Caged Animal

Growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, I always felt that there was something wrong with me....and I believed the dominant narrative: that I just needed to find the right combination of career, partner, hobbies, and friends. And then, voilà, I would be happy….and then the caged-wild-animal feeling inside of me would go away.

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It started when I was 15. I felt like a wild animal that needed to be caged and sedated in order to not annihilate and eviscerate everything and everyone around me, including myself. Thank goodness I discovered alcohol, drugs, sex, work, and travel, which kept the beast busy and at bay.

That caged animal feeling did not go away until my late twenties when, after a solid decade of traveling, I discovered the wildness and wilderness of Alaska that matched and mirrored the wildness and wilderness inside of me.

Eventually, I learned to befriend that wild beast whose pain was once a portal to a bottomless void of agony, quit the drinking and drugging, and did my healing work.

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These days, I travel for 1-3 weeks every month. Mostly to cities. After about seven days, that feeling returns....the restlessness of a wild animal, that does not want to be tamed...and needs to be medicated and sedated in order to find this cage of modernity tolerable.

Despite all of my trauma and grief work, and despite truly being in love with myself and my life, my - now healthier - coping skills resemble a pitiful band aid on a phantom limb pain.

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Last week, I was in Los Angeles, at a board retreat for the Asian Mental Health Collective. I’d just come off of leading two BIPOC-only workshop intensives, in San Francisco and LA. Deeply satisfying work. My board colleagues decided to take a walk “in nature” on the golf course behind our accommodation (a rented house).

I couldn’t do it. There was nothing appealing or sensorily interactive about a meander in manufactured mono-nature.

So I took a walk around this suburb. I admired the variety of tropical plants in all the front yards. Rubbed my face into fragrance of lavender, sage and frangipani. Ran my hands through fir, conifer and spruce. My senses returned.

The sun was setting as I got back to home base, so I did it. I ducked behind the low hedge out front of the house, dropped my pants and peed. My breath returned.

I then walked over to a small patch of lawn, next to the driveway and lay down, face up, feeling the earth rise up around me, embracing me. I then rolled over, navel to the earth, umbilical cord anchoring into deep nourishment. Medicine.

My phantom limb stopped aching, and the beast inside of me lay down to rest.