Like virtually everyone, I faced some early childhood trauma: born into a religious cult, parents divorced when I was only two, lots of moving around the country. On the spectrum of traumas, it was hardly unique, nor particularly extreme, just some stuff I would need to integrate and work through. At age 13, my mother sought out a counselor for me to do just that. There, I received the message that I was a troubled teen, and some things I conveyed to the counselor were then passed on to my mom, whose reaction magnified my shame and self-hatred. I began cutting myself after some early sexual experiences that didn’t match my self-image as a pure-hearted Christian girl. I made it to college, where exposure to all sorts of substances, characters, and behaviors ill-suited to such a Christian girl, deep in the throes of cognitive dissonance, made cutting and now abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs my go-to coping strategy. I continued to do talk therapy at college, where the therapist told me, “Since cutting is working for you as a coping mechanism, I don’t think you need to stop.” He didn’t say it ironically.

By sophomore year, the cutting and Xanax and alcohol abuse weren’t enough self-punishment for the ways that I’d fallen short as a person. At the height of my shame, I attempted suicide, but failed. My parents were alerted, and I was taken out of college and put in psychiatric evaluation. Bless my parents for attempting to help me, but they couldn’t afford the in-patient care my doctors recommended. They were told I needed round-the-clock supervision, group and individual therapy, and medication to treat my bipolar disorder. I was given lithium and Seroquel to treat the emergent symptoms.

I’m glad my parents couldn’t afford the recommended level of institutionalization, but I look back on what happened next and feel tension overtake me, even 20 years later. The Seroquel I was on made me sleep for days. I woke up from stints not sure of where I was or how long I’d been out. Since my parents couldn’t very well have me at home all day while they worked, I got a job at a coffee shop, and had to stop the Seroquel to be able to make it into the café at 4:30 AM. I was manic again as soon as I stopped the antipsychotic, and as depressed as ever on lithium, looking at the failure I’d made of my life at the ripe age of 19.

I had weekly therapy with a student therapist who diagnosed me with several disorders in addition to the bipolar, encouraging me to see myself as a borderline personality disordered person, a PTSD survivor, who would never form relationships and was pathologically manipulative in addition to being chronically depressed and anxious. He also all but diagnosed my parents as narcissistic, histrionic, and abusive, which didn’t help my paranoia and anger toward them. I went to my pediatrician and was prescribed Paxil, a drug which I came to find out has a side effect of increased mania and suicidality. The mania increased, and with it, a complete disregard for my own safety. Risk aversion was gone—I once tried to scale a bridge in Converse tennis shoes and a mini skirt. I stopped a boy my age skateboarding through a crosswalk and propositioned him for sex. I did drugs and woke up next to men twice or more my age, in neighborhoods I didn’t recognize. I never slept unless I was on Lunesta, then when I learned that was dependency-forming, I replaced it with Ambien (also dependency-forming). My behavior brought me into orbit with shady characters, and the shame-inducing sexual violence and drug use only escalated. I went off Paxil without tapering or telling any of my doctors. I left therapy and group therapy and got a prescription for Lamictal. The sleepless nights and bouts of mania became a part of my identity (I’m cute Ernest Hemingway!), and while I found enough stability to not entirely self-destruct, I was still self-medicating with drugs and self-harm.

While age mellowed me and wisened me up some, years still passed in this unstable state, always in and out of therapy, with therapists who seemed absolutely horrified listening to stories from my childhood. There was a dissonance here, as I was mostly a happy child, those traumas notwithstanding, but now I was learning to rewrite my youth as characterized by deep, intractable wounds, with still more repressed pain that would need to be uncovered and given voice if I were to get to the root of my depression, mania, inability to form relationships, addiction to self-destructive behavior, etc. But “getting to the root” wasn’t intended to heal, as the sickness was also incurable.

At 27, my nurse practitioner, in the course of an unrelated appointment, suggested I double my Lamictal dose, as it wasn’t therapeutic level in her words. I remember this prescription-doubling felt deeply validating: my ongoing struggles with anxiety, depression, and self-harm must have been because of my brain chemical deficiencies. I wept with gratitude in the free clinic because someone was finally taking the time to see my problems. My identity as a sick person was fully cemented at this point. And this agreement with my diagnoses, this full acceptance that I needed medication to live a normal life the way other people could, turned out to be a “gateway drug” to all sorts of medication, not just psychiatric.

After I got the therapeutic dose of Lamictal at the free clinic, I had an IUD installed, which I’m convinced contributed to me developing rheumatoid arthritis and three other autoimmune diseases. The same year, I also had an elective tonsillectomy (also associated with autoimmunity) to prevent strep throat recurrences. The rheumatoid arthritis had me in doctors’ offices monthly, getting blood work and X-rays quarterly, and taking steroids, biologics, DMARDs, and supplements. Just as in my mental health journey, medications were added or taken away as I continued to report my symptoms and side effects to a team of specialists. These medications allowed me to live mostly normally, with some symptom flares, but I identified as disabled. As chronically ill. The bipolar disorder, anxiety, and insomnia were just the longest-running chronic illnesses in my unique constellation of conditions.

