From refusing to enter the world (the female doctor trying to deliver me had to call in a burly dude with forceps to yank me out) to some serious sexual dysfunction in my 20s that Kaiser had no idea what to do with for years (that was a festival of terrible, let me tell you) to this morning when my doctor sat staring at me for twenty minutes with a deeply confused look on her face, I’ve been baffling western medicine since 1978.
Guys, this is how I became a hippie in the first place. No one else ever knew what to do with me.
Luckily, I've always been physically healthy. Sure, inside I was a giant ball of traumatized anxiety sponging up every emotion within a three mile radius, but I figured that was normal. Mental and emotional health is so deeply tricky because no one else can see the inside of our heads, and we've always lived there so don't know anything else.
While any number of arguments could be made both for and against my mental health, I feel much better and happier than I ever have in my life and I chalk it up to being a relentless - and one could even claim obnoxious - hippie. Playing with energy healing sorted me out nicely, which is how I accidentally fell into Hippie-As-Profession. When people ask me what I do, I tend to say something like, "I just want everyone to feel better."
Which is both true and also how I end up confusing every well-meaning person who's ever asked me what I do for a living.
Now I'm just laughing in my living room because OH THIS WORLD, YOU GUYS. Do any of us know what to do with it? Even a little?
Since we don't, I think we just keep looking for our own answers, our own truth, and chalk up the days where you get a message from your doctor saying, "I think you can take care of this with an $8 over-the-counter medication, let me know if that doesn't work" as a serious win.
Especially when you spend the rest of that day cheerfully driving down the coast with the top down, eating shepherd's pie in the window seat, and reading your book in the November sun.
And if you come home to a delivery of your new Harry Potter sheets emblazoned with golden stars and owls - well that’s pretty much perfect.
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(Speaking of rampant hippie-ism and energy healing and being both confusing and confused, I did an energy healing on youtube related to all this today. :)
(Book pictured is Capital Gaines, which I loved.)