Here’s what you can expect for the next 36 hours: I will liveblog my bitterness, angst and fear.
I spoke with the hospital this morning and the surgery has been scheduled for Thursday at 7AM. And I have to admit: I am deeply afraid. It is one of those unreasonable fears that paralyze me, leave me at the brink of tears and somehow wondering if “this is it”. Sure, for many (especially folks suffering from long term illnesses and people who have had to undergo frequent surgical procedures), I will come out as a whiny, narcissistic idiot. But I cannot help the fear.
It is not so much the fear of losing consciousness. As a long time psychedelic dweller, I am a veteran in the subject of losing consciousness. Once I lost the consciousness of this reality, I also opened myself to the myriad other forms of consciousness that inhabit me and my universe. It was my “losing consciousness” that allowed me to open up to the consciousness of others. So I am not afraid of that. I am mostly afraid of uncertainty and the “what ifs”. What if I never wake up from anesthesia, what if they detect a terrible disease, what if this is “it” and all the hopes I have been secretly harboring are never going to materialize (those hopes and dreams I never talk about because a) I am afraid I will be seen as a fool for dreaming “big” and b) because so many of them are indeed foolish and I suspect they would reflect poorly on me because who the fuck do I think I am to believe I could make these things happen?).
Probably, the fact that I do not believe in “God” in the traditional sense doesn’t help my case either. If there is any approximation I can rationalize to the type of God I believe in, it would be the Hindu concept of Brahman. A god that is not a god, but the sum of the consciousness of everything that exists (and doesn’t exist). Not an omnipotent being that dictates fate and morality, but the sum of our universes. It was this idea of god that led me to change when I was a privileged girl attending the most expensive school in town. It was the realization that there was no “me” and “them” but that there would not be a “me” without “them”. It was the work I did with elders from the Shuar Nation (from the Amazon in Ecuador) that healed my terribly partial vision of the world. It was that one night in the company of the most powerful woman I ever met, Norma Panduro Navarro, an elder from the Shipibo Nation from the Peruvian Amazon that made me “loose consciousness”. And I am grateful for those moment. But today I am afraid. And somehow regretful.
I regret that I took this long to see what I wanted to achieve. I regret that I didn’t start earlier than I did and that, even though I push forty, I still feel like I am twenty. But I cannot change that now. So, all I have left is hope for the best and wish that maybe, this one time, it will all go well.
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