Cage-Free Existence

Happy Sunday,

I’m getting this out late, and Mindy has brunch plans. So, without further adieu, here’s my evolving perspective on listening to my body.

—david/gonzo

Early Childhood

Yesterday, I chatted with my folks—mostly my dad. I wanted to have them fill in some of the details about my first two years. I have many vivid memories of being three and four years old. I chalk this up to the emotional intensity of those early years and the fact that we moved so frequently; I lived in eight places before I was six. But I have only a few memories from earlier than three. I know that's early to have memories, but my desire wasn’t to confirm or fill in the blanks of what I remember. My desire in asking them to share what they recall was to try and piece together what it was like for me at those early ages—emotionally, spiritually, and somatically.

I want to know what it was like because, increasingly, I’ve felt that some of my reactions and emotional connections (triggers) predate any notion of narrative or self-concept. For contrast, I have a lot of rich memories from adolescence—some lovely, some awful—but none of them exist in a narrative-free place. I have stories I tell myself about why I felt what I felt and what it all means. They’re clean, if not always kind. There’s context, chronology, and a sense of causality. They live in a world of language.

But these other parts of me—the ones that lack form or narrative—predate everything else I feel I can place on a timeline. And that means they are the feelings and reactions I have the least perspective on addressing. They live in my fascia and my breath, not my thoughts.

When I was 11 months old we moved from a comfortable three-bedroom apartment in Gallup, NM to a dilapidated single-wide trailer behind the LDS chapel in Montezuma Creek, Utah, on the Navajo Reservation. My father was teaching religious school to high schoolers as part of the LDS Church’s Education System. At the time—late 70s—the LDS Church was at its peak in what it called the Indian Student Placement Program, a program where missionaries would baptize Native American children and place them in foster care in an effort to "gather" who the church believed to be direct descendants of the peoples written about in the Book of Mormon. One only slightly less icky part of this effort was bringing LDS religious school to High Schoolers on the rez.

As a brown man, my father was recruited by the Church Education System to teach fellow "Lamanites" and assigned to teach in Montezuma Creek. In the winter of 1978, a once-in-a-decade cold front blew in, and my mother—pregnant with my sister who would be born 18 months after me—my father, and I hunkered down in their heated waterbed. The trailer—towed in and built for a hot desert climate—lacked central heating and adequate plumbing to withstand a winter with lows of -20°F.

There’s something haunting about that sweet image. The three of us, cocooned in that heated waterbed, the only warm place in a frozen trailer, clinging to the safety of our tiny family while the cold raged just inches away. The waterbed didn’t just keep us warm—it kept us suspended. It held us when nothing else inside or outside that house could or would. That bed felt like the last barrier between survival and collapse. We weren’t sleeping. We were surviving.

The first two years of my life were spent in an environment where my parents felt very stressed—abandoned by their families, neglected by my father’s employer, deprived of basic comforts and resources, and powerless to change their situation. They were desperate and lacked the social skills to navigate their circumstances. My father shared tearfully how he wishes he’d had the assertiveness and confidence to confront those who neglected him and his young wife. When I was born, he was 28 and my mom was 21. They were trying to do something noble in a system that only offered them neglect disguised as calling.

The feeling that most describes how those early years live inside me is pain. The emotion that surfaces most readily when I tap into those years is terror. Not fear. Not anxiety. Pure, rootless terror. The kind that has no name and no source. The kind that just is.

Operating in Pure Narrative

Besides those early stresses—and, depending on the research you find persuasive, maybe because of them—my childhood had many lovely memories and moments, but a shadow was my constant companion: respiratory health and allergies. I couldn’t seem to stay healthy. I had my first bout of pneumonia when I was just five months old, suffered through bronchitis most years, and carpet-bombed my immune system with 20+ rounds of antibiotics. I experienced digestive issues that would escalate as the inflammation in my body compounded. There was never just one thing. It always felt like everything.

To deal with the barrage of discomfort, I learned to dissociate from the pain in my body and seek distractions that would engage me mentally or physically. This got easier and easier the more I developed a narrative about my existence. Unfortunately, that narrative was not loving or self-supportive. It revolved around the idea that I deserved what I was experiencing because I wasn’t doing "all the things perfectly." The narrative was a courtroom. And I was both the prosecution and the accused.

That narrative, and the coping mechanisms and maladaptive traits I developed to navigate it, peaked sometime in my late 30s and early 40s. I was high-functioning, high-achieving, and hollowed out.

I had developed an armor of “protectors” to keep me far away from the pain and terror inside me. And the narrative that I deserved how I felt—first grown from my relationship with my parents—eventually came to encompass how I felt in my relationship with Mindy. Even tenderness felt suspect, and at the root of me was the knowledge that she hated that I was an entrepreneur. So, even my career was intractably tangled in shame. What had once felt like my most instinctive, embodied way of creating value in the world also felt like a key point of disconnection—a place where I couldn’t be fully seen or fully loved without first earning her the stability and predictability she needed before she could be encouraging and love this aspect of me.

