Short Story: A Guided Meditation

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Aug 30, 2024

You’re wearing only your bra and a hospital gown. And white hospital socks you’re going to wear home because they’re better than the socks you came in. You’re lying on a surgical table. You're on your back, your legs spread in these holsters, a phallic-shaped condom-wearing ultrasound camera nuzzling against your cervix. You start to feel scared now, but you know you have to breathe stable for an operation, so you stare at the ceiling and summon your dissociative abilities. You don’t know this yet, but this dislodges the experience from your timeline and the luminescent surgery room becomes not a memory but a place, a permanent room in your mind with a gaping opening, ready to take you right back.

The guy with the needle up your inner elbow tells you he’s going to take you on a trip. You don't know this yet, but the wound of where the needle stabs the inside of your skin, the shadow of a bruise on the other side like ink leaking through paper, will ache and stiffly pull, long after the bleeding and uterine pains stop. He asks you where you’d like to go, the man infusing you. You panic and say, New York in the 2000s. He chuckles at your answer and says something you won’t remember. Your last word, as you feel the familiar bear hug of your life-long acquaintance, the anesthesia free-trial of death, wrap around you, is a barely muttered “culture”.

You feel well rested. You wake up, over and over and over again, in a recovery room sick bay. Every passing moment is slowly clearer. One of the first things you notice is that you’re wearing underwear you know you didn’t fall asleep in. Less concerning than the other way around, you think, but still disorienting. On the little table next to you are empty pill wrappers and an empty glass of water. The next thing you realise is that you’ve already been awake. Your mind is trying its best to make logical sense of your situation. And of who you are, like, spiritually. How many times have you woken up? In your delirious relief, did you wish the person going in after you good luck? Oh god. Your abdomen hurts and you see blood in the cotton mesh panties. Pain and relief. You’ve never been so relieved to see blood.

You're alone. You need context. Another person to explain where in your timeline you've woken up. They have buttons in hospitals. You remember this. You find a little button with a bell on it. You hear the bell it hits in the other room when you press it. You get another pain killer. You hit the bell again, interrupting the busy staff. In and out of consciousness, it makes sense to you to ask if you can lie in a certain position. You hear the nurse amesudely relay your deliriously phrased question to his colleagues as you fade out again.

You're so young and so new at this. Just 22. And you’ve just broken up your intimate and fiery fling with an aspect of womanhood you never wanted to meet. Nurses walk by, the doctor walks by, and you wait for some kind of explanation, or maybe instructions. Of what happened or what happens next. An “everything went well”. A “wish you a good recovery”. Your fear thinks that you’re seven and waiting patiently to understand the situation while your parents tell you to quit your crying and stop asking so many questions. You are permanently young and permanently a child and you are permanently stuck in your childhood where the world was scary and confusing and you tried to make sense of it and you asked, so curiously and eager to understand, every adult who came your way, but all of them refused to explain anything.

Every passing second makes more sense than the last, and you spend every following second trying to make sense of the preceding one. And eventually you start feeling like you’re taking up a bed you don’t deserve. You’re still foggy, wobbly, weak in the knees. But you’ve overstayed your welcome, clearly. You’re being host-cold-shouldered. You can get a hint, read a hospital room. So you get dressed in the changing room. Another nurse walks by and you tag him to ask him what to do with the cotton mesh panties. He litters the answer in your direction, to keep them on under your own pair, as if this should be logical common sense to you. And then you just leave.

And then you just leave.

And for a reason, you’ll see, this crystallises as the icicle-thorn cold-shiver clear-as-war flashback-fear in your storage. You gnaw at it, but the way that pet rats gnaw at their wood houses, the way that makes as much of a dent in your own teeth as in what you’re chewing.

Then, deep into one night, when you're shivering in bed consumed by the same survival instincts that compose the screams of your night terrors, she calls out to you. 40 year old you. She was getting wine drunk, alone at home, when she stumbled across an old memory. She walks to the window, places her glass on the sill, and she says:

Hey. Kid. I know that right now it's raw and fresh. But I'm here to assure you that, in just the same way that the middle school hobby you kept secret even from yourself for so long is now just a neutral piece weaved into your quilt, what you're going through is just a part of mine. Yes, even the bit that feels like an electric storm cloud haunting your site. I feel nothing particular about any of it.

And you ask her, you cry to her for approval, why didn't they come to you? Care for you? Explain anything? You've been trying to untangle the spaghetti perception since you woke up. Rationally, you know that they were busy, they had other women to rescue. But that just slides right off your fear like a recently thawed lax fillet. You've been picking at the fog. What did you say? What did you do? That made them all no longer concerned for you?

