and was certainly recorded into every fiber of my very being, even without the crazy partying.
I didn’t know it at the time but even in my self-destructive behavior, I was really doing everything I could to try to help myself when know one else would.
I broke up with my high school boyfriend even though he was one of the only people I truly loved and that truly loved me. While I didn’t fully understand this at the time, on a subconscious level, I knew the relationship had to end because my substance abuse was largely linked to him and the friends that I had made through him.
When my childhood best friend asked me why I left him, I blamed it on my undertreated eating disorder and the fact that even though I was no longer throwing up all my food or working out relentlessly, I never really did the real inner work needed to move past it. I just replaced throwing up and working out with drugs and bad friends, but I didn’t tell her that part. Although, I’m sure she knew because she eventually distanced herself from me, too.
I knew what I needed and sought it out in all the wrong places and obviously, it didn’t really make any substantial changes.
I found a new boyfriend who was sober and wrote letters to him while he traversed through the wilderness for 87 days. I romanticized our relationship while he was away and when he came home, I knew it wasn’t right but I stayed with him anyway. He eventually introduced me to the magic of LSD — the “only drug” he did. And I’m not going to lie, it changed my life (for the moment). I remember saying to him that I never wanted to do any other drug ever again (other than cannabis, which I now consider a medicine).
SUPER IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: I WANT TO BE EXTRA CLEAR HERE — I AM NOT ADVISING ANYONE TAKE ANY PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS EVER WITHOUT PROPER SUPERVISION BY A DOCTOR THAT KNOWS WHAT’S UP… AT ALL, EVER, FOR ANY REASON.
But back to my story: LSD gave me some source of the light I had been seeking but first it showed me how deeply I had buried myself in my own darkness.
The first time I tripped, I saw piles of rats all around me. I’m not exaggerating. I watched as flowers, trees, and plants were helplessly dying in my minds eye. I cried real tears. I was terrified. This is what people call a “bad trip” but that part ended quickly when… I told my friend what I was seeing and he guided me with the words, “you know that you decide how this all goes, right?”
No one had ever put power in my hands like that before.
In that one sentence, everything shifted. What was dying in one instance suddenly came to life. I stayed up all night and felt an overwhelming sense of happiness as I connected with Mother Nature in a way I never had before and felt a love I hadn’t known since before my dad died. From that day onward, I did acid every weekend for nearly 4 months until my school had a historic drug bust and my dealer went to jail.
And just like that, that was the end of that phase of external seeking. Quickly, the false light I had found in the psychedelic experiences shrunk back into the darkness that still remained within me all along and that romantic relationship came to an end, too.
I eventually isolated myself from most of my friends and made new ones — ones that were willing to come to me and couch-sit as I smoked pot all day long while I was watching CNN and writing papers about social injustice. At that point, I was only interested in three things: politics, weed, and my dog.
I was always an excellent student. I studied sociology and fine art with an emphasis in illustration. I graduated with honors. I took pride in sitting in the front of the classroom, asking all the questions, writing one helluva of study guide for every test we had, and sending it out to the whole class because I knew they would appreciate it. And they did (you are so welcome, btw, fellow ex-classmates who might be reading this). I drew and painted for full days on end and somehow temporarily set aside the darkness as much as I could, mostly thanks to the light my dog brought me every day.
While I’m not “religious” in the traditional sense of the word, I like to joke — D-O-G is G-O-D, just spelled backwards, because he gave me the unconditional love I had always wanted and deeply needed.
Eventually, my studentship expanded into yoga, which ultimately and truly saved my life because it showed me the REAL light. It took me (reluctantly) through the front door of my heart and into my Self, instead of through the backdoor of my fragile psyche — the way that LSD works. I had practiced Bikram yoga in high school (mostly as another way to burn shit tons of calories) but had never really engaged in the true lineage of yoga practices or philosophy until my last year of college.
This ancient practice created a foundation for me and a sense of safety I had never known before.
It taught me morals no one ever actively instilled in me. It taught me discipline no one ever showed me. It taught me physical and spiritual alignment I had never known was possible. But it also trapped me in a world of “wellness” that blinded me from my own chronic illness that I had painfully experienced for over a decade (hence the ongoing pain killer prescription I mentioned way back in this story).
And while I am so grateful for this path, I now know that without true integration into our health care system — it will always be another dead end.
Fast forward 10 years and here I am — a nearly 30-year-old woman with (finally) diagnosed Endometriosis and Adenomyosis and no active addictions to any substances, thank the Lord (or my dog, as I see it). Yet, even after an excision surgery and countless treatments, I’m still suffering from daily, nagging and sometimes debilitating pain that nearly no one will ever really understand — including other women who I know suffer from the “same” illness, too. This is because everyone’s pain is so different and there’s no way I can understand what they go through either. I don’t know their family history. I don’t know their trauma. I don’t know their triggers. I don’t know the story behind their pain and I will never know.
