Chapter 5: The Menu, the Cage & the Pills

June 2012 – June 2013
Austin, Texas

About a month after my father died, I vividly recall sitting on a barstool drinking a cup of coffee in Brian’s and my home, the one we had moved into on our first wedding anniversary. My elbows were resting on the granite countertops. I looked around the room at the perfect Austin home and into our backyard bordering Shoal Creek, which runs through the city. Anyone I knew at that time would have killed to live here, including me two years prior. I should be grateful and shut up, I told myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a stranger in my own home.

It wasn’t just the home that felt foreign; it was the whole life—the one I had chosen, the one I had thought I wanted to live. I walked through the long hallway of the house into the master bedroom and then through the master bathroom and into my closet. I skimmed my fingers along all the beautiful clothes lining my closet walls. Even my clothes did not feel like they belonged to me. This was not me. None of this. Not the husband. Not the house. Not the job. I felt like a stranger in my own life.

I looked down at the diamond that overwhelmed my left ring finger, and I wondered, “How did I get here? Why did I choose this, and why does it feel like someone else’s life? Is this not what I wanted?” And, better yet, how was I going to get myself out of here? I was overwhelmed and terrified of the changes occurring inside me. My human stressed that if we were not going to live here and be with Brian, what were we going to do? What was the plan?

***

Brian and I had met for the first time on one of the coldest nights in Austin. It was December 9, 2005, shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday. I was wearing cheap jeans, heels from Payless, a black shirt, and a rainbow-striped scarf that had cost me $1.99 from Forever 21. I worked as a newspaper reporter for thirteen dollars per hour after being let go from the state senator’s office while waiting to see if I was going to be accepted to graduate school at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. I’d covered the cheap outfit with a nice black pea coat I had purchased, a huge splurge at ninety-nine dollars on discount, for an impending trip to New York City to see a girlfriend.

When I walked into the Italian restaurant my date had chosen over e-mail, I told the hostess I was looking for a man named Brian. She pointed me in his direction, and I wove through the crowd, full of nerves. He was sipping a glass of red wine, and I noticed a nice bottle of Pinot Noir sitting next to it. He had beautiful green eyes and dark, curly hair, just long enough to rest on the back of the collar of his cream-colored sweater. His eyes were kind and his touch gentle. Brian exuded the rugged good looks of a bearded REI model. I remember thinking, “Wow, he is stunning!”

Brian had saved me a seat at the bar and an empty glass, which he promptly began to fill like a French waiter—to the curve and with a twist of the bottle at the end to prevent a spill. We had met on Match, a dating site I had signed up for when I had been laid off from my position as the press secretary for a state senator. That same week, I’d found out I had a cyst in my left ovary threatening to blow itself up. As a result, I had begun to think about kids as the threat of infertility loomed. Months had passed. I went on crappy date after crappy date. This man was different. I knew instantly I had known him before—his soul, not in this body. The familiarity comforted me, and conversation flowed easily. I had not yet learned about karmic relationships.

Brian ordered the veal. I had the fish. We laughed and chatted while he sipped an after-meal cappuccino. At the end of the date, we walked out to his car, a black BMW he had purchased when the start-up company he worked for was acquired—something he would do over and over again, building wealth and his name in the start-up software world. He hugged me respectfully and made plans quickly to see me again.

Brian and I stepped on the fast track. We were seeing each other all the time, even traveling together to Spain. I moved in eight short months later, right before I started graduate school. But I knew something was off. It was a gut feeling, and it was confirmed by the voice—the same one that had told me my dad would die and that I was going to go to jail if I didn’t do something soon.

One day before I moved in, we were kissing on his couch. The voice came in loud and clear once more: “He’s manipulating you!”

“Wow! I must really be losing my mind,” I thought, and like the times before and after, I buried the words, but the voice had been clear and direct. After we had been living together for about two years, a deep feeling arose in my gut that said I needed to get out of the relationship. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being controlled from behind the scenes. It was too intense to ignore. I tried my best to leave. Found an apartment. Told Brian I was leaving. But he talked me back into staying, like he would the first and second times I tried to leave our marriage. Instead, his grip on me became even tighter, and he proposed to me right before Christmas in 2009 at the same restaurant where we had first met.

