Lately, I’ve been pondering the spiral nature of reality, how things and people tend to “come around again” at various times in life.

Have you noticed?

It’s a spiral, not a circle, because each time round, your perspective changes a bit; you’ve grown a little; you’re encountering the same phenomenon (or person) but you’re in at least a slightly different place with it. And it’s definitely not a line, despite what our culture would have us believe!

This spiral continuously shows up for me when returning to my favorite shows and movies and music, something I often do.

Now, I get that many people use media to “check out,” which is much-needed in this overstimulating world. Personally, I use it to check in and learn about myself. This dates back to when I was a child, and I didn’t have permission to feel my feelings, so I only got to feel them when I watched a show or a movie, and then I could cry, or just feel a range of emotions by relating to the characters.

So to this day, with any media I consume, I’m reflecting, noticing how I respond to things, seeing patterns in the characters and checking if those patterns exist in me too. The teacher and healer in me also loves to find nuggets of wisdom to pass along to my clients and community members that have been helpful for me.

And I have certain media I return to over and over again because they elicit a particular feeling or experience inside me that I know I need.

I use media as medicine.

And boy did I need that medicine during a recent health crisis.

A peek into my health journey

See, I have this chronic, rare, confusing, and distressing disease condition that can be a little delicate to talk about.

I’ve suffered unpredictable, intermittent bouts of cyclic vomiting for over 20 years. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds. I’ll wake up and vomit all day and can’t stop. I can’t even keep a sip of water down, much less food, so eventually I have to go to the emergency room, where they put me on an IV line with fluids and anti-nausea medications, usually for multiple days in a row. It is exhausting!

The last time was just over a month ago in early July where I vomited on & off for six days straight. These episodes come once or twice a year now. Back in my twenties, they happened more frequently but lasted for shorter time periods. Incidentally, no one knows what causes cyclic vomiting syndrome and there’s no cure, though for some people it fades away over time.

Naturally, even once the vomiting recedes, I’m not entirely myself for a few days. I need to rest to regain my strength. So I give myself plenty of down time, and fill that time with video games and watching things.

This past July, I spent many blissful hours replaying a nonviolent, noncompetitive video game called Spiritfarer, in which I locate wandering spirits who’ve recently died, bring them onto my ship, feed them, help them talk through the things they are holding onto, and when they are ready to pass on, I take them to the “Everdoor,” which is the portal into whatever lies beyond the veil of death.

Gradually, my boat grows crowded with more characters, each with a different personality and story. But I have to let each of them go in order to progress in the game. Part of the beauty and poignancy of it is that I can’t hang on to any of the characters. I have to let go of the past to move forward.

With stuff I watch, I like shows & movies that get me emotional. I see crying as a spiritual practice, an opportunity to process stuff and move feelings. It’s extremely hard on me emotionally to vomit for a week straight. While I’m recovering I need “comfort shows.” I have a feeling I am not alone in this.

To that end, I re-watched the entirety of Schitt’s Creek. When I finished, full of tears, I could tell I needed more release, so I started scrolling through Hulu’s offerings. When I came across the thumbnail of a show I used to be obsessed with as a teenager, My So-Called Life, I began bawling immediately and I thought, “Okay, yep, this is what I need to watch now.”

My love of My So-Called Life

I was 15 when that show first came out. The main character, Angela Chase, was also 15. She was taking biology and chemistry and geometry at school; I was taking biology and chemistry and geometry at school. Angela didn’t have much dating experience; she’d only had a couple of weird kisses that weren’t really comfortable. Ditto for me. She did, however, have a longstanding crush on one particular guy, just as I did. Also, Angela was starting to leave behind her nerdy friends from childhood to hang out with cooler kids. Me, too.

Most of all, Angela was introspective, constantly examining herself, wondering about herself, curious about why the world is like it is and people are how they are – just like me.

I thought, “My god, I AM Angela Chase!” Except for one thing. Angela had a loving home with parents who cared for her. I had never had that. At the time, I was living with my wildly abusive grandmother, a woman who beat me up psychologically every day – as she had beaten up my mom physically. This was after my mom sent me to live with her at the age of 12 for having feelings and expressing them to her.

Anyway, when My So-Called Life was cancelled after only one season, I was mad! I was distraught! I was mortified! So I got roughly two hundred of my school classmates (all of whom were around Angela’s age, of course) to sign a petition to get the show back on the air.

And this became a story I told about myself over the course of my adulthood to countless people, including my husband of 22 years. I’d been proactive; I’d gotten all these kids to sign the petition so I could mail it into the network, which was kind of heroic. I was a leader. I’d gotten 200 people to do something to help save the show. Go me.

Reflecting on the past & present

Rewatching the show’s pilot episode after my Week of Vomiting brought up big feelings and memories. I cried and cried. That was on a Sunday evening. The next day, Monday, feeling tender and fragile, I had a session with one of the healers whom I trade with. We wound up talking about ancestral trauma and negative patterns passed down through generations. And a phrase came through my mind like a lightning bolt: breaking the bonds of boastful bullshit.