From a girl who was born in her mother’s bed and never had more than a couple antibiotics as a child, to a woman on multiple daily, long-term medications, I didn’t once question the radical changes I’d undergone or wonder if they were in integrity for me.

By this point, I was only 30 years old, and convinced that I was sick, and that my life would always be abnormal, constrained in ways that others’ lives would never be. And yet, thankfully, I had questioned and begun to address the self-harming behaviors I’d cultivated over the years and the shame that lay beneath them. I began to see my responsibility in a lot of what I’d been through—my choices had exposed me to harm, and while it wasn’t my fault that I had been abused or exploited in various ways going all the way back to my childhood in an extremist religion, nevertheless I could recognize where I had abandoned myself, participated in my own degradation, harmed myself with drugs, alcohol, burning, and cutting. Was my erratic and self-hating behavior actually the cause of much of my depression and anxiety rather than its symptom? Was my brain congenitally defective, or had I developed all of these negative behaviors out of self-protection? Was I anxious because I never forgave my parents for my early childhood struggles, never forgave myself for not being a perfect Christian girl, never forgave the world for not being linear and structured, when that was what I needed most? Where grace and acceptance may have been, in their place I created a belief system where trauma would need to be accounted for and processed under the guidance of trained professionals for the rest of my life.

Psychedelics like acid and mushrooms were a big help for me in becoming aware of my patterns and learning to see my part in the life I’d created. I had gotten into taking them not for self-improvement, but because I loved drugs and getting fucked up. Increased consciousness was an unexpected side benefit. I “felt called,” as the psychonauts say, to work with grandmother ayahuasca, the penultimate psychedelic, to see if she could help me to understand the origin of my rheumatoid arthritis. DMT (the active ingredient) is dangerous, occasionally lethal, to combine with SSRIs and other psych meds. And so I began a taper from my psych drugs so I could go and get as high as any human being on Earth has ever been. The irony of releasing a 10-year drug dependency so that I could go get high on other drugs wasn’t lost on me. In the early 2000s, psych drugs were quite fashionable. Twenty years later, psychedelics are back in. Something that I’ve observed is that individuals in the psychedelic community are at risk of outsourcing their personal healing authority not so differently from the way most people engage with psychiatry: not to the degree-carrying guy in the white coat, but to the shaman with the skin drum. This time, I would listen to my own inner voice.

I didn’t discover the origin of my rheumatoid arthritis during my ayahuasca experiences (that would actually come to me in a dream many years later), but I also stayed off psych meds and never felt tempted to get back on them. After a few years of releasing the identity of “mental illness,” I realized I really wanted to be free of all illness, and the prison of doctor’s appointments, medications, and insurance claims that went with it. And so, just as my psychiatrization had been the gateway drug to disease identity and medicalization, it became the inspiration for me to taper off my collection of autoimmune drugs. If the incurable disease of bipolar disorder could be so thoroughly healed, why not rheumatoid arthritis?

At the risk of making a long story longer, I’ll say it began with a New Year’s prayer. Recognizing that God had blessed me with life, I realized that I could choose to be grateful for this life, joyful even, in spite of my suffering. I knew the pain would return when I quit the drugs, as it had whenever I’d tried to stop them in the past. And instead of being in resistance to that, I decided that it would be the greatest adventure of my life. My healing path would be my Odyssey, my knight’s quest, and I would allow it to take me all over the world learning from different spiritual traditions, working with different healers, and trying different alternative medicines. And if I never “got better,” I would be happy as often as possible, knowing that I was making the absolute most of my life. I wouldn’t let my gratitude for life be conditional on whether life was sufficiently pain-free.

In that spirit of adventure and curiosity, I undertook diets like keto, carnivore, autoimmune protocol, and ayurveda. I added supplements like collagen, magnesium, and L-Theanine. I washed down an ounce of raw beef liver with a liter of bitter herbal infusion every day. At one point I was even drinking chlorine dioxide solution (which tastes like drinking pool water) every hour on the hour. Every day when I woke up, I would look at my naked body in a mirror, imagining it clothed in glowing white cloth, and I would repeat affirmations about how I love my body just as it is. Every evening, I would microwave my body in an infrared sack. I hypnotized myself twice a day, repeating affirmations of health and ease. I attended rituals, learned qi gong, went to the ocean and let the sand hold my tears.

A lot of these things seemed to do nothing, and some of them seemed to help with one or two symptoms, but I think perhaps what has helped me the most in becoming free of dependency on either drugs or outside authority figures has been rewriting the story of religious trauma. I now have complete trust that everything I went through in the past was for my evolution as a person; I have faith that God has a plan for me, and these symptoms and sicknesses were the perfect catalyst to refine the gifts I now have the chance to share with the world.

After a few years, I’m overjoyed to be able to say I don’t take any drugs, and I have no symptoms. I don’t think of hurting or drugging myself even when dealing with difficult times. When I get sick, I take it as a temporary response to environmental stress, and never get attached to the idea that I’m broken or deficient or ill. I trust that I have an inner wisdom that guides me to know what and who is medicine for me. I don’t meet any diagnostic criteria for any disorders or syndromes, but I wouldn’t let anyone assess me or label me even if things were to change. I’m grateful to pain and illness: depression, mania, autoimmunity, and whatever comes in the future, for showing me the path to freedom.