I said yes. This was what I was supposed to do next. That was what people did after graduate school and landing their first big job. I was supposed to get married to an attractive businessman who liked to travel, a man who would take care of me, who wanted a weekend home on the lake. Then I was supposed to produce an heir. Brian fit seamlessly into the check mark on the list society had handed me when I moved out of my parents’ house at the age of seventeen. He was not perfect. No one was, I told myself, and I loved him in the best way I knew how to at the time—a time when I did not even know how to love myself.

I had at least a dozen friends who cried themselves to sleep because they couldn’t find a husband. At the time I began dating Brian, I lived with a woman six years my senior. At thirty-one, she had become the old maid. She even had the two cats to prove it. She would come home from date after date, crying, claiming, “I am never going to get married!” And the thought of turning into her terrified me. I had no idea other options existed.

We live in a world where freedom and choice are illusions. We are told we can grow up to be anything we want to be, marry whomever we want to marry. We can have anything off the menu put in front of us, but you couldn’t order off the menu. The option to not get married and to forgo children did not appear on the menu. That wasn’t something you would choose; that’s where you ended up if you lost the game. Those kinds of women were pitied and labeled as damaged goods. It wasn’t as pronounced as it had been in the 1950s, but the taboo still existed all around me.

According to society, I was one of the lucky ones. The menu handed to me was one of a Michelin-star restaurant. Marriage afforded me the opportunity to live in an impressive cage—one I could decorate in any way I wanted to. I was given a fat diamond ring as a consolation prize and financial security. As a wife, I felt like an attraction at the zoo, an exotic animal. It was a picture-perfect life as long as you stayed in the cage and behaved, as long as you were pretty and smart, as long as you birthed some beautiful children to seal the deal.

I know many people would gladly cut off their right pinkies to have these options. Before I had it all, I would have too. After being let go from the senator’s office and before I found another reporting gig, I was barely scraping by on unemployment checks totaling $800 per month. In that place of scarcity, I told myself that if I had a partner, a savings account, vacations in exotic locals, nicer clothes, and a better career, the dull ache that whispered, “Something is missing,” would go away. It didn’t.

It wasn’t until I actually had it all that I realized the whole thing was an illusion. The veil covering my eyes was lifted, spurred by the death of my dad. I understood that whether you’re in a fancy cage or a dilapidated one, it does not matter—a cage is still a cage. The security the cage provides is yet another illusion. It’s as false as the notion that you have to work to earn money, allowing energy to support you instead.

When my dad died, I saw that everything in my human life was temporary, and the rug could be pulled from underneath me at any time—not only by death, but also in my career and my marriage. Nothing was a given anymore. All of it, all of the life I had built, could change with one phone call. And once you see the truth—that everything is constantly shifting, security is an illusion, and nothing is really “safe” for the human—once you stare it in the face, there is no unseeing it. There is no pretending. You can pop some antidepressant or antianxiety pills to make the bars of the cage less visible. You can drink wine to numb knowing that you are only half living, but it is always there—the familiar dull ache that won’t go away.

I know because I tried it all. Shortly after my dad died, I went to see a doctor for my own sleeping pill prescription. Brian was tired of sharing his. The doctor handed me a questionnaire about depression and anxiety. I was honest but also let him know that my dad had recently died, and it had been traumatic. I explained it was totally normal for me to experience grief and anxiety in this situation. I told him I was seeing a therapist weekly. He filled a sleeping pill prescription and wrote me another for an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is a class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety. He didn’t tell me anything about the drug, and I honestly cannot remember the name of it—only that it smelled rancid, of chemicals and sulfur, and made me extremely ill and disoriented.

