Stress will fuck you up. I’ve always known that (something like 90% of all illnesses are caused by directly impacted by stress) but I’ve never quite experienced it until the last couple of years.

In one of my posts back in…hell, I don’t know, January? I post so infrequently I can’t keep up with time anymore–I talked a little bit about how my health kind of tanked over the last couple of years. When I first moved to NYC, I touched a little on how I felt energetically adrift, but I didn’t really do it justice. I experience prolonged bouts of dissociation and depersonalization pretty much all day, every day, for two and a half months straight.

I think I was experiencing so much stress that I energetically detached from my body and emotionally detached from my life as a way to cope. Life didn’t feel real anymore. It felt like a movie. And I was perfectly content to lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling for hours on end. This was probably the sole reason why I stopped feeling so anxious after I moved here. I think I even wrote about when I finally started feeling anxiety again and I saw it as a good thing because it meant I was back in my body.

Only lately have I realized the after effects of such a thing. I was going through my phone contacts earlier this morning and there were names of people that I’d obviously met here, because they were New York phone numbers, but I had absolutely no clue who they were. Many of them. It’s like I have no memory of what I did or who I met in the month of August and half of September. I can’t remember conversations I had with my ex husband, either. I know I had them. I vaguely recall the general gist of what they were about, but I can’t remember the words.

That’s eternally frustrating because I ordinarily have a memory like a steel trap. It’s actually somewhat photographic. I remember being frustrated between July and even through parts of October that I couldn’t communicate well. I’m normally an extraordinarily articulate person, but I was constantly grasping for words. My brain just wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I honestly don’t know how I was able to function or take care of myself, or even continue to write blog posts.

Obviously I’m in a much better place now. I’m still not 100%, but maybe hovering somewhere slightly above 85%, and that feels good. I’m in a better place than I’ve been since the end of 2015, certainly.

Thank you to all of the people–friends, healers, healers who are friends–who stuck with me through this last year. I don’t know where I’d be without you.

Xo,

Ash

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