See, I come from a long line of braggadocious bullshitters and exaggerators. It’s part of my family legacy and comes from both sides of my family lines. And while the story about my gathering those signatures for the petition is true, there was a key part of it that I’d never told anyone, not even my husband.

What I’d never told anyone before was that I never actually submitted the petition & signatures. I’d intended to mail it in; I had the address of the network; but I never did it.

Why not? I don’t know exactly. There was no single reason. I had undiagnosed ADHD. I was overwhelmed and distracted, emotionally distressed, feeling tons of pressure from every direction. So I just tucked that petition away in some corner and forgot about it until it was way too late, and then it just got sorted into what I call my “shame plate” – that is, one of the many things I’ve secretly shamed myself for over the years. Every time I told the story, a part of me felt proud of gathering the signatures, but a deeper part of me was ashamed of the important part I was hiding – hiding, that is, until that Monday with my healer-friend, after my week of epic vomiting.

Maybe it sounds trivial. The show probably would have remained cancelled anyway. But you have to understand: I had lied about this to everyone for thirty years! Integrity is my highest value, and lying is definitely not consistent with integrity. To me, integrity is not about perfection, but it is about doing the best I can, owning my mistakes, and telling the truth. Lying made me disgusted with myself, and I did not want to be disgusted anymore. And breaking the bonds of boastful bullshit means looking at all the ways I mask myself, or conceal parts of stories that I’m ashamed of.

So this was the first of my post-vomit radical revelations, catalyzed by My So-Called Life.

The next day, Tuesday, I went to see my naturopath/acupuncturist/chiropractor/homeopath/cranial-sacral therapist, who also does muscle testing (and has done for 40 years) to get information about pain and emotions trapped in the body. She discovered some fear trapped in the valve between my small and large intestine, which we traced back to when I was eight years old, and my mom would not allow me to sing. Or actually, I could sing at certain times, in a haphazard way, like when I was cleaning the house or riding in the car, but I was absolutely forbidden from singing in talent shows or choirs or taking singing lessons or anything like that, because my father, a drunken rock musician who left us when I was one and a half years old, had been a singer, and my mother did not want me to be anything like him.

But singing was my passion! It was all I really wanted to do! So I got the message that I was powerless to direct my own career path and future, and shoved down all the negative feelings about it to please mom. Ugh.

Then on Wednesday, I had an energy healing session with a friend I’ve been seeing regularly for nine years who knows me well. We got to talking about my grandmother’s abuse, and how the only way I could (sometimes) avoid it was to verbally abuse myself first. Then, instead of beating me up, she would say stuff to comfort me. That was the only way I could get my grandmother’s love. I also mentioned to my friend/healer that after all these years I still don’t see a pattern with my vomiting; I still don’t know what triggers it, or why it starts or what makes it stop. As a master pattern-finder, this frustrates me to no end! And he said, “You mean, it’s completely unpredictable, like your grandmother’s wrath?”

Woah. Ooohhhhhhh.

So that was radical revelation number two! Something in me uses vomiting to recreate that same experience of unpredictable wrath upon my body.

Then also, it dawned on me that the vomiting is an expression of the emotional pain trapped in my body from being disallowed to sing.

Three radical revelations in one week. But I wasn’t done yet.

Releasing old pain

On Thursday, I watched the episode of My So-Called Life that gets to me the most: So-Called Angels. Angela has a friend, Rickie, who’s androgynous and gay. This episode starts with Ricky having collapsed into the snow, blood pouring from his face. You eventually learn his uncle has beaten him up and kicked him out of the house, so now Rickie is homeless, and it’s midwinter.  But he’s not telling his friends. He’s pretending that his fall was just some random accident. He finds a place to stay in some sketchy warehouse with other street kids, trying to stay warm, but it’s an unhealthy situation. At some point in the episode, Angela, whom Rickie has been avoiding (along with his other usual friends), finds him and begs him to tell her what’s really going on. She pleads, “Rickie, why won’t you talk to me?” And he turns to her and says, “I can’t. Not with you.”

And in the moment of seeing that scene again, and really getting it, I was racked with sobs of understanding and release. It was as if 20 years of my own pain was finally lifted. Because at last I understood why I had behaved in a way that I had been judging myself very harshly for, for decades.

Here is what happened: I met my friend Erin on my first day in the first grade, where we decided we would be best friends, which we stayed all through elementary and middle school. Erin had cystic fibrosis, a terrible, painful, genetic respiratory condition that severely constrained her physically and often kept her out of school. Up until a few years ago, it was considered a terminal illness. I saw her go through pneumonia a bunch of times. Her parents sent her to a camp with other kids who had cystic fibrosis; each year she came back from that camp with stories of kids she’d known from the year before who’d died. So she grew up knowing she was going to die young. She spent her whole life knowing that.

But we were so, so close.