I was such a wreck and so confused that I tried the drug—completely ignoring my gut instinct that it wasn’t necessary and would, in fact, negatively impact my ability to hear my soul or master voice within. My therapist recommended I stay in the marriage for at least a year after my dad died; she didn’t want me to make any rash decisions. Well, I reasoned, if I listened to that soul voice, I would walk out of this marriage today, at that very moment. If I popped these pills, maybe I could make it through the year, following my therapist’s advice. “Maybe I am the crazy one after all,” I thought. People had been telling me this through their energy and behavior for years.

This was not my first SSRI rodeo. My mom stuffed Prozac down my throat when my father became ill for the first time when I was sixteen years old. She was on it too. It made me feel unlike myself, and my behavior changed quickly. I felt like a robot. Suddenly all those unwritten rules society placed on me seemed reasonable. Suddenly it was me who was the problem rather than mass consciousness. I was the insane one, the world outside me the rational one. Maybe they were right. I was so messed up in the stories I was told about myself, the soul voice I had trusted so much was now labeled a voice in my head—one that needed to be ignored or, worse, eradicated.

At sixteen, it had never occurred to me, because my mom and my doctor had been so sure, that it was quite normal to feel sad and anxious while my dad was in a hospital for eight long months. Now, at thirty-two, after the childhood memories came back into my consciousness, I knew a sad situation warranted sad human emotions. Maybe it was no so bad to allow myself the time to feel them. What if instead of pumping myself full of drugs, I could return to the I EXIST, the inner knowing human situations were but tiny drops in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul? What if I could see from an expanded point of view that my dad’s health issues and his death were part of his soul’s journey and mine as well? What if I could honor that instead?

After a week, the disgusting, filthy, chemical, stinking SSRIs went into the trash can where they belonged. As I threw them away, I realized that those little pills were the modern version of mental institutions, where you didn’t even know you were being locked up—institutions with invisible bars. I realized that society wasn’t any freer than it had been, say, twenty years ago; society was simply much more sophisticated at hiding the bars on the cages in the zoo.

I wish I had done the same at sixteen, tossing the Prozac into the trash can where it belonged, but it had drowned out the soul voice almost immediately as I began taking it. Also, I don’t think it was any coincidence my drug addiction kicked in shortly after I began taking the Prozac daily. The authority figures around me told me both with their words and behaviors that if you experienced so-called negative emotions you were supposed to numb them immediately, to push them aside as quickly as possible instead of feeling them and allowing them to flow. To me, it didn’t matter if the drug was legal or not. The law is and never has been mine. My father taught me that; he knew when to bend the rules and when to break them. And let me tell you, cocaine makes you feel a hell of a lot better than Prozac.

Prozac numbed me to a point where I felt I was barely living. Coke made me feel full of life, even if it was a total illusion. In hindsight, I was trying to balance out the numb feeling, the dull ache, with something that made me feel alive. I could have found my solace in nature, in the magic of the trees and in connection with other realms and beings like I had as a child, but those worlds were shut off with the swallowing of the pill my mom handed to me each morning. That green-and-white pill seemed to pull a veil over my eyes through which I could only view the physical reality, and it blocked out all the others that I had discovered as a young girl.

Brian supported the doctor. He read articles online and diagnosed me as bipolar. In his defense, a soul awakening can look a hell of a lot like the symptoms for bipolar disorder, especially to someone living a singular human experience.

“I’ll help you get through this,” he told me, trying to hold my hand.

His words sent shivers down my spine. “Like hell you will,” I thought. He wanted to control me; he had been for years. He told me I was too sensitive, repeatedly, words I had heard all my life, discrediting me at the soul level and my unique abilities and experiences. Brian was too late to the game; my soul had already seeped in through the cracks the grief had so artfully created during my dad’s coma. It probably happened while he was on one of his business trips.

The inner knowing, or gnost, was undeniable: I was not insane, not too sensitive, and Brian was the one stuck in the illusion, under some sort of hypnosis like the rest of mass consciousness. My master voice was there inside of me, and I was going to let it roar like a lion. And that’s why I had to leave. One person living the illusion cannot coexist with another who knows it’s all fake. And they certainly cannot have children together. In the human world, what Brian had to offer was appealing. He had a nice cage in the zoo. I knew he would immediately find a woman to replace me. He did quickly; she was lovely, and I was happy for him. Later I understood where he was on his soul journey and the experiences his soul sought in this life.

