Dissolving an Identity Duality

“When you’re falling– dive.” J. Campbell

I’m a non-dual tantrika, non-dual shiva tantra to be exact. I chose to walk the Left Hand Path decades before I possessed the language to understand what those fancy Sanskrit words actually mean. The unorthodox is my happy place and it smacked me in the face in my late teens after emerging from a very beautiful childhood in the late 70s and 80s.

But for the past 4 years or so, I’ve been holding a deep duality in an attempt to participate in a culture that was never mine to begin with and one that I rejected in my early adulthood for a reason. In 2023, while finishing my bachelors degree in Yoga and formalizing my academic acquisition of the language of the left hand path (called Vamachara in my tradition), I took a wild ass right hand turn into the orthodoxy of late stage capitalism. I took a job as director of community at a crypto corporation in America.

Fucking weird, right?

I won’t bore you with the why behind that choice, it seemed logical at the time. And, even now, there are aspects of that well-trodden path I do not regret. The humans that adventure connected me with are some of the most profound I’ve ever met and some of my deepest relationships stemmed from this time.

But here’s the catch, my nervous system rejected everything the orthodox path stood for and required of me, to the extent that it forced me to listen to its cries for help in the only way it knew how. My body demanded I stop playing this game of the colonizer through a chronic degenerative neck condition turned acute cervical injury.

And the truly ironic part? I knew better.

I had just finished a 1000 hour academic yoga program, that was essentially a “this is how you regulate your nervous system” curriculum and I ran 80 mph into a brick wall with that very nervous system– and shattered it.

Seems insane, no? In isolation, yes. In context of who I am? Totally logical.

I was among the first generation of women who participated in youth sports, mens and womens. My sport was soccer and I loved every second of it. I played with the mens teams because the womens teams were too nascent to handle my skill level. I was raised by a loving Girl Dad and Mom who encouraged me to love what I do, regardless of my gender or the outcomes. I learned early on that navigating the world of the patriarchy would involve me being the best at the game of the masculine. In sports and beyond. (Shout out to Ted Lasso's latest season, now everyone can see the struggle of female athletes in a male dominated sport)

And I did just that, I was an elite female soccer player through high school and college, playing at the Division 1 level on scholarship. I loved my athletic youth and entered into adulthood under that umbrella. I then ported my need for being the best at the man’s game into every profession I embraced to participate in the economy; bartending, photojournalism, commercial production, solo entrepreneurship and even my brief stint of golden handcuffs at the ripe young age of 47.

During my time as an athlete, I trained my body to ignore the pain signals that a normal person would take as an indicator to rest. Not this gal. I took that signal of discomfort as permission to push harder and test my physical boundaries. Because that’s how I have always proved my value– to society and to myself.

As a female GenXer, that’s how we survived a world built for men. Be better than your male counterpart and never complain. Push past the pain and prove your worth by running circles around every man who stands in your way. Never need the support of a man to survive in this world.

But here’s the catch, there’s a reason the body sends those signals and there’s a tax to be paid when the signal to rest is repeatedly ignored. My tax stayed hidden in my cervical spine. It poked its head out in my early 20s and an MRI told my orthopedic that a disc was bulging and I’d just have to learn to live with it as I aged. He warned me never to have surgery on my neck. I took that advice and kept pushing my body, for decades. Shucking oysters, swapping kegs, carrying 10+ pounds of cameras on each shoulder while chasing after child soldiers or inner city cops, herding cats on TV sets and then at Ethereum hackathons– I did it all and I did it well.

And now the tax is due and I make a payment everyday. Each physical action has a cost, and the payment draws from an account with very little left inside. Just writing this essay has a cost that I’ll pay in a few hours because my body now rejects my computer.

And up to this point in time, August 2026, I’ve been living a duality that flows unnoticed most of the time– until its not. The acute injury that threw me into the deep well of chaos for years is now chronic. Chronic pain isn’t something I wish on anyone, especially when the cervical spine is involved. Everything is impacted and nothing is spared. I have 6 wrecked cervical discs with anomalies I can't even pronounce. But I sure as shit know how they feel.

