Seclusion: Part 1

Divide, Colorado

Day 1: I arrived at my pre-scouted site in Divide, Colorado in the late afternoon of May 15th. I had planned to arrive much earlier in the day, but I had dragged my feet. When it came down to it, I just didn’t want to go--I felt afraid and underprepared. After I arrived I felt a little better though; happy to be remote and off the grid again. 

I had eaten only a couple apples that day (part of the dieta recommended to me by the last shaman I worked with), so I made rice for dinner. Afterward, I lit a mugwort bundle. I offered the smoke to the spirits of the land, the plants, and my ancestors. I did a short ritual and offered prayers. By then it was cold, so I watched the eclipse from my trailer, then went to bed.

Day 2: When I awoke the next morning I felt exhausted. I spent the day fasting and only left my bed a few times. Every time I stood up I felt dizzy. I hadn’t realized when I chose this spot that it had an elevation of 9000 feet. I had also forgotten that the town I had previously lived in when I became sick has an elevation of a little over 7000 feet. For whatever reason, I had made it up in my head that all of Colorado has an elevation equivalent to that of Denver, which is 5279 feet. 

This was a serious oversight. I had come out to this location to heal my narcolepsy.  It’s a neurological disease. High altitudes have a serious impact on brain function because of the decrease in oxygen. It can also cause increased metabolism, which makes people hungrier and requires them to eat more in order to feel neutral. High altitude also has a tendency to increase fatigue. I have narcolepsy, I’m already fatigued. You know what else increases fatigue? Going off narcolepsy meds (necessary for the sake of the experiment though). None of these things worked in my favor. 

On day 3 of seclusion I spent most of the day sleeping and reading. I observed my dieta (eating apples and rice), and managed to get out of bed long enough to make offerings of sacred smoke to the land, my Goddess (that’s usually how I refer to my primary deity; she doesn’t have a name), and Cernunnos. 

Day 4 (May 18): I went to Walmart to pick up a couple things and bought a flat of mason jars while I was at it. Living in an RV somewhat inoculates you to any conflicted feelings about shopping there. They’ll let you camp in their parking lots, which is useful in a pinch. Also, I just kind of got used to it while I was in Baja, because there was one not too far from me and it was convenient (among other things it had an ATM and was next to an AutoZone).

I also stopped by Monument, which is the small town I lived in when I developed Narcolepsy. I had been there the week before to have dinner with my aunt and uncle, who moved there the same year my family left. They’ve lived there for over 20 years and love it. Despite their own progressive politics, the conservative, evangelical nature of the place doesn’t bother them. They’re Minnesotan to the core--polite, friendly, and utterly conflict avoidant. Their ability to be that way puzzles me in a way that my brain enjoys (it’s like a very interesting math problem I’m never going to solve). They’re wonderful. 

Part of my seclusion involved having as little contact with other people as possible though, so this time around I was there to visit places, not people. I took pictures of my old house and the first middle school I attended (I went to two different schools in the year and a half we lived there) so I could meditate on them later. 

My foster sister called when I was on my way back to my campsite. She was brief and business-like. She and I had talked about these check-ins prior to my sojourn. They weren’t for chatting; they were just to ensure my mental and physical safety. However, now that I was alone and off the grid, I wanted to talk. I chose my foster sister for these check-ins because she believes in what I’m doing. She understood why it was important not for me to talk to people; I was trying to keep myself clear of external influences. As such, she didn’t take the bait when I tried to be conversational. She put on her mom voice. It should be noted that my foster sister is a single mom and probably one of the best mothers in existence (she has parenting down to an art; it’s fascinating to watch). Her ability to hold healthy boundaries is formidable. She spoke to me calmly and firmly, “I’m glad you’re okay. I believe in you and that you can heal yourself. You can do this. I’m going to go now. I love you.” I held back tears and told her I love her too. 

