Wave walker

Me on Crete, Greece, in the summer of 2000

The year is 2000 and I’m standing on a rocky patch of coast line on the island of Crete, Greece, my hands held up in a prayer-like position while watching the waves come in. I am trying to talk to the ocean. I know I can’t control it, though, so I surrender to what’s coming. The bigger waves often reach me but never engulf me fully. I feel alive.

My fascination with raw natural phenomena has been unbroken since. Any given thunderstorm, you will find me close to a window to observe. When I listen to the rumble in the distance and count the seconds to assess how close it is, I remember everything we learned in school about electricity and discharge and how you should never be the highest point when lightning strikes, but I also can’t help but feel a certain magic. The magic of being part of something greater that, no matter how much we try to explain it, predict it, tame it, will always be bigger than us. Surrendering to this kind of higher power, willingly, has often brought me peace.

Surrender is not the mindset of the 21st century. Everything is a proclaimed fight these days - the fight against cancer, the fight for justice, the fight against (insert political spectrum here), the fight for attention online. The tool to win the fight is, always, science. The more you know, the more you can control. And so we build weapons based on the latest findings about explosives, we fight signs of aging based on the latest studies about collagen and we even control where and when it rains to maximize grape harvest, for instance in my home county of Baden-Württemberg.

Omniscience and omnipotence is the idea. Who wouldn’t want to know everything and control all outcomes? To make up for the insult that life seems to inevitably come with some sort of suffering along the way, us stubborn humans have developed this urge to quick-fix everything we don’t like (some of which was caused by us in the first place). Science, as in, the methodical pursuit of answers to all kinds of questions of the natural world, isn’t just our way of dealing with our insatiable curiosity, it is a means of conquest, the faster, the better.

A conquest I loved as a teen. I was obsessed with textbook knowledge and I looked down upon people who chose to believe instead of know. I even tried to eliminate the word ‘believe’ from my language for a few years, as is documented in my diaries. To be consistent with this idea of myself as a woman of science, I had to suppress any spiritual tendencies I found in myself. No talking to the sea, no indulgence in phenomena like intuition or trust - I replaced them with calculations of probability.

There was a reason for my rigidity. Actually, there were a few. First of all, autism. Autism loves structure like this. But also, and this is related to neurodivergence, my body was sensitive to a lot of things and I was trying to find out what was ‘wrong’ with me, thinking that the more I knew about micronutrients and bone structure and all of that, the more likely it was I was going to find a way to make life hurt less.

As anyone who knows me well can attest to, I’ve been known for living in the extremes, so it’s not a surprise that I took ‘follow the science’ to an almost unreasonable level. I would make the scientific case for veganism over lunch at uni and I would refuse to attend someone’s church wedding because I didn’t want to ‘support’ anything remotely related to any kind of god. At some point, I calculated how many grams of my favorite vegetables I would have to eat in a day to exactly meet my need of calcium. Carrying those things out was impracticable so I didn’t become fully orthorexic, but I was determined to optimize anything I came across in my life, using all the textbook knowledge I could gather.

Despite all my attempts of controlling things however, mind over matter, I never reached my goal. My gut pain, endo pain, nausea, panic, back pain, skin condition, all of that never went away permanently through any of my personal clinical trials with supplements, diets, rigid lifestyle changes or forced mindsets. And even though I was trying to talk myself out of ‘destructive’ and ‘unnecessary’ feelings like grief and sadness, which I often saw as a sign of weakness, I wasn’t really reaching my goal of ‘guaranteed eternal happiness’ either. All my struggles had made me very resilient, and I sometimes mistook that for the ευδαιμονία I was after. Yet deep down I hadn’t found my answers so I kept, as they say in trauma therapy, ‘rushing nowhere’.

But I also kept enjoying thunderstorms somehow. I kept having dreams of flying and floating. I kept having encounters with people who were wiser than me and farther ahead in life who encouraged me to soften. To, just like in a thunderstorm, surrender to what’s there because fighting it is pointless. And slowly, over time, I followed their advice.

