Summer of Purge
On parasitic die-off, grief and heart wreckage
It’s mid August and I’m still waiting for summer to arrive.
Summer is the season in which my tight muscles melt and I feel ready to leave the house whenever, with no resistance. My time to be outside with warm skin ready to tackle my summer reading list of compelling novels for a journey through fiction while my body feels at ease –a very different experience than reading under a weighted blanket with a hot water bottle and folding in to minimise cold air contact with skin.
But this summer has failed to warm up enough to melt my tight muscles. Windy and moody, the unseasonal weather has seen me through a prolonged purge and the biggest flare of my FMS in over 5 years –a flare that started at the beginning of July between frog medicine ceremonies to help me treat parasites I picked up last year during my time in the Colombian Amazon.
This is a thought I often return to: The experience of illness is a call of the body for intimacy, unavoidable intimacy with the self. During illness, the body must be centred and tended to.
I’ve been purging for months now. I did not anticipate it lasting so long, this is not the usual effect of frog medicine. But my body has unique responses, I know this. And it is very possible that the slow purge I’m in is linked to an extensive parasitic infection and also having the MTHFR gene, a mutation associated with FMS and how people with autoimmune disease process toxins. I’m still giggling at the notion of having MOTHERFUCKER embedded in my genome and amazed at my MTHFR body and the hardcore journey it takes me through.
The type of embodied intimacy one experiences during a purging state has its own facets. During the climax of a ceremonial purge I shit, vomit and ooze thick droplets of sweat, humbled in the presence of the person helping me hold my body up with a steady grip. I moan and cry and grip her hand tightly. I apologise, instinctively. She squeezes my elbow and tells me: This is what we are here for.
As the purge continues post climax, over several weeks, I make an inventory of the unpredictable effects of parasitic die off: the mysterious scents of toxins and their vapours; the unending spitting sessions of long held mucous of different consistency and foam quality; the types of headache –heavy, foggy, sharp, dull; the spectrum of temperature –cold to burning hot; morning piss decreasing in yellowness and pungency through the day; sulphurous eruptions; itchy ears and waxy skin secretions; and finally, the most intense dizzying psychoactive effects of excess oestrogen flooding my body, then replaced by the cortisol release and ensuing palpitations.
The textures of fatigue correlate to that which is making its way out of my body. I feel every toxin leaving me, their excretion is a silent constant effort, altering my mental state, my emotional body.
I’m exhausted.
‘A Healing Crisis’, the medicine person called it. I would describe it as an immersive embodied intimacy with the current state of affairs.
Purging alone and communing with that which had taken up space in myself, allowing the chemistry to emote, to catalyse the release of memories and denied realisations, to take over me and be acknowledged, is an all consuming experience.
It is also a sobering one. My purge is like a rushing river clearing out embellished arguments, twisted logics and excuses. All cognitive props and facades collapse. In the reality of my body’s call for intimacy, I understand my betrayal in ignoring its messages. I see the complicity in my willingness to submit my own will and deny my own hurt to uphold illusions that don’t match reality.
My parasitic purge revealed the depth of my heart wounds, buried emotional pain raised with the toxins –though expressed viscerally through my body’s constant exhaustion and inability to digest, the feelings of rejection I had hidden from myself.
I see how my wishful belief in intentions rather than the acknowledgement of the impact of actions set me off on a path of self-betrayal.
Is this how we break our own hearts? By refusing to compassionately acknowledge ourselves and the reality of those we interact with?
We betray love when we enable and participate in the relational fuckedupness that props up a superficial sense of intimacy while feeling deeply unseen.
Every single one of us is exactly where we are at. No matter what we want, no matter where we would like to be or wish someone else was. Another’s denial becomes our own if we go with it. Avoiding this fact makes us complicit of propping up falseness.
Is this how we jointly betray intimacy in our relationships?
These moments of clarity inform my processing. And yet I am still in a purge, and a purge shocks the tissues where grief burrows.
Along with the fumes of parasite die-off, grief floods my body. In between the cortisol fueled pangs of rage, I collapse into sadness, crawl inside the wounds of my heart and find familiar landscapes and scenes, bitterness and sweetness congealed.
Fresh pain reveals old pain. I find the memories of the best love-names I ever had, unpronounced for over a decade. I say them outloud and thank their creator, a former partner in love and war. I had missed them. I will always miss them. And I miss myself and the lighthearted fun and easy tenderness of being in the same loving spot with another for however long that was possible.
I keep crawling amongst scars as if caressing timelines with my fingertips. I find dance tracks that belong to another decade, pandemic dance parties of two, scenes of feet touching while reading in the warm sun. I find journeys on horseback, by boat, and small tender gestures that made me feel seen. I found my grandmother’s apple pie and the cadence of her voice when she called my name, my great-grandmother’s pressed sage sticks and their scent.
No love lost.
Inside the landscape of wounds there are old friends, miscommunications and clashes, a constellation of disappointments.
Crawling deeper is my mother’s grief tangled up with mine, and deeper still, my father’s.
Amongst it all I also find desires I had been too scared to acknowledge, the evidence of self-betrayals. The pain I caused myself by abandoning myself.
My temperature drops and I shiver.
I distract myself, read books, and go on pilgrimages with my friends. I pray to angels and to Sinèad O’Connor, whose death pulled me through a wormhole straight back to my righteous adolescent feelings.
I find a balm in Heartstopper, which helps me realise that I’m also grieving my teenage queer self who had no reference points or gang, unlike the baby queers on the screen –is this GOMO? Gay Grief for Having Missed Out? I keep up with the World Cup and in between the pangs of excitement, I grieve for a child that did not know watching a match could feel right.
I swallow the bitterness of the relentless public homophobic and transphobic attacks of late, and quietly confront the reality of the effects of the denied homophobia that infects the intimacy of connections. I acknowledge the impact of not being able to openly talk about it, and the insidious violence of those who passionately deny their capacity to cause harm because they are too identified with being harmed.
I curate playlists for a bruised heart: Dance and Sulk.
I light candles for myself, take long baths. I give my body what it needs: rest, adornment, and delicious good food. I graciously receive the care of others as hand delivered chicken soup, bone broth, bespoke strength training routines with daily check ins, phone calls, tender sharings, jokes.
I’m still purging but I’ve purged enough to make room for spells of contentment and comfort. I grieve but there’s space for more, I am able to cradle myself with pleasure.
Leo season is finished but the effects of the sun illuminating my heart space remain: I found beauty and wreckage. Venus in her retreat demands that we revise old lessons, sharpen our capacity for discernment, and update our reference points. The cosmic dance of the planetary transits makes us feel part of a whole. I grieve alone but I am not alone in grief.
My purge is not over, I continue to release.
And here I am again taking the familiar vow to acknowledge the messages of my dear vehicle of a body and its wisdom, its ongoing call for intimacy and its immense capacity to transform and transmute experience into knowledge.
Here’s a prayer practice prompt for you
