I close my eyes and visualize myself in the womb, floating, a little astronaut.

I always thought of this as a cozy place, and figured that my lifelong reluctance to get out of bed, pretty much every morning of my life, related in some way to having been yanked out of here. Now as I reimagine myself in this space, I feel weak, like the life is ebbing out of me, I’m floating here alone and I’m uncertain if I’m going to complete my journey. There’s a question of whether I’m going to make it or not, with “or not” hanging quite heavily over this otherwise peaceful scene.

Outside this space, my mother is waiting for two things: my lungs to form in utero, and word from the doctor that she’ll need to be induced. As in, no time to waste, get this kid out of you right now before she dies. My mother’s body, you see, was trying to kill me. So, during the process of being made incarnate—think of that, as I have, having experienced being pregnant, and thinking of it every day, my baby is becoming a being and her soul is coming into her body, RIGHT NOW!—something was pulling my very physical being away from me, like those games where you’re trying to get a silver ball to land in a space but you keep missing it.

But here I am, in this space, realizing that at my very beginning lies the wound I have grappled with my entire life, unbeknownst to me: the need to fully incarnate. I have never felt completely inhabitant in my body, have spent much time floating a little out of it, finding it difficult to imagine safety in a corpus that came so dangerously close to dying before I could be born into it. It’s never been my friend, this body, it’s always seemed like something that could so easily betray me, you see. If my own mother was trying to kill me—I mean, I know it wasn’t intentional, but when you’re a fetus, you’re not thinking about motivation, your emotions are primal—where the hell was I ever going to be safe?

This brings me to tears in my session, and my healer hands me Kleenex for my rapidly moistening and snot-smeared face. The one difference between the me who is expelling all this emotion, finding the words for it, and working to release it, and the me who experienced all this as a simple homo sapien lifeform in the process of incarnation, is that I am fully aware that there is no safety in life.

I have let that illusion go.

I embrace the fact of no safety. I know for certain that safety is a lie we tell ourselves to forget, on a daily basis, just how tenuous and precarious life really is. Grasping at safety gets you nowhere. It doesn’t hold that the answer is to be reckless, but doing anything because it’s safe is a losing proposition. Because the minute you think you’re safe, something happens and then you’re not. Everything is terminal. Everything is in the process of moving into something else, whether you see it and like it or not. 

But still. There’s the problem of needing to inhabit the body you were given. You need to be in it to do any of the important things you get to do here. What does it mean when you can’t do that because you feel inherently mistrustful of it? It’s not an obvious feeling of lack of safety, but it is a mistrust of its ability to hold you, to allow you the means to connect to life, and the physical world.

It leads to betrayal, self betrayal first, because that’s the only kind you have any control over. When you feel unsafe, there’s an odd sort of peace that comes from being the person in control of all the bad shit that could happen to you. It’s an illusion, though: if you spend all your time fixating on the bad things that could happen, you leave no space for much positive to happen. Because doing that leaves you open to losing something that you value, but betraying yourself only reveals how much you’ve learned to devalue yourself preemptively as a defence mechanism.