Then, towards the end of middle school, I started making some friends that I thought were a little cooler (kind of like Angela Chase did). At some point, the fact that Erin couldn’t do much physical stuff and wasn’t as “cool” as I wanted to be felt like a drag on my social life.

Then we wound up going to different high schools, and we only occasionally kept in touch by phone. But Erin had always hated phone calls, so there wasn’t much connection there. We didn’t live far from each other and I had access to my grandmother’s 1981 Corolla by sophomore year, which I drove around a lot, though it wreaked of cigarette smoke. I could have gone to see Erin regularly, but I hardly ever did other than her annual birthday celebrations and one rad ritual honoring her becoming a woman.

At 19 I found out I was pregnant, and I moved to Oregon while Erin remained in Southern California. We kept in touch more through email then, and our love of Daniel Quinn and changing the world. In 2005 I made the trip down to see her in the hospital near the end of her life. She spent her final eight months in the ICU with a trachea tube down her throat after an unsuccessful double lung transplant operation. She was 26 when she died.

For nearly 20 years, I was tormented by the thought that I could have and should have spent much more time with her, particularly during high school. Why didn’t I go to her house? She only lived five minutes away by car, and her family adored me. There was love for me in her home. I was suffering so much in my life at that time, but I was mobile, so why didn’t I go to Erin’s house and get the love that was available for me there and offer my support to my childhood friend? What was I thinking?

I finally comprehended it as I rewatched the scene where Rickie tells Angela that he can’t talk to her about what’s going on with him. How could Angela have understood? He might have said, “You’ve got this beautiful home with parents who give a shit about you. How can I explain to you that my uncle beat the crap out of me and I’m homeless right now? You have no context for this.”

I realized then that that was why I couldn’t go to see Erin during high school! Sure, she was ill, but she had a mom and dad who loved her and made their whole life about her. She had no idea what it was like to live in an abusive home every day, or what it was like to be rejected and abandoned by anyone you’d ever loved. My own mom hadn’t wanted me and my dad wasn’t around. Erin had no idea what that was like. The gap between us was so wide. I had tried to tell many peers what I was going through at home but they never believed me (unless they had abuse at home, too). They thought I was exaggerating, or trying to get attention, so I mostly kept my experience to myself.

So I couldn’t see Erin, because not only would she not ever get it, I also resented the hell out of the fact that she had all this love and she took it for granted. She had no clue what I was going through. She couldn’t possibly understand how mad at her I was for having parents that loved her while she was mad at them for normal teenage shit.

So, finally, as I rewatched this poignant episode of My So-Called Life, I felt compassion for the 15- and 16-year-old Starr who literally could not bear to visit her best friend. And that was radical revelation number four of my post-vomiting week.

During the last months of her life, Erin couldn’t vocalize at all. She could mouth words silently and make signs with her hands. Her parents had a hard time communicating with her, but I walked right in and had no problem understanding. I’m so glad I got to be there with her, during that final phase of her life. I ended up being the only one who took off the “everything will be fine” mask and talked to her about the reality of her death. She needed to have that talk.

She passed only a couple weeks after I left, and I was told I got to see her on her final lucid days. The last time I saw her, as I said goodbye, she told me, “You are an inspiration.” Even nearly 20 years later, I still remind myself of this during dark times.

So, despite everything, I guess, I got to be her real-life spiritfarer. What an honor and a huge blessing for me.

Connecting the dots

So I experienced a handful of radical revelations in the wake of my most recent cyclic vomiting crisis, insights that gave me some measure of healing and closure.

But though revelations expand our awareness, they don’t necessarily bring magical transformation. They bestow a little peace and understanding, but that doesn’t mean that a given issue is completely healed when the revelation occurs.

Take my vomiting, for example (please!). My recent revelations about that are only a couple among dozens of revelations I’ve had about my vomiting syndrome over the last 20 years. They’re just the most recent ones. I’m not going to trick myself into thinking that I’ll never have another vomiting episode again because “at last I understand.” I might continue to vomit on and off for the rest of my life, and I have to be okay with that. (If I don’t accept it, I’ll go nuts.)

Like I say and live and teach, everything basically seems to go and come back in a spiral pattern, so each time the dreaded vomiting cycle strikes, it comes at me with a different lesson, and finds me in a place of increased understanding.

My understanding of what my relationship with Erin was all about will continue to unfold, too, as will my ability to break the bonds of boastful bullshit I inherited, and to live with more integrity.

There are no “final realizations” on this journey. Still, the radical revelations we experience are life-giving and worthy of celebrating and sharing. I am grateful for My So-Called Life and Spiritfarer, and all the other emotional comfort entertainments that call to me, help me uncover my truths, and afford me opportunities to cry, heal, and share my story.

A fun synchronicity I didn’t even realize when I rediscovered My So-Called Life, is that the show was only a month or so away from celebrating its 30^th anniversary (which is today as I publish this!). What a gift that it should plop itself right back in my lap when I needed it most, at such a significant time for me personally, and for the show too.

Spirals can be fun. May your spirals also be fun and healing and revealing on your journey.