We hung up and I let the tears fall. I examined my response to our call. My inner child felt lonely--I had a moment of connection when I really wanted it, but it was already gone again. I did some internal self-talk to soothe this part of myself. I imagined holding a younger version of myself and telling her that I love her. I tell her that I know she wants people, and I understand. It’s okay. She’s never really alone. I’m here and I’ll never leave her. Our isolation from other people is only temporary. 

Nota bene: the above are techniques that I learned from my last therapist while living in Oakland, so if they sound odd, please just know that there’s a science to the method I’m using. I’ve had a lifetime of therapy (I’m always working on myself), but it wasn’t until I started working with attachment, self-compassion, and plant spirit medicine (the first two starting in September of 2020, and the last in January of 2021) that I began to interact with myself in a truly loving way. It helps. I don’t always do it perfectly, but I love being loved by me.

The other thing I thought about after I hung up the phone that was bringing me to tears was something that I’ve been mulling over for the past couple months: how healing it is to have people you love and admire believe in you. It always shocks me a little how much this moves me and how deeply some part of me craves this. It makes me ache, but in a good way. I’m not used to it. It feels like medicine.

After I returned to my trailer, I spent a couple hours grinding reishi with my mortar and pestle to make a tincture. I also strained/finished processing a jar of rose tincture I’d been brewing for the past month. 

Day 5 (May 19): I was tired of being tired so I decided to take a microdose of LSD. LSD makes me feel very open and connected spiritually, and it also facilitates the rewiring of neural pathways, so even though it felt a bit like cheating, it also felt appropriate. I ate a mandrake truffle to see if I could contact the spirit of mandrake and do a little shadow work while I was at it. I spent most of the day wandering the forest and getting sunburnt. 

I noticed the sap was running on some of the aspens nearby, so I foraged some resin. Sap is to trees what blood is to humans; it only runs when a tree is wounded. Its job is to plug the wound and keep the tree from getting infected. Despite their notable pallor, aspen sap is bright red. It looks even more like blood once it dries. Thus, gathering the sap made me feel a little parasitic, but I was careful to only take from the runoff and not from the areas where the trees were healing. I thanked each tree and left gifts of organic tobacco (it’s common practice amongst plant spirit communicators) here and there to express my gratitude.

I did a brief healing ritual with the sun after returning to my trailer, and made a lavender tincture before bed.

Day 6 (May 20): I stopped taking the prescription GHB I use to manage my narcolepsy on Day 1. GHB takes 5 days to clear the system, so on the sixth day, I was clean. To my way of thinking, the real work could now begin. My body could once more become aware of the dysfunction in my hypothalamus (the part of the brain that is damaged in people with narcolepsy), and hopefully this would allow me to more easily target it.

As a result of having Type 1 narcolepsy, I am completely dependent on GHB. My brain doesn’t produce the chemical that would allow it to move through my sleep cycles effectively, so I take GHB three times a night to ensure that it does. Without it, I can sleep for 20 hours and wake up feeling as though I’d never slept at all. Historically, if I do not take it I become very physically and mentally ill. My usually robust immune system tanks, I hallucinate at night and when I nap, wake myself up multiple times a night because I’m talking in my sleep, have vivid nightmares, can’t drive, can’t work, can’t focus, experience more frequent and severe cataplexy (temporary paralysis; it’s mostly harmless, albeit awkward and kind of annoying), am hyperemotional, sleep 12-15 hours a day, and am so exhausted that it actually hurts to be awake. Usually while in this state I avoid human contact as much as possible. People don’t need to be around the somewhat pathetic creature I become, and frankly I’d rather not be seen that way. Much of the way I’ve been living my life for the past 18 years (since I started taking medication consistently) has revolved around ensuring that I have access to prescription GHB. 

However, all of this changed while I was in Baja (more on that later), so much so that this time around I was not at all intimidated by going off my meds. I was looking forward to it, and hoping that the combination of being off meds, fasting, doing ritual and shadow work, engaging in neuro-focused meditation/visualizations, and exploring the spiritual origins of my illness would allow my brain to heal itself.