I knew I was crossing into the land of the chronic last fall, but I still didn’t fully understand what that meant. I had periods of pain, but they had a cadence I understood and a threshold that was bearable and didn’t impact my daily life. This past January, a resurgence of the toxic players that helped put me in acute injury land in the first place crept back into my local community and I flipped a switch.

The switch was a fuckit lever. These toxic humans had already destroyed my life once and I’d be damned if I’d go quietly into that dark night this time. So I didn’t. in 2024, I was fired from my brief stint in golden handcuff land because I was a whistleblower. And having to blow that whistle carried a price, and this past January I realized I hadn’t fully released the trauma of that price tag. So, I took actions which would hopefully break their cycle of crime and abuse.

And while that was happening, the pain returned. More of a subtle whisper, until it wasn't. A hint that my somatic work wasn't done yet. In an attempt to wring out these toxic actors from my samskaras, I did a deep yoga practice at home, filled with twists and turns designed to squeeze the toxicity right out of my spine. While the bad actors went away (community is immunity right there) the pain stayed. The whisper turned into a howl, one I couldn't ignore this time.

Two years to the date had passed since I had first stumbled into my neurosurgeon’s office with my sad MRI results in hand (which I paid cash for so we could skip the whole "do 6 weeks of PT first and then we'll do imaging" conversation), my yoga anatomy coloring book (don't ask) and in enough pain to read its landscape on my face. This time was different. The waiting room was filled with a sea of elderly people whose spines deteriorated decades ago and who were in obvious and intense pain.

Here I was, a normal looking woman at 50 with a tingling spine and some lingering neck pain from a condition that is as illusive and individual as it is invisible. He was already onto the next room when he entered mine. So, he gave me some PT, said to see a chiropractor and sent me on my merry way. Hard to fathom a manual neck adjustment, but I did want more PT and an attempt at landing in a better place than the last round of PT.

I embraced his diminishment of my condition because I wanted to and in those 7 minutes of expedited care and false assumptions, accepting the minimization of it all seemed the best route back to normalcy.

During this second round of PT, which I naively told my therapist was akin to “tuning up a sports car”, the true scope of this clusterfuck of an abused spine revealed itself. And among all the things this phase of trad PT unveiled, the duality I was still living was the hardest to acknowledge, accept and address.

For within this illness narrative, transitioning from chaos to quest, rests the socioeconomic issues we see blasting through our doomscrolls as we seek a sliver of understanding in a world collapsing. I have no life partner and I don’t necessarily want one. My sovereign self has the most amazing dog on the planet and that’s enough most days. But there’s one element I’ve never been able to work around in my life of the left hand path– sustainable income. In the past, I simply worked my little ass off and my production abilities were reflected in my bank account.

As a bartender, a photojournalist and a producer, I took pride in producing the best work possible and creating cash out of thin air from my hard work and relationships with clients. Even my short w2 stint had me at the higher levels of the income game because I produce above and beyond what’s expected of me. I take people pleasing to embarrassing heights, but my ability to serve my clients and employers was never in question.

Until now. I simply can’t do the work anymore. Physically. Knowledge work or physical labor kicks off a pain spiral that is followed shortly by a autonomic spiral that kicks off a series of unpleasant and sometimes devastating, neurological symptoms. Brain fog, dizziness, accelerated speech, cognitive and visual impairments are all part of my daily normal now. My autonomic nervous system is a hot mess and its been re-routing signals to my brain about my neck positioning for years and because of the necessary work we did in trad PT, it just stopped functioning properly.

I’ve kept the duality of this new reality in place because I simply couldn’t acknowledge the reality that my inner producer was at risk here. The producer/patient duality, keeping my chronic pain life out of client conversations, always meeting deadlines regardless of bodily impact or just running my pain in the background through sporadic posts or tertiary references allowed me to pretend that a return to some sort of “normal” was still possible. Even though my heart knows that ship has sailed, my logical mind can’t fully accept this new fact.

And so this bifurcated life has to come to an end. Everything in my life now draws from a diminished well. Driving to coffee takes planning, joining my community for happy hour takes structure, creating space for art takes precedence – everything is now weighed against a limited ledger with diminishing resources.