Although easier to leave than my marriage, my job was the same. I experienced the realization I was leaving one well-decorated cage each morning only to arrive at the other well-decorated cage where I worked. The pattern of work, wife, and workout felt like the movie Groundhog Day. The foundation boasted stellar benefits, bonuses, unlimited vacation, a gym, showers, and free yoga classes. If you were going to work, this was a great place to do it. If I was going to have a white-picket-fence life, Brain was the one to do it with. It wasn’t the foundation or Brian that I despised so much; it was the institution of “should” and “supposed to.” It was the bars on the cage that I could not unsee.

After my dad died, I started to notice how the foundation hid the bars. On-site you could get your car washed, have lunch delivered, drop off dry cleaning, and get massages. We had happy hours and social events. Four years into my time there, I learned at least one-third of its employees attended regular therapy sessions over how the foundation was run. I watched people working themselves into the ground daily. As I talked with friends in other organizations, I learned this was common and to be expected. It’s just the way things were, I was told repeatedly.

The limited menu of human experience became even more pronounced when I quit my job. I was asked the following: Was I pregnant? Had another organization swiped me away? How much did they offer? They could beat it. Was my husband being transferred? Did I need to take a sabbatical? All of a sudden the promotion in title and salary I had asked for for months before my dad got sick was offered. We’ll make the cage prettier. The people at the foundation could not even fathom that I simply was not going to work anymore. Ever. I wasn’t going to have a baby, and soon I would not have a husband. It was time to order off the menu.

Once I realized it for myself, it became so obvious to me that everyone around me was living in a cage at the zoo too. These were wonderfully decorated and adorned cages, but still cages nonetheless. The illusion of freedom was so artfully designed that people did not even know they were in one. They even pitied and raised money for the so-called oppressed in situations where the bars on the cage were more pronounced.

After I noticed the cage I lived in—that everyone around me seemed so happy to live in—I was floored. I was as angry as I had been at eight years old when I felt I was so different from my peers. I couldn’t understand why no one else could see what I was seeing. I felt insane, yet I knew I was not. I wanted so desperately to show them. Like anyone else who becomes aware, the desire to educate felt heavy. Please excuse my barrage of enlightened, anti–status quo Facebook memes while I blow up your feed. I went through what almost everyone goes through when they awaken to something new. I believed it was my job to educate everyone around me, the human twisting the story of the soul into oblivion.

In an energetic conversation with my soul, I realized that the people around me did not want to see what I was seeing. Before my dad died, I would not have wanted to see it either. I was perfectly happy living in the illusion, under the hypnosis. It seemed easier and more comfortable to have your life laid out in front of you in a ten-to-twenty-year plan in which you choose between the chicken, beef, fish, or vegetarian item on the menu. Not knowing what was next was unpleasant to the human. It could only be tolerated, or even embraced, in a state of awareness only found when in alignment with the soul. The soul journey wasn’t for everyone. Had I not experienced many human lives living in the illusion before getting to this point? Was that not a valuable experience? Could I simply honor and respect the choices of others instead?

In this conversation, I realized true compassion is honoring everyone and every situation around you—and here’s the kicker—without trying to change them or it. The desire to educate or enlighten those around me was coming from the human part of myself rather than from the I EXIST. The soul never needs to force the people around it to change using illusory power. The use of energy does not require force. Simply living my life was radical enough, and I did not need to shove my realizations down other people’s throats.

As quickly as the realization had occurred, my human self forgot it. There was that amnesia again, the one experienced repeatedly in the density of the physical body. I continued to try to explain what I was going through to others, realizing that the illusion of freedom was very convincing. When I did try to discuss it with others, their brains would be sent into instant overload—if they could handle listening to me for more than a minute. If they did take the time to hear me out, their eyes glazed over as they quickly labeled me as either a grieving person who would soon recover or as mentally unstable before excusing themselves as quickly as possible.

