Just past 3am of the night of October 19th, 2020 I lay awake in a panic on a hillside beside my person in an Airstream named Mancy.
Four days prior, I had done some casual, light reading about obscure liver diseases on my cell phone, landing on the one that fit and praying to be wrong. Thousands of dollars in medical testing confirmed I was right, and in that moment, I was lost in a free fall.
You have been in a free fall like this, I’m sure. The mental equivalent of the hero in the horror flick running up the stairs rather than out the door, trapping herself with fewer and worse options?
I hid deeper into our shared double sleeping bag so that the light of my phone would not wake my person, wrestled it out of my zipper pocket, and opened Facebook.
50% battery life.
“Anyone awake right now who can DM with me? I need help.”
Two folks responded with messages. One, a person I had never met who was up reasonably early on the eastern side of the US. The other, a former yoga student deployed by the military to South Korea, where it was mid-day.
Lifelines.
Virtual spiritual belay.
They volleyed back and forth with me, reading my terror and holding it via the miracle of cyber connection. Of course, in moments like this, there is little ‘right’ anyone can say, so they shared photos from their 2019 travels to jungly temple ruins, their pets in compromising and adorable positions, lulling me back from the edge of sanity and into the safe zone so that I could soldier on. That was what we did, then, the muscle we built in 2020. Virtual connection - the capacity to give and receive at any distance.
Social media makes so much possible in connecting resources and humans, and it was instrumental in my ability to endure what unfolded.
And yet?
Anything is only as good as it is evil. I don’t believe anything is inherently only good or only bad, but that our skillful and discerning application or use of the tools in our toolbox is what leverages the difference. This is corroborated both by the deep well of philosophy known as yoga and by the less ancient pioneers of medicine: sola dosis facit venenum.
Dose alone determines the poison.
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