What I do know, however, is this:
All the ways I escaped my family trauma, all the substances, and all the yoga in the world couldn’t hide me nor save me from the root cause that was spearheading my stubborn hormones and driving my mental health (or lack thereof) at the hands of an mysterious illness I did not choose. It chose me. And that’s another reason to thank God…
Because — mark my words — if I have anything to say about it, this will no longer be a mysterious disease by the end of my lifetime.
The same way I prided myself on my studentship, is the same way I now pride myself on the much needed truth telling I am doing as I write this blog to fight this terrible disease and shed light on the power of the mind-body connection in health care. This is not only for myself, but for all women who uniquely suffer and don’t know how to talk about it...
May my words inspire you to share or your own.
Here’s the deal — 99% of the treatment offered to patients like me are fertility oriented. And I’m not going to lie, at first, that’s all it was about for me. I wanted, more than anything, to BE ABLE to rewrite the story of the family I felt I never had. When I finally learned (without any shadow of a doubt and no longer just from Dr. Google) that I actually had this disease, my number one concern was my long held desire to have children being taken away from me… Just like so many other things and people I cared about — despite (or perhaps, in spite of) all the pain and mental anguish I’ve carried with me for the majority of my life.
I had the surgery with the goal of “extending my fertility” and all the treatments offered to me by every OB/GYN I’ve ever seen were with my “ability to bear children” in mind. No one ever asked about my mental health and the serious toll that hormone based therapies take on said mental health, let alone the crazy-ass hormones that the disease itself creates on it’s own.
It’s been 9 months since my excision surgery and in all honesty, I’ve felt totally psychotic for most of them.
This is largely due to all the synthetic hormones in the form of pills that work on a neurological level to stop your brain from communicating with your ovaries. Surgery doesn’t cure anything. It just clears up the past so you can manage the future of the disease. And, I’m finally starting to put all the dots of my mental, physical, and spiritual health together, now that I’ve opted to go off of the pills they had me on to “manage” my disease…
This is the crux of what I’ve learned — physical health is a reflection of mental health and mental health is a reflection of spiritual health and there is no one-size-fits all approach to this.
There is one thing that is for sure though, and I’ve said this before but it’s that important so I’ll say it again... If I want to heal it, I have to feel it. I have to be real about all the pain I’ve ever felt in my life on all levels and honor it. And I know I’ve said all of this in other blog posts, but if I’m being honest, I barely scratched the surface of my pain in those…
I’m finally being really fucking real with y’all.
And, I’ll keep doing it. I have to keep lighting myself up from within and consistently challenge the status quo of treatments for this little-understood chronic disease because no amount of surgeries or pills or poses will erase the history of trauma that has built up in my very own cells, epigenetically.
I hate to break it to anyone who’s scared or reluctant to believe that you REALLY need to feel your feelings but — sometimes feelings have to actually HURT YOU in order to HEAL YOU.
My feelings, my mom’s feelings, my friends’ feelings, my ex-boyfriends’ feelings, and everyone’s feelings — all function in the exact same way and get recorded in our genes for our future generations to inherit unless we deal with them, regardless of the uncharted roads that brought us there.
Those feelings are all expressions of our own ability to manage the unique joys and pains and stressors of life and ALL of them are designed for one actionable thing only — to be felt. The minute they are suppressed is the minute things get really, really weird and ultimately, when well hidden enough, only lead us (doctors and patients alike) to treating symptoms rather than causes. And what’s worse in the case of infertility due to Endo, Adeno, and even PCOS, we treat them with them with no other goal in mind other than to pass them down to the next generation we so selfishly want to create and I’ll be DAMNED if I do that to my baby.
While I can’t promise much, this is the promise I wholeheartedly CAN make to the baby I WILL have one day, however or whenever it happens . . . I vow to feel it all so I can heal it all, for you, baby.
And one day, whenever I do have children (by birth or by adoption or by a miracle) I will remind them this every chance I get: this life he or she has selflessly been given is meant to be felt in every sense of the word.
Life’s traumas and triumphs are not meant to be “managed” nor “recorded,” they are meant to be bravely lived through and exquisitely felt.
No amount of external goals (like the children you’re supposed to have or career you’re supposed to build, etc., etc.) will never fill the void that only radical truth telling can permeate and restore.
This is my God-given truth and I’m sticking to it.
Thanks for listening,
P