On this particular day, I’d run out of toilet paper, so I had to go into town again. This was unfortunate as there was a serious snow storm and several feet of snow already on the ground. I am not accustomed to driving in snow, let alone on unpaved, deeply rutted backcountry roads. I got stuck twice. Once on my way into town (for over an hour) and once on my way back to the trailer (for 30-45 minutes). Fortunately, my truck Lancelot and I travel with a shovel, boards, and the expectation that things often go awry when pursuing adventure, which kept me in good spirits despite having to dig him out of mud and snow, and losing control multiple times. 

I fasted all day and made a skullcap tincture before going to bed.

Day 7: By this time I was a little frustrated. From the moment I entered Colorado, I began to purge emotionally (tons of crying), but since I entered seclusion, all the intensity had faded away. My excessive emotionality had disappeared; it was like I just couldn’t access it anymore. I felt like I wasn’t getting any real work done, and I was annoyed.

Due to my fatigue and the cold (the snow was still very much present), I was barely doing ritual.

I was also distracted. I was getting lost in daydreams of what things could be like when I left seclusion and went to California. Maybe my manifesting efforts would work, maybe I’d finally find a partner and an equal to travel with... There are always dudes sniffing around me, but the truth is there are very few people I’d want to partner with. Many people in my position would just settle to avoid being alone, but I don’t know how to settle. I can’t abide placeholders. I need to be with someone who, among other things, is strong-willed, tenacious, and very physically hardy. I’ve always known that my life would get less luxurious and more physically arduous (even though I wasn’t always sure what that would look like)—as far as I’m concerned, the way I’m living now is just the beginning.

At some point, I might want to live off the land in the Amazon and learn from primal peoples. I plan to keep exploring my depths and searching for alternative methods of healing. I want to climb mountains, go backpacking, sail around the world (been thinking about getting my captain’s license for years), and become a certified wilderness EMT so I can use it to further my ability to become a backcountry witch doctor. I’m rambling now, but these are the kinds of things I was thinking about. I just want to be with someone who’s down for anything and wants to grow and build things with me... Who thinks we’ll be stronger together and wants to hold my hand while we build both his dreams and mine... Is that so much to ask? Okay, fine. It’s a lot. Whatever. I still want it and I have every intention of finding it.

Anyway, at this point, I was starting to lose steam in terms of my experiment, but it did finally occur to me that the intermittent fasting was part of the problem. It was making me feel numb, and instead of amplifying me spiritually, it was doing the opposite.

It makes sense. I was anorexic from ages 12 to 16. Although I started watching my weight when I was 10 years old (for no real reason since I was too athletic to have any extra weight on me), it was during the time I lived in Colorado that my obsession with my weight really took off. It was a way to feel in control, superior (other people needed food, but I “didn’t”), and to numb myself emotionally. Thus, it’s not that surprising that my body couldn’t use fasting as a healing method. My body doesn’t know the difference between compulsive food restriction and fasting. It interprets being deprived of food as a punishment, and a separation of self. So ultimately, I had to give up fasting, which was a bummer.

For people who are not me, fasting is an excellent healing method. It’s also been shown to increase hypocretin (the chemical people with narcolepsy lack) in the brains of people with narcolepsy. This effect does seem to diminish once said individuals begin eating again, but I think combining fasting and neuro-visualization techniques could be used to sustain the aforementioned hypocretin-producing effects if used strategically (it’s a theory I have and something I was planning to test on myself).

That night my trailer batteries died. Due to the snow and checking my battery levels throughout the day, I knew this was a possibility. I spent several hours sitting in my truck with the motor running in an attempt to charge the portable battery box that lives in my backseat, but after a couple hours and still no full charge, I gave up. I went back into my trailer and put on several extra layers of clothing.

It was 20 degrees outside and I had no heat for the night. The human body can freeze to death at any temperature below 32 degrees fahrenheit.

I chuckled to myself a little and thought, Hopefully, I survive the night… And this will make a good story later.

Then I went to bed.