Don’t give up on your life.
My stupid book haunted me with hope this week. One line from my upcoming memoir kept calling me out and up:
Don’t give up on your life.
At first, I was ashamed that I can’t just always believe my life is entirely worth living and that all shall be well. I wonder if Julian of Norwich was a constant badass or a brokenhearted bitch like me who wrote the words that she most needed to hear. We’ll never know. But I do know this: despair is not defeat and our wholeness includes our worst days.
If you, like me, have not been okay recently, know that today’s Embodied essay is for you.
Lately, I’ve had to fight like a goddamn honey badger to be well. Cigna has been denying me access to treatment I need for one of my life-threatening diseases, Type 3 Hereditary Angioedema (HAE). My treatment was denied not by immunologists nor physicians familiar with HAE, but by automated AI systems and external reviewers who cherry-picked outdated science to deny the existence of my condition—ignoring both my diagnosis by a leading, world-renowned immunologist and the reality that Cigna is currently treating my HAE prophylactically with Orladeyo. Cigna is also contradicting themselves in that my treatment had already been approved for a full year, but because I was given a new policy number in January, they revoked my access, treating me as though I was an entirely new patient.
I’m being gaslit and my life is being put in danger by a company ordered by corporate greed. You can read more about my fight, call out Cigna Healthcare for their unjust decision, and amplify my story over on Instagram:
Several of my diseases, including HAE, Lupus, and Ankylosing Spondylitis, have been uncontrolled for months now, ever since my bout of Aseptic Meningitis. And that has made my days much more painful and challenging. Between fighting through pain and fighting Cigna for months to maintain access to treatment I need to stay alive, my soul has been punched and crushed. I feel beat down, and some days, the weight of it all is too heavy. And then I look at the news and see the way the Trump administration and my fellow citizens are slashing access to healthcare and hunting down vulnerable people, and, I’ll be honest, it’s hard to hope that love is more real than the hell we’ve created.
This lucky lady was selected to serve as a juror all last week on a trial. I probably should have taken a medical exemption, but jury duty is one civic duty I felt I could do. I want to live in a society ordered by a willingness to be inconvenienced by others’ needs. I want my actions to match my values. I want citizenship to mean caring for the good of all. Jury duty came on one of the worst weeks it could have fallen, when I needed to be on the phone fielding endless medical calls to access treatment that could mean life or death for me. The sacrifice was felt. And, frankly, my time serving as a juror helped restore some of my faith in my fellow citizens. Every juror who served beside me gave the trial their all, caring deeply about finding the truth, never once letting politics invade our care for the other people in the courtroom.
I plan on writing about my jury experience much more. But for now, the point is, I used up all of my spoons in service of others last week, and by the time I reached Monday and needed to fight even harder for my healthcare, I didn’t have enough left in my tank for myself.
I wish I could be the person who knows the truth and never forgets it. I wish I could access hope at every moment. Instead, I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning overwhelmed and then shame-spiraling.
I cannot and will not be anyone’s Therapist Barbie, face stuck in a smile, body never changing, my exterior hard whether the hands that touch my life are kind or cruel.
I am ever shifting, climbing and falling the polyvagal ladder, stretching myself in a range of regulation that was never meant to be stagnant. I am continuously unwriting the capitalist script that says our bodies and nervous systems are things to control rather than friends to hear. I still sometimes believe that my success as an author and human and therapist is dependent on my capacity to stay continuously strong and calm, and that, my friends, is utter bullshit, internalized ableism straight from the pit of a sociopolitical reality that equates worthiness with self-sufficiency.
This week Ryan reminded me that I am fully human in my heartbreak and my hope and that my body’s struggle to access strength when stress is immensely high is not proof of failure but of a personhood that deserves respect, support, and gentleness.
And yours does too.
Yesterday, I drove my despair to the foothills. It took everything I had to get out of bed. But I did, because nature is medicine, and the woman who wrote Don’t give up on your life deserves to be heard. I decided to listen to her more than I’m listening to hell and self-hatred. So I drove west, curving through foothills to Green Mountain Falls, where a new aerial sculpture dances over a pond to the audience of pine-covered mountains and people like me, searching for solace and pausing for peace.
I sat on a boulder at the pond’s edge and watched as the massive dragon-like sculpture swooped and sank in the wind.
