Stuck

I fell into emotional, logistical and finally physical potholes recently. It set me back.

While voraciously reading Bruce Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey’s What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing in late May, I had the opportunity to connect with childhood versions of myself that related to the types of adverse childhood events that Oprah and other patients described in the course of the conversational narrative. I relived the emotions around abandonment, fear and anxiety I experienced as a young girl one Saturday morning after swim team practice at the local YMCA, waiting for hours while families checked in, enjoyed and checked out, only to wonder if and when my mother would have the bandwidth to collect me. That and other long forgotten events evoked by the stories and academic thinking around trauma sent me down a spiral of grief and despair for that little girl.

Shortly thereafter, I was immersed in travel to pack up my Singapore-based nephew from his New England boarding school. His parents were otherwise disposed. Appreciative of the power that having an adult show up for you can feel when you are still a developing kid, I took on the responsibility with excitement. Despite the challenge of getting to New York from California, finding a car, driving up in time to allow for a potentially many hours long pack up process in time to drive back to Staten Island to attend the local Catholic girls’ school graduation ceremony where my sister, my nephew’s mother, was delivering the keynote, I had fun. My partner and I made a little stay of it, visited a campus from his past, and found my nephew pretty much packed and ready to go when we arrived. Our drive back, though full of summertime traffic into NYC was filled with fast food, music and lots of conversation, at least until my passengers both fell asleep. My sister also did a good job with her speech.

A few weeks later, while attending the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science conference, I broke my foot. After spending a perfectly sunny beautiful day a mile high in Denver, CO, attending the Introduction to Psychedelic Neuroscience Workshop, I emerged, brain on fire. Gul Dolan, MDPhD, Manoj Doss, PhD and Frederick Barrett, PhD had presented a day’s worth of sessions highlighting current understandings of the brain and how it works, as well as along what neural circuitry and pathways MDMA, psilocybin and other psychedelics might impact. My lifelong interests in the mind, how it works, how it makes you, you and me, me along with my decades of experience in clinical medicine and drug development intersected before my eyes. My intellectual self felt at home. Mindlessly texting a friend in the psychedelic sciences field while run-walking back to my hotel room, I slipped off the sidewalk curb right into the bike lane (all the same color, giving no visual cues whatsoever, in my defense). Immediately upon trying to stand up and pretend like nothing happened, I realized that something was very wrong. Hence, the Lisfranc injury which has left me completely off my left foot, i.e. non-weight bearing, or cannot put the foot down and place any weight on it at all. It blows, although I have gained a whole new level of reverence for foot and ankle orthopedic surgeons, as well as for people who rely on mobility assist devices and the horribly crooked and pock-marked paths that we shamelessly deem good enough for the public.

All this to say, thanks for your patience with my absence while I worked to get myself un-stuck. I have had a lot going on and have been thinking of you, and all that you have been experiencing over the past month or so.

Heads up, find your joy, and ping me if you want to chat.