There was one pivotal moment that made me begin to open up and exert less control. I might have talked about it on here but in case I haven’t, here it goes. Twenty two years after I was standing on the rocks in Greece and feeling the waves come in, I entered a small church on a hill in the Black Forest. I had just had my hysterectomy a few weeks prior and I had booked a few days away for myself, quite spontaneously. It was hot outside, well over thirty degrees, and yet, I spent every day hiking or riding the bike. The destination of the day had been this chapel in the woods, as I was pretty sure no one would really be here in the heat around noon. And sure enough, despite the priest’s car outside (he lived on the premises, there was a house and a little garden), I was by myself. I was as atheist as I could be (Richard Dawkins paled in comparison) but I loved architecture, the space was cool and there was faint choir music playing on the speakers as I got in. I felt welcomed.

After the surgery, the experience of a second chance at adulthood with a lot less pain had made me open up to feelings I had yet to explore, and this was the place for it. As I was walking around the church, I noticed a pin board close to the altar. People could write their wishes for god and others could pray for them. I stepped closer and was soon weeping. ‘Dear god, please help my wife get better, I can’t imagine a life without her’. ‘Dear god, I hope you can do something for my nephew, who’s taken to drugs. We all worry for him.’ ‘Dear god, I miss my brother’ (obviously written by a young kid). ‘Dear god, please take me to you. I can’t go on anymore.’ Even today, remembering all these notes brings tears to my eyes. It wasn’t just sadness that I was feeling, though. It was compassion, understanding, and an overpowering sense of belonging, all of a sudden. Not to the Catholic church, not to any particular faith (I still don’t believe in a specific god), but to something we all shared.

I left my own note and sat on the bench in the first row for a long time, listening to the music, and without thinking about it too much, I raised my hands in a prayer-like fashion, and just like twenty two years prior, I let the waves come in. It had been a long time.

Surrendering is scary, especially when we’re not taught how. This society holds the firm conviction that with enough knowledge, we can brute force our way out of everything. And it actually does work for some things. But it doesn’t work for happiness and what’s beneath. We can set a bone surgically, but we can’t set a soul. In an attempt of trying to patch myself up, I had hardened against the world, and as I was overriding intuition with conscious control, I wasn’t making myself better. I didn’t even give myself the space to figure out what was going on inside of me. Every ailment, big or small, was treated with individual material solutions to the point where life became overwhelmingly complex - in 2012, for instance, I was following multiple different diets at once in an attempt to ‘fix’ my digestion, which made it absolutely impossible to eat anywhere except home, and the food sucked and I was scared and pretty depressed all the time.

When we’re not used to giving in, we sometimes believe that whatever it is we’re about to let in will stay here forever, unaltered. That it’s going to crush us. We don’t even know how strong we are because we’ve made it a habit to micromanage everything. So what if we don’t? The wave that’s coming on looks like the last thing we’re going to see, but in reality, it’s just another wave, it comes and goes and with enough practice, we can even ride it. What we cannot do is make it stop. And the sense of peace that comes with accepting exactly this is what I reconnected with the last few years.

There’s a lot of confusion about acceptance, and it probably deserves its own blog post to explain it further. For me, ultimately, it means that many things, emotions, events you simply cannot escape, and getting caught up in the attempt to do so regardless causes more damage. So just let the natural cycles complete themselves.

And interestingly, through that, I got better. I became a full person again. I let be what needed to be. Unprocessed emotions, for example (yes, grief is necessary, just saying). I allowed my body to deal with things in its own time. I went to trauma therapy (which really is one big wave-riding exercise). And magic came back to my life. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. The point of my shift was not to become anti-science or anti-anything, which is just another fight. The point was to integrate. We are both, mind and psyche, and my curiosity which had been fixated on physics and astronomy now extents to what’s going on in my body spiritually and emotionally, and let me tell you, this field is just as large and full of surprises. And somehow, along the way, I found the peace again I was feeling when I was so young and staring at the ocean, knowing it was much bigger than I could ever be. My body doesn’t hurt regularly anymore. I feel what needs to be felt. I can trust myself again. It’s been about nine months since my recovery from ME/CFS and a lifetime of various strange conditions that affect the sensitive. I am well. More soon.

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