And your 40 year old self, she says:

Oh, dear. You were young and oh so new at this, and you were drugged. There is absolutely nothing in the world you could have done wrong. Sweetheart, you must know by now, there is no right behaviour that earns you being cared for. Just like when you were fourteen and spent three days dying before your parents finally noticed and took you to the hospital. Just like when you were sixteen and taking the morning train home, accompanied only by your father's voice in your head telling you all the ways it was your fault. Just like when you were fourteen and your mom kept telling you that no the ground isn't shaking now go back to sleep, but you were acting like those WWI veterans from the videos you'd seen in class. If the people that are meant to care for you, don't, then it's they who have failed.

In just the same way your therapist taught you to reach out to your younger self, to be her guiding, assuring adult. In just the same way you once broke into tears in your bathroom telling that middle school you appealing to her future, that yes, you are living that life. You did make it. You are domestically safe, domestically loved, and doing what you love. And you are calling out to her and assuring her. That she heard you perfectly clearly. In just that same way, this older you has called out to assure you.

Your therapist kept telling you that you have to be your adult; that you have to recognise this panicked search for confirmation as the remains of your child ignorance. Until you broke down on her couch crying that you're 22! You don't know enough yet to be an adult and you've burnt yourself out trying to be. You're so fucking young and you're tired of being so much older than you're supposed to be at this age. Why the fuck won't any adult just tell you what the hell is going on?! After a silence, she defeatedly sighed that she couldn't give you an answer either.

But this drunk older you talking to herself out the window, she tells you she knows the answer. All of them, that you're flailing for. She tells you she can tell you the outcome, she knows the lesson you're about to learn, she is the fruit of the seed you are sowing. She tells you that it's a herculean task of growth you've just begun, but look at the fervour with which you are tackling it. She tells you about the strength — and not strength in the sense of that demoralising word everyone describes you with because you only know how to share your struggles with a smile on your face, but strength in the sense of heavy, sturdy, supporting weight — you gain in the way you take this on, in the way you seize the beast yourself this time, in the way you care to help you. She tells you that the way you go about healing this one becomes a major emotional muscle for who she's gotten to be.

She tells you that from now on, you do become the adult that you turn to. You're right, you don't know how yet. But she does. What you're about to learn is old knowledge to her. And because you're young and so new at this and too young to be your adult, she’ll help you out. She'll show you. She softly guides you by your shoulders and says, let's do this together, shall we?

She cruelly places you back in the corner of that recovery room. Your heart is beating at the speed of survival but you know that you have to face this straight ahead before it festers. The same way you're learning to just face the the mouldy delivery and throw it away instead of avoiding the fridge until everything goes bad. You're afraid, but she assures you that yes, while you obviously still feel that fear, she assures you that she has absolutely no bodily reaction to this memory at all.

You're sitting on that cot again. Hands firmly supporting your shoulders from behind, she leans down to your ear and tells you to look past that blinding fear. Look at the situation, properly. Think about how she would see it. She asks you, how do you think she remembers it, after all that time and healing? Just like all those guided anxiety meditations say, when you let go of the judgements in the story you've told yourself about the situation, what is the situation, really?

This was the situation, really:

You were 22, scared, confused, and vulnerable, searching for signs of comfort and finding none, until you left because it no longer felt like a safe and welcoming environment.

She makes you repeat it with her until you've memorised it.

That is the reality of the situation. That is why you feel this way. See, what we've done here is diagnose the true cause of the symptom you experience as unworthiness. Searching for quick fix approval is only going to inflame the symptoms. But now that we've identified a proper diagnosis, we can make the appropriate prognosis. What you need(ed) is comfort, safe and welcoming. And with that, we know to reach out to your friends, invite them over or stop by their place. And tell them every minutiae of what you felt and experienced in that moment. And they will care. They will care oh so much and they will love you even more with every trial that you share with them.

Being your adult does not mean being invincible. Or that you have to tend to your fears and anxieties and hurts and confusions yourself. Or that you have to swallow everything that happens to you perfectly and without being affected. Or that you can't have primal emotional reactions to things.

This is what being your adult is. You've figured out how to figure it out. Because you know, actually, that the comfort and support you sought and you seek is plentiful in your beautiful smorgasbord life of loved ones. But, the you from your future tells you, from now on the way you seek comfort is different. Where you used to search with those child-confused eyes for an answer, looking desperately to older authorities for an assessment of the situation, for instructions or validation, you now take the task on yourself. And like everything you put your mind to, you're fucking efficient at it, too.

And then the connection grows weaker. You beg her to stay, to keep guiding you, to keep explaining it, your life, to you, but she tells you she can only talk to herself while staring out a window for so long. She waves off your attempts to keep her here with a kind knowing smile. She tells you to write it down in the morning so that you don't forget it. You've not fully got the grasp of it yet, but that's alright, you're only 22. And she knows that you do get the hang of it, eventually. She takes her wine glass and fades back into her softly yellow lit living room with the wood floor and red sofa chair.

You make a mental note to yourself to get wine drunk alone at home on some evening in your early 40s and stare out the window while you talk to your 22 year old self. And you go to sleep.

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