These maladaptive traits turned into a cage of my own making, where "discipline" became a euphemism for all the strict routines and rituals I needed to complete—without fail—if I was ever going to earn the love, affection, and encouragement I so deeply wanted but knew I didn’t deserve.

I had developed an entire personality built on numbing myself, and it was a cage that held me captive.

Learning to Listen

It turns out the narratives were so loud that I was missing the signals that could have freed me. Sadly, those signals came from my body—a body I mistrusted and resented for all the illness and discomfort it brought into my life. I was loyal to the mind, loyal to the structure, and utterly divorced from sensation.

Unlike the mind, the body has no words or stories, and it has very limited memory. I find it most helpful to think of my body as an animal. It communicates to my conscious mind through feelings and emotions, and it operates fully in real-time. The body speaks in only two core languages:

Pleasure and Pain.

These sensations can be physical or emotional. There are gradients, of course, but for the sake of limiting my reliance on narrative, I try to keep interpretation to a minimum. The body doesn’t need a metaphor. It just needs attention.

Because so much of my experience with uncertainty and safety triggered feelings of terror, I had manufactured a cage to protect my mind from that terror. And sadly, my body paid the price. The cage was mental. The toll was physical.

Like everyone whose body is constantly bathed in stress hormones, I was not in good physical condition. I carried 280 lbs on my six-foot frame. Most people never thought I looked that heavy, at 26% body fat, a lot of the weight was muscular bulk from a very unhealthy power-lifting obsession. My resting heart rate of 118 was in the very poor range, and my blood pressure at 210/160 put me at the extreme end of  stage 4 hypertension. I was a stroke waiting to happen and absolute certainty of a cardiac event.

Somehow, this glorious body of mine weathered that period of my life without giving out. I will forever be sorry and appreciative of my body. This sweet, soft animal of my existence, a dog beaten into submission but still willing to love me.

It is deeply sad to think that the cycle of avoiding the pain of that ever-present terror resulted in me developing an entire personality built on numbing myself—prizing constancy over connection, routine over presence.

It’s also sad, though unsurprising, that I selected a life partner whose fears and narrative so neatly dovetailed into my own. I felt undeserving of what I wanted, and she felt I was to blame for what we lacked. We operated from narrative while our bodies and lives suffered the fallout of these maladaptive strategies. We were both just trying to survive long enough to feel safe.

Blossoming

The one area where I consistently tapped into my body's feelings to guide action was my work. As a modestly successful entrepreneur, I developed skills in execution and decision-making under uncertainty. I used to tell myself that what I loved about decision-making in these conditions was that it felt like a puzzle—and I do love puzzles, especially the logic kind. I get deliciously lost in untying knots. It feels so satisfying.

But the deeper truth is that I act mostly on intuition. And I’ve come to see how closely that intuition sits beside my sexuality—that feeling of arousal and heightened awareness. I used to use the narrative of predator and prey to describe my entrepreneurial verve, but that’s a lie.

What I focus on and where I ply my talents feels more like falling in love than hunting. It’s an attunement. A noticing. A seduction of possibility.

Sure, there’s some overlap between romantic pursuit and “the hunt”. But the more I lean into the hunting narrative, the less I stay attuned to the emotions and sensations that serve me in decision-making and finding my way. The more I listen to my intuition as a sensual, emotional force, the more alive and connected I feel.

I’m learning to allow this intuition to take root deeper in my relationships. Not that I wish to pursue romantic relationships with everyone I care about—at least not in the traditional sense. But I am learning to let the feelings and emotions alive inside me guide where I pay attention and where I remain open, rather than always being wary and guarded. Intuition is what emerges when I stop rehearsing my worth.

What I’m coming to realize is that when I approach life believing I need to earn the love, affection, and encouragement I desire, I project that belief onto everyone else—and it results in a standoff. A war of attrition between deserving and denying.

As I learn to listen to my body, I can make real-time adjustments to my actions and thoughts that support me. This allows me to explore and stay open, confident that I will protect myself at the moment—no need to plan for every contingency so far in advance that I wind up back in my cage.

And this time, if the cage shows up, I know I drew it. I know its contours and materials. I know how it was built. And that means I can set it down. Or, at the very least, I can walk to its edge, take a breath, and unlock the door from the inside. I can let this lovely, loyal body—this animal that has served me so kindly all these years—step out into the sunlight. To stretch. To romp. To frolic. To feel the wind on the skin and earth underfoot. To move not just for survival but for joy.

—david/gozo

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That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.