The Medicine of Discomfort
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about discomfort. Anyone who follows my work will know that I spend a great deal of time talking about gender euphoria, trans joy and the beauty and possibilities of transness. This is important, it’s on purpose. I have been swimming in the deep end of trans discourse, trans history, and trans sociology for over a decade now and I am deeply familiar with the way that transness is painted as tragedy and what that means for trans children, trans adults, the parents and loved ones of people who come out as trans, and for all of our society and it’s understanding of transness.
I am deeply invested in resisting this narrative.
And yet, I am also sensitive to the intense bypassing of anything with a whiff of negativity, struggle, or discomfort in our modern culture. As we are increasingly confronted with an absolutely overwhelming news cycle, as our world continues to change more quickly than we can fathom or adapt to, and as we face the fallout from centuries of colonialism and white supremacy, we turn more toward escapism. This looks like “love and light” spirituality, “good vibes only,” a constant “fuck it” attitude too. It comes through in many ways, and it’s incredibly seductive. In the face of overwhelm and despair, utter escapism seems like a good way to avoid the pain.
Please don’t misunderstand - I am a firm believed in the power and appropriateness of some well-placed escapism. Sometimes dissociation is the thing that allows us to keep going. Sometimes escaping allows us to rest and repair. The issue is when it becomes your whole toolkit.
Anyway, as I recently listened to the book Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens, I felt that his teachings about suffering, joy, and happiness were particularly helpful. This twitter thread breaks down some of the basic ideas that he teaches around sorrow, and gives some insight into how helpful his approach to suffering and sadness is.
He says, “Metabolizing sorrow is suppose to be uncomfortable. We are intentionally experiencing the discomfort. We are feeding the sorrow space so it has room to be in our experience. I must choose this discomfort in order to have the agency to be with the discomfort.”
This is vital stuff. Because as much as I believe in centering the beauty of trans existence, there is no path on this earth that is all joy, all ease, all simplicity. And for all of its beauty and joy, transness is often a particularly challenging path to walk, particularly at other intersections of marginality, experience, and identity. Even if one were to be sealed off, somehow, from the marginalization of trans identities in this modern culture, there would still be aspects of transition that were deeply and profoundly uncomfortable.
While I would never say that being subjected to trauma and violence is a positive thing, I think moving through sorrow, grief, and discomfort with intentionality and agency is a space of learning and growth. Often, periods of growth mean, by necessity, periods of discomfort. It is not comfortable for our bones to grow in adolescence, so we have a word for this particular sensation—growing pains. It is not comfortable for hermit crabs to expose their softer parts as they exchange shells, it is not comfortable for invertebrates to molt their exoskeletons, it is not comfortable for snakes to move through the shed process. Growth is often uncomfortable, challenging, vulnerable, intense, and scary. This does not mean that the growth should be avoided or bypassed.
In my upcoming class, Snake Medicine , we’re going to lean into the phases of the shed cycle to understand how to move through the steps of personal growth and evolution with something like the agency that Lama Rod Owens describes in the quote above. How do you make room for suffering in order to have agency in being with the suffering? I believe that the medicine of the snake shed cycle sheds light on this process. I believe this so strongly that I believe when I go over the process in depth on the first week of class, it will click for those who are present. The rest of the class will be going deeper and deeper…goldmining the depths of this medicine so that each person can craft their own bespoke path through the underworld.
In Snake Medicine, we will have the profound gift of traveling those depths together. There will be parts of your journey that you must walk alone, but knowing that others are walking in their own depths can bring comfort and support, and perhaps most importantly, can shore up your courage. If you’re feeling this energy, if this resonates with you, or if you need support through your own journey, join me and the rest of the first-ever Snake Medicine cohort, with meetings beginning on Sept 12th!
And if you can’t join us, or the timing isn’t right, I highly recommend Love and Rage, as well as Who is Wellness For? by Fariha Roísín and The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller as supportive and wonderful resources.