I’ll admit it. I didn’t make much sense at the time. Everything was muddled in the constant and incessant mediation between the voices of the human and the soul. As in India, my soul voice came in clearly, and then it would go through the filter of the human mind, which would distort the wisdom beyond recognition. After repeating this pattern several hundred thousand times, I finally realized that I needed to reroute the soul communication away from the human filters of thought and emotion and declare the soul voice the sole voice. No more negotiating with antiquated human logic. It would take years of practice.

In a last ditch effort to stay with Brian, my human self proposed he quit his job too and that we live in a van, travel around, and surf. Maybe we should try freedom for a change. Maybe we should put off having a baby for a little while longer.
He looked at me like I had lost my mind, his bipolar wife making an insane suggestion. “I can’t do that,” he said, rattling off a list of reasons why not, all of which included attending to the home and work cages in the zoo. About a month later, he told me, “You either have a baby, or I will find a new wife.” That was the nail in the coffin that was our marriage.

“You should find a new wife,” I said definitively. For me, having a child felt like an eighteen-year prison sentence. About a year into our marriage, I found myself driving past the West Austin Youth Association, where I saw the line of cars full of exhausted moms waiting to pick their kids up from their sporting activities. In that moment my stomach churned, and I began to sweat with anxiety. It was not what I wanted for my life. I saw my friends having kids with so much love for the experience, but no matter how hard I tried to change my feelings, I knew it wasn’t for me. In my third-eye vision, I saw another blond woman rolling down a conveyor belt from the wife factory for Brian—one much more suited for the traditional experience he so desired.

After we split up, I realized Brian was not a bad person for demanding I have a baby. I was not a bad person for not wanting one. We both behaved in ways others would find offensive. While the fight was ongoing, my human self was keeping score. One blow by Brian was met with another blow from me. Once I moved out of the house and could see it with fresh eyes, I realized the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, and positive and negative were all human creations. When I moved beyond the dualistic constructs, I saw that everything—and I truly mean everything—is good and bad, and neither good nor bad. It was the human brain that wanted to label it one or the other. Brian was doing his best to love me and support me, and he was an asshole. I was going through a massive transformation, and I had broken the promises I had made to him, all while acting totally insane. Nothing is as black and white as the human tries to make it.

The more I connected with my soul, the more I could see the and in everything. I saw and sensed that my soul didn’t operate in or really even comprehend dualities. It operated in experiences and expressions without labeling them as positive or negative. It took a while longer for my human self to get it. My brain desperately wanted to keep everything in nice, neat categories—to label Brian as the villain, to blame the doctor for my dad’s death. Instead, Sar’h, in her deep, sensual voice, reminded me that my marriage had been an amazing experience and had taught me many things, including how to love myself and listen to the soul voice. Instead of blaming someone for my dad’s death, my soul took an expanded perspective. My dad parted with this world at the perfect moment. His death spurred an awakening inside me before I brought a child into this world. His death allowed me the freedom to do what I had set out to do at the soul level, and he had left me some pocket change to get me going. His death was a gift that afforded me the time and space to breathe into the awareness of the soul and what a relationship with it had to offer me—true freedom. No menus, no cages, no pills.

I had no idea what my life would look like outside of the cage. I didn’t even know what I was going to order; I only knew it would be off the menu. Freedom is scary as fuck. When people say they want freedom, what most actually mean is they want a little bit more—a little bit more money, a nicer car, more vacation days—a bigger, nicer cage in the zoo. Freedom is a different beast entirely. It’s what exists beyond the walls of the zoo. It was uncharted territory, and I didn’t have much to go on, only the sense and the inner knowing that I could not stay inside its walls.

​I finally busted through the bars, filing for divorce in June 2013. The human part of me felt lost as fuck, barely keeping her head above water in the chaos of consciousness. Inside me, fireworks were going off in celebration of the soul’s return. I was two people at once, and it felt completely natural. I felt more myself than I had in years. I was the four-year-old under the kitchen table again. I EXISTED, and fresh out of the zoo, I needed somewhere to live.