The past seven days were a doozy and nothing spectacular even happened, it was just – August. But about halfway through the week, I did my cardio PT workout for 15 minutes at minimal exertion for my threshold heart rate where symptoms appear and I was wrecked for a full 36 hours after. The workout was so inconsequential I had to repeatedly tell my iWatch I was still working out. And Monday was a heavy PT day, Tuesday was a recovery day and Wednesday was supposed to be "land more client contracts" day. Instead, the first 4 days of my week were a total wash. My calendar only has 1-2 meetings a week for a reason right now. And the longer I deny the reason and pretend I'm still a capable little producer, the more the pain and its emotional baggage grows.

And so the latest domino to fall in a life where everything is falling away faster than I can log it, is the domino of duality. I will no longer separate the producer and the patient into isolated lives and different realities. I can't. My body rejects every attempt. I will now try, and I expect this to be messy as fuck, to remove the membrane keeping those two elements separate and collapse the final identities I’ve been clinging to into one being.

What does this actually mean? As I’ve been navigating this chronic world for the past 6 months, I’ve had to look hard at the circles of relationships in my life. I am my own caregiver in my scenario because my little pup can’t cook me dinner or take the trash out. That means I rely on humans outside of my home for emotional support. Some of them have done the hard work on self to sit with my pain and just witness. I don’t ask anyone to hold this with me, it's mine and mine alone to hold. I do ask that people who love me just witness. And I hope in doing so, they learn to bear witness to suffering throughout their own lives. Witnessing does not mean fixing, solving or bypassing. It just means, "I see you. I got you. I'm still here."

But not everyone has the skillset or has done the necessary work to be able to sit with suffering as a witness. And those people have simply moved to the background of my life. Relationships of decades become background props in the set of my life.

The relationship is now shallow, and the acceptance of that is part of the journey of the quest. That love lives in a tiny box in the back of my closet now and hopefully one day I can open it again and that little sliver of my heart will still beat.

But it might not, and that's a lesson that rests at the core of my yoga training. Hopefully, and this is the case for me, the other relations move into the space and fill it with depth, power and beauty. Those relations now hold enough strength to witness the darkness and are still standing when I re-enter the light. And each time I step back into the light I know that I have the capacity to bear my own pain– and theirs.

In the realms of how I make a “living”, well, things get a bit more curious and hopefully, communal. Since I live in America, my healthcare is fractured and my ability to be my own advocate takes priority. That advocacy seeps into how I produce income as well. I can choose work that nourishes or extracts from my diminished well and that choice is obvious.

I am shifting into three roles -- experimentation, writing and teaching.

The first two are deeply personal and I will awkwardly share them with the world because the work matters and we all need these conversations right now. I am experimenting with my body as I transition from chaos to quest narrative in the vein of the Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank. And I’ll be writing about that quest in the genre of medical narratives with my A Somatic Unraveling project. The third role is helping people and orgs adopt AI in a way that doesn't suck their souls out of their eyeballs.

My ask is simple. Share this work with people who can support it AND with people who NEED it.

My declarative statement here is that the duality of performing normalcy to sustain myself or to make others feel less uncomfortable around me stops now. I am no longer two people, the diligent and relentless producer or the compliant and colonized patient. I am now my advocate and my caregiver, my own witness and my provider– and I am sharing this journey with anyone who wants to listen so the weight of it all isn’t unbearable.

I am one person who now embraces all of herself as she returns to the left hand path and finds the new beauties that rest in the witnessing of ALL our humanity– including the suffering. The unorthodox path was always the way and now it is so clearly the ONLY way.

This essay was written organically from my daily field notes for A Somatic Unraveling: Field Notes from the Cremation Grounds a creative writing project helping me write my new Quest Narrative and find a way through the pain towards...whatever comes next.

• I'm publishing the data from this project on my HealingOS on Github. 
• You can work with me at Factland Foundation as an educator or advisor, click here to learn more.
• Leave a gift to support the work here.

Please share this work with someone who is also navigating the world of chronic illness and pain– as a patient or caregiver. And tell them you see them. ;)