Every gust brought a pirouette or plié. Thousands of hand-tied pieces of kite fabric shimmered in the sun, dancing in a display of the beauty of moving with the forces of nature rather than staying in one place.
And as I sat there, getting schooled by a sculpture, words from my memoir haunted me for the second time in one week. This time, the words were from a chapter that didn’t even make it into the final version of the book. I’ll share the full chapter for paid subscribers at the end of this post, but for everyone else, here’s the line that haunted me:
“Like the moon and the tides, I wax and wane. I rise and fall in a rhythm I have never been able to outgrow. Sometimes, I am a sliver of the self I wish I could see; today, I am full.”
I rise and fall in a rhythm I have never been able to outgrow.
Like the sculpture, our selves are not stagnant but ever-shifting. We might be tempted to believe any downward descent in our mental or physical health is a failure. But like the sculpture, we are not solitary beings unaffected by forces beyond our control. The wind blows and it is not our fault when we shift in its gale.
I stared at the sculpture for a good thirty minutes or so, feeling the breeze against my skin and watching as the art billowed in a flow that was both beautiful and ever-changing. I noticed too that the sculpture’s shifting glory was made possible by the steel tethers bracing its arc and holding it in several places to the firm ground. We too need tethers that ground us to the grace of a stable earth. The fact that I needed both my husband and my past self’s wisdom this week to be grounded again in hope was further proof not of failure but of full humanness. Both you and I are inherently interdependent, and hope will always remain a team sport.
Father Richard Rohr writes, “It will really help you, Christian or not, if you can begin to see Jesus—and Christ—as coming out of Reality, naming it, giving it a face, not appearing to Reality from another world.”1
This week I am remembering that reality is where God dwells, including the realities I hate. If God comes out of reality, then God is in my struggle. If God exists in reality, then God is also in the uncertainty that I must bear about where my life is headed. I need something in my life to let up right now, and I have a feeling many of you do too. But every time I surrender to the ever-shifting pattern of descent, I am also consenting to the counterforce of resurrection.
It feels like dying sometimes, this dance, but do not be fooled by the politicians and pastors who preach peace peace where there is no peace. You are not weak but worthy of being witnessed. You are an ever-shifting work of art and as you surrender to the dynamic pattern of movement in your real life, you become a living sculpture of resurrection.
Here, in the winds that whip me so hard I feel like I might be ripped away, I am being upheld in the divine dance of interdependence. Like the moon, like the tides, I wax and I wane. I rise and I fall. I swell and I sliver. But even when all I can see—and all that others can see too—is a sliver of my whole self, like the moon, I am ever and always whole.
Rest. Stare at a sculpture. Set down your phones. Let someone remind you of what is too hard to believe for yourself right now. Trust the wisdom of your past self. Take your despair on a drive. Fight for yourself when you can. Fight for your neighbors too. And please, please, don’t give up on your life.
—KJ
Reminder! This month paid subscribers to Embodied will be gathering to discuss ’s gorgeous spiritual memoir, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand.
You can order the book through Bookshop.org to get it from an indie bookseller (definitely preferred!). But you can also get it on Amazon or at your local library.2
I’ll be offering 1-2 exclusive posts discussing what the book has meant to me and creating a space for dialogue in the comments section around spirituality, a changing faith, and what the book is bringing up for you.
Don’t feel pressure to read the whole book in order to participate, but if you are like me, you might not want to put it down! I read my copy in two days. 😂
At the end of July—tentatively, July 30th at 6pm Mountain Time—the author himself will be joining us for a live video conversation! That might take place here or by Zoom—details TBD. But I am so excited to get to hold space for conversation with some of you and Jeff, whose kindness and spiritual wisdom have been so generative for me personally.
You are absolutely welcome to just sign up for a month-long paid subscription if you’d like to join the Embodied Book Club for July and cancel afterwards! I do hope and plan to offer more book clubs like this for paid subscribers in the future too.
If cost is a major barrier for you to participate, please do email me at kj@kjramsey.com and I’ll give you a free month’s subscription with zero questions asked. I know what financial stress feels like, and I want my work here to be accessible to you.
Two extras for paid subscribers!
The following is a little extra excerpt—a chapter from my upcoming memoir, which didn’t make it into the final version of the book. I hope the words are meaningful for you today too. 🙏🏼
And I have one more little bit of joy to share with you too…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Embodied to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.