When sickness is really an identity-death

It felt like a death. Throbbing in my bone marrow. Muscle aches crying their own tears. Cold chills and night sweats.

Parts of myself that had been frozen in time were unthawing … dripping from my body, soaking through my pajamas, being coughed up and out. Leaving me. 

I was becoming a different person -  someone who understands this paradox: 

Intensity is a sign of HEALING. Not of coming down with sickness, but rising up from it. 

Intensity is what happens when the long hidden parts of ourselves bubble to the surface. Some call these parts of self “symptoms.” I call them messengers. 

I awoke in the middle of the night to change out of my sweat soaked clothes. That’s when my symptom-messengers told me this: 

“Be willing to let go. You don’t need to live this old identity anymore. It’s over. If you want it to be.”

A Dark Night of the Soul

Everyone of us has developed an identity around some feeling of unworthiness that we’ve carried for decades. For most of our lives that subconscious feeling rules us - causing us to avoid our fears, give away all of our energy, and abandon our own voice and creativity in pursuit of some lesser reward from the outside world.

But then one lonely night, when we find ourselves sweating through our sheets and tossing in bed, when we’re too fatigued to face the outside world, a physical suffering will force us to lie there and consider our lives. Who we are. Why we are. And what our place is in the world…

Most people will resist these symptoms and reach for the Nyquil. A rare few will surrender to them, and listen to the stories unraveling from the aches and pains.

After a week of my unrelenting symptom-messengers, the intensity amplified. I bent over to pick up a bag, and shooting pain dispersed throughout my back. I stood up to find that I was unable to turn my head left or right. Walking was agonizing. I was immobilized.

I laid down in bed and asked the sensations to show me what they had to share. 

Images and memories flooded through me. I was 16, lying in bed with temporary paralysis from the shock of being targeted by my mentally ill guardian who was struggling with a drug habit. She had a proclivity for shading my light, and making me feel guilty and ashamed for being myself. Her attacks and mental meltdowns eventually led to me bouncing between homes in my final year of high school. I felt out of place everywhere I went. I always felt like I needed to be quiet so as not to be a nuisance in someone else’s space. Voiceless… or otherwise guilty for using my voice. This feeling became my identity, and I split off from who I was born to be.

In a grand apology for being myself, I chose to become an over-giving helper in the world. I believed my presence was not valued otherwise.

But in that decision, I lost even more of myself. I allowed myself to be used and abused. By my corporate employers, by co-dependent friends, by narcissistic partners.

My life flashed before me as I laid in bed sick and suffering, watching the scenes and emotions of my past move through my psyche and body. I allowed them to rise and fall until I felt empty of them. 

For the next few days, I experienced intense vertigo. Walking a straight line was impossible. And yet, I had all of these new feelings moving through me…

Amazement over the psyche-body connection. Astonishment over how our Creator designed us such that our physical symptoms signal a psychologic conflict, and that if we’re present enough with ourselves, we can shed the identities we’ve built around past pain.

We can die … and be reborn

I felt this surge of creative energy moving through my core. I was excited to write again. To share more vulnerably than I ever have with an audience. To reclaim my voice … and, for the first time in my life, do it without any fear of being shot down, and most of all, without any guilt or shame over sharing my inner self with the outside world.

In that moment of self-reclamation, my vertigo intensified into extreme dizziness. The room started spinning. I was sure I was going to vomit. But instead, my body temperature skyrocketed, and I began dripping sweat … droplets of old me raining from my body, cleansing the psychologic damage that was no longer mine to keep. My mind worried that these symptoms were a bad thing, and that I was “getting worse.” But my heart knew differently. 

An inner voice whispered, “This is the old identity leaving. You’ll feel better soon.” I laid down and received this message, delivered to me from an unseen and loving source:

“Nothing is wrong. This is happening for your highest good. Trust the process … Nothing is wrong. This is happening for your highest good. Trust the process… Nothing is wro—” 

I awoke lying in the sun, feeling better than I had in months. And most of all, I could tell that I’d shed this old trauma imprint, this fear around bearing my inner world with the outer world, and doing the thing that feels most natural to me, the thing that I feel dead on the inside if I don’t do: WRITE.

Higher highs and lower lows

After an identity-death and rebirth, we experience higher highs and lower lows.

The lows come when something in the outside world re-pokes that old wound. Like when a friend judges you for using your voice, and it reminds you of being silenced throughout your childhood.

But we have a choice whether to pick up the old pain and re-enliven that identity. Or we can choose to nurture the reborn self, by letting it speak, share, create, set a boundary, walk away from a relationship, start a new one, move deeper into love… or whatever it is that unworthiness held you back from. 

If you can recognize the low as just a deeper layer of your pain dissolving, you’re gonna be just fine. But also - don’t be too proud or averse to support. Mentors, therapists, and teachers can help you find the perseverance and inspiration to move through these experiences and come out on the other side.

In the meantime, remember this:

Intensity is a sign of HEALING. Not of coming down with sickness, but rising up from it.

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